Count Pёtr Rumiantsev in Ukraine
Why does a society repudiate the remains of freedom? Why does a large (and often best) part of a nation voluntarily accept the infringement of its civil and cultural rights, with all the consequences of this fatal decision to be felt later? What role in the final pacification of a nation is played by a magnetic historical figure who plays the most active role in the major developments of an epoch?
The past of every nation offers a certain number of highly dramatic, truly outstanding periods, which help us find an answer to such questions. Of special interest in the history of Ukraine are the 1760s through eighties, when General Field Marshal Count Pёtr Aleksandrovich Rumiantsev, a prominent military figure and statesman of Catherine II’s Russia, was president of the Little Russian Collegium and then Governor General of Little Russia. The years of Rumiantsev’s rule — and this word is used without exaggeration — in our land (roughly 1765-1768 and 1777- 1782) are distinguished for the unswerving imperial willpower brilliantly displayed by this exalted servant of his empress’s orders, as well as for the masterful way he took advantage of contradictions within Ukrainian society itself. But let us first briefly recollect the prehistory of the events that put the final touch to Ukraine being swallowed by the “parent country.”
Pёtr Rumiantsev was appointed imperial governor of Ukraine with very broad and clearly defined powers in the first half of 1765. He already possessed rich military experience in the Seven Years’ War of 1756-1763, rank of commanding general, and the resounding glory of one who had defeated the army of Prussian King Frederick the Great in the battles of Gross Egersdorf (1757) and Kunersdorf (1759). Although the 39-year-old count had had no political experience at the time he was appointed, he showed great zeal in fulfilling St. Petersburg’s orders.
Shortly before Count Rumiantsev arrived in Ukraine, Catherine II had made an extremely important decision: in November 1764 the empress issued her “Manifest to the Little Russian People” whereby Ukraine’s last hetman, Kyrylo Rozumovsky, was stripped of his title due to his supposedly voluntary abdication. The Manifest did not say directly that the office of hetman was being abolished, nor did it mention the election of the next hetman. Thus the autonomous political entity in de facto ceased to exist as part of the empire.
It took contemporaries quite a long time to fathom the significance of this event. The point was not in the personality of Kyrylo Rozumovsky himself. Indeed. Volodymyr Antonovych, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Dmytro Doroshenko, and many other leading Ukrainian historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were right, when they noted that Rozumovsky was in many ways alien to Ukraine and its people: he maintained much closer ties at the court of Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter.
But... “everything comes obvious in comparison:” the true reasons for the last hetman’s dismissal became fully clear as soon as 1765, when Catherine II instructed Rumiantsev as he left for Ukraine in no uncertain terms about how exactly the empire was going to improve its policies there. He was to “follow an unswerving course” and proceed, above all, from the premise that Ukraine, Finland, and the Baltic provinces must be strictly subject to the same administrative system as in the rest of the empire. With reference to Ukraine, it was ordered to see to it that “the times and names of hetmans be erased from memory, for it is not a question of just putting some other person in this office.”
Obeying the tsarina’s instructions, Rumiantsev took the measures mandated. The Little Russian Collegium (which had existed in the first half of the eighteenth century) was restored, but not on the basis of parity between Ukrainians and the Russians, for this, to quote Catherine II, “would instill depravity in the Little Russians that they are totally different from the local (i.e., Great Russian — Author) people.” To gain exact information on the property of “Little Russians” and organize exemplary tax collection, Rumiantsev conducted the first census of Ukraine in 1767. The imperial governor of Ukraine was ordered to pursue a steadfast and unwavering policy of stripping Ukrainian peasants of the right to go from one landlord to another, as well as to counter the Ukrainians’ alleged “deep-rooted hatred for Great Russia.”
Indeed, Rumiantsev quickly saw danger in what he interpreted as the republican ideas of some representatives of the newly formed Ukrainian nobility and took extreme repressive measures. Even the quite innocent and simultaneously “glaringly outrageous” wishes of some Ukrainian delegates in the so-called Constituent Commission, Catherine II’s advisory body draft proposed laws in the light of soon to be stillborn reforms, to return the autonomous rights and liberties bestowed on Bohdan Khmelnytsky led a court to hand down under Rumiantsev’s pressure thirty death sentences, which were soon commuted. After quickly stripping the Little Russian Collegium members of any real power, Count Pёtr pursuing his policy with an iron hand, rapidly augmenting his already huge estates in Ukraine and deftly presenting himself as protector of the common folk from the Cossack officer corps.
Rumiantsev was able to objectively appraise the qualities of the people he ruled. In 1766 the count wrote Catherine II about our ancestors, “They nurture the image of a nation and a sweet fatherland of their own. All this small bunch of people says that they are the first all over the world, that nobody is stronger, braver, or wiser than they, and that nowhere is everything so good, useful, and truly free as in their land, in a word, that what they have is the best.” (Were these more pluses or minuses in this portrait of the then Ukrainian elite?)
In 1769 a Russo-Turkish war began. 43-year-old Rumiantsev played a most active role in the hostilities, adding up to his record as an outstanding general by brilliant victories near Larga and Kagul (in 1770 Catherine II awarded him the grade of field marshal). Yet, he saw in the year 1780 again as Governor General of Little Russia. Again, as before, he set out to implement, firmly and painstakingly, an ukase of Catherine II whereby Ukraine was to be administratively divided into guberniyas like Russia. In particular, the imperial ruler split the hetmanate into three protectorates — those of Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Novhorod-Siversky — carried out a reform of the judiciary, bringing it as close as possible to that of Russia (1781), and disbanded the Little Russian Collegium (1782), for, as it was announced, “there should be no Little Russian distinctions at all.” The Ukrainian gentry had their rights “reviewed,” which resulted in most of them being granted Russian nobility. And, finally, in what amounts to the grand finale and a true apotheosis of the policies of Catherine II, “a fierce she-wolf,” in the words of Taras Shevchenko, Rumiantsev and company, the Ukrainian peasants, already quite dependent on the local gentry, were enserfed in 1783.
After leaving Ukraine for the second (and last) time, Pёtr Rumiantsev lived another twelve and a half years and died just before turning 70. Why did the field marshal manage to fulfill so brilliantly all Petersburg’s instructions resulting in still greater restrictions on civil rights, personal dignity, and even greater humiliation of the people of our land? It is perhaps Mykhailo Hrushevsky who gave the most exact answer. He noted that the catastrophic consequences of the eighteenth century (and not only it) were caused by “a complete lack of resistance by the Ukrainian community, when Cossack grandchildren, the descendants of those who had risen up under the leadership of Khmelnytsky, shatter the domination of the nobility in Ukraine, and drive out the magnates and royal offspring, now themselves became lords and magnates who had amassed by hook or by crook huge estates and peopled them with the defenseless subjects.”
One should always remember a bitter truth of history: a voluntary refusal of freedom often makes it possible to strengthen property rights and accumulate wealth, but always does irreparable damage to the personal and national dignity of man.
