Ukrainian national consciousness of several political stripes continued to develop. Some focused on Cossack liberties: immediately after Mazepa's fall, Hryhorii Hrabianka penned The Great War ofBohdan Khmelnytsky (1710), inaugurating a cult of Khmelnytsky as a loyal servant of the Russian tsar in a bid to maintain traditional Cossack autonomies despite Peter I's wrath at Mazepa. Others were broader: Samuil Velychko's Tale of Cossack Wars with the Poles (1720) developed even more strongly an "ethno-national" vision of the Rus' community as the heartland of East Slavic, Orthodox civilization, now arrayed against non-Orthodox forces in the Commonwealth. In 1728 in St. Petersburg even Feofan Prokopovich penned a drama extolling Bohdan Khmelnytsky and implicitly Ukrainian autonomies even while it toed the line of imperial loyalty. Historian Faith Hillis calls this trend the "Little Rus' idea"—an idealized vision of Rus' autonomy and East Slavic Orthodox unity—that endured through the century. In 1767-8 when Catherine II solicited feedback from communities across the empire in preparation of a new imperial lawcode, Cossack delegates from the Left Bank requested the confirmation of traditional Cossack political and economic rights, equality with the Russian nobility, protection of their landholding, and abolition of new imperial taxes, clearly expressing a vision of an autonomous state and ethnic community within the imperial system. Cossack writers continued to develop the Little Rus' theme, as in Semen Divovych's 1762 poem, "Conversation between Great Russia and Little Russia," where "Little Russia" boldly declares its fraternal friendship and equality to "Great Russia."
The fine arts flourished as well. As in the seventeenth century, schools in the hetman's capital in Hluhkiv and one in New Russia developed religious music. Ukrainian-trained musicians dominated at the St. Petersburg court through the century; similarly, Ukrainian painters enjoyed great success in Russia. The portraitist Dmytro Levytsky, for example, born and trained in Kyiv, emigrated to St. Petersburg where he filled an entire room in Catherine II's palace at Tsarskoe selo with sentimental folk portraits, as well as producing exquisite portraits of Russian nobles. Traditional Ukrainian folk singers—itinerant minstrels who played the bandura—traversed the countryside, singing religious and folk songs and historical epics. Architecture, patronized in Kyiv and other centers by Cossack elites, emigre Russian noblemen, and religious institutions, continued in the baroque manner popular in Hetman Ivan Mazepa's time; over the century styles integrated European rococo and neoclassical, executed by Italian, German, Russian, and Ukrainian architects in a full imperial medley.
Russian presence should not be discounted, of course. Russia stationed 50-75 regiments in Left Bank Ukraine, draining local resources to support them; it sent thousands of Cossacks to battle for the empire. In Minister Ivan Shuvalov's empire- wide cameralist reforms of 1755, internal tariffs across the empire and customs at borders between the Hetmanate and Russia were abolished, depriving the Hetmanate of revenue and benefiting Russian merchants. Publication of books in Ukrainian language was not abolished, but supervised. The most direct Russian influence was felt in the Orthodox Church, which tried to regulate Ukrainian religious painting, architecture, and art to limit western artistic innovations.
By the 1760s, led by the dynamic Hetman Kyrylo Rozumovsky, the Hetmanate was working on a major reform of the judicial system, bringing it closer to the Polish- Lithuanian system, with a more regularized hierarchy of venues, streamlined procedure according to the Lithuanian Statute, and better division of civil and criminal courts. Hetman and Cossack elites were energized for other reforms of the Hetma- nate's educational and military systems. At the same time, Catherine II came to power with radically different ideas about empire and region. She abolished the Hetmanate's autonomies in two waves of reform, not as punishment for acts of opposition, but acting on a cameralist vision of empire-wide standardization. In 1764 she abolished the hetman's office, replacing it with a Little Russian Collegium under Governor- General Petr Rumiantsev. For the next decade, despite Russia's involvement in uprisings on the Right Bank and a Turkish War (1768-74), Rumiantsev systematically drew the Hetmanate into the Russian imperial system and the Cossacks into more regular military status: he introduced a flat ruble tax to support Russian troops and a system for their billeting in the Hetmanate; he created stronger fiscal collection and budgeting procedures linked with the imperial Treasury; he created a special guards unit and introduced more Russian-style military organization to the Cossacks.
The second stage of abolition of Ukrainian autonomies followed with Catherine II's administrative reforms, spurred by the wave of unrest across the borderlands already detailed in relation to Russia's abolition of the Zaporozhian Sich. The reforms were intended to create a stronger governmental presence by doubling the number ofgubernii and creating a denser network oflocal offices. Introduced in the Hetmanate in 1779, the reforms, on the basis of a census completed in 1781, abolished the Hetmanate's ten regimental districts in favor of three units called not gubernii as in the Russian center, but namestnichestva (Kyiv, Chernigov, and Novgorod-Severskii) divided into a total of forty-six districts, most replicating existing units (povity). They were given, nevertheless, the fiscal, administrative, and judicial organs ofthe reform. Ukraine's long tradition oflocal elections ofoffice holders was abolished by the reform's practice of having offices appointed by the center or elected by single social groups.
Russia further pursued homogenization on the military and ecclesiastical fronts. In 1783 Cossack regiments were abolished and rank and file Cossacks were blended into the regular army. With the outbreak of war with the Ottoman empire in 1787 and Sweden in 1788, conscription of all taxpayers—peasants, townsmen, lesser Cossack—was introduced for the first time in the Hetmanate (1789). The regional integrity of military service in Ukraine was abolished, and the Hetmanate's Cossacks and rank and file served around the realm. In 1786 Russia imposed the secularization of vast church lands that had been carried out in Russia in 1764. Forty-two monasteries and convents were closed, involving approximately 1,000 clergy, leaving only nineteen such institutions with about 400 monks and nuns. Church peasants were transformed into state peasants, filling imperial coffers. Diocesan borders were redrawn to match new administrative borders. The era of reforms contributed to the Hetmanate's Orthodox clergy becoming a closed social class, as in Russia: now only those social groups not subject to the poll tax were allowed to become clergy. Compulsory seminary training became limited to sons of priests, and the number of parish positions was tightly regulated. With their education in Russian seminaries, gradually the Ruthenian Orthodox clergy became not only a closed estate, but a more Russianized one.
Along with the administrative reforms came a recategorization of Hetmanate society. Petty Cossack landholders were demoted to taxpaying state peasants and in a law of May 1783 all taxpayers were required to pay the poll tax. The same law created serfdom by forbidding peasants from moving from their landlords. Urban institutions were also reformed with the administrative reforms (1779) and 1785 Charter to the Towns: there had been ten magistrates, with a separate court for the influential colony of Greek merchants at Nezhin. The reform maintained the Nezhin Greeks' court, but otherwise introduced Russian-style reformed magistracies, from which the Hetmanate's burghers benefited. They found confirmation of their status; their existing guild organization fit the reform and towns continued to use the combination of Russian law and Lithuanian statute that had become common across the Hetmanate, even in so-called Magdeburg Law towns. The reform did open up towns in the Left Bank to foreign merchants, including Jews and Russians, who joined with local burghers and merchants in the reform's new categories determined by wealth, not ethnicity. Russian gradually became the language of cities and commerce, and in the long run, Ukrainian burghers and merchants assimilated into an imperial urban burgher class.