In the last third of the 18th century, the Russian government resorted to the final integration of the Hetmanate and Slobozhanshchina into the Romanov Empire. In 1764, the Russian Empress Catherine the Second abolished the position of hetman in the Hetmanate, the following year the regimental structure was eliminated in Slobozhanshchyna, and in 1775 the tsarist army destroyed the Zaporozhye Sich on the Podpolnaya River. After 6 years, the Little Russian Government General was created in Left Bank Ukraine with a general imperial administrative structure.
Finally, on May 3, 1783, Catherine Druga signed a decree prohibiting the peasants of Left Bank Ukraine and Slobozhanshchina from moving from the place where the last revision found them. Consequently, Ukrainian peasants, freed from serfdom during the Khmelnytskyi region, again became serfs like Russian peasants. Meanwhile, the peasants of Galicia, then part of the Austrian Empire, had been freed from personal dependence 11 months earlier by a patent from Emperor Joseph II.
As a result of Catherine's decree, about three hundred thousand peasants of the Left Bank and Slobozhanshchina became dependent on the landowner on whose land they lived. For the use of this land, they performed natural duties (corvee labor and rent), and also paid a poll tax. The landowner had the right to sell the serf or exchange him for any property. But the serf peasant could not dispose of real estate, speak in court and take the state oath.
Peasants responded to enslavement with violence against landowners and mass flight, along with their families and property, to the steppes of southern Ukraine. Over the next nine years, 5% of all peasants in the Kyiv and Chernigov provinces fled there, but by 1796 serfdom was introduced in the south of Ukraine. Some peasants submitted petitions to the Russian administration in which they tried to prove their Cossack origins, and this process was called the “search for the Cossacks.”
In the 19th century, the serfdom of peasants on Ukrainian lands as part of the Russian Empire acquired particularly brutal forms. It was abolished in 1861.
Finally, on May 3, 1783, Catherine Druga signed a decree prohibiting the peasants of Left Bank Ukraine and Slobozhanshchina from moving from the place where the last revision found them. Consequently, Ukrainian peasants, freed from serfdom during the Khmelnytskyi region, again became serfs like Russian peasants. Meanwhile, the peasants of Galicia, then part of the Austrian Empire, had been freed from personal dependence 11 months earlier by a patent from Emperor Joseph II.
As a result of Catherine's decree, about three hundred thousand peasants of the Left Bank and Slobozhanshchina became dependent on the landowner on whose land they lived. For the use of this land, they performed natural duties (corvee labor and rent), and also paid a poll tax. The landowner had the right to sell the serf or exchange him for any property. But the serf peasant could not dispose of real estate, speak in court and take the state oath.
Peasants responded to enslavement with violence against landowners and mass flight, along with their families and property, to the steppes of southern Ukraine. Over the next nine years, 5% of all peasants in the Kyiv and Chernigov provinces fled there, but by 1796 serfdom was introduced in the south of Ukraine. Some peasants submitted petitions to the Russian administration in which they tried to prove their Cossack origins, and this process was called the “search for the Cossacks.”
In the 19th century, the serfdom of peasants on Ukrainian lands as part of the Russian Empire acquired particularly brutal forms. It was abolished in 1861.
