Hetmanate, the Cossack officer elite (starshyna) dominated the farming, livestock,
and trading economy; social tensions arose between them and rank andfile.
Like the Bashkirs, Zaporozhian Cossacks were politically outmaneuvered by the
Russian empire, surrounded in their own lands by in-migration. In the 1750s
Russia established military colonies in the northern corners of Sich lands. Organ-
ized as military regiments, Serbian, Bulgarian, Moldavian, and even Ukrainian-
speaking peasants were settled as border guards and peasant settlers in New Serbia
(1752) and Slaviano Serbia (1754). Border guards paid no direct taxes; state
peasants here paid no poll tax but only a land tax, while serfs paid half that amount,
although in 1776 all peasants were required to provide recruits. In 1764, Catherine II
deprived New Serbia and Slaviano Serbia of most of these privileges and integrated
these areas into a governor-generalship of Novorossiia (New Russia). In-migration of
Ukrainians, Russians, and foreigners intensified. The Zaporozhian Cossacks were
being outflanked.
Russia’s victory in the 1768–74 Turkish war provided an opportunity to destroy
Zaporozhia as a Cossack entity. Alarmed by waves of unrest—in Right Bank
Ukraine, New Russia, and Zaporozhia in the late 1760s, theflight of the Kalmyks
in 1771, revolt among the Iaik Cossacks in 1772, Bashkirs, Nogai, Iaik Cossack,
and Urals peasants all supporting Pugachev 1773– 5 —Russia resolved to crack
down on paramilitary Cossack Hosts. Even though Zaporozhians had fought
loyally in the Turkish wars, in June 1775 Russian troops returning from Black
Sea battlefields destroyed the Sich fortress. Much of the senior officer corps was
arrested, many were exiled to Siberia; many Cossacks were relegated into Russian
rank andfile, while some became free farmers and around 5,000fled to serve the
Ottoman sultan, settling on the southern Danube. Lands of displaced Cossacks
were distributed to Russian nobles or Ukrainian, Russian, and Serbian settlers.
Some Zaporozhians returned to Russian service during the Turkish 1787–91 war,
settling the Ochakov steppe near Kherson, but after victory in 1792 Russia resettled
them to the Kuban to create the Black Sea Cossack Host.
When the Crimean khanate was annexed in 1783, these lands were included in
an immense governor-generalship from the Dniester River to the northern Caucasus
and north to Saratov, comprising three gubernii (Ekaterinoslav, Voznesensk,
Saratov), Crimea as a separate oblast, and the Don Cossacks maintaining their
own lands, under the supervision of the able empire builder and Catherine II’s
confidant, G. A. Potemkin. The 1775 administrative reforms were introduced in
1783 – 4 in the three gubernii according to the empire-wide model, with lower-level
courts staffed by locally elected assessors given the dearth of Russian nobility in the
areas. By 1796 the population of the Ekaterinoslav and Voznesensk gubernii was 80
percent Russian and Ukrainian. Because of the difficulty of securing labor here,
landlords could not enforce serfdom and gave their peasants relatively lower labor
obligations than peasants in the center.
Sloboda Ukraine was similarly integrated in the eighteenth century. It had had
traditional Cossack self-government, organized aroundfive territorial regiments
with Cossack rights (no poll tax, freedom to distill and to trade). Sloboda Cossacks
loyally served Russia in campaigns against Persia, Poland, and the Ottoman empire
Western Borderlands in the Eighteenth Century 105