The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  The career of Oleksandr Bezborodko offers a good example of how the new generation of Cossack officers combined loyalty to the Hetmanate with service to the empire. Born in 1747 to the family of the general chancellor of the Hetmanate, Bezborodko received his education at the Kyivan Academy. A few decades earlier, such a background would have been a perfect starting point for a spectacular career in the Hetmanate. But times were changing. Bezborodko attained the rank of colonel by serving not the hetman but the imperial governor of Little Russia, Petr Rumiantsev. The young Bezborodko took part in a war with the Ottomans, showed his bravery in a number of battles, and served with distinction as the head of Rumiantsev’s chancellery. Promoted to colonel in 1774, by the following year he was in St. Petersburg, serving at the pleasure of the empress herself.

  The 1768–1774 Russo-Turkish War, which propelled Bezborodko’s career and moved him from the former Hetmanate to the imperial capital, had a major impact not only on the Hetmanate but also on the Ukrainian lands in general. A revolt that began in Right-Bank Ukraine in the spring of 1768 triggered the conflict.

  In fact, two revolts happened at the same time. The first was an uprising or, in the language of that time and place, a “confederation” of the Catholic (Polish and Polonized) nobility against the decisions of the Diet of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that gave religious dissidents, especially the Orthodox, equal rights with Catholics. Catherine forced the decision of the Diet on its Catholic deputies through her envoy, who threatened to use the Russian troops at his disposal to achieve his goal. For Catherine, this was a way of demonstrating her Russian and Orthodox credentials. The rebels refused to obey the Diet resolution, which they interpreted as a Russian ploy to undermine not only their religion but also the sovereignty of their state. This noble uprising became known as the Confederation of Bar after the name of the Podolian town where it broke out.

  As the members of the confederation went after the remaining Orthodox believers in Right-Bank Ukraine, their actions provoked a different kind of revolt. This one involved the Orthodox Cossacks, townspeople, and peasants who, encouraged by Russian government and church officials, rebelled against the Catholic nobles, prompting fears of a massacre on the scale of 1648—the first year of the Khmelnytsky Revolt. Once again, the Zaporozhian Cossacks joined forces with those Cossacks who served the authorities. The first group was led by Maksym Zalizniak, the second by Ivan Gonta—two future heroes of Ukrainian populist and later Soviet historical narratives. As in 1648, the victims were Polish nobles, Catholic and Uniate priests, and Jews. The Jews had returned to the region in the eighteenth century and reestablished their economic, religious, and cultural life in Right-Bank Ukraine. Many of them were the followers of Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, who in the 1740s began teaching Hassidism in the Podolian city of Madzhybizh. The Catholic rebels wanted a Catholic state without Russian interference, while the Orthodox wanted a Cossack state under the jurisdiction of Russia. The Jews wanted to be left alone. None of the groups got what it wanted.

  In the summer of 1768, the Russian army crossed the Dnieper border with the commonwealth, attacking both the Catholic confederates and the Orthodox Cossacks and peasants. This took the latter in particular by surprise, since they regarded the tsarist troops as their liberators. The empire, however, had its own logic. Both revolts threatened stability in the region, and both were crushed—but not before a detachment of Ukrainian Cossacks claiming to be in the Russian service crossed the Polish border at the town of Balta and entered the territory of the Crimean Khanate, apparently in pursuit of members of the Confederation of Bar. The Ottomans, concerned, along with the French, about growing Russian influence in the region, exploited the incident to declare war on the Russian Empire. Russia accepted the challenge.

  Governor-General Petr Rumiantsev led one of the imperial armies, along with a Cossack detachment, into Moldavia and Wallachia. After a number of successful battles (Bezborodko distinguished himself in those fought at Larga and Kagul), the Russians took control of those two principalities, including their capitals, Jassy and Bucharest. Also captured were the Ottoman fortresses of Izmail and Kiliia on the Danube, which are now in Ukraine. Russian forces also took the Crimea, and most of southern Ukraine came under Russian control. The Ottomans were on the run. In the Mediterranean, the Russian fleet destroyed the Ottoman navy with the help of British advisers.

  The Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarjae, signed in 1774, looked like a setback for Russian aspirations in the Black Sea region. Imperial troops had to leave the Danube principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. St. Petersburg also had to remove its troops from the Crimea. The reason was simple: a number of European powers were unhappy with the sudden growth of Russian influence in the region. But the treaty benefited the Russian Empire in other ways. It effectively expelled the Ottomans from the northern Black Sea region and the Crimea. Russia established its outposts on the Azov and Black Seas. The Crimean Khanate was now declared an independent state. That was a one-sided description: while the peninsula became independent of Istanbul, it now depended on St. Petersburg.

  The formal annexation of the Crimea to the Russian Empire took place in 1783, with the Russian army entering the peninsula and sending the last Crimean khan into exile in central Russia. Bezborodko, by then a leading architect of Russian foreign policy, played an important role in this development. He was also an author of the so-called Greek Project, a plan to destroy the Ottoman Empire and establish a new Byzantium under Russian control, as well as to create Dacia, a new country on the Danube consisting of Moldavia and Wallachia. The project never came to fruition, but its echoes still resonate in the Greek names given by the imperial authorities to the Crimean towns, including Simferopol, Yevpatoria, and the most famous of them, Sevastopol—the Russian naval base established on the peninsula two years after its annexation.

  Alarmed by Catherine’s trip to the Crimea in 1787 and rumors of the Greek Project, the Ottomans began a new war for control of the northern Black Sea coast. They lost once again, this time to allied Russian and Austrian troops. According to the peace treaty signed at Jassy in 1792 by Oleksandr Bezborodko, the Russian Empire extended its control to all of southern Ukraine. The Ottomans now recognized both the Crimea and the Kuban region across the Strait of Kerch as Russian territories. With a stroke of Bezborodko’s pen, the Russian Empire had closed the Ukrainian steppe frontier. The cultural frontier, however, remained in place, simply becoming an internal one.

  The military closure of the steppe frontier opened it for colonization, encouraged and directed by the imperial government. The Cossacks were no longer needed in the area. In fact, the imperial authorities wanted them out, considering them liable to cause revolts, skirmishes, and conflicts with neighboring powers. The government got one more confirmation of that in the participation of the Russian Cossacks in the 1773–1774 Pugachev Uprising. The following year, Russian imperial troops returning from the Moldavian front surrounded the Zaporozhian Host and dispersed the Cossacks. Some of them were recruited into new Cossack formations, including the Black Sea Cossacks, who were eventually shipped to the Kuban Peninsula, bordering on the turbulent North Caucasus. Others stayed, but no longer as an organized force. Grigorii Potemkin, the favorite of Catherine II, showed their settlements to the empress during her trip to the Crimea in 1787. The presentation that gave birth to the expression “Potemkin village” was false in the sense not that the villages did not exist but that they were hardly the result of Potemkin’s efforts: they had been there before.

  The mass colonization of the steppes of southern Ukraine began while they were still under Cossack control. The Zaporozhians themselves invited peasant refugees to the region, and the government subsequently established new settlements of its own on the lands taken from the Cossacks. Serbian refugees from Ottoman rule settled north of Yelysavethrad (present-day Kirovohrad) and Bakhmut (present-day Artemivsk in Donetsk oblast) in districts called, respectively, New Serbia and
Slavo-Serbia. As the line of Russian fortresses moved south and the empire absorbed new lands as a result of the Russo-Turkish wars and the annexation of the Crimea, all Zaporozhian lands became part of an imperial province called New Russia. (Its borders changed over time, including or excluding the Donets River region and the Crimea, but it never included the Kharkiv region of Sloboda Ukraine, as claimed by the Russian idealogues of the partition of Ukraine in 2014.) Centered on the former lands of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, New Russia became the primary destination of domestic and foreign migration in the last decades of the eighteenth century.

  From 1789 to 1790, the first Mennonites moved into the region from Prussia in an attempt to avoid obligatory military service and settled on the Cossack island of Khortytsia immediately beyond the Dnieper rapids. More coreligionists from their old homeland, as well as German Protestant and Catholic colonists from central Europe, would soon join them. Most of the “foreigners,” however, came from the Ottoman Empire: Greeks, Bulgarians, and Moldavians. The imperial authorities, seeking farmers and artisans with a proven record, encouraged their immigration and provided the settlers with land, tax breaks, and benefits that Russian subjects could only dream of.

  The imperial elites celebrated the settlers’ multiethnic composition, which they saw as proof of the greatness of the empire and its ruler. “The Moldavian, the Armenian, the Indian, and the Hellene or the black Ethiopian—whatever the sky beneath which he came into the world, Catherine is the mother of all,” wrote late-eighteenth-century poet V. P. Petrov. By the end of the century, “foreigners” constituted up to 20 percent of the region’s overall male population of approximately half a million. The rest were Eastern Slavs. Some of the latter were Russian religious dissenters exiled to the borderlands, but most of them were runaway Ukrainian peasants, more often than not from Right-Bank Ukraine. Despite its imperial origins and multiethnic bent, the province of New Russia was largely Ukrainian in ethnic composition.

  Whereas New Russia was largely Ukrainian, the province of Taurida, which included the Crimean Peninsula, was predominantly Crimean Tatar. St. Petersburg did its best to smooth the incorporation of the peninsula into the empire, offering Crimean nobles Russian noble status along with the lands that had once belonged to the khans. The other social arrangements of the khanate, as well as the dominant role of Islam, remained intact. The empire was taking its time. As with the Hetmanate, the incorporation of the Crimean Khanate would take more than a generation. Caution was necessary for several reasons. One was outmigration: before the end of the eighteenth century, close to 100,000 former subjects of the Crimean khan had left the peninsula and the Black Sea steppes to its north for the Ottoman Empire. The desire to live under an Islamic ruler was one explanation for this migration; the decline of economic opportunity with the closing of the steppe frontier—the slave trade and war booty had completely dried up—was another.

  In 1793, a year after Bezborodko signed the Jassy agreement, which legalized Russian possession of the Crimea and southern Ukraine under international law, another dramatic event took place on the western borders of the former Hetmanate. The long-established Russo-Polish border along the Dnieper, which had divided Ukraine for more than 120 years, suddenly ceased to exist. Russian troops, some of them led by former Cossack officers who now held high rank in the imperial Russian army, crossed the Dnieper and began to advance westward. They occupied Eastern Podolia, including the fortress of Kamianets-Podilskyi, and part of Volhynia, including the town of Zhytomyr. In the north, the Russian army occupied the Belarusian towns of Minsk and Slutsk.

  The development that put an end to the existence of the Dnieper boundary and realized the age-old Ukrainian Cossack dream of uniting Right- and Left-Bank Ukraine was the second partition of Poland. The first partition had taken place in 1772, when three great European powers—Russia, Austria, and Prussia—took over parts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Prussia’s share included Danzig (Gdańsk), connecting its core possessions with East Prussia; Russia took eastern Belarus; and Austria claimed Galicia. For the Russian Empire, which had controlled the entire commonwealth for most of the eighteenth century through its Diets, which were vulnerable to military and political pressure, and more recently through a loyal king, the partition was more of a loss than a gain. In fact, it was a way of avoiding military conflict, for which St. Petersburg was unprepared. Alarmed by Russian victories in the 1768–1774 Russo-Turkish War, Austria had sided with the Ottomans, threatening to attack Russia. By agreeing to the first partition, Russia was in fact bribing Austria to stay out of the Ottoman-Russian conflict.

  The Austrians took the bait. They wanted Silesia, a province centered on present-day Wrocław (Breslau), but were offered Galicia. The Austrian (Habsburg) empress Maria Theresa detested the term “partition,” which in her opinion implied the unlawful character of the whole enterprise, and sought historical justification for the new acquisition. She found it in the historical claims of the Hungarian kings to the medieval Galician-Volhynian principality, and so the new territory became known as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. The Austrians took their invented Galician-Volhynian connection very seriously. In 1774, claiming the right of the Galician princes to Bukovyna, the Habsburgs annexed that territory from Moldavia. As the entire province of Transcarpathia (the westernmost region of today’s Ukraine) had been under Vienna’s control since 1699, the Habsburgs united under their scepter three future Ukrainian provinces—a development with major implications for modern Ukraine and eastern Europe in general.

  The first partition added no Ukrainian lands to the Russian Empire—all its territorial gains were in Belarus and Lithuania. But the situation changed in 1793, during the second partition of Poland, triggered by events in Warsaw. In May 1791, the delegates to the Polish Diet had adopted a new constitution that promised to put the commonwealth back on its feet. A product of the Enlightenment and the ideas of the French Revolution, the new constitution promoted centralization, good governance, and education; it also made progress in the realm of religious toleration. More importantly from the perspective of the partitioning powers, it promised to make the Polish government workable again by strengthening the authority of the king and removing the requirement to pass all Diet resolutions by unanimous vote—the famous, or rather infamous, liberum veto.

  It appeared that despite (or because of) the shock of the first partition, the commonwealth would lift itself out of the chaos of infighting between aristocratic clans and reemerge as a strong state in the center of Europe. To prevent this, Prussia and Austria annexed even more Polish territory. Russia did likewise under the pretext of protecting the old Polish rights and liberties, including the liberum veto. The Dnieper frontier in Ukraine had to go; the new one was established in Volhynia and Podolia. It made the Habsburgs and the Romanovs neighbors, as the Russians had moved the imperial border all the way to the eastern boundary of Austrian Galicia. Like Empress Maria Theresa, Catherine cared about legitimacy. After the second partition, Russian imperial authorities issued a medal with a map showing the new boundaries and bearing the inscription “I have restored what was torn away”—a reference to the lands that had once belonged to Kyivan Rus’.

  The Russian borders soon moved even farther west. This had nothing to do with a reexamination of maps of Kyivan Rus’ but stemmed from an uprising in the commonwealth caused by the second partition. It was led by Tadeusz Kościuszko, a native of Belarus, veteran of the Confederation of Bar, and participant in the American War of Independence, during which he constructed fortifications at West Point and was promoted to the rank of brigadier general by the Continental Congress. In 1784 he returned to the commonwealth, where he served as a major general in the Polish army. In 1794 he began the uprising in Cracow, assuming command of all the commonwealth armed forces. All three partitioning powers—Russia, Prussia, and Austria—sent their troops across the Polish borders to crush the revolt. The outcome was the complete destruction of t
he Polish state.

  The enlightened despots now divided up whatever remained of the commonwealth after the second partition. Austria competed with Russia for the acquisition of Volhynia (“Lodomeria”) but lost the claim and took part of Poland with Cracow instead. To make the acquisition look legitimate, Austria treated the territory as part of Galicia. Prussia extended its possessions south of the Baltic Sea, reaching Warsaw. But the greatest beneficiary was Russia, whose share of the loot included the Baltic provinces, Lithuania, western Belarus, and, in Ukraine, Volhynia with the towns of Rivne and Lutsk.

  Some regard the partitions of Poland as reunifications of Ukraine—that was certainly the line taken by Soviet historiography. In fact, they resulted in the reunification of some of the Ukrainian lands and the division or partitioning of others. If before the partitions the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian Empire divided up most of the Ukrainian lands, now the division was between the Russian and Habsburg empires. When it comes to the Ukrainian lands, Russia turned from a minority into a majority “stakeholder,” controlling most of Ukrainian ethnic territory. As a result of the partitions, the share of ethnic Ukrainians in the Russian Empire increased from 13 to 22 percent, while the share of ethnic Russians decreased from 70 to 50 percent. More than 10 percent of the population of the newly acquired Ukrainian territories was Jewish, while roughly 5 percent consisted of Poles and Polonized Catholics. It was an ethnic mosaic on a par with or even greater than the one the empire promoted and celebrated in southern Ukraine. But the loyalty to the empire of its new Polish, Jewish, or even Ukrainian (in the parlance of the time, Little Russian) subjects was anything but a given. The multiethnic inhabitants were not newcomers to the area; the state that claimed them was. It embraced some of its new subjects but not the others. As early as 1791, the imperial government introduced the Pale of Settlement, limiting the areas open to the Jewish settlement to the former provinces of the commonwealth and later adding to them newly acquired territories in the south. Most of Ukraine became part of the Pale.