When the Crimean khanate was annexed in 1783, these lands were included in an immense governor-generalship from the Dniester River to the northern Caucasus and north to Saratov, comprising three gubernii (Ekaterinoslav, Voznesensk, Saratov), Crimea as a separate oblast, and the Don Cossacks maintaining their own lands, under the supervision of the able empire builder and Catherine II's confidant, G. A. Potemkin. The 1775 administrative reforms were introduced in 1783-4 in the three gubernii according to the empire-wide model, with lower-level courts staffed by locally elected assessors given the dearth of Russian nobility in the areas. By 1796 the population of the Ekaterinoslav and Voznesensk gubernii was 80 percent Russian and Ukrainian. Because of the difficulty of securing labor here, landlords could not enforce serfdom and gave their peasants relatively lower labor obligations than peasants in the center.
Sloboda Ukraine was similarly integrated in the eighteenth century. It had had traditional Cossack self-government, organized around five territorial regiments with Cossack rights (no poll tax, freedom to distill and to trade). Sloboda Cossacks loyally served Russia in campaigns against Persia, Poland, and the Ottoman empire across the century. Nevertheless from the 1730s Russia began to limit the register of Sloboda Cossacks, push lesser Cossacks into taxpaying status, and station regular Russian troops there. Meanwhile, as in Zaporozhia and Bashkiria, Sloboda Cossacks were being outnumbered in their lands: from a population of 120,000 in the late seventeenth century, Sloboda Ukraine grew to 660,000 in 1773, primarily from peasant colonization.
In 1763 the poll tax was imposed on non-Cossack peasants in Sloboda Ukraine and in 1765 Russia abolished the region's autonomy as a Cossack entity. Sloboda Ukraine was turned into Kharkiv gubernia, with a new legal structure of Russian procurators and Russian law in some forty-six districts (uezdy), several intermediate level courts, and four civil and criminal chambers at the highest venue. Towns were given Russian-style government. In the 1770s its five Cossack regiments were integrated into the regular army, the officers becoming Russian noblemen and 60,000 rank and file soldiers and laborers demoted to regular army or taxed state peasants. In the 1780s the administrative reforms and Charters to Towns and Nobles were introduced, including in May 1783 the poll tax on all peasants as well as quitrent for state peasants and Cossacks; this decree de facto enserfed Ukrainian peasants by linking them to their place of registration.
A different social and economic history played out in the Rus' palatinates of the Right Bank and western Ukraine in the eighteenth century, still part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until the 1790s. Stretching from Galicia and Volhynia to the Dnieper, these lands experienced substantive political and social changes. Cossack governance and landholding was squeezed out in favor of Polish magnates who produced grain and cattle for export. By the middle of the century, only four Polish aristocratic families owned 80 percent of the Right Bank; they populated it by encouraging settlement by Ukrainian peasants from Galicia, Right, and even Left Bank on advantageous terms. Widespread discontent was stoked by religious, economic, and social oppression. As tax breaks and loans expired after a decade or two of settlement, Ukrainian peasants fell into harsh serfdom, with up to four days a week of labor services. In addition, while the Hetmanate had a system of primary schools, Polish landlords prevented peasants in the Right Bank from attending school. The Orthodox Church was systematically weakened, with the bishoprics of Galicia and Volhynia (Lviv, Peremyshl, Lutsk) converting to the Union between the 1690s and 1720s. Once a staunch defender of Orthodoxy, the Lviv Orthodox fraternity became Uniate in 1708; by the 1760s in the Right Bank only twenty Orthodox parishes were left as well as a network of monasteries. Discontent on all these grounds merged into three major peasant uprisings led by "social rebels" called haidamaks attacking Uniates, Jews, and Poles. In 1768 the entire region was convulsed in the chaos that broke out with domestic confederations representing pro-Russian and pro-Polish factions. In the midst of war with the Ottoman empire Russian troops in the Hetmanate crossed into Right Bank to quell the unrest, opening the door to the first partition of Poland.
Galicia with its central city of Lviv, like Vilnius to the north, was a vibrant center of intermingling cultures—Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish. Ukrainian education and arts flourished here, particularly Polish-influenced baroque architecture in cathedrals, town halls, and noble estates. Its Uniate establishment nurtured Ukrainian language and culture, particularly after Galicia was ceded to the Habsburg empire in the first partition (1772).
The Hetmanate remained an autonomous political entity within the empire in the eighteenth century, despite Hetman Ivan Mazepa's fateful decision in 1708 to throw his support behind Charles XII of Sweden in the Great Northern War. Alarmed by Peter I's cavalier use of Cossack forces outside of Ukraine, Mazepa sought protection in a Swedish alliance. Defeated at Poltava in 1709, Mazepa barely escaped with his life. Personally enraged at Mazepa's "treason," Peter I instituted Russian oversight of the hetman's court and appointments of hetmans and major offices. He punitively conscripted thousands of Cossacks to hard labor, introduced heavy imperial tariffs and taxes, purged the hetman's offices, and asserted Russian control over the Hetmanate's finances and judiciary. When the Great Northern War was over (1721), Peter I regularized Russia's relations with a variety of Cossack Hosts, here transferring the Hetmanate from the jurisdiction of the Foreign Affairs College to the new Little Russia or Malorossiiskii College, a step symbolic of Russia's intent to integrate Ukraine more directly.
But Russia soon found it difficult to assert direct power over the Cossack administrative system and, since these borderlands were an important staging ground for wars against the Ottomans, Russian policy vacillated over the century. As Zenon Kohut writes, "from 1727 to the 1760s the local administration and judicial organs of the Hetmanate functioned without interference from St. Petersburg." Controls over the selection of the hetman waxed and waned in the 1730s-50s; Empress Elizabeth (1741-61) personally favored the Hetmanate, allowing a "golden autumn" of hetman autonomy through the 1750s. Structurally the Left Bank's autonomy from the Russian empire can be seen in the fiscal realm. No direct Russian burdens were instituted here until late in the eighteenth century, most notably the poll tax and the responsibility to provide military recruits. Rather, the Hetmanate's rather chaotic fiscal system continued. Different categories of taxes were levied by different corporate institutions—the hetman's administration, monasteries, private landlords. A few taxes were paid by all taxed peasants and Cossacks in the "hired labor" social rank, one to support the Cossack army and another to support Russian troops stationed in the Hetmanate. But these were collected locally by local agents.
The Hetmanate also maintained independence from Russia in its legal structures; in addition to criminal courts run by the hetman's administration, Cossack landlords had broad civil and minor criminal administration over their people. Towns and the Church maintained their own courts. Various legal codes were applied: church law for religious issues in ecclesiastical courts; Magdeburg Law in towns with such charters; the Lithuanian Statutes of 1566 and 1588, Cossack and Ruthenian customary law, and hetmans' decrees (universaly) from 1648 on. When legal cases came to the Senate in St. Petersburg on appeal, Russia as a rule affirmed local norms and laws. The Hetmanate compiled a comprehensive legal code in 1743; although never approved formally by the Senate, it was used widely in the