The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  The spectacular imperial career of Teofan Prokopovych reflected a larger phenomenon—the recruitment into the imperial service of westernized alumni of the Kyivan College, whom Peter needed to reform Muscovite church culture and society along Western lines. Dozens and later hundreds of alumni of the Kyivan College moved to Muscovy and made their careers there. They assumed positions ranging from acting head of the Orthodox Church to bishop and military chaplain. One of the Kyivans, Metropolitan Dymytrii Tuptalo of Rostov, was even raised to sainthood for his struggle against the Old Belief. They helped Peter not only to westernize Muscovy but also to turn it into a modern polity by promoting the idea of a new Russian fatherland and, indeed, a new Russian nation, of which Ukrainians or Little Russians were considered an integral part.

  If Peter’s policies intended to strengthen his authoritarian rule and centralize state institutions offered new and exciting opportunities to ecclesiastical leaders, they were nothing short of a disaster for the Cossack officers. Mazepa’s defection added urgency to the tsar’s desire to integrate the Hetmanate into the institutional and administrative structures of the empire. A Russian resident now supervised the new hetman, Ivan Skoropadsky. His capital was moved closer to the Muscovite border, from the destroyed Baturyn to the town of Hlukhiv. Muscovite troops were stationed in the Hetmanate on a permanent basis. Family members of Cossack officers who had followed Mazepa into exile were arrested and their properties confiscated. More followed once the Northern War ended with a Muscovite victory in 1721. Tsar Peter changed the name of the Tsardom of Muscovy to the Russian Empire and had himself proclaimed its first emperor. In the following year, the tsar used the death of Skoropadsky to liquidate the office of hetman altogether. He placed the Hetmanate under the jurisdiction of the so-called Little Russian College, led by an imperial officer appointed by Peter. The Cossacks protested and sent a delegation to St. Petersburg to fight for their rights—to no avail. The tsar ordered the arrest of the leader of the Cossack opposition, Colonel Pavlo Polubotok, who would die in a cell of the St. Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg.

  Mazepa had gambled and lost. So did the state he tried to protect. We do not know what the fate of the Hetmanate might have been if Charles XII had not been wounded before the battle and the Cossacks had supported Mazepa in larger numbers. We can say, however, what kind of country Mazepa’s successors wanted to build and live in. Our knowledge comes from a document called Pacta et conditiones presented to Pylyp Orlyk, the hetman elected by the Cossack exiles in Moldavia after Mazepa’s death. Needless to say, they did not recognize Skoropadsky, elected on Peter’s orders, as their legitimate leader. The Pacta, known in Ukraine today as the Constitution of Pylyp Orlyk, is often regarded as the country’s first constitution, adopted, many say with pride, even before the American one. In reality, the closest parallel to the Pacta would be the conditions on which the Polish Diets elected their kings. The document tried to limit the hetman’s powers by guaranteeing the rights of the Cossack officers and the rank-and-file Cossacks, especially the Zaporozhians, many of whom had followed Mazepa into exile.

  The Pacta presented a unique vision of the Hetmanate’s past, present, and future. The Cossack officers gathered around Orlyk, who had been Mazepa’s general chancellor, traced their origins not to Kyiv and Prince Volodymyr—a foundational myth already claimed by Kyivan supporters of the tsar—but to the Khazars, who were among the nomadic predecessors of Kyivan Rus’. The argument was linguistic rather than historical, and, while laughable today, it was quite solid by the standards of early modern philology: “Cossack” and “Khazar” sounded quite similar, if not identical, in Ukrainian. At stake was a claim to the existence of a Cossack nation separate and independent from that of Moscow. Orlyk and his officers described it as Cossack, Ruthenian, or Little Russian, depending on circumstances. Most of Orlyk’s ideas remained unknown or unclaimed by his compatriots. At home, in Ukraine, the Cossacks were fighting hard to preserve whatever was left of their autonomy.

  The Cossacks in the Hetmanate regarded the death of Peter I in February 1725, a few weeks after the demise of the imprisoned Cossack colonel Polubotok, as divine punishment for the tsar’s mistreatment of them. They also viewed it as an opportunity to recover some of the privileges usurped by the tsar. The restoration of the office of hetman topped the Cossack agenda. In 1727 the Cossack officers achieved their goal by electing one of Peter’s early opponents, Colonel Danylo Apostol, to the newly reinstated hetmancy. They celebrated this restoration of one of the privileges given to Bohdan Khmelnytsky by rediscovering a portrait of the old hetman and reviving his cult not only as the liberator of Ukraine from Polish oppression but also as a guarantor of Cossack rights and freedoms. In his new incarnation, Khmelnytsky became the symbol of the Hetmanate elite’s Little Russian identity, which entailed the preservation of special status and particular rights in return for political loyalty.

  What exactly was that new identity? It was a rough-and-ready amalgam of the pro-Russian rhetoric of the clergy and the autonomist aspirations of the Cossack officer class. The main distinguishing feature of the Little Russian idea was loyalty to the Russian tsars. At the same time, Little Russian identity stressed the rights and privileges of the Cossack nation within the empire. The Little Russia of the Cossack elite remained limited to Left-Bank Ukraine, distinct in political, social, and cultural terms from the Belarusian territories to the north and the Ukrainian lands west of the Dnieper. The DNA of the new polity and identity bore clear markers of earlier nation-building projects. The Cossack texts of the period (the early eighteenth century saw the appearance of a new literary phenomenon, Cossack historical writing) used such terms as Rus’/Ruthenia, Little Russia, and Ukraine interchangeably. There was logic in such usage, as the terms reflected closely interconnected political entities and related identities.

  In defining the relationship between these terms and the phenomena they represented, the best analogy is a nesting doll. The biggest doll would be the Little Russian identity of the post-Poltava era; within it would be the doll of the Cossack Ukrainian fatherland on both banks of the Dnieper; and inside that would be the doll of the Rus’ or Ruthenian identity of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. At its core, Little Russian identity preserved the memory of the old commonwealth Rus’ and the more recent Cossack Ukraine. No one could know, in the aftermath of the Battle of Poltava, that it was only a matter of time before the Ukrainian core emerged from the shell of the Little Russian doll and reclaimed the territories once owned or coveted by the Cossacks of the past.

  III

  Between the Empires

  chapter 13

  The New Frontiers

  The last quarter of the eighteenth century saw a dramatic change in the geopolitics of eastern and central Europe. Its major feature and cause was the rise of the military might and geopolitical influence of the Russian Empire, which the 1709 Battle of Poltava had launched on its career as a European superpower. Oleksandr Bezborodko, a descendant of a prominent Cossack officer family in the Hetmanate and grand chancellor of the Russian Empire at the end of the century, once told a younger interlocutor, “In our times, not a single cannon in Europe could fire without our consent.” The borders of the Russian Empire advanced rapidly west and south, causing the retreat of the Ottomans from the northern Black Sea region and the partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which disappeared from the map of Europe.

  These striking changes took place with the active involvement of many Ukrainians. Bezborodko, who played a key role in the formulation of Russian foreign policy in the 1780s and early 1790s, was one of them. The changes Bezborodko helped to introduce affected his compatriots at home. Ukraine found itself at the center of this major geopolitical shift, at once its victim and its beneficiary. At this point the Hetmanate vanished from the map of Europe and the Russian Empire. The two main cultural frontiers of Ukraine—one between Eastern and Western Christianity, the other between Chris
tianity and Islam—also began to shift. The change in imperial Russia’s borders altered cultural spaces as well. In the west, the Russian authorities halted the advance of the Catholic and Uniate churches at the Dnieper and pushed it back; in the south, the “closing” of the steppe frontier gave new impetus to the further Ukrainian advance toward the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.

  Historians of politics, ideas, and culture know the eighteenth century first and foremost as the Age of Enlightenment, an era extending from the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth century and defined by the rise, in both philosophy and politics, of the ideas of individualism, skepticism, and reason—hence another term for the period, the Age of Reason. Reason, however, was understood in more than one way. The ideas of liberty and the protection of individual rights took center stage in the writings of the period, but so did the notions of rational governance and monarchical absolutism. The modern republic and the modern monarchy both have deep roots in the ideas of the French philosophes. Both the founding fathers of the United States and the absolute rulers of eighteenth-century Europe were disciples of the Enlightenment. Three of the latter—Catherine II of Russia, Frederick II of Prussia, and Joseph II of Austria—became known in history as “enlightened despots.” In addition to being their countries’ second monarchs to bear their names, as well as their belief in rational administration, absolute monarchy, and their right to rule, another commonality united them: they all took part in the partitions of Poland (1772–1795), which ultimately crushed the commonwealth’s Enlightenment-inspired efforts to reform itself. The partitions were welcomed by none other than Voltaire, who considered them a victory for the cause of liberalism, toleration, and, yes, reason. He wrote to Catherine, suggesting that the Russian government could finally bring order to that part of Europe.

  The ruler’s absolute power, good government, and the application of universal norms to all parts of the empire and all its subjects: these principles informed the thinking and reforms of Catherine II, who ruled the Russian Empire for more than thirty years, from 1762 to 1796. None of these principles boded well for the Hetmanate, an autonomous enclave whose very existence rested on the idea of special status within the empire. The abolition of internal borders and the full incorporation of the Cossack state into the empire became one of the empress’s first priorities in the region. “Little Russia, Livonia, and Finland are provinces governed by confirmed privileges,” wrote Catherine in 1764. “These provinces, as well as Smolensk, should be Russified in the easiest way possible so that they cease looking like wolves to the forest. The approach is easy if wise men are chosen as governors of the provinces. 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.”

  The first Russian ruler to eliminate the office of hetman was Peter I. He did so after the death of Ivan Skoropadsky in 1722. The revival of the Hetmanate’s autonomy after his death in 1725, with the election of a new hetman two years later, did not last very long. It came to an end in the mid-1730s, when the imperial government barred the election of a new Cossack leader after the death of Hetman Danylo Apostol. The Hetmanate again came under the control of a government body called the Little Russian College. With the hetmancy’s short-lived restoration in 1750, the mace went not to a Cossack colonel or a member of the general staff but to the president of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences. This man of many worlds and talents was the twenty-two-year-old Kyrylo Rozumovsky.

  A native of the Hetmanate educated at the University of Göttingen, Rozumovsky was, more than anything, an imperial courtier. The secret of his early and spectacular career lay in his family ties. His elder brother Oleksii, a Cossack youth from the town of Kozelets between Kyiv and Chernihiv, was a talented singer and ended up in the court chorus in St. Petersburg, where he sang, played the bandura, and met a granddaughter of Peter I named Elizabeth, a future empress of Russia. They became lovers and, by some accounts, were secretly married. One way or another, the Cossack Oleksii Rozum became the Russian count Aleksei Razumovsky (Ukrainian: Rozumovsky). And on the advice of the “Emperor of Night,” as some courtiers called Rozumovsky, Empress Elizabeth restored the office of hetman, which went to his younger brother.

  If the elder Rozumovsky was instrumental in bringing Elizabeth to the throne (he was running the court at the time of her accession in 1741), the younger one played an important role in the succession of Catherine II. She became empress as the result of a coup backed by the imperial guards, which saw her husband and the lawful ruler of the realm, Peter III, assassinated. The killing of her husband aside, Catherine, born Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg, had no more than a shaky claim to the Russian throne. Those who brought her to power believed that she owed them a debt. “Every guardsman when he looks at me can say: ‘I made that woman,’” wrote Catherine to Voltaire. Among those who thought that way was Hetman Kyrylo Rozumovsky of Ukraine. In return for his services he wanted a hereditary hetmancy. His subjects in the Hetmanate also wanted broader autonomy and a local legislature.

  Some of the Cossack patriots regarded the Hetmanate, which they, too, now called Little Russia, as a polity equal to the imperial core, which they called Great Russia. “I did not submit to you but to your sovereign,” wrote Semen Divovych in his poem “A Conversation Between Great and Little Russia.” With these words, written soon after Catherine’s accession to the throne, a personified Little Russia addresses Great Russia. Divovych continued, “Do not think that you yourself are my master, / But your sovereign and mine is our common ruler.” This vision of a dynastic union of Little and Great Russia harked back to the ideas of the Union of Hadiach. The sovereign in question, Catherine II, had no intention of presiding over a confederation of polities that claimed special rights and privileges. She envisioned a centralized empire divided rationally into administrative units, not enclaves like the Hetmanate.

  Catherine’s recall of the hetman to St. Petersburg and abolition of the hetmancy altogether in the fall of 1764 dashed not just Rozumovsky’s hopes but also those of many Ukrainian patriots in the Hetmanate. The new ruler of the Hetmanate, or whatever was left of it, was General Petr Rumiantsev. An ethnic Russian, he assumed the newly created office of governor-general of Little Russia and took command of the Russian army in the region. His rule lasted more than twenty years and witnessed the introduction of serfdom in the Hetmanate, as well as imperial tax and postal systems. In the early 1780s, he presided over the liquidation of the territorial autonomy of the Hetmanate and the abolition of the administrative and military system based on Cossack regiments. The regular army incorporated the military detachments, and Cossack administrative units were merged to create three imperial provinces according to the new administrative system introduced by Catherine throughout the empire.

  When it came to realizing her vision of a well-ordered imperial state, Catherine clearly took her time. The whole process of assimilating the Hetmanate, from the abolition of the hetman’s office to the administrative integration of the Hetmanate into the empire, took almost twenty years. The transition happened gradually, without new revolts or the creation of new martyrs for the cause of Ukrainian autonomy. It took place with the support of numerous natives of the Hetmanate who believed that imperial incorporation was a godsend. Many of the Hetmanate’s institutions and practices seemed out of date, incapable of responding to the challenges of the Age of Reason. Imperial integration turned auxiliary Cossack detachments into disciplined army units and introduced such public services as a school system and regular mail delivery. It also brought serfdom, but few Cossack officers protested, as they stood to benefit from serf labor.

  The Cossack elite ruled in the Hetmanate and Sloboda Ukraine—a region around Kharkiv and Sumy that had remained under direct Russian administration since the seventeenth century—but peasants accounted for most of the population of those two areas. In the course of the eig
hteenth century, they found themselves increasingly losing not only their land but also their freedom—the great achievement of the Khmelnytsky Uprising. In the second half of the century, close to 90 percent of peasants in the Hetmanate and more than half of those in Sloboda Ukraine lived on estates owned by Cossack officers, now members of the gentry, and by the Orthodox Church. A decree issued by Catherine in May 1783 prohibited close to 300,000 peasants living on gentry estates from leaving their locations and obliged them to perform free labor for the landowners. This was a third onset of serfdom.

  Some have argued that at least one voice advocated against enserfment in the Hetmanate. That voice belonged to Vasyl Kapnist, a descendant of a Cossack officer family from the Poltava region, who wrote one of the best-known oppositional texts of the Catherinian era, the “Ode on Slavery” (1783). According to some scholars, Kapnist protested the enserfment of the peasantry; others see him as arguing against the liquidation of the Hetmanate’s institutions. In fact, he may have opposed both developments, which coincided closely in time and were enacted by decrees of the same ruler. Kapnist did not hide his disappointment with the consequences of Catherine’s rule for his homeland. With regard to the empress’s treatment of her people, he wrote, “And you burden them: You place chains on the hands that bless you!”

  Kapnist was one of many members of the Ukrainian elite who made a good part of their careers in St. Petersburg and contributed to the development not only of Ukrainian but also of Russian literature and culture—his “Ode” became a canonical text of Russian literature. Whereas in Peter’s time Ukrainian clerics moved to Russia and joined the imperial church, the age of Catherine saw the migration to St. Petersburg of the sons of Cossack officers and alumni of the Kyivan Academy who opted for secular professions. Between 1754 and 1768 alone, more than three hundred alumni of the academy chose the imperial service or moved to Russia. Their educations prepared them well to continue their studies abroad and then return to serve the empire. There were twice as many Ukrainian as Russian doctors in the empire, and in the last two decades of the century, more than one-third of the students at the St. Petersburg teachers’ college came from the lands of the Hetmanate. Catherine stopped the recruitment of Ukrainian clergymen for the Russian church (when she took office, most of Russia’s bishops were migrants from Ukraine), but the influx of Ukrainians into the civil service and the military continued apace.