President of the Russian Academy of Sciences or Hetman of Ukraine?
Each of the offices mentioned would undoubtedly have meant a high social status. It would have obviously been difficult to make a choice if fate had decreed to choose one of them. Kyrylo Razumovsky (1728-1803) faced no such dilemma, for he held the offices of both President of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Hetman of Left Bank Ukraine.
Moreover, he also possessed other high-sounding official titles, such as Actual Chamberlain, Colonel of the Izmailovsky Life Guards Regiment, holder of the Russian Orders of Saint Andrew the First Called Apostle and of Alexander Nevsky, the Polish Order of the White Eagle and the Order of Saint Anna of Holstein, Count of the Russian Empire, etc.
Strangely enough, the future Ukrainian ruler enjoyed a far humbler social status in his youth, as a shepherd of his father’s and communal herds at the farmstead of Lemeshy (now a village in Kozelets district, Chernihiv oblast). Yet, thanks to the incredible career of his elder brother Oleksiy, wh o managed not only to get the noble name of Razumovsky (both Cossack brothers were Rozum by birth) and be awarded the title of count but also to enter into a secret marriage with Peter I’s daughter Empress Elizabeth, Kyrylo not just passed but literally vaulted over all the rungs of the Russian imperial social ladder.
Having unexpectedly become a count at the age of sixteen, the future hetman set off for a tour of Europe. Visiting Europe’s best academic centers (Berlin, Koenigsberg, and Danzig), Razumovsky received quite a broad, if superficial, European education. And as early as May 1746, when Kyrylo was only eighteen, he headed the Petersburg Academy of Sciences because he had “acquired and displayed outstanding scholastic aptitude.” In early March 1750, the General Rada, holding a highly solemn and duly ceremonial session in Hlukhiv, the then administrative center of Left Bank Ukraine, elected in absentia the 22-year-old Kyrylo Razumovsky as hetman. The empress awarded him on this occasion the rank of general field marshal and handed him the hetman’s insignia at a St. Petersburg court church.
Despite a purely theatrical nature of the empress’s extravaganza, Razumovsky the Younger proved to be not so helpless a plaything in the clutches of St. Petersburg as Elizabeth Petrovna’s entourage hoped and as many Russian and Ukrainian historians once wrote. In the years of Kyrylo Razumovsky’s hetmanship, Ukraine experienced, beyond any doubt, its last political, economic, and cultural upsurge of the eighteenth century.
The hetman inherited a completely unbalanced state mechanism from what was known as “hetman’s government,” in which Russian officers called the tune. The very first close scrutiny of Ukrainian affairs convinced Kyrylo that radical transformations were needed. Raised at the St. Petersburg court and closely linked to the Russian top aristocracy owing to marriage with Yekaterina Naryshkina, a relative of the empress, the hetman naturally viewed the future Ukraine as part of the Russian Empire, but with one fundamental reservation: one must honor local rights and customs while creating the conditions for Ukraine’s economic and cultural prosperity.
RAZUMOVSKY’S ENLIGHTENED RULE
It is only the states and societies that patronize science and care about the spiritual sphere that have a chance to develop. This irrefutable axiom, which Ukrainian politicians and statesmen are gradually embracing today (let us hope, in earnest and forever), was very popular, strange as it is, among European aristocrats as long ago as the mid-eighteenth century. That was a time when, having analyzed the roots of the deep crisis that engulfed almost all the European countries, the most far-seeing thinkers of that epoch (Charles Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Claude Adrien Helvetius, et al.) came to the conclusion that only by tapping the human intellectual potential was it possible to create the conditions for a steady social progress. Being aware that rulers wielded the real power of influencing public life, they believed they had to carry enlightenment and all the freshest fruits of intellectual labor to those on the throne.
The enlighteners’ reasoning sounded so convincing and their activities looked so all-embracing that a number of European rulers fell under their charm and put into practice the proposed reforms aimed at modernizing public life. It is gratifying that Ukraine did not avoid these progressive undertakings thanks to its ruler Kyrylo Razumovsky, Ukrainian hetman and president of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
Quite in the spirit of the enlightened despotism, Razumovsky first took up judicial reform. Under the hetman’s concept, the reform was supposed not only to set up a streamlined system of judicial institutions but also duly enforce law and order. The system of public administration also underwent fundamental change. In this case, the hetman quickly managed to win, albeit for a short time, the right to appoint colonels, i.e., heads of local government bodies, a prerogative exercised by Petersburg since the times of Peter I. In addition, Razumovsky resumed the practice of regularly convening senior Cossacks’ councils to discuss the most important problems of public life. While introducing some elements of open and transparent decision-making into the Cossack state’s political life, the hetman nurtured plans to gradually establish a nobility Sejm as an institution of class representation. This approach fully met the concept of enlightened rule and could have put Ukraine still closer to the European civilized community.
Razumovsky’s domestic policies clearly outline another sign of “enlightened rule:” a tendency to restrict church intrusion into public life. This was all the more important for Ukraine because the almost completely Russified top clergy had become an obedient instrument of tsarism to obstruct any manifestations of national aspirations. In particular, the hetman’s government opposed the ordination of foreigners “who have not taken monastic vows in Little Russia, showed no merits, and are unaware of local practices.” Instead, it was proposed to restore the traditional practice of free election of church hierarchs by the clergy and laity.
Striving to revitalize the economy, the hetman lifted domestic duties and obtained permission for Ukrainian merchants to carry out free trade outside the Russian Empire. After analyzing the losses Ukraine suffered from excessive wine- making, the hetman’s government resolved that only “the landlords and Cossacks who own arable land and woods” had the right to engage in this trade.
Of special import are Razumovsky’s reforms in education and culture. By longtime tradition, the hetman first of all rendered considerable support to the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. In 1752, 1763, and 1764, the years of his rule, instructions were drawn up to modernize teaching in the Academy. Yet, he failed to thwart the attempts of church hierarchs to turn the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy into a purely theological establishment. This led the hetman to toy increasingly with the idea of creating a new, fully secular, system of education in Ukraine, based on universities and gymnasia. In 1760 it was projected to establish Baturyn University, which was to meet all the European standards of the day. Another university was to have been formed on the basis of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, with the latter being the university’s theology department.
Given the poor state of book-printing in Ukraine, the hetman’s proposal to establish print facilities at universities and, if necessary, at gymnasia to put out both ecclesiastical and secular books was also of vital importance.
“LITTLE PETERSBURG”
Finally, Razumovsky attached great patriotic importance to the construction of the hetman’s official residence in the place where his outstanding predecessor Ivan Mazepa once ruled. It is here, on the picturesque bank of the river Seym, that the English-born Petersburg-based architect Charles Cameron built, at the hetman’s request, a luxurious palace in the first-class style of classicism and the Italian Rinaldi laid out a park. Also involved in designing the “national structures” were such great court masters of those times as Kvasov, Aksamitov, and Startsev.
In Baturyn, the hetman collected one of the Russian Empire’s best libraries, famed even in Europe. The hetman’s library was run for over fifteen years by an expert invited from France. Word had it that Razumovsky even nurtured the idea of inviting the well-known French enlightener Rousseau to assume the office of his library director. The atmosphere of national revival aroused interest in Ukrainian history, encouraged the creative pursuit of writers and artists and, finally, formed a whole generation of politicians and intellectuals.
Razumovsky’s attempt to make a “little Petersburg” out of Baturyn was logically in line with his intention to legally single out the Ukrainian aristocracy born from Cossack senior officers. The 1763 congress of senior officers passed a resolution calling for legal approval and extension of the hetman’s state’s autonomy. In particular, the idea was to establish the right to freely elect the hetman, restore the tradition of signing Ukrainian- Russian treaties, constitute a nobility Sejm, restore the Ukrainian-Russian customs border, etc. Some senior officers from the hetman’s entourage even suggested that the hetman’s office be made hereditary in the Razumovsky family.
“THAT THE VERY WORD HETMAN DISAPPEAR...”
Catherine II also considered herself a sincere advocate of the idea of enlightened rule. However, the system of Russian enlightened absolutism held no place for an enlightened hetman’s rule in Ukraine...
The news from Hlukhiv about the political attitudes of Ukrainian senior Cossack officers and the nobility seriously worried the Petersburg authorities. The new Empress Catherine II, a confirmed advocate of strict centralized control, immediately summoned Kyrylo Razumovsky to her so-called Palmyra of the North and forced him in late February 1764 to sign a “voluntary” act of abdication. The empress also sent the following order to the Russian administration in Ukraine, “Little Russia, Livonia, and Finland are provinces ruled in line with the privileges granted to them. It would be unfair to immediately revoke these privileges, but it would also be very stupid to consider these provinces as alien lands. You must make an all-out effort to Russify these provinces, so they do not look like wolves from the woods...” The empress also instructed, “When there is no longer a hetman in Little Russia, you must see to it that the very word hetman also disappear...”
The last decades of the eighteenth century passed precisely under the sign of the empress’s instructions. Yet, fortunately Petersburg never succeeded in turning Ukrainian wolves into Russian lambs. This happened, not least thanks to Ukraine’s political and cultural revival in the years of the enlightened rule of hetman Kyrylo Razumovsky, a count, chamberlain, general field marshal, president of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences, and, above all, a true Ukrainian patriot.
