Hetmanate and stands as a sharp contrast to the Russian empire's inability to codify its own laws despite efforts by Peter I and Empresses Elizabeth and Catherine.
In the eighteenth century, social inequalities within the Cossack class that had developed in the seventeenth century only worsened. Since the Hetmanate's administrative structure was based on the Cossack regimental model, the Cossack officer elite or starshyna built wealth from access to power. A cohesive landed gentry developed, legally identified as the Society of Notable Military Fellows; it was divided into three social categories associated with three levels ofoffice holding—in the hetman's, the central, and the regimental (provincial) administrations. The Society's approximately 2,000 members effectively excluded lower rank Cossacks from the privileges of Cossack status and monopolized the economy; by 1735 approximately 50 percent of the cultivated land of the Hetmanate was in their control. Culturally over the century this Ukrainian gentry became more European- ized in education and culture, and domestically it enjoyed privileges akin to a nobility: freedom from taxation, trade privileges, right to own estates and demand labor from peasants, the right to produce alcoholic beverages and trade in certain commodities and to participate in councils and offices. But Hetmanate offices were not included in the Table of Ranks, so gentry elites could not earn the status of "hereditary nobility" on a par with Russian nobles.
As high as the families of the Society rose in the eighteenth century, so low did much of the rest of Cossackdom fall. Rank and file Cossacks fell into impoverishment from the dual obligations of rendering Cossack service and supporting themselves from the land, and became unable to equip themselves to fight. The number of battle-ready Cossacks fell from 60,000 in 1650 to 30,000 in 1669 and 20,000 in 1730. Reliant on Cossacks for border defense and campaigns against the Ottoman empire, Russia attempted in the 1720s to slow this military degradation by prohibiting Cossacks from becoming peasants and prohibiting officers' purchase of rank and file Cossack farms. A wide-reaching reform of 1735 attempted to alleviate military burdens on poor small-holder Cossacks or landless Cossacks by creating legal categories of Cossack "helpers" and Cossack hired laborers; they retained Cossack legal privileges and status, but gradually became liable for taxation. By the 1760s 45 percent of the Hetmanate's population was Cossack, but the majority fell into one of these two non-fighting categories of impoverished, taxed Cossacks. With the Society of Noble Military Fellows becoming a landed gentry and most Cossacks too poor to serve, as Orest Subtelny says, by the 1760s traditional Cossackdom had "ceased to exist in Ukraine," militarily and economically.
It was also a difficult time for the taxed population. The plight of the peasants worsened: the starshyna, church hierarchs, and monasteries expanded their lands at the expense of peasants such that by the 1760s 90 percent of peasants were living on private lands, owing two days of labor service as well as other services and dues to their landlords. Still, there were differences from the Russian center. Peasants' position as property owners was stronger than that of their Russian peers. In Russia peasants farmed lands regarded as village or landlord property, and fields were regularly reallocated as communes struggled to meet the collective tax burden. But in the Hetmanate and former Grand Duchy lands, individual family holdings remained the norm, under the influence of Polish property laws, and communities relied on communal institutions to regulate access to other shared resources (grazing lands, fishing, timber) and to govern social life in the village. Furthermore, Hetmanate peasants were not enserfed. They retained mobility, although it was becoming restricted. In 1721 peasants who left their landlords forfeited their landed property; in 1760 a landlord's permission was required to leave. In 1766 the starshyna was allowed to purchase villages with serfs as private property. Nevertheless, many left for the expanding southern frontier.
Typical of eastern Europe at this time, urban life yielded to manorial economy over the century. Cossack and monastic landholders, with tax-free status, could undercut merchants and townsmen; they maintained their own private market towns with courts and administration that they controlled. Only twelve towns in the Hetmanate had Magdeburg Law rights of municipal autonomy, and local Cossack administrations steadily impinged on these rights. The number of towns dwindled as manorial economies prospered. In 1723 there were 200 towns in the Hetmanate; the number fell by 1783 to around 120. Townsmen were a small minority of the Hetmanate population, and there were even fewer in Sloboda Ukraine and Zaporozhia. By the 1760s, townsmen were only 3.3 percent of the population of the Hetmanate, and only 2.5 percent in Sloboda Ukraine. In 1767-8 when Catherine II solicited petitions from communities across the empire in preparation for a new imperial lawcode, delegates from the Hetmanate's towns exposed these tensions. They petitioned for affirmation of their municipal and economic rights, protection from interference by the Cossack administration, and imposition of city taxes on any non-townsmen trading in towns.
The Hetmanate experienced the booming economy of the eighteenth century. Farming produced a variety of crops—wheat, barley, oats, millet, tobacco, hemp, and hops—and light industry engaged in distilling, brewing, tobacco preparation, potash and tar, textile and leather. Exports included grain, cattle, tobacco and alcohol, textiles. Russian economic policy, however, forced the Hetmanate to orient its trade towards Moscow, St. Petersburg and Volga ports, rather than towards the Baltic, and networks of roads, canals, and rivers in that direction were weak. Thus, grain was often turned into alcohol, making Left (and Right) Bank lands the empire's source for vodka. At the end of the century when Russia had acquired trade ports on the Black Sea, including Odessa (founded 1794), these areas, plus the newly settled Black Sea steppe, became major exporters of wheat.
In a setting of economic growth, the Cossack elite and wealthy church institutions prospered; gentry and hierarchs became urbane and well-educated and patronized the arts. Culture in the Hetmanate was fully integrated with that of the capitals, with much interchange. In many ways, the Hetmanate had a more robustly developed cultural life than did Russia. It enjoyed secondary schools and seminaries in many major towns, and elementary schools in most parishes, far outpacing primary education in the Russian empire even after Catherine II's educational reforms. The Kyiv Mohyla Academy remained the leading educational institution in the Russian empire; with its up-to-date curriculum, in the first half of the century it produced generations of secular leaders, including learned intellectuals, some of whom served in St. Petersburg. Left Bank Ukraine produced many fine writers, dramatists, and historians, including poet and philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda (1722-94). A rich school of dramas on religious and national themes emerged from the Mohyla Academy; Feofan Prokopovich's Vladymyr (1705) heralded Grand Prince Volodymyr as Christianizer of Rus' in 988 and ended with a paean to then Hetman Ivan Mazepa for his patronage of the arts. Over the second half of the eighteenth century the Mohyla Academy shifted more to seminary education, integrating Enlightenment ideas into the curriculum and shaping a modern ecclesiastical elite. The majority of the empire's Orthodox bishops in this century (70 of 117) were Ukrainians or Belarus'ans, trained in Kyiv and other regional centers. Colleges in Chernigov and Pereiaslav provided secular training for administrative service for Ruthenian gentry at a time when the Russian nobility was abjuring non-military service.