Just as tsarist Russia between 1765 and 1785 eliminated the governmental and administrative peculiarities of territories on the fringes of its realm, which included Sloboda Ukraine, Zaporozhia, and the Hetmanate, so too did it succeed in integrating the social structure and economic life of these lands with those of the rest of the empire. The process of socioeconomic change was gradual, with the eighteenth century witnessing essentially a continuation of trends begun during the previous century.
While the decades following the Khmel'nyts'kyi revolution saw the disappearance of the Polish nobility and the liberation of many peasants from serf status, the eighteenth century saw the rise of a new Cossack gentry which improved its socioeconomic status by increasing the labor obligations of the peasants on its lands and by reducing the rights and privileges of the poorer Cossacks. Nonetheless, whereas peasants made up the vast majority of the population in the rest of Russia and Poland, as late as the 1760s they made up only half (50.6 percent) of the population of the Hetmanate. In effect, the social estates in eighteenth-century Ukraine remained the same as before - nobility, Cossacks, clergy, townspeople, and peasants - although their internal composition was altered.
The eighteenth century witnessed increasing differentiation among the Cossacks, who in the 1760s represented 45 percent of the Hetmanate’s population. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the highest level of officers from among the Cossack elite (starshyna) had begun moving up the social scale, and later, joining with those Orthodox nobles who had supported the Khmel'nyts'kyi revolution, they came to form the newer noble estate which replaced the Polish and polonized Ukrainian nobility who had been forced to flee. By the 1760s, there were about 300 members of the oldest Orthodox aristocracy and 2,100 members of the new Cossack gentry. Together they represented no more than 0.2 percent of the Hetmanate’s population. The new Cossack gentry in particular was anxious to improve its status and even began to call itself by the name given to the hated
Polish nobility - the szlachta. Despite this self-designation, the tsarist government refused to recognize the Cossack gentry as part of the noble estate.
The economic status of the majority of Cossacks - divided into the military rand and fde, helpers, and laborers - continually worsened. For instance, the rank and file were expected to serve as soldiers, but in practice they were neither paid nor allowed to obtain booty. They were, however, like the nobility, not liable for taxes. That privilege was not extended to the Cossack helpers. Both the Cossack rank and file and the Cossack helpers were soldier-farmers, and during their long absences in military service they often neglected their lands. The Cossack laborers were worse off still, since they did not even own land. By the second half of the eighteenth century, the members of all three Cossack groups had, with few exceptions, been reduced to an economic level that was about the same as that of the peasants.
As for the peasants, their status too gradually worsened during the eighteenth century. As a result of the Khmel'nyts'kyi revolution, the majority of the villages formerly owned by Polish landlords had come under the authority of the new Cossack state. These so-called free military villages did not stay free for long, however; they were distributed to the Cossack officers and officials as so-called rank estates, in payment for their services to the state. Inidally these ‘rank estates’ were not hereditary, but before long they became the possession of the family of the recipient, and the formulaic ‘customary service’ was expected of the peasants toward their new Cossack ‘landlord’ administrators. Aside from peasants living in free military villages, those on monastery lands and on manorial estates of the hereditary nobility loyal to the Cossack state (especially in the Chernihiv region) were freed from their duties.
The eighteenth century saw an absolute increase in the number of manorial and monastery peasants as well as a quantitative and qualitative increase in the number and kind of duties they were expected to perform. Two days a week of service to the landlord had become the minimum. At the same time, the tsarist government was granting large tracts of land as rewards to Russian nobles (in par-dcular to generals) for their service to the state. The land grants often included mills and peasants over which - according to an imperial decree of 1687 - the Cossack government had no control or jurisdiction. Statistics available from parts of the Hetmanate confirm these trends. With regard to land tenure, in seven regiments of the Hetmanate, by the 1730s more than half the estates (56 percent) were owned by monasteries and hereditary nobles; one-third (33 percent) were free peasant villages; and a mere 10 percent were rank estates held by Cossack officers for the duration of their term of office. The number of free homesteads, however, was rapidly declining. For example, in nine regiments of the Hetmanate there were 27,500 free homesteads in 1729, but that number had decreased to only 2,800 by 1752. Thus, by the 1760s, of the 515,000 male peasants living in the Hetmanate, 90 percent resided on private estates held by the hereditary nobility or the monasteries.
The status of the other two social estates, the clergy and townspeople, continued to differ radically. The clergy was able to increase its wealth and social presTige. As members of a state church, the Orthodox hierarchy and monastic orders were eager and willing to cooperate with the secular authorities in order to preserve their social and economic status. By the mid-eighteenth century, for instance, the monasteries alone owned 10,000 estates, or 17 percent of the land in the Hetmanate. All clergy were exempt from taxes, and because they could marry, much of their amassed wealth was passed on to their children. Nonetheless, despite certain efforts to protect itself from an influx of newcomers, the clergy did not become a closed estate. Cossacks and peasants could become priests, and sometimes priests became Cossacks or peasants. Many priest’s children also entered or married into the Hetmanate’s civil service.
The status of the townspeople was in great contrast to that of the clergy. The vast majority (artisans and workers) remained in the same dependent situation during the eighteenth century as during the second half of the seventeenth century. This was because the Cossack administiation continued to extract as much profit from urban areas as possible. As before, only a dozen towns enjoyed selfgovernment (Magdeburg Law), and most of these had fewer than 5,000 inhabitants. Since townspeople, like peasants, had to pay taxes, there was nothing to attract new settlers to urban areas. Artisans continued to operate witbin the framework of their guilds. The rich patricians of the towns, however, who because of tbeir wealth and status could hold administrative offices in the Hetmanate, became indistinguishable from die privileged Cossack starshyna - neither group being liable for taxes. Within urban areas, a special category of inhabitants was the foreign merchants, especially Greeks and Russians, who also enjoyed tax-free status and who came to dominate commerce, especially international trade. In Nizhyn, for instance, the Greeks had their own brotherhood in the 1680s, whose wealthy merchants by the eighteenth century were sponsoring the largest trade fairs on Ukrainian territory.
The leading positions in Ukrainian towns within the Russian Empire were thus in the hands of a group of urban patricians, Cossacks, and foreign merchants. The generally dismissive view of the townspeople as a social estate was reflected in the Cossack censuses, which did not even have a rubric for them. According to estimates from the 1760s, townspeople comprised only 3.3 percent of the population of the Hetmanate. In neighboring Sloboda Ukraine (1773), they represented a mere 2.5 percent of the population.
The population also included Russian peasants, Jews, and settlers who had been invited from abroad. The Russian peasants generally accompanied former imperial military officers, who as nobles were allowed to bring with them peasant-serfs to serve on their new estates in the Hetmanate. The number of Jews in the Hetmanate remained minuscule - about 600 in the eighteenth century - as a result of decrees (1717, 1731, 1740, 1742, 1744) issued by the imperial government, usually over the protests of Cossack leaders, banning Jewish settlement on the Left Bank. The majority of the Jews had fled or been exiled westward to the Polish-ruled Right Bank, but a few who remained converted to Orthodoxy. From that small group, there were some (from the Hertsyk, Markovych, and Kryzhanivs'kyi families) who attained high-ranking positions in the Cossack administrative structure. Of the settlers invited from abroad by the imperial government, most were settled in Zaporozhia, which after 1775 was incorporated into the province of New Russia. They included Serbs, Bulgarians, and Romanians, many of whom, because of their peasant social status and Orthodox faith, often became assimilated to and indistinguishable from the Ukrainian masses. Other newcomers like the Germans, who began to arrive in the last decades of the eighteenth century, maintained their distinct language and religion and remained isolated in their farming communities from the rest of the population. A similar tendency to hold themselves in isolation and look to their own group was characteristic of certain urban dwellers like the rich Greek merchants, who maintained with their ‘families’ a close hold over certain trading enterprises.
Agriculture continued to be tbe main economic activity on Ukrainian territories throughout the eighteenth century. These same decades also witnessed, at least in Ukrainian lands within the Russian Empire, the growth of a small but vibrant domestic industry as well as the continuation of the pattern whereby Ukrainian trade with Poland and the Ottoman Empire decreased and was replaced by greater integration into the Russian Empire’s economic framework.
In agriculture, wheat continued to be the predominant product. Barley, buckwheat, oats, millet, hemp, flax, and hops were also cultivated. After the mideighteenth century, with the arrival of Bulgarian and Romanian colonists as part of the settlement of New Serbia and Slavic Serbia, corn was introduced; and after 1783 and the incorporation of the Crimean lands, clover and tobacco became widespread. The potato, which later became the staple of the Ukrainian domestic agricultural economy as it did in many other agricultural economies in Europe, was not introduced until the late eighteenth century and was not produced in quantity until the nineteenth century.
Hunting, fishing, and livestock continued to have economic importance. Horses and cattle were a particularly important commodity in frontier areas, especially in Zaporozhia. Besides meeting the needs of local consumption, the fishing industry expanded to the point that nobles and rich Cossacks operated fish ponds, especially in the Hetmanate and Sloboda Ukraine.
Industrial development took the form of small enterprises, usually of a domestic cottage-industry type, which grew steadily in number especially during the rule of Hetman Mazepa. Also under Mazepa, the Hetmanate was able to revive its iron mines and iron processing industry, which had been largely destroyed during the Khmel'nyts'kyi era. By the eighteenth century, several establishments, some owned by religious orders (in Kiev, Chernihiv, Novhorod-Sivers'kyi, Nizhyn, Hadiach) and some by secular entrepreneurs (in Sheptakiv, Pochep), were in operation. The iron industry flourished because of a growing demand for military hardware, church bells, tools, farm implements, and household goods.
Among other industries in the first half of the eighteenth century were distilling and brewing, tobacco pressing, potash and tar production, glass and ceramic Making, and textile production and leather working. The textile industry became particularly well developed. In 1726, a linen factory was founded at Pochep which soon employed 221 workers at 63 benches. In 1756, Hetman Rozumovs'kyi erected a textile factory at Baturyn that initially had 12 machines. By 1800, that number had grown to 76 machines and 100 workers.
Rozumovs'kyi’s venture in Baturyn reflects the degree to which he and other hetmans were under the influence of mercantilist economic theory. This theory, which prevailed in western Europe at the time, argued that the state should take the lead in developing its own economy by promoting agriculture and manufacturing. The goal was to obtain a favorable balance of trade. Whereas in older, feudal and manorial-based economic systems development was left at the whim of individual landlords or petty princes, each of whom imposed his own tariff system and taxes, the mercantilist theorists called for the unification and standardization of economic life within a given territory. Cossack hetmans beginning with Mazepa believed in the feasibility of mercantilist economic theory for the Hetmanate. It was in this context that Mazepa passed a whole series of decrees (universaly) during his tenure which regularized the duties of the peasants and townspeople, thus protecting both these groups from the whims of the increasingly gentrified Cossack landlords. Hetmans Skoropads'kyi, Apostol, and Rozumovs'kyi continued Mazepa’s mercantilist initiatives, since all realized that a regularized economic structure would bring prosperity to the realm and, especially, an increase in tax and tariff revenues.
International trade and commerce
It was the desire of the Hetmanate to increase its income from tariffs that prompted it to encourage trade and commerce. Until 1648, parts of the Right Bank functioned primarily as a source of grain for Poland’s rich trade from its Baltic Sea ports. After the Khmel'nyts'kyi revolution, the Polish orientation in Cossack Ukrainian trade was weakened, and although it was to be revived by the beginning of the eighteenth century, it never again reached its pre-1648 strength. Instead, trade between Cossack Ukraine and Muscovy, the Ottoman Empire, and the Crimean Tatars increased after 1648. Ukraine exported cattle, horses, hemp, flax, tobacco, alcohol, wax, saltpeter, textiles, and potash to Muscovy in exchange for furs of varying kinds and some linen, textiles, and leather. Meat, grain, and wax were sold to the Ottomans in exchange for luxury items like silk, rugs, velvet, belts, Persian textiles, citrus fruits, rice, and tobacco. With the Tatars, Ukrainian traders exchanged grain for horses, cattle, and sheep. In the late seventeenth century, the grain trade with Poland was renewed. The efforts at expanding international trade brought in badly needed revenue in the form of tariffs for the Hetmanate and contributed to the development of a distinct Cossack economy within the framework of east-central Europe. The mercantilist practices of the hetmans clashed, however, with the similar practices of the Russian government.
Russia, especially under the dynamic Peter I, was anxious to strengthen the empire by integrating its economy under the leadership of the central government in St Petersburg. From the Russian imperial standpoint, all Ukrainian territories - whether the Hetmanate, Sloboda Ukraine, or Zaporozhia - were part of one imperial realm. Consequently, they should be economically as well as politically integrated within the imperial system. Starting from this premise, as early as 1701 Peter I issued a decree forbidding Ukrainian merchants to ship certain products (hemp, flax, potash, leather, wax, salt pork) along the traditional westward routes to Poland and, via Danzig (today, Gdansk), Konigsberg (today Kaliningrad), or Breslau (today Wroclaw), to western Europe. Instead, Ukrainian products were required to pass through Russia, to that country’s cold water port of Arkhangel'sk, on the White Sea. This decree effectively cut off Cossack trade with western Europe, because the Arkhangel'sk-White Sea route - generally frozen and therefore accessible only a few months of the year - would make Ukrainian products prohibitively expensive. Both Ukrainian merchants and Hetman Mazepa protested this decree, and it was temporarily rescinded in 1711. It was issued again in 1714, however, and new products were placed on the list, with the result that the Hetmanate’s international trade became an adjunct of Russia’s. Finally, in 1755 the tariff border between Ukrainian lands and the rest of the empire was permanently abolished. Thus, in the course of the eighteenth century the economy of Left Bank Ukraine, like its political and social structure, became progressively isolated from that of the rest of Europe and integrated into the framework of that of the Russian Empire.
World History
