From the End of Cossack Self-Rule to the Ban on Ukrainian-Language Publishing

This is the second of four articles tracing the history of the land that is now Ukraine. It covers the period from the emergence of Cossack groups in the late 15th century, through the dismantling of Hetmanate self-rule and the growth of separate national movements in the land divided between the Russian and Habsburg empires, up to the eve of the First World War.

Who Were the Cossacks?

The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, CIUS, at the University of Alberta) writes that peasants and townspeople who fled to the sparsely populated steppe called themselves “free people” — Cossacks. The Encyclopaedia Britannica describes them as “a semimilitary community that developed from runaway serfs, brigands, and merchants.”

It was among the organizers and leaders that people of noble origin were found. Bohdan Khmelnytsky himself came from the petty nobility.

The Zaporozhian Sich had a mechanism of collective deliberation. The same encyclopedia’s entry “Sich Council” records that the council elected the officer corps (the starshyna) and its head, the kish otaman, and that decisions were made by majority vote. The hetman was elected at a general military council. This, however, was the practice of a military community within a society organized by estate, and should not be read as equivalent to modern democracy.

1648 — The Uprising, and What Happened Within It

The same encyclopedia (entry title “Cossack-Polish War”) writes that on 21 January 1648, Khmelnytsky, leading a small detachment of registered Cossacks, was elected hetman. Britannica gives his leadership as running from 1648 to 1657 and states that he marched against the Polish side in April 1648. Behind this lay the expansion of forced-labor obligations, the suppression of the Orthodox Church, and a policy of Catholicization.

This uprising was accompanied by large-scale violence against Jewish communities. This is the part where the numbers are hardest to handle. The entry “Ukraine” in the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (written by Henry Abramson) states that massacres occurred across the right bank of the Dnipro, bringing death to as much as half of the Jewish population. The same encyclopedia’s entry “Gzeyres Takh Vetat” (written by Shaul Stampfer) estimates that the Jewish population in the affected region was about 40,000, that the number of dead was fewer than half of that — fewer than 20,000 — and probably far fewer than half. The same entry also states that recent research shows the account of Nathan Note Hannover, long used as a contemporary record, was often inaccurate, and that its casualty estimates were greatly exaggerated.

This article does not give the number of victims as a single figure. The two estimates above come from separate authors within the same YIVO Encyclopedia. Told only as a story of state formation, this harm would disappear from the account.

Pereiaslav 1654 — An Agreement With No Surviving Original

The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine writes of this agreement that “the original document has not been preserved, but translations and drafts of the tsar’s charter survive.” There is no complete document one can read to see what was agreed.

Understanding of it also diverges. The same encyclopedia records that the Ukrainian side’s government regarded it as a temporary political and military alliance, while the Muscovite state used it as grounds to deepen its own interference. Among historians as well, multiple interpretations sit side by side — vassalage, protectorate, personal union.

Soviet historiography portrayed this, the same encyclopedia writes, as “the culmination of a desire on the part of two brotherly peoples to be united in a single Russian state.”

Partition, and the “Era of Ruin”

Under the Treaty of Andrusovo, signed between Poland and the Muscovite state on 13 January 1667, the left bank of the Dnipro remained under Muscovite control while the right bank passed to Poland. The same encyclopedia calls this “Ukraine’s first partition.” The turmoil before and after this is called the Ruin (Руїна), though historians divide the period differently: one view places it from 1663 to 1687, another from 1657 to 1687. Both the dates and the period divisions given here come from the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine.

The Dismantling of Self-Rule — 1708 to 1783

In 1708, Hetman Ivan Mazepa formed an anti-Muscovite alliance with King Charles XII of Sweden, and was defeated at the Battle of Poltava on 8 July 1709.

The office of hetman was then abolished in 1764, the Zaporozhian Sich was destroyed by Russian forces on 15–16 June 1775, and the Russian Empire annexed the Crimean Khanate in 1783.

The Russian Empire called the annexed southern territory “Novorossiya” (New Russia). The same encyclopedia explains this as an administrative designation, used from 1764 onward, for the southern Ukrainian territory the Russian Empire acquired from the Zaporozhian Cossacks, the Hetmanate, the Crimean Khanate, and the Ottoman Empire. It is the name of an imperial administrative division, not a statement that no one lived there before.

In the same period, Poland was partitioned three times, in 1772, 1793, and 1795. The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine’s entry “Poland” writes that in these partitions Russia gained all of Poland’s Ukrainian territory except Galicia and Bukovyna, which were annexed by the Austrian Empire. But according to the same encyclopedia’s entry “Bukovyna,” Bukovyna belonged to Moldavia until 1774 and was land Austria annexed by taking advantage of the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74. Galicia became Austrian territory in the First Partition of 1772, and that rule continued until 1918. Podilia was split, with its western part passing to Austria in 1772 and its eastern part to Russia in the Second Partition of 1793.

The 19th Century — Serfdom, Ports, and Coal

Serfdom was abolished in 1861 in the Russian Empire, and in 1848 in the Habsburg lands of Galicia, Bukovyna, and Zakarpattia. Sources give two different dates for 1848 — 16 April and 22 April — so this article does not give a specific date.

Odesa became the largest wheat-exporting port on the Black Sea, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine records that by 1874 it had become the largest in all of Europe. In the heavy industrialization of the Donbas, John Hughes, a Welshman, built an ironworks on the site of what is now Donetsk. Both the same encyclopedia and Britannica give this as 1872.

On the spread of literacy, the same encyclopedia’s entry “Literacy” (written by Volodymyr Kubijovyč, 1993) cites figures from the 1897 Russian Empire census. Of the population aged nine and over in the Ukrainian gubernias, 26 percent were literate; among ethnic Ukrainians the figure was 23.6 percent (38.6 percent for men, 12.4 percent for women). The same entry also states that, through the expansion of schooling, this reached about 42 percent of the total population by 1914 — but this figure uses “total population” as its denominator, a different basis from the 1897 figure.

What, Concretely, Did the Empire Do to the Language?

The 1863 Valuev Circular, according to both the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine and Britannica, banned nearly all publication in Ukrainian except for belles lettres.

The 1876 Ems Ukase, according to the same encyclopedia, banned the printing and import from abroad of Ukrainian-language publications, the staging of Ukrainian-language theater and public readings, and the printing of Ukrainian song lyrics. Britannica states that it extended to education as well.

Taras Shevchenko was born on 9 March 1814 and died on 10 March 1861 (New Style). Britannica records that he was born a serf and became free in 1838. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, his first collection of poems, Kobzar (containing eight poems), was published in St. Petersburg in 1840. Earlier still, in 1798, the first three parts of Ivan Kotliarevsky’s Eneida — a burlesque rendering of Virgil’s Aeneid — were published, also in St. Petersburg.

What Was Different in the Habsburg Lands

In Galicia, the revolution of 1848 and the abolition of serfdom opened room for parliamentary politics, associations, and publishing. But the shift in self-identification from “Rusyn” to “Ukrainian” was not smooth. The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine’s entry “Galicia” records that it appeared as a factional conflict between the conservative “Old Ruthenians” and the pro-Ukrainian populists (narodovtsi).

Cultural and academic societies were also born in this period. Prosvita was founded in Lviv on 8 December 1868, and the Shevchenko Scientific Society was founded on 11 December 1873, reorganized into a scholarly society in 1893.

Jewish Society

The origins of Hasidism, according to the YIVO Encyclopedia’s entry “Hasidism,” are linked to Israel ben Eliezer (1698/1700–1760, the Baal Shem Tov) and to the southeastern part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, particularly the Podilia region. Even his birth year is not settled, given as either 1698 or 1700.

On the pogroms of the late imperial period, the same encyclopedia’s entry “Pogroms” (written by John Klier) gives the main sites as Yelizavetgrad, Kyiv, and Balta in 1881–82, and Odesa and Kyiv in 1905. The entry itself states that the total death toll is disputed. This article gives no figure.

The First World War

According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine’s entry “First World War” (written by John-Paul Himka), in Galicia a Ukrainian volunteer unit, the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, was formed within the Austro-Hungarian army, while Ukrainian organizations in the Russian Empire’s territory declared their loyalty to the empire.

The continuation — from the 1917 revolution to the Second World War — is covered in the next article.