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settlers. Much of this was mere waste-paper, disregardedor nullified in practice: the demands madesometimes reveal fantastic ignorance or miscalculation:continual levies for labour service, often from far afield,and for military duties, whether temporary or permanent,were very heavy. Yet, despite evasion, flight, or rioting,the relentless perseverance of the Moscow bureaucratsand their local officials, in combination with the staminaand resource of the peasants trekking south, bore richfruit. The woodland steppe was won.Into the Muscovite frontier a new element swelled toa great scale after 1650 when the Ukrainians rose againstthe Poles and turned to Moscow (see p. 227). The bulkof the original Ukrainian immigrants formed five regiments,which took up land in the middle Donets region,founded and garrisoned Kharkov and other towns witha new defence line in advance. They enjoyed specialprivileges, including the much-prized right of freebrewing and distilling, and until far into the eighteenthcentury were allowed comparative autonomy in theirSlobodskaya Ukraine, free Ukraine, joining on to thewest with their compatriots in the Little Russianprovinces, the so-called Left-bank Ukraine (i.e. on theleft bank of the Dnieper), which the Poles were forcedto admit as part of Muscovy in 1667. Behind the soldiersettlerscame other non-military farmers, traders, andartisans, mostly families of some means. Ukrainiancolonization was much less dependent on the state thanGreat Russian. To the northward of Kharkov Ukrainiansand Great Russians for long kept apart, but from thelate eighteenth century they merged together. To thesouth it was different; the solid Ukrainian colonizationmaintained itself and spread over the open steppe; GreatRussian penetration on a large scale took place only withthe industrial and mining development of the last sixtyyears.The Ukrainian line of the seventeen-thirties, from theDonets to the Dnieper on the borderland of the woodedand the feather-grass steppes, was the last of the bigfortified lines. By then Slobodskaya Ukraine had not farshort of 400,000 inhabitants: its military character as a45