The Russian Empire 1450–1801

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remained the norm, under the influence of Polish property laws, and communities
relied on communal institutions to regulate access to other shared resources
(grazing lands,fishing, timber) and to govern social life in the village. Furthermore,
Hetmanate peasants were not enserfed. They retained mobility, although it was
becoming restricted. In 1721 peasants who left their landlords forfeited their landed
property; in 1760 a landlord’s permission was required to leave. In 1766 thestarshyna
was allowed to purchase villages with serfs as private property. Nevertheless, many left
for the expanding southern frontier.
Typical of eastern Europe at this time, urban life yielded to manorial economy
over the century. Cossack and monastic landholders, with tax-free status, could
undercut merchants and townsmen; they maintained their own private market
towns with courts and administration that they controlled. Only twelve towns in
the Hetmanate had Magdeburg Law rights of municipal autonomy, and local
Cossack administrations steadily impinged on these rights. The number of towns
dwindled as manorial economies prospered. In 1723 there were 200 towns in the
Hetmanate; the number fell by 1783 to around 120. Townsmen were a small
minority of the Hetmanate population, and there were even fewer in Sloboda
Ukraine and Zaporozhia. By the 1760s, townsmen were only 3.3 percent of the
population of the Hetmanate, and only 2.5 percent in Sloboda Ukraine. In 1767– 8
when Catherine II solicited petitions from communities across the empire in
preparation for a new imperial lawcode, delegates from the Hetmanate’s towns
exposed these tensions. They petitioned for affirmation of their municipal and
economic rights, protection from interference by the Cossack administration, and
imposition of city taxes on any non-townsmen trading in towns.
The Hetmanate experienced the booming economy of the eighteenth century.
Farming produced a variety of crops—wheat, barley, oats, millet, tobacco, hemp,
and hops—and light industry engaged in distilling, brewing, tobacco preparation,
potash and tar, textile and leather. Exports included grain, cattle, tobacco and
alcohol, textiles. Russian economic policy, however, forced the Hetmanate to orient
its trade towards Moscow, St. Petersburg and Volga ports, rather than towards the
Baltic, and networks of roads, canals, and rivers in that direction were weak. Thus,
grain was often turned into alcohol, making Left (and Right) Bank lands the
empire’s source for vodka. At the end of the century when Russia had acquired
trade ports on the Black Sea, including Odessa (founded 1794), these areas, plus
the newly settled Black Sea steppe, became major exporters of wheat.
In a setting of economic growth, the Cossack elite and wealthy church institu-
tions prospered; gentry and hierarchs became urbane and well-educated and
patronized the arts. Culture in the Hetmanate was fully integrated with that of
the capitals, with much interchange. In many ways, the Hetmanate had a more
robustly developed cultural life than did Russia. It enjoyed secondary schools and
seminaries in many major towns, and elementary schools in most parishes, far
outpacing primary education in the Russian empire even after Catherine II’s
educational reforms. The Kyiv Mohyla Academy remained the leading educational
institution in the Russian empire; with its up-to-date curriculum, in thefirst half
of the century it produced generations of secular leaders, including learned


Western Borderlands in the Eighteenth Century 109
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