Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation

by Serhii Plokhy

In November 1832, the Western Committee issued a decree intended to diminish the number of people in the western provinces who could claim noble rights, including the right to buy land and serfs—a measure designed to undermine the status of Polish nobles. In the 1840s, Nicholas promoted initiatives to register and limit peasant obligations to landowners in order to support “Russian” peasants. To the degree that a noble-based empire could do so, it was taking the side of the Ukrainian and Belarusian peasantry against Polish nobility. Other policies included the liquidation of urban self-government and the abolition of the local law code, which went back to the times of Polish and Lithuanian rule over the region. Those policies were applied to the lands that had once belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a whole, including the former Hetmanate, whose loyalty was no longer in question.