across the century. Nevertheless from the 1730s Russia began to limit the register of
Sloboda Cossacks, push lesser Cossacks into taxpaying status, and station regular
Russian troops there. Meanwhile, as in Zaporozhia and Bashkiria, Sloboda
Cossacks were being outnumbered in their lands: from a population of 120,000
in the late seventeenth century, Sloboda Ukraine grew to 660,000 in 1773,
primarily from peasant colonization.
In 1763 the poll tax was imposed on non-Cossack peasants in Sloboda Ukraine
and in 1765 Russia abolished the region’s autonomy as a Cossack entity. Sloboda
Ukraine was turned into Kharkiv gubernia, with a new legal structure of Russian
procurators and Russian law in some forty-six districts (uezdy), several intermediate
level courts, and four civil and criminal chambers at the highest venue. Towns were
given Russian-style government. In the 1770s itsfive Cossack regiments were
integrated into the regular army, the officers becoming Russian noblemen and
60,000 rank andfile soldiers and laborers demoted to regular army or taxed state
peasants. In the 1780s the administrative reforms and Charters to Towns and
Nobles were introduced, including in May 1783 the poll tax on all peasants as well
as quitrent for state peasants and Cossacks; this decree de facto enserfed Ukrainian
peasants by linking them to their place of registration.
A different social and economic history played out in the Rus’palatinates of
the Right Bank and western Ukraine in the eighteenth century, still part of the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until the 1790s. Stretching from Galicia and
Volhynia to the Dnieper, these lands experienced substantive political and social
changes. Cossack governance and landholding was squeezed out in favor of Polish
magnates who produced grain and cattle for export. By the middle of the century,
only four Polish aristocratic families owned 80 percent of the Right Bank; they
populated it by encouraging settlement by Ukrainian peasants from Galicia,
Right, and even Left Bank on advantageous terms. Widespread discontent was
stoked by religious, economic, and social oppression. As tax breaks and loans
expired after a decade or two of settlement, Ukrainian peasants fell into harsh
serfdom, with up to four days a week of labor services. In addition, while the
Hetmanate had a system of primary schools, Polish landlords prevented peasants
in the Right Bank from attending school. The Orthodox Church was systemat-
ically weakened, with the bishoprics of Galicia and Volhynia (Lviv, Peremyshl,
Lutsk) converting to the Union between the 1690s and 1720s. Once a staunch
defender of Orthodoxy, the Lviv Orthodox fraternity became Uniate in 1708; by
the 1760s in the Right Bank only twenty Orthodox parishes were left as well as a
network of monasteries. Discontent on all these grounds merged into three major
peasant uprisings led by“social rebels”called haidamaks attacking Uniates, Jews,
and Poles. In 1768 the entire region was convulsed in the chaos that broke out
with domestic confederations representing pro-Russian and pro-Polish factions. In
the midst of war with the Ottoman empire Russian troops in the Hetmanate
crossed into Right Bank to quell the unrest, opening the door to thefirst partition
of Poland.
Galicia with its central city of Lviv, like Vilnius to the north, was a vibrant center
of intermingling cultures—Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish. Ukrainian education
106 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801