Most remarkable, perhaps, was the relatively smooth transition into the reforms by the Ruthenian elite. Certainly voices were initially raised in defense of Rus' autonomies, but they were matched by others representing the Rus' lands as an equal partner in the empire and urging tighter integration with it. The most complex issue was equating the Ruthenian elite to the Russian nobility. Initially, since the new administrative reforms created hundreds of new positions for noblemen, any Ruthenian gentryman in military service to Russia in a rank of the Table of Ranks that conferred hereditary nobility was declared noble. Those not in service were invited, under the broad reading of the sympathetic governor Petr Rumiantsev, to submit proof of noble status to be decided upon by panels of local nobles. When the 1785 Charter of Nobility was extended to the Hetmanate, offering the Ruthenian gentry benefits of noble status that equaled (save for political power and institutions) those of the Polish nobility, local boards ennobled upwards of 25,000 Cossacks and Ruthenian gentry by the 1790s, many on flimsy grounds. Even though that number was cut in half by a more stringent review of 1795, ample numbers of Ruthenian gentry received the status and privileges of imperial nobility and went on to serve in police, judicial, and administrative institutions across the southern border (New Russia, Right Bank, Georgia) and in St. Petersburg. Some reached the height ofimperial service: two ofthe six men in Catherine II's powerful Secretariat of the 1770s reform era were Ukrainian: A. A. Bezborodko and Peter Zavadovskii. Certainly pride in the Hetmanate's historical identity did not falter, kept alive by descendants of Cossack officers and Ruthenian noblemen. As Serhii Plokhy argues, such circles produced the anonymous History of the Rus' People (1801-4) which argued eloquently for Ruthenian culture and Cossack rights and privileges, and inspired the development of nineteenth-century Ukrainian nationalism. Nevertheless, in the reign of Catherine II, after more than a century of self-government and regional autonomy, the Left Bank was becoming integrated into the empire.
POPULATING "NEW RUSSIA"
Throughout this century Russia steadily populated the steppe for farming as it subdued Cossacks and nomads from the Black Sea to the Caspian and Ural steppes. In the first half of the century, the focus on settlement was the lower Volga, where local governors aggressively urged landlords to import serfs there; peasants as always were willing to flee enserfment. The peasant population of Saratov Province almost tripled by the 1740s. In the second half of the century the state enticed Russian and Ukrainian settlers from overpopulated regions with a variety of inducements—cash subsidies, years ofexemption from taxation, free land. But their terms were never as favorable as those offered to foreign immigrants.
As we have seen, in the 1750s Empress Elizabeth's government attracted foreign settlers (Serbs, Bulgarians, Moldavians, Macedonians) to military settlements in the northern border of the Zaporozhian Sich (New Serbia in 1752, Slaviano Serbia 1754) with favorable tax breaks. Starting in 1764 and through Catherine II's reign, these areas were transformed into Russian gubernii, and in 1776 their farming peasants were brought into line with Russian state peasants and serfs by being required to provide recruits and pay poll tax. At the same time, the empire created new colonies of foreigners who retained their privileges for decades.
In the 1760s Catherine II promoted foreign immigration in the mercantilist spirit of populationism, the conviction that a country's success is measured by the size of its population. In her Instruction of 1767, she worried, "Russia not only has not inhabitants enough but it contains immense tracts of land, neither peopled nor cultivated." All across Europe in the mid-eighteenth century rulers were trying to attract new settlers, much to the resentment oftheir neighbors. Frederick the Great, for example, aggressively populated Prussian lands with Huguenots and Germans, as did the Habsburgs; meanwhile Britain and France were trying to populate overseas colonies with European emigrants. Catherine II was as aggressively popu- lationist as her European counterparts. Starting in 1762 Russia advertised across Europe, offering land, freedom from taxation for up to thirty years, freedom from conscription, loans, guarantees of religious freedom, and self-government. Those who intended to found manufactories were even allowed to purchase serfs. Since larger European states banned Russian agents, refused to publish their manifestos, and forbade their people to emigrate, most of the applicants came from the free cities and states of southern and western Germany. Up to 30,000 Germans arrived between 1762 and 1775, settling in seven or eight colonies on the west bank of the lower Volga around Saratov; many were Moravian Brothers, called in Russia the Herrnhuters. Groups of Mennonites moved into Zaporozhian lands on the lower Dnieper in the 1770s. Aided by unigeniture in inheritance (compared to Russian peasants' traditional partible inheritance), exempt from military service, billeting, and direct taxation for many years, these German farmers prospered. Thousands of other foreigners—Bulgarians, Greeks, Romanians, and others—flowed in as well. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, government sponsorship of foreign immigration was curtailed as expensive and unnecessary; subsidies were ended in 1819. When in 1780 administrative reforms came to Saratov gubernia where the bulk of the German colonists lived and to other southern borderlands, colonists' language and customs were preserved in lower level courts.
Between 1782 and 1795 the Black Sea steppe accounted for over 56 percent of new settlers in the empire, particularly picking up after the end of the Turkish war in 1792. Novorossiia was divided into the Kherson (from the Dniester eastward past the Bug) and Ekaterinoslav (extending east to the Don Cossack lands) gubernii. Settlers came from all directions. In addition to Mennonites, Moldavians moved eastward to settle the Ochakov steppe between the Dniester and Bug; peasants moved south from Left Bank and Sloboda Ukraine; Russians fled serfdom or were moved by their landlords from the overpopulated center; Old Believers were invited to return from abroad to settle this steppe. Throughout such settlement serfdom was the exception; immigrants received privileges as colonists or the status of state peasants. These, plus a steady influx of Ukrainian peasants, increased the population of Novorossiia exponentially from the 1760s.
Russia's last major acquisition in the steppe was the Crimean khanate, the most politically articulated and successful of the successor states of the Mongol Horde. Crimean Tatars were Turkic-speaking, Islamic descendants of steppe nomads who had long established themselves as a landed elite on the Crimean peninsula and Black Sea steppe. Their Chinggisid heritage elevated their status: while they accepted vassalage to the Ottoman empire, they insisted on sovereign superiority to both the Muscovite and Polish-Lithuanian states, successfully demanding tribute from them well into the eighteenth century. The Crimean khan of the Chinggisid Girey clan ruled, with a large elite of clans of respected lineage (mirzy and beys), over a multi-ethnic, urbanized society on the peninsula, with Greek, Armenian, and Jewish merchants in Caffa and other major cities. The Crimean steppe and peninsula supported nomadic pastoralism, farming, viticulture, livestock, and arts and crafts; slaves were used as well as a range of peasant labor. Although 1769 is often cited as the last major Crimean Tatar raid into the southern borderlands of Russia, Crimean slave emporia continued to be populated with captives from the Caucasus. Russian conquest abolished slavery and closed down Crimea's slave markets, but the trade continued to be a scourge on Russia's southern borders well into the nineteenth century.