Zenon E. Kohut Problems in Studying the Post-Khmelnytsky Ukrainian Elite (1650s to 1830s)

The study of elites has become a major task of modern sociology and political science. Its popularity is due to the social scientist’s growing realization of an intrinsic link between modernization and social change.

While the social scientist focuses primarily on modern or modernizing societies, the historian must also deal with traditional societies. Historians have long recognized that from early modern times to the twentieth century, the social structure of Europe underwent a profound transformation. Most, whether Marxist or non-Marxist, have agreed that during the period social classes replaced a society defined by orders (legally recognized estates). However, with its emphasis on capitalism, industrialization, market economy and class struggle, the Marxist interpretation offered little for the understanding of a traditional pre-industrial elite. Thus, for a long period, social historians wrote descrip­tive studies of recognized nobilities rather than applying the concept of elites. Recently, the social historian has turned again to the social sciences for aid in studying pre-industrial traditional elites. What differentiates the new social historian of elites from the conventional student of European nobilities is his manner of approach.

Most social historians accept Max Weber’s three criteria of class (wealth), status (estate) and party (power) in ranking people within a society. Class refers to an individual’s economic position, status denotes his prestige in society, and party defines his place in the political order.² The subsequent theoretical literature on elites has, to date, made little impact on the social historian. Vilfredo Pareto made the historian more aware of the multiplicity of elites (military elite, political elite, economic—rentiers and speculators) and their “circulation” (ascendancy or descendancy) as a mechanism of social equilibrium.³ Gaetano Mosco and C. Wright Mills focused on the problem of power and came to the conclusion that a “ruling class” or “governing elite” rules society.⁴ Brilliant as these analyses may be, they operate at such an abstract level that they offer little practical guidance for the social historian. On the whole, the social historian of traditional elites is primarily concerned with the overlap of status, wealth and power. In addition, he is interested in how access to the elite is regulated, in whether a specific life-style emerges and in the development of certain attitudes, including a political outlook.

In European society under the old regime, the greatest congruence of wealth, status and power was enjoyed by the nobility or a group functionally similar to a legally recognized nobility. Even a cursory glance at the nobility in Ukraine reveals two basic problems.

A Ukrainian elite which functioned as a nobility developed in the Hetmanate. It evolved after the Khmelnytsky revolution and was incorporated at the end of the eighteenth century into the Russian nobility. As a result, the Poltava and Chernihiv provinces—the territory of the former Hetmanate—contained a native Ukrainian nobility. According to the first all-Russian census, taken in 1897, 68 per cent of the hereditary nobles of Poltava province and 41 per cent of the hereditary nobles of Chernihiv province listed Ukrainian as their native language. This percentage far exceeded the number of Ukrainian-speaking nobles for any other Ukrainian territory in the Russian empire.⁴ As bearers of a certain historical tradition, the nobles of the Hetmanate provide a modicum of continuity from the post-Khmelnytsky period well into modern times.

Having indicated the importance of the Hetmanate’s elite, let us turn to the state of research. Although numerous studies have dealt with various aspects of the elite, there is no single comprehensive work of synthesis covering the entire period. Nor is it possible to write such a monograph without substantial additional research. But before examining what has been studied and what could and should be studied, let us first consider the general attitudes of the historians who have treated the topic.

The earliest writings about the elite were produced by members of that elite and their descendants. These works were to honour ancestors and to establish an indisputable case for considering the Ukrainian elite a genuine hereditary nobility. As such, they cannot be considered scholarly. Yet, the works of the aristocrats do provide valuable information about the composition and outlook of the elite.⁷

The first professional historians to study the elite were the populists. On the whole, they were not as interested in the elite as in its antithesis, the peasantry. The populists viewed the whole post-Khmelnytsky era as a struggle of the masses (peasantry and rank-and-file Cossacks) for freedom and social justice against an exploitative and parasitical elite. Oleksandra Iefymenko, who wrote the only overall synthesis on the subject (Malorusskoe dvorianstvo ³ ego sudba), asserted that after the Khmelnytsky revolution the old order was swept away and Ukrainian society was equalized, but that after several generations the new Cossack elite was able to usurp for itself the socio-economic position once enjoyed by the Polish szlachta.ⁱ Iefymenko condemned the Ukrainian elite for having betrayed all political ideals—i.e., maintaining Ukrainian autonomy—in order to enserf the populace. Iefymenko^,s study was followed by the much -more detached work of Dmytro Miller. As a legal historian, Miller was primarily concerned with the juridical steps by which the Ukrainian elite was incorporated into the Russian nobility and the struggle of the Ukrainian aristocrats for imperial recognition of their ti­tles.’ But writing when populism was at its peak, Miller, in the end, came to conclusions similar to lefymenko’s. This attitude was shared by Oleksander Lazarevsky—the most respected and prolific historian of Cossack Ukraine. Lazarevsky was the first scholar to offer pr∞f that the Ukrainian peasants were gradually enserfed by the elite, well before Catherine IΓs ukaz of 1783.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new generation of Ukrainian historians revolted against populism and followed a new “statist” orientation. They viewed the Hetmanate as a virtually independent state and concentrated their research on such indicators of this status as foreign relations, internal administration and law. Study of the elite per se was revolutionized by Viacheslav Lypynsky, who was the first to discover that considerable numbers of the szlachta had joined Khmelnytsky and that the Khmelnytsky revolution did not totally sweep away the old order.¹¹ Subsequently, interest in the elite primarily centred on how this elite either defended or failed to defend the state interests of the Hetmanate. Relatively little attention was paid to the elite as a social group. Most works concentrated on political history, particularly of the earlier period when the Hetmanate still played a political role. In dealing with the later period, the state-school historians studied various instances of opposition to imperial integration. Special mention must be made of Oleksander Ohloblyn, who did much to identify various oppositionist circles and contributed to the biographies of many members of the elite.¹² Because of its outlook, the state school could flourish only in interwar Galicia and in emigration.

In Soviet Ukraine, several schools coincided and overlapped during the 1920s.

All these trends were cut short by the liquidation of Ukrainian scholarship in the 1930s and the adoption of an official Soviet interpretation. Although on some topics this interpretation occasionally changes, it has been consistent and uniform in reference to the elite. Following the populist tradition, Soviet historians have emphasized the development of serfdom, Ukrainian class antagonism and the Ukrainian elite’s alliance with the Russian autocracy in order to exploit the masses (although any sign of opposition to the autocracy is also considered treason). The Soviets have not only condemned the Ukrainian elite, but also have stopped studying it. Their contribution has been limited to a few new details about Cossack and peasant uprisings.¹⁶

If one accepts the sociological model that status, power and wealth are the basic dimensions in studying any elite, one must conclude that, at vari­ous times, Ukrainian historiography has been remarkably one-dimensional. The aristocrats were interested in status, the populist and Soviet scholars were concerned with wealth and the state-school historians dealt solely with politics. Only in the 1920s and early 1930s was there a genuine multiplicity of approaches and even some overlap between them. Since no work can present a problem in all its dimensions, it is perfectly legitimate to concentrate on one aspect of a topic. However, it can hardly be conducive to scholarship for all historians to focus on one aspect to the exclusion of all others. A meaningful synthesis about the Ukrainian elite could only be achieved by undertaking serious research covering all three dimensions of the model accepted here.

All three factors were regulated by two centres: one in the Hetmanate, the other first in Moscow and then in St. Petersburg. The structure of the elite and the hierarchy of ranks were, in the end, determined by the Hetmanate’s central authorities. Moreover, the Hetmanate distributed land to the elite or, in rare instances, confiscated land from them. Those in power attempted to exclude their political enemies. Thus, the Hetmanate’s elite, particularly the upper echelons, struggled to control its institutions, which, in turn, arbitrated questions of power, status and wealth for at least another part of the elite. While several factions of the elite struggled to control the local centre, they had little influence over the second more powerful centre in St. Petersburg. The imperial government was free to recognize or deny the status of the Ukrainian elite. It could question the rights of ownership of estates. The tsar could and did demote members of the elite, confiscate their estates and exile or imprison them.¹⁷ Therefore, the social, economic and political position of the elite was part of a dynamic system, arbitrated by two unequal power centres.

With these important qualifications in mind, let us now turn to the first dimension of social rank, namely, status. By status we mean the amount of prestige or honour one enjoys by virtue of occupying a certain position in society. The position may be defined by custom or law. In the Hetmanate, one’s position was recognized largely by custom, but customary practices were beginning to enter into the law codes, particularly the Laws by Which the Little Russian People Are Judged.'¹

The social group in the Hetmanate which enjoyed the greatest honour and prestige was the elite that we are considering. By the eighteenth century it was called “Little Russian szlachtaⁿ and was composed of sev­eral subgroups. First was the genuine szlachta stemming from the Pre-Khmelnytsky era. As Lypynsky pointed out, significant numbers of the szlachta had joined the Khmelnytsky uprising. However, it had been as­sumed that these szlachta elements did not survive the period of the Ruin and the transfer to Left-Bank Ukraine. Subsequent studies by Serhii Ivanytsky-Vasylenko and Lev Okinshevych indicated that a considerable number of szlachta had survived and prospered in the Hetmanate, particu­larly in the most northern part, which was touched least by the Khmelnytsky upheavals. Moreover, there are indications that the szlachta continued to immigrate into the Hetmanate, especially from Belorussia.¹⁹ The question of a genuine szlachta presence in the Hetmanate is important, for it could help explain the adoption of szlachta political val­ues by the entire elite.

The rest of the Little Russian szlachta was composed of Cossack officers and notables, but the clergy and urban patriciate was also represented. In Poland-Lithuania, many Roman Catholic priests had been considered noblemen and this tradition had been copied by the Orthodox clergy of the Hetmanate. On the whole, the clergy was recognized as having szlachta status and certain szlachta economic privileges but, except for some members of the higher clergy, it neither participated in the Hetmanate’s politics nor was it included in the fairly elaborate ranking of the Ukrainian elite.²⁰ In 1757 Hetman Kyrylo Rozumovsky ordered that the sons of archpriests who did not enter the priesthood could join the lowest rank of the Notable Military Fellows—the secular system of ranks—but that sons of ordinary priests should be registered as free Cossacks.²¹ This indicates that the clergy did not enjoy social rank or status equal to that of office-holders but were a subgroup only marginally connected to the szlachta.

While some szlachta rights for priests were recognized, the urban patriciate had no claim to szlachta status. It could enter the “Little Russian szlachta” only by assuming an office in the Hetmanate’s administration. There are indications that at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, a number of merchants and craftsmen were able to enter the elite or, at least, had familial ties with the elite.²² Unfortunately, the social roles of the urban patriciate and clergy have not as yet been studied. My very preliminary observations are based on an impressionistic reading of the sources.

Honour and prestige were not meted out equally to all who claimed to belong to the Little Russian szlachta, but depended on either government office or rank in the Society of Notable Military Fellows. A person with a szlachta title stemming from Polish times could quite easily be ranked below someone who had risen through the Cossack military hierarchy. The institution for determining social rank, rather than political office, was the Society of Notable Military Fellows, consisting of landowners who could require peasants to perform labour obligations (peasants were not as yet serfs because they could seek better conditions by moving to another landlord). In return for this basic szlachta right, notables were required to perform certain duties and were listed in an official register. When a notable assumed a military or administrative position, he was dropped from the register, since he was no longer capable of performing the re­quired duties. With the exception of the infirm or aged, all Notable Military Fellows were liable for the military levy in times of war and for various incidental duties during times of peace, such as service as couriers, judges or criminal investigators.

Since virtually all administrative and military officers were filled by Notable Military Fellows, social status was closely connected with power. By the 1720s the structure of the Notable Military Fellows had evolved into an elaborate hereditary hierarchy of three levels. The highest ranking notables were called the Fellows of the Standard (bunchukovi tovaryshi). They were under the direct authority of the hetman and thus immune from the Hetmanate’s local administration. The highest officials of the land—the general staff, the colonels and regimental staffs—were drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of the Fellows of the Standard. Below the Fellows of the Standard came a large middle layer called the Military Fellows {yiiskovi tovaryshi), who were under the jurisdiction of the Hetmanate’s central administration. The company captains and senior chancellery clerks usually came from the Military Fellows. At the base of the Society of Military Fellows were an even larger number of mere Fellows of the Banner (znachkovi tovaryshi). They provided the administration with lower company officers and clerks.

Lev Okinshevych was the first to study the Society of Notable Military Fellows and to show that it was primarily a hierarchy of social rank—or status—rather than a peculiar Cossack military office.²’ Because the notables performed state service, many historians have treated them as state officials, although they were unsure whether to place them in the military or administrative hierarchy. The correlations between the ranks of notables and certain offices are mine. If they stand, then I believe that the basic relationship between the status hierarchy and the power hierarchy has been resolved. We can then proceed to tackle questions regarding the openness or impenetrability of the elite and social mobility into and within the elite.

Considering the present state of research on status and power, the next step, in my opinion, should be to establish or reconstruct memberships in the elite. There exists a good base of published sources for such a project, including works by Modzalevsky, Myloradovych, Pavlovsky and Lazarevsky.²⁴ That it can be done has been demonstrated by George Gajecky, who was able to reconstruct the central and regimental staffs.²⁵ As a result of Gajecky’s project we now possess lists of the most important office-holders throughout the existence of the Hetmanate. If these could be correlated with lists of Notable Military Fellows, we would know the membership of the entire elite. Unfortunately, lists of Notable Military Fellows have not been published and we are not quite sure how many are available in Soviet archives. But even without the Soviet archives, it is pos­sible to establish a fairly comprehensive list of the elite, at least for a cer­tain period. If such lists were available for several periods, then a simple comparison could tell us what new families had entered the elite, the length of time it t∞k for a family to move from one level of the Notable Military Fellows to the next, whether certain families controlled a particular office, whether certain families fell in the status and power hierarchies and many related questions. Ideally, the status and power hierarchies should also be correlated with wealth. However, as will be shown subsequently, the current state of research does not permit the utilization of this category. Consequently, let us first determine the membership of the elite and their rates of mobility. Only then can one concentrate on explaining the reasons for such mobility.

The elite’s power was exercised not only through the possession of offices, but also through control of institutions. In the Hetmanate, views of the elite found expression through a quasi-parliamentary body called the Council of Officers. It evolved from a council of military officers of the Cossack Army into a representative body of the “Little Russian szlachta.ⁿ Meeting between Christmas and Epiphany and during the Easter holidays, the council discussed all important pending matters, especially foreign affairs, finance, taxation and judicial reforms. By the mid-eighteenth century such councils met for longer sessions with elaborate agendas, and the hetman did not initiate important judicial or civil reforms without the approval of a council. Finally, the council meeting in 1763 petitioned Catherine II to approve a regular Diet of the Nobility for the Hetmanate.

The Council of Officers is only the most outstanding example of an institution through which the elite could exercise power. Others included the general staff, the various judicial bodies, the central treasury and the regimental staffs. Fortunately, thanks to the juridical school of the 1920s, many of these institutions have been studied. Undoubtedly, the most important scholar of institutional history is Lev Okinshevych, who was the first to trace the evolution of the Council of Officers into a quasi-parliamentary body of the aristocracy and to give a comprehensive analysis of the general staff.²⁶ Yet, many questions about the nature and limits of power as expressed through institutions remain unresolved. For example, the exact constitutional relationship between the hetman and the Council of Officers remains unclear. Was the hetman obliged to call a council on a regular basis? How, exactly, was representation determined? How were decisions made? Did the Russian authorities influence the relationship between the hetman and the council? Similar questions could be asked about other institutions. Thus, while we are informed about the basic functions of institutions and governmental offices, knowledge about the way power was distributed among various institutions controlled by the elite awaits further research and elaboration.

The local power enjoyed by the Ukrainian elite was also limited by an outside force, the Russian central administration. The relationship between the two power centres is regularly the subject of political history. Although many more details about this relationship are yet to be discovered, the general contours are well known, and I shall not dwell upon them here. Instead, I would like to mention a few words about the political outlook of the elite which, to a large extent, motivated its political behaviour.

From the time of Khmelnytsky to the end of the eighteenth century, the political outlook of the elite changed according to political circumstance and alterations within its structure. In the early stages, the elite’s orientation was mainly that of the Cossacks, who in a patrimonial relationship served their king or tsar in return for cash payments and economic prerogatives. The Cossacks did not claim that they represented a specific land or manifest any particular territorial patriotism. The success­ful Khmelnytsky revolution, the influx of szlachta members into the Cossack elite and the reality of an existing state forced a revaluation of the basic political presuppositions. The Cossack view was challenged by a territorial concept, the Great Principality of Rus’, as expressed in the Treaty of Hadiach (1658). According to the treaty, the Rus’ principality was to have been a separate state, with its own administration, finances and currency, and it was to have joined Poland and Lithuania in a tripartite commonwealth. The three equal partners would have had a common king and Diet. In the Diet, the szlachta of Rus’ (expanded by the ennoblement of Cossack officers) was to have been the representative of the territorial interests of Rus’—thus functioning as a representative nobility of the European type. With conditions unacceptable to both Muscovy and the rank-and-file Cossacks, the Union of Hadiach failed.

During the Mazepa era, when the Cossack officers began to assume the role of a szlachta, the idea of a contractual relationship between a monarch and a nobility representing a specific territory re-emerged, but it was challenged by the old Cossack notion of a contractual relationship be­tween a monarch and the Cossack army. Only in the mid-eighteenth century, with the development of a quasi-parliament, did the Little Russian szlachta begin to express the concept that it was responsible for the territorial integrity and constitutional arrangement of its patria, the Hetmanate. But this breakthrough in political thought occurred when the Russian empire was being transformed from a patrimonial into a Centralistic, absolutist state—a state that could not tolerate an autonomous territorial elite.

On the whole, the study of political thought is fairly well developed. For the Khmelnytsky period, too much attention has been focused on the nature of the Pereiaslav treaty, and not enough on the political outlook and expectations of the Cossack officer class. The Hadiach Union has been thoroughly analysed by Mykhailo Hrushevsky and more recently by Andrzej Kaminski.²⁷ Political thought in the Mazepa era has been elucidated by Oleksander Ohloblyn and Orest Subtelny.²⁸ I have analysed mid-eighteenth century constitutional thought, particularly the territorial szlachta concept.²⁹ Early nineteenth-century political thought, represented by such works as Istoriia Rusov, has been covered by Ohloblyn, Andrii Iakovliv and many other scholars.³⁰ Therefore, while many details and undercurrents still need further study, the major steps in the evolution of political thought are now known. The next step should be a synthesis of political ideas from the time of Khmelnytsky to the early nineteenth century.

Let us now turn to the third criterion for ranking elites, namely wealth. Paradoxically, after a century of research by populist and Soviet historians, this criterion remains the least known. The populists had carefully established the legal steps by which the peasants had become enserfed. The second discovery of the populist historians was that the Ukrainian elite had gradually accumulated more and more land. The figures which are given vary and are often contradictory, depending on the sources used. But the trend is unmistakable: by the 1780s crown lands (rank lands) given temporarily for service had been greatly reduced; the plots of the free peasantry had virtually disappeared; and the Cossack homesteads had become much smaller and more impoverished.³¹ Although no exact figures exist, it seems that through purchase, outright seizure and court actions, the seigniors (the elite and monasteries) were able to obtain the greater part of the Hetmanate’s cultivated land area.

Having made these important discoveries, the populist historians smugly condemned the elite and saw no need for further study of its landholdings. Soviet scholars have followed suit by focusing exclusively on peasant and Cossack resistance to socio-economic exploitation. Peasant revolts, landlords’ seizure of peasant lands and court cases over land and status (whether one is Cossack or peasant, free or dependent) have become the mainstay of Soviet historiography.³² But these studies tell us virtually noth­ing about the wealth of the elite or seigniorial economics. What was the size of a typical estate? How many peasants worked on it? What were its products? Were the products consumed on the estate or was there a surplus for a market? These important questions—basic for any Marxist approach to history—seem of no concern to the Soviet historian of the Hetmanate.

In researching any aspect of the Hetmanate, one inevitably comes across documentation that some families were exceedingly wealthy. For instance, the Kochubei, Galagan, Lyzohub, Myklashevsky, Markovych, Mazepa, Skoropadsky, Apostol and Rozumovsky families owned hundreds of estates and had up to thirty thousand peasants attached to the family manor. But these were the wealthiest and among the most powerful families in the Hetmanate. My impression is that the vast majority of the elite owned middle-sized estates, probably smaller with fewer dependent peasants than the typical central Russian or Right-Bank Ukrainian estate. This impressionistic view has been partially confirmed in a recent pioneering work by E. M. Kabuzan and S. M. Toritsky, who calculated the number of serfs per nobleman for all regions of the Russian empire. From this work it is clear that between 1782 and 1795 there were more nobles and fewer serfs in the Hetmanate than in any other region of the empire. In fact, per nobleman, the Ukrainian elite averaged only one-third the number of serfs owned by the nobles in the central Russian regions.³³

The number of serfs per nobleman is a rather crude estimate of wealth.

More refined studies are necessary. As is well known, the Hetmanate underwent numerous censuses and revisions throughout its existence. Most of them contained material concerning landholdings. Some parts of these censuses have been published and various works based on these statistical materials have appeared. I once attempted to collect all these published sources to see what could be learned about the landholdings of the elite. I soon discovered that the sources rarely used the same categories (homesteads, estates, houses) and never seemed to cover the same geographical region over any significant period of time. But such a study is feasible if one has access to archival materials, particularly the 1764 Rumiantsev census. This is proved by M. Tkachenko’s brilliant analysis of economic relations in the Kaniv company of the Pereiaslav regiment, published in 1926.^m Unfortunately, it covers only a tiny part of the Hetmanate, and it is essential to investigate the landholdings for at least one or two full regiments before coming to any general conclusions.

In addition to the major concerns of status, power and wealth, the social historian is also interested in the education, culture and life-style of an elite. Sources that provide invaluable materials for this topic are family papers, memoirs and diaries; works describing the educational system in eighteenth-century Ukraine, St. Petersburg and Moscow; lists of students in West European universities; and analyses of private libraries. Space, however, does not permit me to discuss the culture or life-style of the Ukrainian elite. Instead, I would like to pose one concluding question which should be of particular concern to the historian of Ukraine—the relationship between the traditional elite and modern Ukraine.

If the elite of the Hetmanate provides one of the few instances of a traditional Ukrainian aristocracy surviving into modern times, then its impact on modern Ukrainian history becomes a crucial question in determining the degree of continuity or discontinuity in the Ukrainian historical process. As with many questions of Ukrainian history, it has not been thoroughly studied, but only touched upon by scholars.” In dealing with this problem, it must be remembered that the Hetmanate was only a small part of Ukraine and its elite represented an even smaller part of the Ukrainian population. Other social groups and other regions played a cru­cial role in the formation of a modern Ukraine.

In my opinion, three questions about the role of the Hetmanate^,s elite merit particular attention: (1) What was the impact of its political and historical traditions on Ukrainian political thought and historical consciousness? (2) What was its role in the formation of a Ukrainian intelligentsia? (3) What was its impact on the Ukrainian cultural and literary revival?

My own rather limited research has convinced me that the elite’s political and historical traditions had considerable influence on subsequent political thought—particularly on the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood—as well as on the preservation of a historical consciousness and on the formation of modern Ukrainian historiography.³⁶ As far as an intelligentsia is concerned, Omeljan Pritsak’s statistics on the social and national origins of the students of Kharkiv University in the first decades of its existence indicate that virtually all its Ukrainian students were either nobles from the Hetmanate (strangely enough, very few were from Sloboda Ukraine) or sons of priests primarily from Right-Bank Ukraine.³⁷ Moreover, as is well-known, some of the first writers in Ukrainian, includ­ing Ivan Kotliarevsky and Ievhen Hrebinka, were nobles from the former Hetmanate. If one adds scholars, particularly historians, to their number, then it seems that the Hetmanate’s elite did play a significant role in the creation of a Ukrainian intelligentsia. But the elite’s role does not stop here. Has anyone ever considered who purchased the publications of the early intelligentsia? It is becoming more and more apparent that many were bought by the nobles of Little Russia; certainly the nobles subsidized them.³⁸ In fact, Taras Shevchenko’s emancipation, education and the publication of the Kobzar would not have been possible without political influence and subsidies provided by “Little Russian” nobles.³⁹ These are only a few instances of what can and must be thoroughly explored.

In conclusion, our knowledge of the post-Khmelnytsky elite is fragmentary. Bits and pieces of the mosaic have been uncovered but a great deal of the picture is still missing. Some of the missing pieces—par­ticularly those regarding status and power—can be supplied by a judicious interrogation of published sources. Others—mainly dealing with wealth and economics—can be discovered only with extensive archival research. So far, Western scholars have not been given access to this rich archival fund while our Soviet colleagues seem unable or unwilling to tap this resource. Therefore, we must do the best we can on the basis of whatever resources we can muster. The Ukrainian elite, kin to a European nobility, is too rare and important a phenomenon for us to ignore.

Notes

1. P. Burke, Venice and Amsterdam: A Study of Seventeenth-Century Elites (London, 1974).

2. M. Weber, Essays in Sociology (New York, 1958).

3. V. Pareto, The Mind and Society, ed. Arthur Livingston, 4 vols. (New York, 1956).

4. G. Mosca, The Ruling Class (New York, 1935); C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York, 1956).

5. I. L. Rudnytsky, “The Role of the Ukraine in Modern History,” The Development of the USSR, ed. D. W. Treadgold (Seattle, 1964), 211-28.

6. Tsentralnyi Statisticheskii komitet, Pervaia Vseobshchaia perepis naseleniia Rossiiskoi Imperii, 89 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1899-1905). According to the census, the following percentages (computed by the author) of hereditary nobles claimed Ukrainian as their native language: (1) Chernihiv province—41 per cent, 48 “Chernigovskaia guberniia” (St. Petersburg, 1905), 308; (2) Poltava province—68 per cent, 33 “Poltavskaia guberniia” (St. Petersburg, 1904), 286; (3) Volhynia province—26 per cent, 8 ^uVolynskaia guberniia” (St. Petersburg, 1904), 248; (4) Podillia province—30 per cent, 32 “Podolskaia guberniia” (St. Petersburg, 1904), 256; (5) Kherson province—13 per cent, 47 “Khersonskaia guberniia” (St. Petersburg, 1904), 258; (7) Kharkiv province—14 per cent, 46 ^uKharkovskaia guberniia” (St. Petersburg, 1903), 270; (8) Tavrida province—4 per cent, 41 ^uTavricheskaia guberniia” (St. Petersburg, 1904), 274; (9) Katerynoslav province—18 per cent, 13 ^uEkaterinoslavskaia guberniia” (St. Petersburg, 1904), 206.

7. The historiography of the aristocrats has been discussed in Z. E. Kohut, “The Abolition of Ukrainian Autonomy (1763-1786): A Case Study in the Integration of a Non-Russian Area into the Empire” (Ph. D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1975), 323-33, and in A. Lazarevsky, ^uPrezhnie izyskateli Malorusskoi stariny,” Kievskaia Starina (hereafter KS), no. 2 (1895): 170-94.

8. A. Efimenko, ^uMalorusskoe dvorianstvo ³ ego sudba,” Iuzhnaia Rus’. Ocherki, issIedovaniia ³ zametki 1 (St. Petersburg, 1905), 145-200.

9. D. Miller, ^uOcherki iz istorii ³ iuridicheskogo byta staroi Malorossii. Prevrashchenie malorusskoi starshiny v dvorianstvo,” KS 1897, no. 1, 1-31; no. 2, 188-220; no. 3, 351-74; no. 4, 1-47.

10. A comprehensive list of Lazarevsky’s works has been published by M. Tkachenko, ^uSpysok prats O. M. Lazarevskoho ³ prats pro nioho,” Ukrainskyi Orkheohrafichnyi zbirnyk 2 (1927): Ii-Ixxx.

11. W. Lipihski, ed., Z dziej∂w Ukrainy (Cracow, 1912); V. Lypynsky, Ukraina na perelomi, 1657-1659 (Vienna, 1920).

12. The most important works of O. Ohloblyn dealing with the elite are the fol­lowing: Liudy staroi Ukrainy (Munich, 1959); Hetman Mazepa ta ioho doba (New York, 1960); Opanas Lobysevych (1732-1805) (Munich, 1966); “Ukrainian Autonomists of the 1780’s and 1790’s and Count P. A. Rumyantsev-Zadunaysky," Anrials of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States 6, no. 3-4 (1958): 1313-26. For a comprehensive listing of Ohloblyn’s works, see L. Vynar, "Bibliohrafiia prats prof, d-ra Oleksandra Ohloblyna,” Zbirnyk na poshanu prof, d-ra Oleksandra Ohloblyna (New York, 1977), 93-126.

13. A. P. Ogloblin, Ocherkii istorii ukrainskoi fabriki; Manufaktura v

Getmanshchine (Kiev, 1925); O. Ohloblyn, “Do istorii ukrainskoi politychnoi dumky na pochatku XVIII viku,” Zapysky istorychno-fllolohichnoho viddilu Vseukrainskoi Akademii nauk (henceforth ZIFV VAN) 19 (1929): 231-41.

14. M. Slabchenko, Khoziaistvo Getmanshchiny v XVII-XVIII st., 4 vols. (Odessa, 1925).

15. L. Okinshevych, Tsentralni Ustanovy Ukrainy-Hetmanshchyny XVII-XVIII w., part 2: Rada starshyn, Pratsi Komisii dlia Vyuchuvannia istorii zakhidno-ruskoho ta Ukrainskoho prava 8 (Kiev, 1930); L. Okinshevych, Znachne viiskove tovarystvo v Ukraini-Hetmanshchyni XVH-XVHI st., Zapysky Naukovoho tovarystva im. Shevchenka 157 (Munich, 1948).

16. The best general Soviet work is by V. A. Diadychenko, Narysy suspilno-politychnoho ustroiu Livoberezhnoi Ukrainy kintsia XVII-pochatku XVIII st. (Kiev, 1959). Other studies include: I. O. Hurzhii, Borotba selian ³ robitnykiv Ukrainy proty feodalno-kriposnytskoho hnitu (Z 80-kh rokiv XVIII st. do 1861 r.) (Kiev, 1958). Istoriia Selianstva Ukrainskoi RSR, 2 vols. (Kiev, 1967); K. Huslysty, Turbaivske povstannia (Kiev, 1947); I. Hurzhii, Povstannia selian v Turbaiakh (1784-1793) (Kiev, 1950).

17. For example, the families who had supported Hetman Mazepa’s break with Muscovy suffered such consequences. See O. Ohloblyn, Hetman Ivan Mazepa, 369, note 49. Moreover, tsarist agents pursued even those members of the elite who had escaped to Western Europe, particularly Mazepa’s relative Andrii Voinarovsky. See L. Vynar, Andrii Voinarovsky (Munich, 1962).

18. This codification of laws was completed in 1743. A brief appended to the code suggests that penalties be adjusted to take into account the rank of both the victim and offender and lists of the hierarchy of ranks in the Hetmanate. The code has been published in A. Kistiakovsky, ed., Prava po kotorym suditsia Malorossiiskii narod (Kiev, 1879). The relevant appendix is to be found on pages 833-8.

19. For the survival of the old szlachta and immigration of the szlachta from Belorussia, see Okinshevych, Znachne viiskove tovarystvo, 5-18, 33-9 and S. Ivanytsky-Vasylenko, ^uDerzhavske Zemlevolodinnia polskoi shliakhty na Hetmanshchyni," Pratsi Komisii dlia vyuchuvannia istorii zakhidno-ruskoho ta ukrainskoho prava 1 (Kiev, 1925): 122-80.

20. For example, the brief appended to The Laws by Which the Little Russian People Are Judged merely states that clergymen are to be considered as having szlachta status, but does not include them in the ranking system. See Kistiakovsky, ed., Prava po kotorym suditsia, 833-8.

21. L. Okinshevych, Lektsii z istorii ukrainskoho prava (Munich, 1947), 75.

22. Apparently, in the seventeenth century, burghers were connected with the elite and even participated in the Council of Officers. See Okinshevych₁ Rada starshyn, 253.

23. Okinshevych, Znachne viiskove tovarystvo.

24. V. L. Modzalevsky, Malorossiiskii rodoslovnik, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1904-15); G. A. Miloradovich, Rodoslovnaia kniga Chernigovskogo dvorianstva, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1901); I. F. Pavlovsky, Po arkhivnym dannym. K istorii poltavskogo dvorianstva, 2 vols. (Poltava, 1906). A great many of the over four hundred works of O. Lazarevsky touch upon the life of Ukrainian nobles and cannot be listed here. The following works are in my opinion the most important for studying the elite: ^uOcherk Stareishikh dvorianskikh rodov v Chernigovskoi gubernii,” Zapiski Chernigovskogo gubernskogo Statisticheskogo komiteta 2 (1868): 35-148; Sulimovskii arkhiv (Kiev, 1884); ^uOcherki malorossiiskikh familii,” Russkii arkhiv 1-3 (1875); ^uLiudy staroi Malorossii,” KS, 1885: ^uLizoguby,” no. 1, 101-25; ^uMiloradovichi," no. 3, 479-98; ^uMiklashevskie," no. 8, 245-53; ^uSvechki," no. 8, 253-8.

25. G. Gajecky₁ The Cossack Administration of the Hetmanate, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1978).

26. Okinshevych, Rada starshyn∙, L. Okinshevych, ^uHeneralna Starshyna na Livoberezhnii Ukraini XVI-XVII-XVIII st.,” Pratsi Komisii dlia Vyuchuvannia istorii zakhidno-ruskoho ta Ukrainskoho prava 2 (1926): 84-171.

27. M. Hrushevsky, Istoriia Ukrainy-Rusy 9, part 2 (Kiev, 1931), 292-359; A. Kaminski, ^uThe Cossack Experiment in Szlachta Democracy in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: The Hadiach (Hadziacz) Union,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 1, no. 2, (1977): 178-97.

28. O. Ohloblyn, Hetman Mazepa ta ioho doba∖ O. Ohloblyn₁ “Do istorii ukrainskoi politychnoi dumky”; O. Subtelny₁ ^uMazepa₁ Peter I, and the Question of Treason,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 2, no. 2, (1978): 158-83.

29. Kohut, “The Abolition of Ukrainian Autonomy,” 47-58; a fuller treatment is Z. Kohut, “The Ukrainian Elite of the Eighteenth Century and Its Integration into the Russian Nobility,” The Role of the Nobility in Russia and Eastern Europe (Yale Russian and East European Publications, No. 4), forthcoming.

30. For a thorough review of the varied interpretations as to the authorship and philosophy of Istoriia Rusov, see O. Ohloblyn’s introduction to a modern Ukrainian translation of the work, Istoriia Rusiv (New York, 1956), v-xxix.

31. A. Lazarevsky, Malorossiiskie pospolitye krestiane (1648-1783 gg.) (Kiev, 1908); A. Lazarevsky, Opisanie Staroi Malorossii, 3 vols. (Kiev, 1888-1902); V. Barvinsky₁ Krestiane v Levoberezhnoi Ukraine v XVII-XVIII w. (Kharkiv, 1909); V. A. Miakotin, Ocherki sotsialnoi istorii Ukrainy V XVII-XVIII vv., 3 vols. (Prague, 1926).

32. The major Soviet works are listed in note 16.

33. V. M. Kabuzan and S. M. Troitsky, ^uIzmeneniia v Chislennosti₁ udelnom vese ³ razmeshchenii dvorianstva v Rossii v 1782-1855 gg.,” Istoriia SSSR, no. 4, (1971): 153-69. These statistics are corroborated by impressionistic accounts. Iosyp Hermaize provides a good description of the impoverished petty nobility in his foreword to O. Doroshkevych, ed., 20-40 roky v ukrainskii Iiteraturi 2 (Kiev, 1924), xi-xii. Recently V. Holobutsky described the estates of the Left-Bank Ukrainian nobles as primarily small to middle size. See V. O. Holobutsky, Ekonomichna istoriia Ukrainskoi RSR (Kiev, 1970), 170.

34. M. Tkachenko, ^uKanivska sotnia Pereiaslavskoho polku z Rumiantsevskoiu revizieiiu,” ZIFV VAN 7-8 (1926): 242-308^

35. G. S. N. Luckyj, Between Gogol and Sevcenko, Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies, 8 (Munich, 1971); Kohut, “The Abolition of Ukrainian Autonomy,” 281-348; O. Pritsak, ^uU Stolittia narodyn M. Hrushevskoho," Lysty do pryiateliv, no. 5-7 (1966): 1-18; I. L. Rudnytsky, “Intellectual Origins of Modern Ukraine,” Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States 6, no. 3-4 (1958): 1381-1405.

36. Kohut, “The Abolition of Ukrainian Autonomy,” 343-7.

37. Professor Omeljan Pritsak of Harvard University compiled these statistics in connection with a course on modern Ukrainian intellectual history. Unfortunately, they have not as yet been published.

38. For a fascinating study of the social profile of Ukrainian book readership, see P. Fylypovych, ^uSotsiialne Oblychchia Ukrainskoho chytacha 30-40 rr. XIX viku,” Pavlo Fylypovych, Literatura, statti, rozvidky, ohliady (New York, 1971).

39. For a stimulating article about the relationship between Shevchenko and the Ukrainian nobility, see O. Ohloblyn, ^uProblema Ukrainskykh zviazkiv Shevchenka," Ukrainskyi istoryk, no. 3-4 (1973): 38-53.