Tracing lost liberties

The historian Mykola Gorban has a very important and quite fiction-like article “Kharkiv pasquil 1800”. This is a legendary story when a leaflet was found at the door of the Voznesenska church in Kharkiv (now – Ludwig Feuerbach Square 49.989884, 36.247270) with a mockery of Emperor Paul I, senior noblemen and local authorities. There was a call to action on the opposite side of the leaflet – to get freedom from the yoke and tyranny of “moskals” (“because we are simple Ukrainian people”) and also Tadeusz Kosciuszko was mentioned: “Long live our benefactors Kosciuszko and our faithful Tsikalov”. The illiteracy of the Russian language of this text (apparently the author was not a native speaker and didn’t study Russian), the words “tyrants”, “cursed tzars”, “friends of humanity”, testified that the author of the leaflet was not skilled in Russian bureaucratic language, but politically aware of revolutionary ideas. Gorban put forward an assumption, either not confirmed or exploded till now, that the author of this document had been perhaps one of the Poles who, after the defeat and division of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, had dwelled in Kharkiv. To what extent was Gorban right?

This plot will be difficult for several reasons. First, what does “Pole” mean for the time of the 18th century? At that time, besides Poles and Lithuanians, also Ukrainians (Ruthenians) and Belarusians (Lithuanians), as well as numerous representatives of the Jewish communities, were part of the Commonwealth of Two Nations before it was divided. And the notion “of the Polish nation” meant only originating from the lands of the Commonwealth, but not an ethnic or even political category. For example, among the students of the Kharkov College of 1732, we found Vasyl Pavlovsky, “of the Polish nation from Lviv”[1]. Or what is more interesting – in the petition of the 1780, the Kharkiv resident Saveliy Kolosov called himself “Little Russian of the Polish nation” because his grandfather, a native-born of Medzhybizh, was “of the Polish nation”[2]. The decisive marks such as language, customs and church were not yet absolutized at that time, and the cultural borrowing was quite evident due to the location of the ancestors of Slobozhanshchina residents in the one and the same area of the Commonwealth. Sergii Kushnariov, a researcher of the data of Russian state enumerations in Kharkiv at the end of the 18th century, found out that according to the fourth enumeration, 13 people “of the Polish nation” lived in the city. But with reference to the description of these figures it becomes clear that they are of Orthodox religion and come from Right-Bank Ukraine. It is difficult to talk about “Poles” in Kharkiv until the beginning of the 19th century.

It is noteworthy to mention that it is quite possible that the author of the leaflet was a nobleman from the Commonwealth, who after its division went to serve in the Russian army. In particular, as Ivan Ustinov points out, in Kharkiv in the late 90’s of the 18th century, the Alexandrian Hussar Regiment was lodged, headed by Brigadier General Stanislav Godlewski, who came from a well-known Polish noble family. However, as early as September 1797, he was arrested on charges of embezzlement, but former officers of the Royal Guards could serve alongside him. Even after the first division of the Commonwealth in 1772, the nobility of the Right-Bank Ukraine and Belorussia were eagerly involved in the Russian imperial Hussar regiments, especially for waging war with the Ottoman Empire and conquering territories adjacent to the Black Sea.

The second reason is the presence in Kharkiv in the early 19th century of Polish war prisoners after the rebellions and fighting for the constitution. But, unlike identification difficulties, this problem can be solved more easily, for the situation and the number of war prisoners was an integral part of the bureaucratic reporting of the Sloboda Ukrainian provincial secretariat. Moreover, since the 70’s of the 18th century, the presence of war prisoners (especially from the Ottoman Empire) became an essential feature of the towns of Slobozhanshchina. The new province was well suited to detaining prisoners both a long way from the theaters of war and, keeping in mind the transit position of Kharkiv, in place from where prisoners could be sent to the capitals, or vice versa, to Siberia or Caucasus. In the early 19th century, one can see a certain “international unity” of prisoners in Kharkiv: Turks (that included representatives of the South Slavic peoples and Greeks), Swedes, Hungarians and Poles, and from 1812 on also Germans and French. Important comment: the prisoners moved freely, communicated with the local population, but contacts with their homeland were denied (rather because of lack of communication facilities) and were under the supervision of local authorities.

After the suppression of Tadeusz Kosciuszko’s rebellion (1794), a certain number of former prisoners eventually appeared in Kharkiv, but a little later than 1800. In 1807, in connection with the yet another focusing of attention on the “Polish issue”, due to the creation by Napoleon Bonaparte of the Duchy of Warsaw, Prosecutor General Olexander Bekleshov sent requests to the provinces for the presence of exiles or ex-prisoners of the “Polish army”, especially in service squads (soldiers under the command of police chief). It turned out that there were two such former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth military servants in Kharkiv – Ivan Ioda and Yakym Vyshnevsky. They verbally stated that they were indeed war prisoners “of the Polish nation”, imprisoned during the rebellion of 1794, but they were allowed to serve in the Kostroma service squad. They were taken to the Ingermanland Regiment for their skills, and from there they moved to Kharkiv after some time. Similar former captives appeared in Bogodukhiv, Ostrogozhsk and remote Boguchar[3]. But how consciously fought these people for “liberties”? Or were they more likely victims of unexpected events? In Boguchar, the only such former war prisoner, Pavel Sushkov, stated that he was a peasant from the present Minsk province and was taken with Polish soldiers in 1794. He also served in a service squad in Kostroma, from where he moved through the Ingermanland Regiment to Boguchar. The Bohodukhiv “Pole” Jakiv Gotzal was generally from the Zhytomyr district of Volyn province, where he was subjected to the landowner Rachynsky. In 1797, he entered the Russian military service. However, Bekleshov’s message about amnesty of Polish war prisoners in 1807 had no consequences at all: all provinces answered that there were none of them[4].

There was another category of Polish-born migrants. These were mostly adolescents and young girls (women) who were taken to Kharkiv or, rather, to the Sloboda Ukrainian province by deception or force. For example, Tymofiy Vyshnevsky, who asked to be enlisted in Kharkiv as an official resident, noted that in 1794 he was “taken out of the Polish regions”, along with two other teenagers Grigory and Ilya, by Brigadier General Yevgraf Annenkov (hero of the war “with the Polish rebels”) and given by him to his brother in the rank of lieutenant (Georgiy?) in the settlement of Khoroshiv near Kharkiv[5]. Such “Poles” were used as servants at the nobility’s courts. There were also quite melodramatic stories. For example, in 1800 in Poland (and rather in Lutsk in the Volyn province), a major of the Kharkiv Dragoon Regiment, Ivan Brinkman, deceived a young noblewoman Maria Ptaszynska: “He told me, so young as I was, a lot of endearing words; promised to make me happy” and took her to “Russia” to his home in the town of Zmiiv. There, Brinkman forced the noblewoman to do peasant work, and she bore him two illegitimate sons[6]. Being a citizen of a particular state was not a key factor in choosing a national identity, and only in general terms can clarify the situation with the emergence of Polish emigrants in Kharkiv

Although there are significant precedents still associated with the coming of Poles in Slobozhanshchina. This is a case of the robbing of Jan Bogutsky, whose biography of 1803 was already very Polish. He was born in “Poland” in the city of Grodno (now – the territory of the Republic of Belarus), but from the beginning of the divisions he was in military service and for twelve years fought “against the Russian army” until he was captured (it is a funny thing that in a Russian-language official document was used a Ukrainian word to denote the captivity). A year later, in 1794, he, like many of his comrade-in-arms, entered a military service in the Nizhniy Novgorod Dragoon Regiment. After serving there for nine years, Jan Bogutsky was on his way … to Lublin, but was robbed in the Sloboda Ukrainian province, in the village of Sukhariovo (now non-existent village, near the village of Torske, Limansky district, Donetsk region). There, Bogutsky was stolen documents, and he was captured in sloboda Kreminna as a person without passport and sent to Kupyansk[7].

Therefore, biographies from “Poland” (including freedom fighters) will be quite diverse. These people slowly came to the east of Ukraine and in no ten-fifteen years started to identify themselves as Poles, finding a brand new world not far from the lands of the former Commonwealth, which was acquiring Polish features with a special emphasis on the fight for freedom.

In any case, the struggle for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, its echoes, the loss of statehood and the ways of dialogue with the empire are the times when Poles appeared in Kharkiv, which was closely connected with certain political events. It should be noted that “Poles” often made only a temporary stopover in Kharkiv, heading further afterwards. For a long time, they did not form a specific ethnic group and did not have such interactions with the local population that immigrants from German lands had created from the very beginning.

Sources of information

  1. Горбань М. Харківський пасквіль 1800 р. // Прапор. – 1957. – № 12. – С. 122-123.
  2.  Гуржій О. Українська козацька держава в другій половині XVII–XVIII ст.: кордони, населення, право. – Київ: Основи, 1996.
  3. Державний архів Харківської області (ДАХО). – Ф. 3. – Оп. 4. – Спр. 63. – Арк. 3.
  4. ДАХО. – Ф. 3. – Оп. 7. – Спр. 247. – Арк. 2-3.
  5. ДАХО. – Ф. 3. – Оп. 7. – Спр. 286. – Арк. 1-58
  6. ДАХО. – Ф. 3. – Оп. 9. – Спр. 252. –  Арк. 2-6.
  7. ДАХО. – Ф. 3. – Оп. 16. – Спр. 93. – Арк. 1-2.
  8. Кушнарев С. «Люди польской нации» на Харьковщине по материалам Генеральных ревизий конца XVIII в. // Поляки на Харківщині. Огляд джерел. – Харків: ХНУ, 2016. – С. 77-86.
  9. Устинов И.А. Харьков в начале нынешнего столетия (1798-1801 гг.). Историко-статистический очерк // Харьковский календарь на 1886 г. – Харьков, 1885.
  10. Центральний державний історичний архів УкраїнимКиїв (ЦДІАК України). – Ф.1725. – Оп.1. – Спр. 22. – Арк.118.

Prepared by PhD Volodymyr Masliychuk.


[1] Citation from: ЦДІАК України. – Ф. 1725. – Оп. 1. – Спр. 22. – Арк. 118.

[2] Citation from: Гуржій О. Українська козацька держава в другій половині XVIIXVIII ст.: кордони, населення, право. – Київ: Основи, 1996. – С. 92-93.

[3] ДАХО. – Ф. 3. – Оп. 7. – Спр. 247. – Арк. 2-3.

[4] ДАХО. – Ф.3. – Оп.7. – Спр. 286.

[5] ДАХО. – Ф.3. – Оп.4. – Спр. 63. – Арк. 3.

[6] ДАХО. – Ф.3. – Оп.16. – Спр. 93. – Арк. 1-2.

[7] ДАХО. – Ф. 3. – Оп. 9. – Спр. 252.