The Russian Empire 1450–1801

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

political power and institutions) those of the Polish nobility, local boards ennobled
upwards of 25,000 Cossacks and Ruthenian gentry by the 1790s, many onflimsy
grounds. Even though that number was cut in half by a more stringent review of
1795, ample numbers of Ruthenian gentry received the status and privileges of
imperial nobility and went on to serve in police, judicial, and administrative
institutions across the southern border (New Russia, Right Bank, Georgia) and
in St. Petersburg. Some reached the height of imperial service: two of the six men in
Catherine II’s powerful Secretariat of the 1770s reform era were Ukrainian:
A. A. Bezborodko and Peter Zavadovskii. Certainly pride in the Hetmanate’s
historical identity did not falter, kept alive by descendants of Cossack officers and
Ruthenian noblemen. As Serhii Plokhy argues, such circles produced the anonym-
ousHistory of the Rus’People(1801–4) which argued eloquently for Ruthenian
culture and Cossack rights and privileges, and inspired the development of
nineteenth-century Ukrainian nationalism. Nevertheless, in the reign of Catherine
II, after more than a century of self-government and regional autonomy, the Left
Bank was becoming integrated into the empire.


POPULATING“NEW RUSSIA”


Throughout this century Russia steadily populated the steppe for farming as it
subdued Cossacks and nomads from the Black Sea to the Caspian and Ural steppes.
In thefirst half of the century, the focus on settlement was the lower Volga, where
local governors aggressively urged landlords to import serfs there; peasants as always
were willing toflee enserfment. The peasant population of Saratov Province almost
tripled by the 1740s. In the second half of the century the state enticed Russian and
Ukrainian settlers from overpopulated regions with a variety of inducements—cash
subsidies, years of exemption from taxation, free land. But their terms were never as
favorable as those offered to foreign immigrants.
As we have seen, in the 1750s Empress Elizabeth’s government attracted foreign
settlers (Serbs, Bulgarians, Moldavians, Macedonians) to military settlements in the
northern border of the Zaporozhian Sich (New Serbia in 1752, Slaviano Serbia
1754) with favorable tax breaks. Starting in 1764 and through Catherine II’s reign,
these areas were transformed into Russian gubernii, and in 1776 their farming
peasants were brought into line with Russian state peasants and serfs by being
required to provide recruits and pay poll tax. At the same time, the empire created
new colonies of foreigners who retained their privileges for decades.
In the 1760s Catherine II promoted foreign immigration in the mercantilist
spirit of populationism, the conviction that a country’s success is measured by the
size of its population. In herInstructionof 1767, she worried,“Russia not only has
not inhabitants enough but it contains immense tracts of land, neither peopled nor
cultivated.”All across Europe in the mid-eighteenth century rulers were trying to
attract new settlers, much to the resentment of their neighbors. Frederick the Great,
for example, aggressively populated Prussian lands with Huguenots and Germans,
as did the Habsburgs; meanwhile Britain and France were trying to populate


Western Borderlands in the Eighteenth Century 113
Free download pdf