The Russian Empire 1450–1801

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into the regular army. With the outbreak of war with the Ottoman empire in 1787
and Sweden in 1788, conscription of all taxpayers—peasants, townsmen, lesser
Cossack—was introduced for thefirst time in the Hetmanate (1789). The regional
integrity of military service in Ukraine was abolished, and the Hetmanate’s
Cossacks and rank andfile served around the realm. In 1786 Russia imposed the
secularization of vast church lands that had been carried out in Russia in 1764.
Forty-two monasteries and convents were closed, involving approximately 1,000
clergy, leaving only nineteen such institutions with about 400 monks and nuns.
Church peasants were transformed into state peasants,filling imperial coffers.
Diocesan borders were redrawn to match new administrative borders. The era of
reforms contributed to the Hetmanate’s Orthodox clergy becoming a closed social
class, as in Russia: now only those social groups not subject to the poll tax were
allowed to become clergy. Compulsory seminary training became limited to sons of
priests, and the number of parish positions was tightly regulated. With their
education in Russian seminaries, gradually the Ruthenian Orthodox clergy became
not only a closed estate, but a more Russianized one.
Along with the administrative reforms came a recategorization of Hetmanate
society. Petty Cossack landholders were demoted to taxpaying state peasants and in
a law of May 1783 all taxpayers were required to pay the poll tax. The same law
created serfdom by forbidding peasants from moving from their landlords. Urban
institutions were also reformed with the administrative reforms (1779) and 1785
Charter to the Towns: there had been ten magistrates, with a separate court for the
influential colony of Greek merchants at Nezhin. The reform maintained the
Nezhin Greeks’court, but otherwise introduced Russian-style reformed magistra-
cies, from which the Hetmanate’s burghers benefited. They found confirmation of
their status; their existing guild organizationfit the reform and towns continued to
use the combination of Russian law and Lithuanian statute that had become
common across the Hetmanate, even in so-called Magdeburg Law towns. The
reform did open up towns in the Left Bank to foreign merchants, including Jews
and Russians, who joined with local burghers and merchants in the reform’s new
categories determined by wealth, not ethnicity. Russian gradually became the
language of cities and commerce, and in the long run, Ukrainian burghers and
merchants assimilated into an imperial urban burgher class.
Most remarkable, perhaps, was the relatively smooth transition into the reforms
by the Ruthenian elite. Certainly voices were initially raised in defense of Rus’
autonomies, but they were matched by others representing the Rus’lands as an
equal partner in the empire and urging tighter integration with it. The most
complex issue was equating the Ruthenian elite to the Russian nobility. Initially,
since the new administrative reforms created hundreds of new positions for noble-
men, any Ruthenian gentryman in military service to Russia in a rank of the
Table of Ranks that conferred hereditary nobility was declared noble. Those not
in service were invited, under the broad reading of the sympathetic governor Petr
Rumiantsev, to submit proof of noble status to be decided upon by panels of local
nobles. When the 1785 Charter of Nobility was extended to the Hetmanate,
offering the Ruthenian gentry benefits of noble status that equaled (save for


112 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801
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