The Russian Empire 1450–1801

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

independent Zaporozhian Sich; thousands of Ruthenian peasants and Cossacks
fled to both during decades of chaos.
Right Bank Ukraine was devastated in population and economy by the decades
of war that accompanied the Khmelnytsky uprising. In the 1680s the Polish
government allowed Cossacks to return and reclaim their lands, but also moved
in Polish landholders, setting in motion social tensions that played out in the next
century. Serfdom and the Polish social class structure endured. Under Catholic
pressure the Orthodox Church in the Right Bank was transferred to the Union in
the early eighteenth century. West of the Right Bank, Galicia and Volhynia
remained the most Polonized Ukrainian-speaking lands, with no Cossackdom, a
serf-based noble manorial economy, and the vibrant, multi-ethnic town of L’viv.
The Cossacks of the Hetmanate enjoyed virtual autonomy for at leastfifty years.
It was a relatively densely settled territory with about eleven cities, 126 towns, and
about 1.2 million in population by the end of the century. Standing for Cossack
independence and Orthodoxy, the Hetmanate eradicated the Uniate Church,
exiled Polish landlords, and abolished the Polish-Lithuanian parliamentary system
with county noble assemblies. In its place the Hetmanate created a regimental
administration ruled by Cossack officers and law. The Hetmanate never established
legal corporate estates such as a Cossack equivalent of nobility, but within a
generation or two, a clear social hierarchy was developing.
Initially the Hetmanate continued the tradition of easy access to Cossack status;
peasants, burghers, and Ruthenian petty nobles won Cossack status with rights of
landholding, free taxation, and participation in local government. At its height in
1650, the number of Cossacks was 50,000. The admixture of so expansive an elite,
in a setting of Polish parliamentary political culture and tremendous agrarian
productivity, rapidly transformed the Hetmanate’s Cossacks into an exclusive
landed nobility with sharp social divisions (parallel to the process occurring on
the Don). The Hetmanate’s Cossack officer elite (starshyna) took over Polish crown
and noble lands; they gradually excluded lesser officers and rank andfile Cossacks
from landholding, office-holding, and political rights. Lesser Cossacks fell into
poverty and were decimated by the warfare of the second half of the century. By
1669 there were only 30,000 Cossacks; by 1730, only 20,000, many of them
impoverished.
Culturally and politically, however, thefirst half-century of the Hetmanate
(1648–1709) is considered a high point in Ukrainian history, particularly the
reign of Hetman Ivan Mazepa (1687–1709), for its cultivation of early modern
national consciousness. A cultural centerpiece was the distinguished Kyiv-Mohyla
Academy, which featured a twelve-year classical and modern curriculum offering
languages such as Latin, Greek, and Slavonic, classicalfields such as rhetoric,
oratory, philosophy, and theology, and modern disciplines such as astronomy,
geography, and mathematics. It nurtured in its students a Renaissance call to
civic engagement around a revived Orthodoxy. From here came two of Russian
Tsar Peter I’s most influential advisors—Stefan Iavorsky and Feofan
Prokopovich—who brought to St. Petersburg potent ideas of absolutism and
political and religious reform. In Kyiv at the Mohyla Academy, Prokopovich


Assembling Empire 77
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