Not by Force Alone: Russian Incorporation of the Dnieper Borderland, 1762-1800

This dissertation concentrates on the history of frontiers, borderlands, and empires in Eastern and Central Europe in the eighteenth century. While the existing literature examines mainly ideological and political competitions among the empires for land, resources, and the stateless population; I explore more physical and material spheres of rivalry such as border security, economy and public health. This dissertation explores the politics of the Russian Empire in these spheres in the eighteenth century. It argues that the policies of improvement in migration control, border infrastructure, and health care promoted by the government of Catherine II allowed the empire to incorporate its borderland with Poland-Lithuania and attract the local population more swiftly and effectively than did political repressions, ideological propaganda, or forced cultural assimilation.;The history of the Russo-Polish Dnieper borderland sheds new light on the diplomatic and political cataclysms which struck the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the second half of the eighteenth century. The largest and most multicultural country in East-Central Europe, the Commonwealth was erased from political maps, and significant parts of its territory and population were incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1795. I argue that the Partitions of Poland (1772-1795) were not a result of solely political and economic declines of Poland-Lithuania, but they stemmed from extreme decentralization of Poland-Lithuania and loss of state control over its borderlands. This research reveals that the major difference between the Russian Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the management of the Dnieper borderland was that the Polish state relied on the autonomous government of nobles, while the Russian Empire used a highly centralized state apparatus to promote its policies. Declining system of noble provincial governance of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was not efficient in coping with such major cataclysms as large peasant rebellions or severe outbreaks of bubonic plague. My study concludes that the Russian Empire took advantage of progressive government and administrative reforms in the Kyiv province in the 1770-1790s, and it outperformed the Commonwealth in the borderland. These reforms changed the status of the borderland provinces and political loyalties of their population.