Great piece for history buffs, re: Ukraine

[TheProle]

Ukrainian Tales

Since it became its first imperial possession in the 18th century, Russia has denied Ukraine’s national existence, while seeing it as an exotic threat.

Ukrainians have long been aware of Russian imperial mythmaking. Nostalgia for the 17th and 18th centuries, when Ukraine’s Cossacks enjoyed significant autonomy and its peasants felt protected by them, developed soon after Russia’s expansion southwards. With Ukrainian historiography obstructed by tsarist censorship, the job of preserving the past fell to writers like Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet. Born a serf in 1814, he felt the reality of Russia’s ‘enlightened’ rule, which had drastically worsened the conditions of the peasants in the decades before his birth. Shevchenko, despite his poverty, was able to gain a basic education and displayed a flair for drawing. His owner cultivated him as his personal artist and allowed him to enter the St Petersburg art world. Through the efforts of his well-connected friends, Shevchenko was able to buy his freedom.

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/behind-times/ukrainian-tales?utm_source=pocket-newtab

[Goonch]

1. Cossacks is the traditional name for the members of self-regulating military male communities that

existed on the territory of Ukraine from the XV till the XVIII centuries.

[Igel]

2. State or private serf?

Sounds like a private serf.

State serfs were subject to, well, the state administrators. Private serfs officially weren't as oppressed as US slaves, but often the difference was de jure not de facto. I was taught that serfs were bound to the land, but that they could be transferred between estates. And there was a thriving black-market business in selling serfs. They could be sold, raped, killed, families split up. Unlike in the US, this was illegal but like many laws in the US prosecutors used their "discretion" to not enforce the law. (Or they could see some advantage in non-enforcement.)

Gogol' had fun with that last bit. A couple of times.

It's mildly amusing (in an odd way) that emancipation happened in 1861.

What's not amusing is the reception that emancipation received. While there were movements to improve the lot of serfs, there were also forces that made their lives usually no better and in some circumstances worse. Serfs worked the land and kept the product of their labor, apart from either barshchina or batrak, one being a "time tax" and the other a "production tax." Suddenly they were tenant farmers, and very much like Irish cottagers.