Domestically, the empire had begun to implement a rational, homogenized
administrative structure in Catherine II’s reforms of the 1770s–80s. But by no
means had Russia’s essential character as an“empire of difference”been erased. We
will see in further chapters where Catherinian reforms asserted standard imperial
practices and where local differences persisted. Concluding this chapter, one might
simply note that even after the 1775 gubernia reforms were introduced across the
empire, the borderlands were treated to different models.
Borderlands with the steppe from the Volga eastward, for example, were admin-
istered as large governor-generalships with less articulated hierarchies of lower and
upper courts, police, andfiscal institutions. Cossack Hosts, more and more drawn
under Russian military control, nevertheless maintained autonomies over territories
and communities. Each was different, representing the eclectic diversity of military
defense and social organization characteristic of the middle ground. By 1801 Russia
had“separate deals”with a vast array of Cossacks—the Don Cossack Host, the Black
Sea, Greben and Terek Hosts in the northern Caucasus, small groups of Cossacks on
the Bug and Volga Rivers, the Orenburg, Ural, and Siberian Hosts on the Kazakh
“Line,”and smaller Cossack-type regiments of Bashkirs, Tatars, and others.
The western borderlands, where one might expect rationalization to have pro-
ceeded on the basis of pre-existing administrative divisions and state organizations,
also persisted as islands of difference in the empire. Paul I felt that Catherine II had
reached too far in destroying the autonomies of Baltic Germans and Polish elites; he
regarded these lands as functioning sufficiently well not to need such drastic
revision. As discussed in Chapter 14, in 1796 he designated most of the lands of
the partitions, from Volhynia to Vyborg, as areas of special status, restoring many
traditional rights to the German and Polish nobles, particularly in local govern-
ment. He also restored rights to non-Orthodox religious communities (including
Jews). His step was particularly welcome in the Baltics, where he restored Baltic
institutions and partly abrogated the 1785 Charter to the Nobility to restore
traditional rights to the Baltic German nobility. Thus, strong Polish and German
traditional nobilities, welcomed into the imperial Russian nobility and civil service,
also retained local power into the nineteenth century.
*****
John LeDonne’s two works on Russia’s foreign policy and expansion provide detailed
background:The Russian Empire and the World, 1700–1917: The Geopolitics of Expansion
and Containment(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) andThe Grand Strategy of
the Russian Empire, 1650– 1831 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
On the Hetmanate: Zenon E. Kohut,Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy: Imperial
Absorption of the Hetmanate 1760s–1830s(Cambridge, Mass.: Distributed by Harvard
University Press for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1988); Daniel Stone,The
Polish-Lithuanian State, 1386– 1795 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001);
Orest Subtelny,Ukraine: A History, 2nd edn. (Toronto: Published by University of
Toronto Press in association with the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1994);
Paul R. Magocsi,A History of Ukraine(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996).
On Ukrainian identity: Frank E. Sysyn,“The Cossack Chronicles and the Development
of Modern Ukrainian Culture and National Identity,”Harvard Ukrainian StudiesWestern Borderlands in the Eighteenth Century 125