SOPHIE FRIEDERIKE AUGUSTE VON ANHALT-ZERBST-DORNBURG became the Russian empress Catherine II on June 28, 1762. For her, that day began in the early morning with disturbing news about the arrest of one of the officers involved in the plot to depose her husband, Emperor Peter III, and bring her to power. Chances were that she would soon be arrested and possibly executed. She and her advisers decided to act immediately and launch the coup that had long been in the making. Peter was away from St. Petersburg, and Catherine immediately left her palace in the St. Petersburg suburb of Peterhof and drove to the capital. There she was welcomed by the guards regiments, whose commanders were involved in the plot. The army was on her side. A few days later, it would all be over. Peter III, Catherine’s unfortunate husband, was surrounded by troops loyal to her and forced to abdicate. He died under suspicious circumstances less than ten days later.
Although the coup was well prepared and successful, it still badly needed justification and legitimization. Catherine had to show why she—a German-born princess who had come to Russia at the age of fifteen, had never managed to shed her German accent, and had violated every rule of succession to the throne—was a better Russian than her husband, the grandson of Peter I. The manifesto issued on behalf of Catherine on June 28 claimed that she had assumed power to save Russia from mortal danger: “It was clearly apparent to all upright sons of the Russian Fatherland what a grave danger this presented to the whole Russian State.” The authors of the manifesto relied mainly on the religious factor, claiming that Catherine was more genuinely Orthodox than Peter. He had allegedly planned to change Russia’s state religion from Orthodoxy to Lutheranism. “Our Greek church was already utterly exposed to ultimate danger by the change of Orthodoxy, ancient in Russia, and the adoption of an infidel faith,” read the manifesto.
According to Catherine, the manifesto was written on the fly. Some scholars think that it was prepared ahead of time. One way or another, it reflected important elements of Russian thinking at the time: given the close association of the Russian state with the Orthodox Church, a threat to either was deemed sufficient reason for the “sons of the Fatherland” to intervene and depose an otherwise legitimate ruler. It was now up to Catherine II to prove her loyalty and usefulness to Russia lest she suffer a similar fate. She accomplished the task admirably, becoming known in Russia and abroad as Catherine the Great.
DURING CATHERINE’S LONG REIGN OF ALMOST THIRTY-FIVE YEARS (1762–1796), the formation of the imperial Russian nation begun under Peter I and Elizabeth took on new impetus and new characteristics. As one would expect under the rule of a foreign-born princess, the civic elements of the new Russian identity became more important than the ethnic ones. The concepts of nation, state, and fatherland were disseminated far beyond the circle of the tsarina’s Western-leaning and foreign-trained advisers. It was also during her rule that the idea of citizenship made its way into Russian discourse. The ethnocentric model of Russian identity formed under Elizabeth turned into one of civic loyalty to the empire. The ideas of the Enlightenment, of which Catherine was a student and admirer, transformed the understanding of empire from a patchwork of territories that maintained particular rights and privileges acquired over the centuries to a centralized state that relied on administrative uniformity even as it celebrated its ethnic and religious diversity.
Catherine presented her vision of the relation between empire and nation in another important document, a manifesto of 1785 that confirmed the right of the Russian imperial nobility to forgo obligatory service to the state. The manifesto read: “In the true glory and greatness of the empire we taste the fruits and recognize the results of the deeds of our subject, obedient, courageous, dauntless, enterprising, and mighty Russian people.” The same manifesto left no doubt about the identity of the leading stratum of the nation and the true “sons of the Fatherland.” “In the course of eight hundred years from the time of her founding,” wrote Catherine, “Russia has found commanders and leaders among her sons. At all times it has been, is, and, with God’s help, always will be characteristic of the Russian nobility to distinguish itself with qualities making for brilliant leadership.” Thus the nobility was the vanguard of the Russian nation, and the Russian nation was the leading force of the empire.
Among the “true sons of the Fatherland” who brought Catherine to power in 1762 was the president of the Imperial Academy of Sciences and hetman of the autonomous Cossack state on the Left Bank of the Dnieper, known in history as the Hetmanate, Kirill Razumovsky. It was the printers of the academy who issued Catherine’s first manifesto, leaving no doubt about Razumovsky’s political allegiance. As the new empress showered her supporters with titles, gifts, and lands, Razumovsky was among the first in line. We do not know whether he made any requests on behalf of the academy, but his plans for the Hetmanate were quite extensive. Backed by local Cossack officers, he planned to strengthen its autonomy and institutions. Many in the Hetmanate were looking forward to a bright future for their autonomous polity.
In the fall of 1762, a few months after Catherine’s coronation, Semen Divovych, a scribe in the Hetmanate’s headquarters in the city of Hlukhiv on today’s Russo-Ukrainian border, produced a long poem titled A Conversation Between Great Russia and Little Russia. One passage read as follows:
Do you know with whom you are speaking, or have you forgotten?
I am Russia, after all: do you ignore me?
Little Russia:
I know that you are Russia; that is my name as well.
Why do you intimidate me? I myself am trying to put on a brave face.
I did not submit to you but to your sovereign,
Under whose auspices you were born of your ancestors.
Do not think that you are my master:
Your sovereign and mine is our common ruler.
These verses presented a vision of empire in which the little Hetmanate called Little Russia would be linked to the huge Russian Empire only by name and common ruler, undoing all that the Russian emperors, starting with Peter I, had done to limit the autonomy of the Hetmanate. That vision made scant provision for a common state, nation, or fatherland. Hopes were high in the capital of the Hetmanate, and at first they appeared to be justified. Catherine began her rule with a minor concession to her loyal hetman and the Little Russian elites, reinstating the Hetmanate’s traditional court system in 1763. The Cossack officer council asked for more, and Razumovsky threw in an additional request: he wanted the hetman’s office to become hereditary and stay in his family.
But Catherine’s gratitude had its limits, and her reaction was swift. In 1764, she summoned Razumovsky to St. Petersburg and removed him as hetman, compensating him later with the title of field marshal. More important, she abolished the office of hetman altogether. It was the third and final liquidation of the office of Cossack leader, the first two having occurred under Peter and Anna Ioannovna. It would take Catherine another two decades to eliminate all the institutions of the Hetmanate, including its system of military regiments, but the empress took her time and stayed her course. At stake was the formation of an empire whose regions would all be governed from the center according to Enlightenment principles of rational governance and universal laws. The hodgepodge of long-established customs and special privileges accumulated in the course of history was to yield to well-ordered and homogeneous bureaucratic norms.
Even so, prudence called for a gradual transition to the new practices. In February 1764, a few months before the abolition of the hetman’s office, Catherine wrote to the procurator-general of the Senate—the empire’s legislative, judicial, and administrative body—and de facto chief of Catherine’s political police (“secret expedition”), Prince Aleksandr Viazemsky: “Little Russia, Livonia, and Finland are provinces governed by confirmed privileges, and it would be improper to violate them by abolishing them all at once. To call them foreign and deal with them on that basis is more than erroneous—it would be sheer stupidity. These provinces, as well as Smolensk, should be Russified as gently as possible so that they cease looking to the forest like wolves.… When the hetmans are gone from Little Russia, every effort should be made to eradicate from memory the period and the hetmans, let alone promote anyone to that office.”
Catherine first turned the Hetmanate into the province of Little Russia and then divided it into the vicegerencies of Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Novhorod-Siverskyi. The abolition of the Hetmanate and the gradual elimination of its institutions and military structure ended the notion of partnership and equality between Great and Little Russia imagined by generations of Ukrainian intellectuals. Once incorporated into the administrative system of the empire, the former Hetmanate was dwarfed by the huge Russian state. Out of close to fifty imperial vicegerencies at the end of the eighteenth century, only three represented the former Hetmanate. The special status of the former Cossack polity was gone, its officer class integrated, though not without difficulty, into the Russian nobility and expected to serve the interests of the all-Russian nation. The Little Russians maintained their attachment to their traditional homeland, which they continued to call a “fatherland,” but for most of them there was no longer a contradiction between loyalty to their historical patria and to the Russian Empire.
Accordingly, the lands of the former Hetmanate continued to supply cadres for the empire. Young Cossack officers, such as Oleksandr Bezborodko and Petro Zavadovsky, enjoyed Catherine’s support and made spectacular careers in St. Petersburg. Bezborodko served as her secretary, and eventually as one of the architects of imperial foreign policy; Zavadovsky became the highest official in the empire’s educational system. The westward-looking alumni of the Kyivan Academy were needed as much by the empress, who proclaimed Russia a European state, as they had been by Peter I. But whereas Peter had summoned clerics to the capital, Catherine brought in secular elites. Given the Kyivan graduates’ good knowledge of Latin, they were considered ideal candidates for training as medical doctors, and 60 percent of the empire’s doctors in Catherine’s time were Ukrainians.
Ukrainians constituted a significant part of the intellectual elite, with Hryhorii Kozytsky, Vasyl Ruban, and Fedir Tumansky, all natives of the Hetmanate, becoming publishers of some of the first Russian journals. Kozytsky, who was one of Catherine’s secretaries, published the journal Vsiakaia vsiachina (Anything and Everything, 1769–1770) on her behalf; Ruban published Starina i novizna (Antiquity and Novelty, 1772–1773); and Tumansky served much later as the publisher of the first historical journal in the Russian Empire, Rosiiskii magazin (Russian Magazine, 1792–1794). They were among the early “nationalists” who helped form an emerging Russian identity that embraced the new Russian literary language and associated nation with empire more closely than ever before. According to some estimates, as many as half the “Russian” intellectuals promoting the idea of a Russian nation were in fact “Little Russians,” or Ukrainians.
IN THE FALL OF 1772, THE RUSSIAN ARMY, UNDER THE DIRECTION of the president of the Military College, Zakhar Chernyshev, crossed the Polish-Russian border and took new positions along the Dnieper and Daugava Rivers. The towns of Polatsk, Vitsebsk, Mstsislaŭ, and Mahilioŭ, which had not seen Russian troops since the mid-seventeenth century, now found themselves under Russian control. The Russian takeover of eastern Belarus was part of what became known in historiography as the first partition of Poland, undertaken in 1772 by Russia, Austria, and Prussia.
The partitions of Poland had been foreshadowed in 1762, during the festivities accompanying the coronation of Catherine II in Moscow. Among the speakers was Archbishop Heorhii Konysky of Mahilioŭ, who had come to take part in the coronation from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where his eparchy was located. Speaking on the last day of the coronation ceremonies (September 29, 1762), the hierarch of the last surviving Orthodox bishopric in the Commonwealth pleaded for his persecuted church, arguing that God had spared Catherine’s life so that she could defend not only the faith and the fatherland in Russia but also her coreligionists outside the empire. “Among Your Imperial Majesty’s subject peoples celebrating your most joyous coronation, the Belarusian nation, too, offers its most devoted greetings through me, a subject of Your Majesty,” declared the hierarch. The idea of religious unity between the Orthodox of the Russian Empire and the Commonwealth was well established in Russian imperial discourse of the time. But the notion of the “Belarusian people” being among the real or potential subjects of the empress was something new and entirely different—it had not appeared in Russian discourse since the mid-seventeenth century, when the name “White Rus’” was added to the tsar’s title.
Konysky’s prayers for the protection of the “Belarusian nation” were unexpectedly answered when Russian troops took over eastern Belarus in 1772. In Mahilioŭ, church bells rang day and night to mark the swearing of the loyalty oath to Catherine. In March 1773, Konysky was in St. Petersburg, thanking Catherine for what he could hardly have expected a few months earlier. “Finding myself among this people now, it seems to me that I am among the Israelites making their way out of Egypt; among the captives of Zion returning from Babylon; among the Christians of the times of Constantine,” Konysky told the empress. She had not only offered protection to the “Belarusian nation” under Polish control, but taken it under her rule, making Konysky and his countrymen Russian subjects. Konysky thanked the wrong ruler for the liberation of his people from “Egyptian captivity.” His true redeemer was Frederick II of Prussia, not Catherine II of Russia.
Ever since the Battle of Poltava (1709), after which Peter I introduced de facto Russian control over Commonwealth affairs, the Polish-Lithuanian state had belonged to the Russian sphere of influence. Consequently, for a long time, the annexation of any of its territory by other powers was not in the interests of Russia. But the partition of Poland-Lithuania was certainly in the interests of other European powers. Prussian kings, who badly wanted Polish-held West Prussia in order to connect Brandenburg with East Prussia, made their first offers to divide the Commonwealth in the early eighteenth century. The weakness of the Polish-Lithuanian state was an irresistible temptation to the stronger European powers to settle their accounts at its expense, and the Russian Empire could resist the desires of the Commonwealth’s neighbors only so long.
The turning point came in 1771. Once Austria, alarmed by Russian successes in a war with the Ottomans, allied itself with the Porte, St. Petersburg decided to succumb to Prussian pressure and agree to a three-way partition of Poland-Lithuania in order to avoid the looming conflict with Austria. On February 17, 1772, Prussia and Russia signed a treaty in St. Petersburg agreeing to annex parts of Polish territory. A tripartite agreement with Austria was signed in the Russian capital on August 5 of the same year. Prussia got what it most wanted—West Prussia. Austria annexed eastern Galicia, with its center in Lviv, to be renamed Lemberg. Russia got part of Lithuania and Belarusian territories.
Russia was also a reluctant participant in the second partition of Poland, which took place in 1793. Developments in the rump Commonwealth—the territories left under Warsaw’s control in the 1780s and early 1790s—presented a clear threat to Russian interests in the country. In 1790, the Poles signed a defensive alliance with Prussia to the exclusion of Russia, and potentially against it. The alliance ended the de jure Russian protectorate over the Kingdom of Poland. To add insult to injury, the Four-Year Diet, which began its proceedings in Warsaw in 1788, launched a number of reforms intended to modernize the Polish state. Adopted by the pro-reform faction of the Diet, the Constitution of May 3, 1791, strengthened the position and powers of the king, made the Diet a more workable institution by getting rid of the liberum veto—the requirement that all decisions be made by unanimous vote—and establishing the separation of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. None of that was good news for Russia, which saw the reforms not only as impairing its ability to manipulate the Polish political system but also as promoting the ideas of the French Revolution. The latter threat made Catherine forget many of her Enlightenment-era initiatives and take a reactionary view of anything that smacked of danger to her authoritarian rule.
The third partition took place in 1795, shortly after the second, as a reaction to the Polish revolt against the partitioning powers led by Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Polish military commander and a native of Belarus. Russia sent an army led by its best military commander, Aleksandr Suvorov, against the rebels. The Prussians also sent their troops, and the two powers defeated the Kościuszko Uprising. Russia, Prussia, and Austria divided the rest of the Polish territories between themselves and, once again, the Russian booty significantly exceeded that of Prussia and Austria—the latter two got less than 50,000 square kilometers each, whereas Russia’s share was 120,000 square kilometers. Altogether, Russia took over more than 66 percent of the former Polish territories. Its new borders encompassed all of Lithuania, with its capital city of Vilnius and its Baltic coastline, as well as Brest in Belarus and the towns of Lutsk and Volodymyr in Ukraine’s Volhynia region. Almost all the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands were now under St. Petersburg’s control. The only exception was Ukrainian Galicia, which remained under Vienna.
In Russian imperial historiography, the partitions of Poland were often referred to as the reunification of Rus’—a term emphasizing that, with the exception of Lithuania, all the other lands annexed to the Russian Empire as a result of the partitions were settled by Eastern Slavs, who had been subjects of Kyivan princes centuries earlier. The ethnic selectivity of the Russian territorial acquisitions was by no means accidental and signaled changes in the Russian national imagination that would take place during Catherine’s rule.
IF THE PARTITIONS PER SE WERE FORCED ON CATHERINE BY HER allies and changing circumstances, the territories that Russia annexed as a result offer insight into the historical, religious, and ethnic identity of the Russian elites.
The territory of Russia’s first partition was defined not by any historical claims but by the desire of the Russian military to have clear-cut borders that would be easy to defend. The new line was drawn along the Dnieper and Daugava Rivers and their tributaries—a border first suggested by the president of the Military College, Zakhar Chernyshev, in the early 1760s. But the treaty on the first partition signed between Russia and Prussia in January 1772 referred to a historical rather than a strategic rationale for the partitions. “Her Royal Majesty the All-Russian Empress and His Royal Majesty the King of Prussia pledge the most positive mutual assistance to each other in their undertaking to take advantage of current conditions to obtain for themselves those districts of Poland to which they have ancient rights,” read the Russo-Prussian convention on the partitioning of Poland.
Territorial claims based on history were also made by Empress Maria Theresa of Austria: “Her Royal Highness the Imperial Queen has ordered her army corps to enter Poland and instructed them to occupy the districts to which she asserts her previous rights.” Maria Theresa hated the term “partition,” which in her opinion implied the unlawful character of the whole enterprise, and sought historical justification of the new acquisition. She found it in the historical claims of the Hungarian kings to the medieval Principality of Galicia-Volhynia. As the Austrian emperors were considered heirs of the Hungarian kings, the new territories became known as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria—the latter term being the Latinized form of the word “Volodymeria,” referring to the capital of Volhynia, the town of Volodymyr, which remained in Poland for the time being.
Curiously enough, references to historical rights disappeared from the manifestos that accompanied the second and third partitions. But those were precisely the partitions that Russia justified with intensive domestic propaganda stressing its historical rights. Where possible, the borders of the second and third partitions were drawn along rivers, but this time historical, religious, and ethnonational considerations were involved along with strategic ones. On the occasion of the second partition, Catherine ordered that a medal be struck depicting the double-headed eagle straight from the Russian imperial coat of arms holding in its clutches two maps, one with the territories attached to Russia in 1772, the other the territories attached in 1793, with an inscription at the top: “I restored what had been torn away.” Thus Catherine was allegedly returning to Russia what had once belonged to it but had been taken away by force.
Catherine’s understanding of what territories she had the right to claim was based on her study of Rus’ history. In her Notes on Russian History, which she wrote for her two grandsons, Alexander (the future tsar of Russia) and Konstantin (the future king of Poland), Catherine covered a good part of the history of Kyivan Rus’ and described in some detail the Rus’ princes’ relations with their Polish counterparts, including numerous wars between the two sides. There is little doubt that Catherine wanted all the former Kyivan territories, including Galicia, which Austria had taken in the first partition. Soon after the second partition, she commented, in the presence of one of her secretaries, “In time, we should obtain Galicia from the emperor in exchange: he has no need of it.” Catherine never got Galicia but insisted on taking the town of Volodymyr in the third partition. In doing so, she prevented Emperor Joseph II of Austria from obtaining Volhynia—the land that the Austrians had claimed as part of their inheritance (Galicia and Lodomeria) from the Hungarian kings. The Austrians had to be satisfied with Little Poland, including Cracow and Lublin, claiming that those lands were in fact “Western Galicia.”
Something important had changed in Catherine’s mind between the first and second partitions. In the case of the first, she did not mind Austria getting Galicia; by the time of the second partition, she wanted Galicia for herself. A better knowledge of Rus’ history could certainly have been one reason for this change of heart (the empress wrote her Notes sometime in the 1780s), but there may have been other reasons as well. Catherine began to think about the new lands not just in historical and religious terms, as she had earlier, but also in ethnic ones. In December 1792, once Catherine had decided in favor of the second partition, she wrote to her ambassador in Warsaw that her goal was “to deliver the lands and towns that once belonged to Russia, established and inhabited by our kinsmen and professing the same faith as ours, from the corruption and oppression with which they are threatened.” Thus, she was not only claiming what had belonged to her predecessors on the Russian throne, but also saving coreligionists and people of the same ethnic background from persecution and from the temptation to rebel.
Much of Catherine’s thinking on the subject became public knowledge and, indeed, official policy after the second partition, when the Russian army crushed Kościuszko’s rebellion. The capture of Warsaw was lavishly celebrated in St. Petersburg, in stark contrast to the marking of the second partition, when liturgies were served but no gun salute ordered. Catherine II, who believed that the Orthodox population of the Commonwealth (the Ukrainians and Belarusians) belonged to the same tribe as the Russians, had no fraternal feelings toward the Poles. In the same letter of December 1792 to the Russian ambassador in which the empress wrote so positively about the fellow Eastern Slavs, she castigated the Poles: “The experience of the past and the current disposition of conditions and attitudes in Poland, that is, the inconstancy and frivolity of this people, the hostility and hatred it has shown us, and particularly the inclination it has shown toward the depravity and violence of the French, indicate that we shall never have in it either a peaceful or a secure neighbor unless we reduce it to utter weakness and impotence.”
The view of the Poles as a hostile nation and Ukrainians and Belarusians as fraternal ones became dominant in Russian discourse after Suvorov’s capture of Warsaw in November 1794. In December, the government issued a manifesto that had been written by Catherine’s chief foreign-policy adviser, Oleksandr Bezborodko, but reflected, sometimes almost verbatim, the ideas expressed by Catherine in her letter of December 1792. “Her Imperial Majesty has restored to her empire lands that belonged to it from antiquity, torn away from it in troubled times with the same perfidy as that shown in our day by malevolent individuals among the Poles preparing to act to the detriment of Russia, and inhabited by people who are our kinfolk and coreligionists, oppressed because of their piety,” read the manifesto. With regard to the Poles, Bezborodko wrote, “the treachery of the Poles was revealed to the utmost by their perfidious attempt to annihilate the Russian troops who were peacefully and securely posted in Warsaw under the terms of a treaty of alliance concluded in good faith. All of them, young and old, had a hand in perpetrating this villainous act.”
The loyal poets were eager to adopt a new line. Vasilii Petrov, a poet who after the second partition had called Poles the “confidants of Russia,” now turned them into bloodthirsty monsters:
Having trampled on the sacred rights,
They threaten to plunder and raze the temples,
To take their fill of foreign property
And satisfy their greedy hands, mouths, and stomachs.
FOR MOST OF CATHERINE’S RULE, THE UKRAINIANS AND BELARUSIANS of the Commonwealth were defined by religious terminology as adherents of the Greek-Russian—or simply Greek—Church, suggesting that they were Orthodox. But the absolute majority of the “Belarusian nation” that Russia acquired in the partitions was non-Orthodox. This was true not only of the Polish or Polonized nobility, which was Catholic, or the Jews, who were not Christian at all, but even of the majority of the Eastern Slavs—they were Uniates. In the lands annexed to Russia after the second partition, only 300,000 people were Orthodox. More than 2 million were Uniates, while the lands attached as a result of the third partition had almost no Orthodox believers.
In April 1794, Catherine decided to remedy that situation by launching an official campaign to convert the Uniates to Orthodoxy. Her decision was triggered by an appeal from representatives of twenty villages in Right-Bank Ukraine—the battleground between Orthodoxy and the Union since the time of the 1768 uprising—who wanted to abandon the Union and convert to Orthodoxy. Catherine not only granted the request but also suggested it as a model for the “return” to Orthodoxy of other Uniate parishes, by force if necessary. According to a pastoral letter issued at her request, “during the troubled times of Russia, a great part of its subjects who confessed the Greek Orthodox faith, having been torn from the true body to fall under the Polish yoke… witnessed the greatest oppression of the free worship of their faith.” Catherine, claimed the pastoral letter, had returned “to her reign this people of the same tribe.”
Catherine’s own decree, addressed to the governor general of the annexed territories, was much more blunt and explicit than the pastoral letter about the goals of the new policies. She wrote about “the most suitable eradication of the Uniate faith” as a whole, not just the conversion of a few willing parishes. Catherine was prepared for major disturbances and protests against the liquidation of the established church and expected the governor to deal with it. With the support of the police force, he was to ensure that “any disorder and trouble be averted, and that none of the permanent or temporary landowners or spiritual and civil officials of the Roman and Uniate faith dare to cause even the smallest hindrance, oppression, or offense to those who are converting to Orthodoxy. Any such attempt directed against the dominant faith and indicating disobedience to Our will shall be regarded as a criminal offense, subject to trial and entailing confiscation of property until a court decision is reached.”
The empress who had defended the Orthodox of the Commonwealth in the name of religious toleration and had been acclaimed for that by Voltaire suddenly turned into the persecutor of another religion. How to explain this? Although the reference in the pastoral letter to Uniates as people of the same tribe can elucidate the background to her thinking about the connection between religion and ethnicity, the immediate reason should be sought elsewhere. By 1794, in response to the French Revolution and to what she saw as a French-style attack on the authoritarian order coming from Poland and its new constitution, Catherine had abandoned many elements of her earlier beliefs. The decree ordering the eradication of the Uniate faith was issued at the time of the Kościuszko Uprising, whose leaders sought support among the Uniate peasantry. The eradication of the Uniate Church under such circumstances could be regarded as an anti-insurgency measure. Catherine could count on the loyalty of Orthodox priests in the former Commonwealth, but she could hardly trust the Uniate ones.
Catherine’s erstwhile defense of religious toleration was not replaced with a justification of intolerance. What she now claimed to be doing was redressing the previous injustice done to the Orthodox. They had been forcibly converted to the Union by the Polish authorities, and now she was merely trying to bring them back to their ancestral faith. The return to “the faith of fathers and forefathers,” as the conversion campaign was called in official pronouncements of the Russian church and state, proceeded with spectacular success in Right-Bank Ukraine, where almost no Uniate parishes remained by 1796. The farther one went west and northwest, however, the more Uniate priests and parishes refused to convert, despite the pressure applied by the secular and religious authorities. Central Belarus and Volhynia remained largely Uniate. The number of Uniates further increased after the third partition of Poland. Altogether, close to 1.4 million Ukrainians and Belarusians remained Uniate after Catherine’s “reunification” campaign came to a halt following her death in 1796.
THE PROCESS OF MERGING EMPIRE AND NATION UNDER THE AUSPICES of a powerful state began under Peter and was highly developed under Catherine, who employed Enlightenment practices of rational governance to eliminate regional and ethnic particularities, thereby strengthening central control over the empire’s diverse lands. Besides reshaping the administrative structure and institutions of the state, empire-building involved the articulation of a historical mythology, the development of a common language, and the rethinking of the status of Orthodoxy in a multiethnic polity.
As for Russian identity and self-awareness, Catherine’s rule brought about a new understanding of the Russian imperial nation. As increasing centralism broke down regional loyalties and autonomous enclaves such as the Hetmanate, an all-Russian identity emerged. Social norms were also changing: Russians were now not only “sons of the Fatherland” obediently serving the state but also citizens endowed with rights. The Russian imperial outlook was still as opposed to the West as it had been in Elizabeth’s time, but it became less xenophobic.
The empress’s role as protector of Orthodoxy prompted Russia to intervene more than ever before in the Catholic-Orthodox conflict in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but Catherine regarded the Orthodox there as coreligionists, not ethnic compatriots of the Russians. For her, the borders of the Russian nation were coterminous with those of the Russian state. It was only toward the end of her reign that the partitions of Poland, which brought millions of largely non-Orthodox subjects into the Russian Empire, helped introduce ethnicity into official Russian discourse. Catherine and her advisers never accepted ethnicity as the main defining feature of the empire’s new subjects, but those subjects helped lay the foundations for a new understanding of Russian identity in the next century.
The partitions challenged the Enlightenment-era model of Russian imperial identity. Not unlike Ivan III in the fifteenth century, Catherine II claimed new territories in the eighteenth by invoking the historical rights of Kyivan princes. But Catherine faced a much more difficult task than Ivan had when it came to the integration of those lands into the Russian state. The partitions brought into the empire millions of Eastern Slavs (Ukrainians and Belarusians) whom Catherine depicted in her letters and decrees not only as coreligionists but also as people of the same Russian tribe. As most of those prospective Russians turned out to be Uniates, the imperial government refused to adopt a multi-religious model of the Russian nation, launching instead a program of forcible conversion of the Uniates to the faith of their “fathers and forefathers.”
Dictated largely by security concerns in the midst of the Polish uprising led by Tadeusz Kościuszko, the conversion campaign would provide an early model for the Russian authorities’ treatment of the borderland Ukrainian and Belarusian population in the face of the Polish challenge to the stability and unity of the empire for generations to come.