But Catherine’s gratitude had its limits, and her reaction was swift. In 1764, she summoned Razumovsky to St. Petersburg and removed him as hetman, compensating him later with the title of field marshal. More important, she abolished the office of hetman altogether. It was the third and final liquidation of the office of Cossack leader, the first two having occurred under Peter and Anna Ioannovna. It would take Catherine another two decades to eliminate all the institutions of the Hetmanate, including its system of military regiments, but the empress took her time and stayed her course. At stake was the formation of an empire whose regions would all be governed from the center according to Enlightenment principles of rational governance and universal laws. The hodgepodge of long-established customs and special privileges accumulated in the course of history was to yield to well-ordered and homogeneous bureaucratic norms.
Even so, prudence called for a gradual transition to the new practices. In February 1764, a few months before the abolition of the hetman’s office, Catherine wrote to the procurator-general of the Senate—the empire’s legislative, judicial, and administrative body—and de facto chief of Catherine’s political police (“secret expedition”), Prince Aleksandr Viazemsky: “Little Russia, Livonia, and Finland are provinces governed by confirmed privileges, and it would be improper to violate them by abolishing them all at once. To call them foreign and deal with them on that basis is more than erroneous—it would be sheer stupidity. These provinces, as well as Smolensk, should be Russified as gently as possible so that they cease looking to the forest like wolves.… When the hetmans are gone from Little Russia, every effort should be made to eradicate from memory the period and the hetmans, let alone promote anyone to that office.”
Catherine first turned the Hetmanate into the province of Little Russia and then divided it into the vicegerencies of Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Novhorod-Siverskyi. The abolition of the Hetmanate and the gradual elimination of its institutions and military structure ended the notion of partnership and equality between Great and Little Russia imagined by generations of Ukrainian intellectuals. Once incorporated into the administrative system of the empire, the former Hetmanate was dwarfed by the huge Russian state. Out of close to fifty imperial vicegerencies at the end of the eighteenth century, only three represented the former Hetmanate. The special status of the former Cossack polity was gone, its officer class integrated, though not without difficulty, into the Russian nobility and expected to serve the interests of the all-Russian nation. The Little Russians maintained their attachment to their traditional homeland, which they continued to call a “fatherland,” but for most of them there was no longer a contradiction between loyalty to their historical patria and to the Russian Empire.
Accordingly, the lands of the former Hetmanate continued to supply cadres for the empire. Young Cossack officers, such as Oleksandr Bezborodko and Petro Zavadovsky, enjoyed Catherine’s support and made spectacular careers in St. Petersburg. Bezborodko served as her secretary, and eventually as one of the architects of imperial foreign policy; Zavadovsky became the highest official in the empire’s educational system. The westward-looking alumni of the Kyivan Academy were needed as much by the empress, who proclaimed Russia a European state, as they had been by Peter I. But whereas Peter had summoned clerics to the capital, Catherine brought in secular elites. Given the Kyivan graduates’ good knowledge of Latin, they were considered ideal candidates for training as medical doctors, and 60 percent of the empire’s doctors in Catherine’s time were Ukrainians.
Ukrainians constituted a significant part of the intellectual elite, with Hryhorii Kozytsky, Vasyl Ruban, and Fedir Tumansky, all natives of the Hetmanate, becoming publishers of some of the first Russian journals. Kozytsky, who was one of Catherine’s secretaries, published the journal Vsiakaia vsiachina (Anything and Everything, 1769–1770) on her behalf; Ruban published Starina i novizna (Antiquity and Novelty, 1772–1773); and Tumansky served much later as the publisher of the first historical journal in the Russian Empire, Rosiiskii magazin (Russian Magazine, 1792–1794). They were among the early “nationalists” who helped form an emerging Russian identity that embraced the new Russian literary language and associated nation with empire more closely than ever before. According to some estimates, as many as half the “Russian” intellectuals promoting the idea of a Russian nation were in fact “Little Russians,” or Ukrainians.
IN THE FALL OF 1772, THE RUSSIAN ARMY, UNDER THE DIRECTION of the president of the Military College, Zakhar Chernyshev, crossed the Polish-Russian border and took new positions along the Dnieper and Daugava Rivers. The towns of Polatsk, Vitsebsk, Mstsislaŭ, and Mahilioŭ, which had not seen Russian troops since the mid-seventeenth century, now found themselves under Russian control. The Russian takeover of eastern Belarus was part of what became known in historiography as the first partition of Poland, undertaken in 1772 by Russia, Austria, and Prussia.
The partitions of Poland had been foreshadowed in 1762, during the festivities accompanying the coronation of Catherine II in Moscow. Among the speakers was Archbishop Heorhii Konysky of Mahilioŭ, who had come to take part in the coronation from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where his eparchy was located. Speaking on the last day of the coronation ceremonies (September 29, 1762), the hierarch of the last surviving Orthodox bishopric in the Commonwealth pleaded for his persecuted church, arguing that God had spared Catherine’s life so that she could defend not only the faith and the fatherland in Russia but also her coreligionists outside the empire. “Among Your Imperial Majesty’s subject peoples celebrating your most joyous coronation, the Belarusian nation, too, offers its most devoted greetings through me, a subject of Your Majesty,” declared the hierarch. The idea of religious unity between the Orthodox of the Russian Empire and the Commonwealth was well established in Russian imperial discourse of the time. But the notion of the “Belarusian people” being among the real or potential subjects of the empress was something new and entirely different—it had not appeared in Russian discourse since the mid-seventeenth century, when the name “White Rus’” was added to the tsar’s title.
Konysky’s prayers for the protection of the “Belarusian nation” were unexpectedly answered when Russian troops took over eastern Belarus in 1772. In Mahilioŭ, church bells rang day and night to mark the swearing of the loyalty oath to Catherine. In March 1773, Konysky was in St. Petersburg, thanking Catherine for what he could hardly have expected a few months earlier. “Finding myself among this people now, it seems to me that I am among the Israelites making their way out of Egypt; among the captives of Zion returning from Babylon; among the Christians of the times of Constantine,” Konysky told the empress. She had not only offered protection to the “Belarusian nation” under Polish control, but taken it under her rule, making Konysky and his countrymen Russian subjects. Konysky thanked the wrong ruler for the liberation of his people from “Egyptian captivity.” His true redeemer was Frederick II of Prussia, not Catherine II of Russia.
Ever since the Battle of Poltava (1709), after which Peter I introduced de facto Russian control over Commonwealth affairs, the Polish-Lithuanian state had belonged to the Russian sphere of influence. Consequently, for a long time, the annexation of any of its territory by other powers was not in the interests of Russia. But the partition of Poland-Lithuania was certainly in the interests of other European powers. Prussian kings, who badly wanted Polish-held West Prussia in order to connect Brandenburg with East Prussia, made their first offers to divide the Commonwealth in the early eighteenth century. The weakness of the Polish-Lithuanian state was an irresistible temptation to the stronger European powers to settle their accounts at its expense, and the Russian Empire could resist the desires of the Commonwealth’s neighbors only so long.
The turning point came in 1771. Once Austria, alarmed by Russian successes in a war with the Ottomans, allied itself with the Porte, St. Petersburg decided to succumb to Prussian pressure and agree to a three-way partition of Poland-Lithuania in order to avoid
the looming conflict with Austria. On February 17, 1772, Prussia and Russia signed a treaty in St. Petersburg agreeing to annex parts of Polish territory. A tripartite agreement with Austria was signed in the Russian capital on August 5 of the same year. Prussia got what it most wanted—West Prussia. Austria annexed eastern Galicia, with its center in Lviv, to be renamed Lemberg. Russia got part of Lithuania and Belarusian territories.
Russia was also a reluctant participant in the second partition of Poland, which took place in 1793. Developments in the rump Commonwealth—the territories left under Warsaw’s control in the 1780s and early 1790s—presented a clear threat to Russian interests in the country. In 1790, the Poles signed a defensive alliance with Prussia to the exclusion of Russia, and potentially against it. The alliance ended the de jure Russian protectorate over the Kingdom of Poland. To add insult to injury, the Four-Year Diet, which began its proceedings in Warsaw in 1788, launched a number of reforms intended to modernize the Polish state. Adopted by the pro-reform faction of the Diet, the Constitution of May 3, 1791, strengthened the position and powers of the king, made the Diet a more workable institution by getting rid of the liberum veto—the requirement that all decisions be made by unanimous vote—and establishing the separation of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. None of that was good news for Russia, which saw the reforms not only as impairing its ability to manipulate the Polish political system but also as promoting the ideas of the French Revolution. The latter threat made Catherine forget many of her Enlightenment-era initiatives and take a reactionary view of anything that smacked of danger to her authoritarian rule.
The third partition took place in 1795, shortly after the second, as a reaction to the Polish revolt against the partitioning powers led by Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Polish military commander and a native of Belarus. Russia sent an army led by its best military commander, Aleksandr Suvorov, against the rebels. The Prussians also sent their troops, and the two powers defeated the Kościuszko Uprising. Russia, Prussia, and Austria divided the rest of the Polish territories between themselves and, once again, the Russian booty significantly exceeded that of Prussia and Austria—the latter two got less than 50,000 square kilometers each, whereas Russia’s share was 120,000 square kilometers. Altogether, Russia took over more than 66 percent of the former Polish territories. Its new borders encompassed all of Lithuania, with its capital city of Vilnius and its Baltic coastline, as well as Brest in Belarus and the towns of Lutsk and Volodymyr in Ukraine’s Volhynia region. Almost all the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands were now under St. Petersburg’s control. The only exception was Ukrainian Galicia, which remained under Vienna.
In Russian imperial historiography, the partitions of Poland were often referred to as the reunification of Rus’—a term emphasizing that, with the exception of Lithuania, all the other lands annexed to the Russian Empire as a result of the partitions were settled by Eastern Slavs, who had been subjects of Kyivan princes centuries earlier. The ethnic selectivity of the Russian territorial acquisitions was by no means accidental and signaled changes in the Russian national imagination that would take place during Catherine’s rule.
IF THE PARTITIONS PER SE WERE FORCED ON CATHERINE BY HER allies and changing circumstances, the territories that Russia annexed as a result offer insight into the historical, religious, and ethnic identity of the Russian elites.
The territory of Russia’s first partition was defined not by any historical claims but by the desire of the Russian military to have clear-cut borders that would be easy to defend. The new line was drawn along the Dnieper and Daugava Rivers and their tributaries—a border first suggested by the president of the Military College, Zakhar Chernyshev, in the early 1760s. But the treaty on the first partition signed between Russia and Prussia in January 1772 referred to a historical rather than a strategic rationale for the partitions. “Her Royal Majesty the All-Russian Empress and His Royal Majesty the King of Prussia pledge the most positive mutual assistance to each other in their undertaking to take advantage of current conditions to obtain for themselves those districts of Poland to which they have ancient rights,” read the Russo-Prussian convention on the partitioning of Poland.
Territorial claims based on history were also made by Empress Maria Theresa of Austria: “Her Royal Highness the Imperial Queen has ordered her army corps to enter Poland and instructed them to occupy the districts to which she asserts her previous rights.” Maria Theresa hated the term “partition,” which in her opinion implied the unlawful character of the whole enterprise, and sought historical justification of the new acquisition. She found it in the historical claims of the Hungarian kings to the medieval Principality of Galicia-Volhynia. As the Austrian emperors were considered heirs of the Hungarian kings, the new territories became known as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria—the latter term being the Latinized form of the word “Volodymeria,” referring to the capital of Volhynia, the town of Volodymyr, which remained in Poland for the time being.
Curiously enough, references to historical rights disappeared from the manifestos that accompanied the second and third partitions. But those were precisely the partitions that Russia justified with intensive domestic propaganda stressing its historical rights. Where possible, the borders of the second and third partitions were drawn along rivers, but this time historical, religious, and ethnonational considerations were involved along with strategic ones. On the occasion of the second partition, Catherine ordered that a medal be struck depicting the double-headed eagle straight from the Russian imperial coat of arms holding in its clutches two maps, one with the territories attached to Russia in 1772, the other the territories attached in 1793, with an inscription at the top: “I restored what had been torn away.” Thus Catherine was allegedly returning to Russia what had once belonged to it but had been taken away by force.
Catherine’s understanding of what territories she had the right to claim was based on her study of Rus’ history. In her Notes on Russian History, which she wrote for her two grandsons, Alexander (the future tsar of Russia) and Konstantin (the future king of Poland), Catherine covered a good part of the history of Kyivan Rus’ and described in some detail the Rus’ princes’ relations with their Polish counterparts, including numerous wars between the two sides. There is little doubt that Catherine wanted all the former Kyivan territories, including Galicia, which Austria had taken in the first partition. Soon after the second partition, she commented, in the presence of one of her secretaries, “In time, we should obtain Galicia from the emperor in exchange: he has no need of it.” Catherine never got Galicia but insisted on taking the town of Volodymyr in the third partition. In doing so, she prevented Emperor Joseph II of Austria from obtaining Volhynia—the land that the Austrians had claimed as part of their inheritance (Galicia and Lodomeria) from the Hungarian kings. The Austrians had to be satisfied with Little Poland, including Cracow and Lublin, claiming that those lands were in fact “Western Galicia.”
Something important had changed in Catherine’s mind between the first and second partitions. In the case of the first, she did not mind Austria getting Galicia; by the time of the second partition, she wanted Galicia for herself. A better knowledge of Rus’ history could certainly have been one reason for this change of heart (the empress wrote her Notes sometime in the 1780s), but there may have been other reasons as well. Catherine began to think about the new lands not just in historical and religious terms, as she had earlier, but also in ethnic ones. In December 1792, once Catherine had decided in favor of the second partition, she wrote to her ambassador in Warsaw that her goal was “to deliver the lands and towns that once belonged to Russia, established and inhabited by our kinsmen and professing the same faith as ours, from the corruption and oppression with which they are threatened.” Thus, she was not only claiming what had belonged to her predecessors on the Russian throne, but also saving coreligionists and people of the same ethnic background from persecution and from the temptation to rebel.
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Much of Catherine’s thinking on the subject became public knowledge and, indeed, official policy after the second partition, when the Russian army crushed Kościuszko’s rebellion. The capture of Warsaw was lavishly celebrated in St. Petersburg, in stark contrast to the marking of the second partition, when liturgies were served but no gun salute ordered. Catherine II, who believed that the Orthodox population of the Commonwealth (the Ukrainians and Belarusians) belonged to the same tribe as the Russians, had no fraternal feelings toward the Poles. In the same letter of December 1792 to the Russian ambassador in which the empress wrote so positively about the fellow Eastern Slavs, she castigated the Poles: “The experience of the past and the current disposition of conditions and attitudes in Poland, that is, the inconstancy and frivolity of this people, the hostility and hatred it has shown us, and particularly the inclination it has shown toward the depravity and violence of the French, indicate that we shall never have in it either a peaceful or a secure neighbor unless we reduce it to utter weakness and impotence.”
The view of the Poles as a hostile nation and Ukrainians and Belarusians as fraternal ones became dominant in Russian discourse after Suvorov’s capture of Warsaw in November 1794. In December, the government issued a manifesto that had been written by Catherine’s chief foreign-policy adviser, Oleksandr Bezborodko, but reflected, sometimes almost verbatim, the ideas expressed by Catherine in her letter of December 1792. “Her Imperial Majesty has restored to her empire lands that belonged to it from antiquity, torn away from it in troubled times with the same perfidy as that shown in our day by malevolent individuals among the Poles preparing to act to the detriment of Russia, and inhabited by people who are our kinfolk and coreligionists, oppressed because of their piety,” read the manifesto. With regard to the Poles, Bezborodko wrote, “the treachery of the Poles was revealed to the utmost by their perfidious attempt to annihilate the Russian troops who were peacefully and securely posted in Warsaw under the terms of a treaty of alliance concluded in good faith. All of them, young and old, had a hand in perpetrating this villainous act.”
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