Untitled - OUDL Home

ut he was also a ruse, wealthy man of affairs, representativeof the new, grasping Ukrainian upper class andan enemy of the old Cossack equalitarian traditions.Distrusting Peter and fearing to be on what seemed tobe the losing side, he went over to Charles XII, aimingat a more or less united Ukraine under Swedish or Polishprotection. Despite bitter discontent at Peter's heavyhand little support for Mazepa was forthcoming from hisfellow-countrymen, and the battle of Poltava decidedthe issue.Thereafter, Little Russia was governed either by puppethetmans or by a board nominated by St Petersburg.Its autonomies were more and more curtailed untilCatherine II, true to her centralizing policy, completelyabsorbed it into the administrative, financial, military,and ecclesiastical system of the rest of the empire (1781,1783, 1786), and facilitated the further extension ofserfdom. The Zaporozhian 'host,' now a shadow of itsformer power, was broken up (1775) and its muchreducedlands granted to new settlers. New Russiabegan to take shape (see pp. 46-47). The ZaporozhianCossacks themselves, after various peregrinations, weremostly re-employed on frontier defence along the BlackSea coast by the Kuban.This absorption of Little Russia was leffected largelythrough the assimilation of the Ukrainian Cossackofficers, who, even more than in Slobodskaya Ukraine(see p. 45), developed into a serf-owning aristocracy,only too anxious to receive, as they did in 1785, the sameprivileged status as the Russian gentry. Just as earlierthe upper class of the western Ukraine had becomepolonized, so in the eighteenth century the upper classof the eastern Ukraine became russianized. HenceforwardUkrainians played a prominent part in all sidesof Russian life.The Ukrainian peasantry under Russian rule, whichwas extended to the Right-bank Ukraine by the secondpartition of Poland (1793), multiplied to such an extentthat these provinces became the most densely populatedrural areas in the empire and one of the main centres ofagrarian discontent and of migration. While retaining229