Acknowledgements An Englishman in Newcastle who publishes a book in Canada about Ukrainians in Russia needs a lot of help. I have been fortunate enough to receive it, especially from Harry Willetts of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, who introduced me to Imperial Russian history when I was an undergraduate and supervised the doctoral dissertation on which this book is based. I should also like to thank the following: Professor A. G. Cross of the University of Leeds and Dr. R. J. W. Evans of Brasenose College, Oxford, who examined my dissertation; Dr. L. G. Mitchell and Dr. A. D. Stokes of University College, Oxford, who read draft chapters; the late Professor Ivan L. Rudnytsky and Professor John-Paul Himka of the University of Alberta, who read the whole and offered penetrating criticism; Professor I. A. Fedosov of Moscow State University and Professors V. V. Mavrodin and L. B. Semenov of Leningrad State University, who acted as my advisers in the Soviet Union; Mr. Victor Swoboda and Mr. Julian Graffy, of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London; Professor J. L. Black of Carleton University, Ottawa; Professor Peter Brock of the University of Toronto; and Mrs. Sharon Holleworth and Miss Janice Cummin, for the extraordinary efficiency of their typing. I am greatly indebted to the British Council, the Research Committee of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, the Twenty-Seven Foundation and the Wolfson Foundation for scholarships and financial support. I received much assistance from the staff of the Central State Historical Archive in Leningrad, especially from Vladimir Somov, and I am grateful to X Ukrainian Impact on Russian Culture ail the Soviet archival repositories in which I worked for permission to make use of their materials. Parts of Chapters Six and Seven have appeared in different guise in Harvard Ukrainian Studies, The Slavonic and East European Review, and Nationalities Papers. None of those mentioned here bears any responsibility for my mistakes, for which I am entirely to blame. My parents should take most of the credit for any merit which the book may possess, because without their material and spiritual backing this study would not have been begun, continued, or ended. David Saunders Newcastle upon Tyne, September 1983 Chapter One Introduction I ’ollowers of that scourge of the intelligentsia, the humorist Stephen I’otter, interrupt experts on foreign countries by saying, “Yes, but not in the south.” The phrase “will do for any argument about any place,... It is an impossible comment to answer.”' It certainly applies to the Russian Empire between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. Russia and Ukraine, the northern and southern parts of the empire, differed from one another politically, socially and culturally. They were different before 1750 and different in new ways after 1850, but the differences were particularly important at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries because the Russians were integrating their domains. As a result of the process of integration, northern and southern cultures interacted in more ways than they liad in the past. Neither was sufficiently well-developed to ride roughshod over the other. By the mid-nineteenth century Russian dominance seemed assured, but before then Ukrainians had made a considerable impact on their northern neighbours. The Ukrainian contribution to the cultural identity of early nineteenth-century Kussia is the subject of this book. 2 Ukrainian Impact on Russian Culture In 1831 a Russian described the difference between Russians and Ukrainians. “Little Russians,” he wrote, using a conventional contemporary term for Ukrainians, “are on the whole very frank, pure-hearted, timidly submissive, but in moments of irritation, when insulted, bold to the point of recklessness, but not malicious. The respect and courtesy they show their elders are apparent at all times.” Russians, by contrast, were “more furtive, more enterprising, stubborn in pursuit of their goals, given to wrangling.”^ Thirty years earlier a Russian traveller commented on the striking physical difference between the northern and southern parts of the empire. Just outside Kharkiv, a major town in Eastern Ukraine, he came across Humble white-daubed cottages; villagers with shaved heads riding on bullocks; taverns open and selling alcohol. In a pleasant, jolly hut I find different faces, different ladies’ dress, different organization, and I hear a different language. Is this the empire’s border? Am I entering a different state? No! The empire goes on, but the land called Little Russia starts here.^ Ukrainians, like Russians, reflected on the differences between north and south. A Ukrainian traveller to St. Petersburg found the inhabitants of the capital unnatural. Although other accounts spoke of the Russians’ hospitality and straightforward behaviour, he noticed no such thing.'' A Ukrainian who lived among Russians for forty years thought that arrogance was their distinguishing feature.^ Gogol believed that Ukrainian folksongs, even when doleful, expressed involvement with life; Russian laments, on the other hand, were withdrawn and tried “to smother everyday needs and cares.”* Many nineteenth-century intellectuals commented upon the difference between Russia and Ukraine. The Russian historian S. M. Soloviev spoke affectionately of one of his teachers at Moscow University, the half-Ukrainian Timofei Granovsky. He recalled his charm, his “Little Russian, southern physiognomy,” his laziness about writing, his love of company, his goodness. A Russian teacher, Kriukov, came off badly by comparison.’ S. T. Aksakov, author of a quintessentially Russian autobiography, described how the celebrated actor M. S. Shchepkin “brought to the Russian stage a true appreciation of Little Russian nationality, with all its humour and sense of the comic.”* The principal figure in one of Nikolai Leskov’s short stories found Ukrainian students “passionate Introduction 3 and stubborn.”’ Perhaps the Ukrainian-born poet Mykola Hnidych (Nikolai Gnedich) summed up the early nineteenth-century view of the difference between north and south when he called Ukraine “the Russian Italy.”'® According to a late eighteenth-century Ukrainian commentator, the botanist Linnaeus was surprised “that a land as richly blessed by nature as Little Russia has not attracted natural scientists or historians.”" The record was set straight in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A picture of Ukraine emerged: land of Cossacks, of the bandit Horkusha and the itinerant philosopher Skovoroda, land of cholera and locusts, of the great river Dnieper, of bootlegging, week-iong wedding festivities, painting, folk medicine, song, tumuli, witches. Orthodoxy and education. The picture was partly wish-fulfilment and partly accurate, but both parts, the myths and the reality, contributed to the vitality of Imperial Russian culture. They did so for material reasons. From the end of the eighteenth century Ukrainians and Russians came into much closer contact with one another. Russia had acquired suzerainty over part of Ukraine in the mid-seventeenth century, but before Catherine the Great her control of this frontier zone was partial. In 1648 the Ukrainian Cossack Bohdan Khmelnytsky had led a rebellion against Poland which brought into Russian hands, in due course, Kiev and Ukraine east of the Dnieper. Khmelnytsky set up an autonomous military republic under a Hetman. One of his successors, Mazepa, was bold enough in 1708 to join Charles XII of Sweden in making war on Russia. The allies were defeated at the battle of Poltava in 1709, but the Hetmanate survived in attenuated form. Although Peter the Great had ambitions which turned on the southern lands, and although he captured Azov and fought on the Prut, he won his principal victories in the north and founded his new capital, St. Petersburg, on the Gulf of Finland. As the eighteenth century continued, however, the Russian Empire’s geographical orientation altered. One Hryhorii Vinsky wrote that around 1770 Ukrainians knew no foreigners apart from Poles and Greeks,'^ but times were already changing. In the first half of Catherine the Great’s reign. Count Nikita Panin was still able to advocate a “northern system” of alliances, but Catherine chose another path.'^ Russia began concentrating on the Black Sea rather than the Baltic. In 1768 the empress embarked upon the first of two major wars with Turkey; in 4 Ukrainian Impact on Russian Culture 1772 she participated in the first partition of Poland; in 1783 she annexed the Crimea. Behind the lines, she abolished the Ukrainian Hetmanate in 1764 and the Zaporozhian Cossacks in 1775. In 1793, in the second partition of Poland, she acquired most of Ukraine west of the Dnieper. If it could almost be said, in the economic sphere, that “in the sixteenth century there was no Russian isthmus... playing a connecting role and bringing large exchange movements to the Mediterranean,”''* by 1800 this was rapidly ceasing to be so. Trade-routes were changing.'^ Odessa had ten inhabitants in 1793, 25,000 in 1814, and by 1863 had become the third city of the empire.'* The central government devoted itself to the settlement and exploitation of the newly acquired southern lands.'’ Catherine the Great went to see them in 1787.'* Her closest adviser. Prince Grigorii Potemkin, dreamed of carving out an independent southern principality for himself.” Russia was now a southern as well as a northern