IN THE SUMMER OF 1831, AT THE HEIGHT OF THE NOVEMBER Uprising, Nicholas I had offered Austria and Prussia some of the Polish lands beyond the Vistula, but now, with the uprising crushed, he changed course. His answer to the new Polish question came in February 1832 with the publication of the Organic Statute, which laid out his plans for the future of the Kingdom of Poland. The Organic Statute took away freedoms previously granted to Poland by Alexander I: the office of tsar of Poland was gone and the Diet abolished, as was the separate Polish army. General Field Marshal Count Ivan Paskevich was given the new title of Prince of Warsaw and appointed ruler of the former kingdom, which he was to integrate into the Russian Empire.
The decision to integrate the Kingdom of Poland with the empire had a major impact on imperial policy in what would become known in official parlance as the “western provinces”—the Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Lithuanian lands annexed by Catherine and located between the Kingdom of Poland and core areas of the empire. For a long time before the November Uprising, the imperial rulers had vacillated on what to do with those territories. Nicholas was no exception. Like his father, Paul, and his brother and predecessor, Alexander, Nicholas did not believe that partitions served the interests of Russia, but, like them, he felt that he could not afford to turn those lands over to the Poles. “As long as I live, I can in no way allow ideas of annexing Lithuania to Poland to be encouraged,” wrote Nicholas to his brother, Constantine, in 1827. He believed, however, that “this does not prevent me from being just as good a Pole as I am a good Russian.” What he probably had in mind was the fulfillment of his duties as emperor of Russia and tsar of Poland. When the Polish revolt broke out in November 1830, the Polish minister of finance quipped that “Nicholas, Tsar of Poland, is waging war with Nicholas, Emperor of All Russia.” With the defeat of the November Uprising, there was no longer any doubt about who had won that war. Poland would not get its former territories back.
On September 14, 1831, only a week after the fall of Warsaw, the imperial government created a special body that became known as the Committee on the Western Provinces, or “Western Committee.” Established on the oral and secret order of Nicholas, the committee was charged with “examining various proposals concerning the provinces regained from Poland.” For the first time since the partitions, the Russian government had created an authoritative body to deal systematically with the annexed territories. The goal was their speedy and complete integration into the empire, to be accomplished much more quickly than the integration of the Kingdom of Poland. Russification (obrusenie), the goal that Catherine II had formulated for Smolensk province and the Hetmanate back in 1763, now became official Russian policy with regard to the former Polish lands. It included administrative, legal, and social measures to bring those regions into line with the Russian provinces of the empire.
The model of imperial expansion and integration of new territories based on the principle of elite co-optation had failed to function in the case of the territories annexed from Poland, and the Polish uprising drove home to the Russian imperial elite this uncomfortable truth. The Polish elites had rebelled, and the government now had no choice but to change its policy. The popular masses at whose expense the deal with the Polish nobility was made were overwhelmingly Eastern Slavs, although their adherence to Uniate Catholicism differentiated them from the Russian Orthodox. In its struggle with the imperial center, the Polish Catholic nobility had appealed for and often obtained support from its Ukrainian and Belarusian subjects because of this religious affinity. The government wanted to drive a wedge between the elites and the ruled. It employed every means at its disposal, including the concept of official nationality formulated by Count Uvarov, to that end.
In November 1832, the Western Committee issued a decree intended to diminish the number of people in the western provinces who could claim noble rights, including the right to buy land and serfs—a measure designed to undermine the status of Polish nobles. In the 1840s, Nicholas promoted initiatives to register and limit peasant obligations to landowners in order to support “Russian” peasants. To the degree that a noble-based empire could do so, it was taking the side of the Ukrainian and Belarusian peasantry against Polish nobility. Other policies included the liquidation of urban self-government and the abolition of the local law code, which went back to the times of Polish and Lithuanian rule over the region. Those policies were applied to the lands that had once belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a whole, including the former Hetmanate, whose loyalty was no longer in question.
The government also introduced policies to promote cultural Russification of the region. These included the creation of a new historical narrative, claiming the newly acquired lands for Russia, the establishment of new university and school districts, and the conversion of the Belarusian and Ukrainian Uniates to Orthodoxy and their incorporation into the ranks of the Russian Orthodox Church. It was these three sets of policies that had the most profound effect not only on the region but also on the way in which the Russian elite imagined itself and the geographic, social, and cultural borders of its nation.
THE RUSSIAN IMPERIAL ELITES HAD BEGUN TO THINK ABOUT THE future of the western provinces of the empire, which were settled largely by Eastern Slavs, during the period of Alexander’s liberal reforms. A leader of the Decembrist Uprising (1825), Pavel Pestel, had fully recognized the complexity of the question when he sat down to write the rebels’ manifesto of intentions—a constitution for the future Russian state that he called “Russian Justice,” alluding to the law code of the medieval Kyivan state. He had to reconcile his concern for the preservation and strengthening of the Russian Empire with his belief that every nationality had a right to political independence. Clearly, the empire had no shortage of national homelands. Aside from Russia and Poland, Pestel’s incomplete list included “Finland, Estland, Livland, Courland, Belarus, Little Russia, New Russia, Bessarabia, the Crimea, Georgia, the whole Caucasus, the lands of the Kirghiz, and all the Siberian peoples.” Pestel’s solution to the problem was simple: smaller nationalities would have to forgo their right to independence and become part of the larger and more powerful nationality. “They will find it better and more useful to themselves,” wrote Pestel about the small nationalities, “if they unite in spirit and society with a large state and completely merge their nationality with that of the ruling people, constituting just one people with them, and ceasing to dream uselessly of a task that is impossible and unrealizable.”
Pestel wanted to give independence to the Kingdom of Poland while Russifying most of the lands acquired during Catherine’s partitions of Poland. He considered those lands to be settled by the Russian people, which he defined as a Slavic tribe united by a single language, religion, and social structure. He divided his Russian nation into five subgroups: the Great Russians of the core imperial provinces, the Little Russians on the Left Bank of the Dnieper, the Ukrainians of the region around Kharkiv called Sloboda Ukraine, the Rusyns on the Right Bank of the Dnieper as well as in Volhynia and Podolia, and the Belarusians of the lands annexed to Russia at the time of the first partition of Poland. (Pestel did not consider the inhabitants of the Grodno [Hrodna] and Minsk provinces to be part of the Russian nation and probably envisioned the transfer of those provinces to the enlarged Kingdom of Poland.) Pestel argued that the difference between the Russians of the core imperial provinces and those of today’s Ukraine and Belarus lay in the special administrative status of the western provinces. “Hence it should be established as a rule,” wrote Pestel, that all inhabitants of the Vitebsk [Vitsebsk], Mogilev [Mahilioŭ], Chernigov [Chernihiv], Poltava, Kursk, Kharkov [Kharkiv], Kiev [Kyiv], Podolia, and Volyn [Volhynia] provinces should be considered true Russians and not divided from the latter by any particular names.”
It fell to Nicholas I’s minister of education, Count Uvarov, to find ways of uniting the various branches of Pestel’s “true Russians” in the wake of the Polish uprising. Uvarov was of one mind with Pestel when it came to treating the East Slavic population of the western provinces as Russians, but he did not share Pestel’s belief that the differences were purely administrative. He must have thought that they were much more substantial, had to do with culture, and could be overcome only in another generation—and that even that would require a proper educational program. He wrote to the tsar: “All illustrious rulers from the Romans to Napoleon—those who intended to unite the tribes they conquered with the victorious tribe—invested all their hopes and all the fruits of their labors in future generations instead of the present generation.”
Uvarov had good reason to be cautious and place his trust in the future. In the western provinces, he had to deal with a formidable obstacle in the shape of the Polish language, history, and culture: in the aftermath of the uprising of 1830, more people there read and wrote in Polish than in Russian. Like Pushkin and Pestel before him, Uvarov regarded the Polish question not as a conflict between an imperial center and a province, or between a multiethnic empire and one of its nationalities, but as a conflict between two nations, Russia and Poland, which ultimately had to be resolved in the sphere of education.
As early as 1831, Uvarov began looking for an author who could provide historical justification for the annexation and integration of the western provinces into the empire. His search was triggered by a letter to the Ministry of Education from one of its officials in the Grodno (Hrodna) province of what is now western Belarus. The official argued for the “resurrection, dissemination, and establishment in the western provinces of a nationality closely tied to the general Russian nationality.” In his view, the problem of nationality in the region was to be solved by integrating its history into that of the empire and promoting linguistic assimilation by offering classes in Church Slavonic, a common literary language of the Eastern Slavs throughout most of the eighteenth century.
Uvarov took to heart the request for a new history. His vision of the region’s past was not unlike that of Pavel Pestel. The Decembrist leader argued that the western provinces “belonged to Russia in ancient times and were torn away from it under unfavorable circumstances.” According to Pestel, by “reuniting them with its body” under Catherine II, Russia had “restored its ancient dignity, all the dearer to it inasmuch as it can pay homage to the cradle of the Russian state—in the north, Novgorod and its adjoining provinces, and in the south, Kiev [Kyiv] with the Chernigov [Chernihiv], Kiev [Kyiv], Poltava, Podolia, and Volyn provinces, that most ancient nucleus of the Russian state.”
This line of argument followed the tradition established by Catherine II and Prince Oleksandr Bezborodko after the second partition of Poland but called into question during the liberal rule of Alexander I. It was during the latter’s rule that the statist interpretation of Russian history, presented by Nikolai Karamzin in his History of the Russian State, was challenged by the nationality principle advocated by the Polish and Russian historians. One of the leading Russian historians and journalists of the period, Nikolai Polevoi, published a six-volume history of the Russian narod (people or nation) between 1829 and 1833—a clear contrast to Karamzin’s earlier multivolume work. This challenge to the statist interpretation coincided with the Polish uprising, which dramatically changed the Russian historiographic scene and placed on the agenda the task of uncovering and substantiating the “Russian” past of the western provinces.
Uvarov’s first choice for writing a history text integrating the western provinces into the empire was Mikhail Pogodin, a professor of history at Moscow University who enthusiastically embraced the task. Pogodin, who assured the minister that he would fight the Polish historians as General Paskevich had fought the Polish insurgents in 1831, was approached in November 1834 and submitted his text a year later—Uvarov reported directly to the tsar about the scholar’s progress. But Pogodin turned out to be too good a historian to satisfy the minister’s demands. His book presented the history of northeastern Rus’, or Russia, as distinct—indeed, separate—from that of southwestern Rus’ (Ukraine and Belarus), undermining the project’s main goal of linking the western provinces with Russia in a seamless historical narrative. Uvarov explained the failure to the tsar by citing the novelty of presenting the history of the Russian, Polish, and Lithuanian provinces as a single narrative.
But Pogodin’s failure did not discourage Uvarov. He established a special prize of 10,000 rubles for an author who could present the history of the western provinces as part of Russian history, then asked another history professor, this time from St. Petersburg University, to attempt the task. His name was Nikolai Ustrialov, and he set to work on a four-volume history of Russia. In December 1836, Ustrialov submitted the first volume of his work. Uvarov approved it a month later, recommending the volume as a standard textbook to his subordinates in educational districts throughout the empire. In 1839, Ustrialov produced a one-volume synthesis of his larger work, which Uvarov presented to the tsar. The next year, Uvarov closed the competition for the best textbook of Russian history. The task accomplished, the award eventually went to Ustrialov.
What attracted Uvarov so much in Ustrialov’s compendium, titled Russian History, was Ustrialov’s presentation of the reclamation of the Kyivan lands, which had been lost through treachery to foreign powers, as the leitmotif of Russian history. Ustrialov wrote: “The major fact in the history of the Russian tsardom was the gradual development of the idea of the need to reestablish the Russian land within the borders it had under Yaroslav [the Wise].… [A]ll our conflicts with Poland, the Livonian Order, and the Swedes… stem from this fact.” In Ustrialov’s interpretation, the Lithuanian state was a dynastic rather than a national rival of Moscow, and he claimed that difficulties in relations between Lithuanian rulers and their “Russian” subjects had begun only with the arrival of the Poles in the fourteenth century. Ustrialov wrote three versions of his survey, which was printed a total of twenty-six times.
In the 1857 edition, Ustrialov claimed that the population of Kyivan Rus’ had constituted one nation, thereby completing the process of supplementing Karamzin’s statist approach with one based on the principle of nationality and extending the scope of Russian history not only in institutional but also in geographic terms. As Ustrialov conceived it, Russian history was now something more than just the history of the Russian state. It also included historically Russian lands that did not belong to that state.
APART FROM HISTORY, RUSSIAN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE EMERGED as the principal tools of the government’s new policy in the borderlands. Education with Russian as the language of instruction was meant to suppress a sense of separate nationality among Polish youth. To that end, new educational institutions and policies were established in the western provinces of the empire.
The empire needed new people to introduce those policies. In 1802, when the empire created its first ministry of education, it was entrusted to Petro Zavadovsky, a former Cossack official and, more importantly, a graduate of the Kyivan Academy and a Jesuit seminary in the Belarusian town of Orsha, which had then belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Zavadovsky’s subordinates who headed educational institutions in the western borderlands of the empire were Polish aristocrats. Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, an adviser to Alexander I and for some time foreign minister of the Russian Empire, also ran the Vilnius educational district between 1803 and 1817. The district included Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian provinces annexed from the Commonwealth. The Kharkiv educational district, which encompassed eastern Ukraine, was administered during the same period by a fellow Polish aristocrat, Seweryn Potocki. The Poles had more experience than Russian educators because of the pioneering activities of the Polish Educational Commission, created in 1773 in the partitioned Commonwealth to establish a system of public education in the country, including its Ukrainian and Belarusian provinces.
The Polish-run universities and schools turned out to be something more than institutions of general education. They also popularized Polish culture and spread anti-imperial ideas, as became obvious in 1830, when the University of Vilnius became a recruiting ground for the Polish insurrection. In May 1832, the imperial authorities closed the university (it would not reopen until the fall of the Romanov dynasty) and dissolved the Vilnius educational district. But shutdowns and prohibitions could take the empire only so far. The void left by the closure of the Polish institutions had to be filled with imperial ones. In November 1833, Nicholas I approved Sergei Uvarov’s proposal to open a new university in the city of Kyiv, which Pushkin had feared a few years earlier might fall into Polish hands. In fact, if one did not count the Kyivan Cave Monastery and Orthodox churches, the city was already dominated by Polish culture. Visitors heard more Polish spoken in the streets of Kyiv than Russian or Ukrainian. In Kyiv province there were 43,000 Polish nobles as against slightly more than 1,000 Russian ones, and it was Poles who defined the public face of Kyiv.
The first attempt to open a Russian university in Kyiv was made in 1805, when Petro Zavadovsky sought to convince the city’s metropolitan to help him turn the Kyivan Academy into a university. The minister did not get much support from the hierarch. Also nonsupportive were the Polish nobles, the only group with enough money to fund the institution. One of the best Polish educators of the period, Tadeusz Czacki, was working hard to obtain donations from the nobility for a Polish institution of higher learning. To avoid competition with Kyiv, he called it a gymnasium rather than a university and proposed to open it in the Volhynian town of Kremianets. Backed by the curator of the district of Volhynia, Adam Czartoryski, and donations from Polish nobles, Czacki succeeded in opening the Kremianets school, which became a lyceum in 1819. The lyceum, a hotbed of insurgency during the uprising of 1830, was swiftly closed by the authorities. Kyiv’s time had come. The lyceum’s library, which had close to 35,000 volumes, its chemical laboratory, and its botanical garden were shipped to Kyiv for the new university. Some of the professors also came along.
The story of the Polish lyceum was effectively over, while that of the Russian university in Kyiv was about to begin. It was named after St. Volodymyr, the tenth-century prince who was regarded as the founder of the Russian state and its first Orthodox ruler. The opening took place on July 15, 1834, St. Volodymyr’s Day according to the Orthodox calendar. In symbolic terms, the imperial authorities were reclaiming Volodymyr’s city. In his decree on the opening of the university, Nicholas I called Kyiv “precious to all Russia, the cradle of the holy faith of our ancestors and first witness of their civic individuality.” The minister of education, Count Uvarov, dubbed the university a “mental fortress.” There was no doubt whom it was supposed to protect, and who the enemy was. According to the minister, the new university was “to smooth over, as much as possible, the sharp characteristics whereby Polish youth is distinguished from the Russian, and particularly to suppress the idea of a separate nationality among them, to bring them closer and closer to Russian ideas and customs, to imbue them with the common spirit of the Russian people.”
The first rector of the university was Mykhailo Maksymovych, a native of the former Hetmanate. He came to Kyiv from Moscow University, where he had been a professor of botany. A man of many talents, at Uvarov’s personal request he now took on the much more politically important position of professor of Russian philology. Maksymovych’s appointment exemplified the strategy chosen by St. Petersburg to Russify the educational system in the newly annexed territories. The foot soldiers of the new policy—and, indeed, some of their field commanders—were cadres from the former Hetmanate. This seemed an obvious choice: they knew the local language, culture, and conditions, and they were as anti-Polish as one could imagine at the time.
In time, however, the government’s reliance on natives of the Hetmanate would become problematic. By the late 1840s, the inhabitants of that region would acquire a national agenda of their own, presenting an unexpected challenge to the empire. For the time being, however, the Ukrainians from the former Hetmanate did their best to fight Polish influences.
Kyiv, with its new university, became a construction site of the new imperial Russian identity. Pilgrimages of Russian intellectuals and officials to that city had begun in the early nineteenth century, with travelers looking for the origins of Russian history as presented in the Rus’ chronicles. By the 1820s, little remained of Kyiv’s princely past except a few churches, so enthusiasts undertook archeological digs to uncover the city’s lost heritage. In 1832–1833, the local amateur archeologist Kondratii Lokhvitsky conducted excavations of Kyiv’s Golden Gate—the main entrance to the city, built by Prince Yaroslav the Wise in the first half of the eleventh century in an attempt to emulate the Golden Gates of Constantinople. The excavations were visited by Emperor Nicholas I himself, who gave Lokhvitsky an award for his work and provided funds for more excavations.
At that time, Kyiv was a predominantly Polish and Jewish city. Its Russification was literally proceeding from below as ancient ruins, accurately or inaccurately dated to princely times, emerged from beneath the surface of the earth. The first rector of Kyiv University, Mykhailo Maksymovych, became among other things a guide to the world of “Russian antiquities” for scores of prominent guests, starting with Nikolai Gogol (Mykola Hohol’) and the professor of Russian history at Moscow University, Mikhail Pogodin, and ending with the future tsar Alexander II, who was accompanied by his tutor, Vasilii Zhukovsky, Russia’s best-known poet of the pre-Pushkin era.
In 1853, the Kyiv authorities celebrated a special event in the history of their city—the unveiling of a monument to Prince Volodymyr. This was the culmination of a project that had taken twenty years: the first proposal to erect the statue had been submitted to the tsar by the governor general of Kyiv back in 1833. It was unveiled on the same day as the opening of a chain-link bridge across the Dnieper connecting the city’s Left Bank with its rebellious Right Bank. By that time, Kyiv already had a special institution charged with the task of substantiating Russia’s claim to the entire Right Bank of Ukraine. The Archeographic Commission, established in 1843 under the supervision of the governor general, went on two years later to issue its first collection of documents from local depositories that were intended to demonstrate the inalienably Russian identity of the region. In decades to come, it would issue hundreds of volumes of valuable sources that ultimately supported local inhabitants’ claims to an identity distinct from the Russian.
WITH THE POLISH UPRISING CRUSHED, THE EMPIRE ONCE AGAIN had to address the question of the Uniate Church, which numbered 1.5 million followers, mainly in territories that had been annexed to the Russian Empire after the third partition of Poland. Most of the Uniates who lived on lands taken over in the second partition had been converted to Orthodoxy during the time of Catherine II.
When leaders of the Polish nobility in the western provinces issued a call to arms in 1830 and 1831, it was met with understanding and even enthusiasm by many Uniate priests, with monastics offering particularly strong support. According to government estimates, close to two-thirds of those belonging to the Uniate Order of St. Basil in the Lithuanian province were Roman Catholics. Among those who fully supported the insurrection were the Basilian monks of the Pochaiv Monastery in Volhynia—a former stronghold of Orthodoxy that had converted to the Union in the early eighteenth century. The monastery’s printing shop published an appeal to the inhabitants of Ukraine, asking them to join the uprising. Not only did the monks welcome a Polish military unit to the monastery in April 1831, but eight of them joined the rebels. They rode on horseback in monastic garb, swords at their side, calling on the crowds to join the fight for the fatherland. Forty-five members of the monastery joined the insurgent ranks. The loyalty of the Uniate peasants was clearly at stake, and the government acted without delay. In September 1831, at the request of the military and civil authorities, Nicholas I signed a decree dissolving the Uniate monastery in Pochaiv. Its buildings were turned over to the Orthodox Church, which opened its own monastery there. Altogether, about half the ninety-five Uniate monasteries that had existed in the empire before 1830 were shut down in the wake of the Polish uprising.
Nicholas I also accelerated his earlier plans to convert the entire Uniate population to Orthodoxy by devising an institutional unification of Orthodox and Uniate churches. Like many members of the Russian imperial elite, he considered the Uniate Ukrainian and Belarusian peasants to be quintessential Russians who had been forced to abandon their native Orthodox faith by Polish pressure and intrigue, which now endangered their national identity. While stationed with his military unit in the western provinces of the empire before his ascension to the throne, the future tsar had been struck by the poverty of the Uniate priests and their churches. Lacking support from the state or from Catholic landowners, some Uniate clergymen had sought ways of “returning” the Uniates to the Orthodox Church even before the Polish uprising. Nicholas found a perfect candidate to achieve that goal in the twenty-nine-year-old Iosif Semashko, a Uniate priest and member of the Spiritual College in St. Petersburg, an institution charged with supervising the activities of the Roman Catholic and Uniate churches in the empire.
Semashko, a native of Right-Bank Ukraine, was born in 1798, a few years after the region came under Russian control as a result of the second partition of Poland. His father was a Uniate priest who had refused to accept Orthodoxy and lost his parish. As a child, the young Semashko more often attended Orthodox services in his native village than Roman Catholic ones farther away, as there were few Uniate churches remaining in his neighborhood. A talented youth, he was first sent to study at a school in the town of Nemyriv in Podolia and then at the joint Roman Catholic–Uniate seminary in Vilnius University. Both institutions were centers of Polish education and culture under the patronage of the inspector of the Vilnius educational district, Adam Czartoryski. The young Semashko had to master Polish and later remembered the privileged status of the sons of the Polish nobility at the Nemyriv school and the atmosphere of Polish patriotism and anti-Russian sentiment in Vilnius, where his reading of a Russian journal with a fellow student was regarded as an act of national treason.
But it was not until Semashko was sent to serve as an officer of the Spiritual College in St. Petersburg that he decided to link his future with the Orthodox Church. He was impressed by the grandeur of the imperial capital and the richness of St. Petersburg’s Orthodox churches, but appalled by the patronizing attitude of the Roman Catholic clergy toward Uniates. Compelled to choose either a Polish or a Russian identity (he saw no other option), Semashko decided that he was a Russian and, as such, had to belong to the Russian church. To achieve that, he had to make his Uniate Church Russian, which meant Orthodox.
“Immeasurable Russia, bound by one faith and one language, directed by a single will toward a blessed goal, became for me a great attractive fatherland. I considered it my sacred duty to serve it and promote its welfare,” remembered Semashko later. In 1827, he prepared a memorandum for the government outlining his plan for the gradual conversion of the Uniates to Orthodoxy, which caught the emperor’s eye and won his full approval.
Semashko’s plan was in many ways a continuation of the official policy toward Uniates during the liberal rule of Alexander I. The forcible conversion of Uniates to Orthodoxy that had marked the rule of Catherine II was no longer practiced. The change of policy was due not only to the tsar’s ideological preference for toleration but also to the failure of the pressure applied to the Uniates to yield the desired result. Indeed, it had produced an unwanted result: rather than becoming Orthodox, some 200,000 Uniate peasants had joined the Roman Catholic Church in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1805, on Alexander’s orders, a special Uniate department was created within the Spiritual College, which had previously overseen the activities of Roman Catholics only. The Uniate metropolitan welcomed this official recognition of his church and, with government support, embarked on an effort to free the Uniate liturgy from Latin borrowings and influences.
Semashko, however, wanted much more than just to stop the conversion of Uniates to Roman Catholicism. In preparation for the unification of the Uniate and Orthodox churches, he suggested the establishment of a Uniate Spiritual College separate from the Catholic one, as well as a Uniate seminary to train Uniate priests in an Orthodox spirit, thereby preparing cadres for future unification. The Uniate Basilian monastic order, which Semashko considered the main instrument of Latin and Polish influence in the region, was to be subordinated to the Uniate bishops in order to prevent Roman Catholics from joining the order. In April 1828, Nicholas I issued a decree that closely followed Semashko’s recommendations. Semashko himself was consecrated a Uniate bishop in the following year and put in charge of one of the two Uniate eparchies remaining in the empire.
The Polish uprising brought the Uniate question closer to the center of the government’s concerns and, for the first time, made it the object of public attention and debate. Semashko felt that he had to speed up the realization of his original plan. In 1832, Nicholas I approved Semashko’s idea of subordinating the Uniate College, now independent from that of the Catholics, to the Orthodox Synod, but that measure was not realized. The Orthodox authorities, backed by public opinion, made it a priority to convert individual Uniate parishes rather than the entire Uniate Church to their faith. Disheartened, Semashko requested permission to convert to Orthodoxy himself, but he was prevented from doing so by the Orthodox hierarchs, who now promised to assist him in his efforts to prepare the ground for the future conversion of the entire church.
Semashko redoubled his efforts. His promotion of the “Orthodoxization” of Uniate parishes went hand in hand with their cultural Russification. He would later assert that he had been guided by one thought: “how to turn Uniates into born-again Russian Orthodox.” Semashko busied himself convincing priests to erect an Orthodox-style iconostasis—a high screen or wall of icons separating the nave from the sanctuary—in Uniate churches that had eliminated them under Catholic influence, replacing old Uniate service books with Russian ones, and encouraging Uniate priests to grow beards, as was customary among their Orthodox counterparts. The use of Russian service books also meant introducing the Russian language into spheres where it had not previously been present. It was an uphill battle, as the priests were much more comfortable with Polish, the language in which they corresponded with Semashko. He himself was mortified by what he considered his inadequate mastery of Russian, even though he regarded himself as more Russian than many native speakers of that language.
Semashko also conducted a campaign of anti-Polish propaganda among his priests, trying to turn their Ruthenian (Ukrainian and Belarusian) identity into a Russian one. “In order to warm the hearts of the Uniate clergy with the Russian spirit, every possible opportunity was taken to revive the memory of their origins, the Polish repressions that they had suffered, and the paternal concern of the Russian government for their welfare,” wrote Semashko in 1837. He thought his efforts were bringing some results: “The previously alien notion of taking pride in the Russian name and heritage,” he wrote, “is now treasured by a very considerable portion of the clergy subordinate to me.”
Generally speaking, however, Semashko felt overwhelmed by the difficulties that his project encountered. The Orthodox authorities were suspicious of him as someone who opposed direct conversions and was trying to build up the Uniate Church, while the Roman Catholic clergy regarded him as their sworn enemy. More importantly, the Uniate priests whom Semashko was trying to bring back to their “Russian” roots, even if they sympathized with him, were caught between the Roman Catholic landowners, who controlled resources in the village, and the conservative peasants, who wanted no change at all. The one power Semashko had was that of appointing Uniate priests to their parishes and removing those whom he considered opponents of his policy, thereby denying income to the malcontents and their families. He used that power extensively, working together with the civil authorities and the police to crush resistance among the Uniate clergy. He was a zealot who apparently had no regrets or doubts about what he was doing, and he finally obtained the full support of the authorities.
By the mid-1830s, Nicholas I and his government had become more serious than ever in their efforts to eliminate the Uniate Church. In 1835, Semashko was invited to join a secret government committee charged with bringing about unification. Two years later, Semashko’s old idea of subordinating the Uniate hierarchy to the Orthodox Synod, which the tsar had approved in 1832, was finally implemented. Two deaths—that of an elderly Uniate metropolitan, Iosafat Bulhak, and that of a bishop who had opposed unification—resulted in Semashko being put in charge of church administration, opening the way for the realization of his old dream of the religious reunification of the Russian nation.
With the support of the Orthodox authorities and the backing of the civil administration, Semashko convoked a Uniate Church council to consider the issue. The synod was supposed to issue an appeal to the tsar drafted by Semashko. “With Lithuania’s detachment of Russian provinces in troubled times and their subsequent annexation to Poland, their Russian Orthodox inhabitants were subjected [to persecution],” Semashko wrote. “Since then, those people, separated from the broad Russian masses, have constantly been subjected to all the devices of a policy of fanaticism intended to make them alien to Russia.” Semashko continued: “A million and a half Uniates, Russian by language and origin… would have remained somewhat alien to the broad mass of their actual brethren, the Russians.”
The synod took place in February 1839 in the Belarusian town of Polatsk, the home of the seventeenth-century Westernizer of Muscovy Simeon of Polatsk. In preparation for the event, with the help of the authorities, Semashko collected 1,305 statements from Uniate priests indicating their readiness to join the Orthodox Church. Despite pressure, arrests, and exile of opponents of the “reverse Union,” 593 priests refused to sign the statement. To forestall possible peasant riots, the authorities sent a Cossack regiment to Vitsebsk province. On February 12, 1839, the Polatsk synod adopted the Act of Union and issued an appeal to the tsar prepared by Semashko, asking him to accept close to 1,600 Uniate parishes and close to 1.5 million parishioners into the body of imperial Orthodoxy. Semashko served an Orthodox liturgy in the St. Sophia Cathedral in Polatsk before taking the document to the imperial capital. The St. Petersburg Synod—the ruling body of the Orthodox Church—was glad to approve the request. The imperial hierarchs celebrated not only the adherence of the Uniates but also the return of part of the Russian tribe to its brethren. The Synod welcomed “the reconsolidation of the ancient interrupted union and the reestablishment of perfect unity” with the Uniates, who had been “united with us for ages by unity of kin, fatherland, language, faith, liturgy, and church hierarchy.”
Nicholas I offered a token of approval in the spirit of Catherine II by having a special medal struck for the occasion. Its inscription echoed the one on the medal that she had issued upon the second partition of Poland: “Torn away by force (1596), reunited by love (1839).” Like Catherine, Nicholas was reacting to a Polish insurrection and trying to prevent Ukrainian and Belarusian peasants from joining it by converting them to Orthodoxy. But there was also an important new element in Nicholas’s policy. He was not just returning what he believed historically belonged to the Romanov dynasty, but also striving to restore the broken unity of the Russian nation. Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality were to be mutually reinforcing elements of an attempt to integrate the western provinces into the empire. But the fait accompli of 1839 contained the seeds of future problems. The provinces reunited “by love” with the Orthodox Church and the Russian nation under the tsarist scepter would soon challenge the model of nationality promoted by the authors of the Polatsk synod.