Bibikov decided to accelerate the increase in the numbers of Russian landlords in his gubernia: he was astonished that the local four- million-strong population was still under Polish rather than Russian influence. He blamed it for the absence of an influential class-the Russian nobility. The situation could be changed, he believed, only through the imposition of Russian land ownership. The estates confiscated from Poles had to be transferred to Russian officeholders without the right to divide or lease them.
However, these radical moves proposed by Bibikov encountered government resistance. The governor-general was forced to reform his policy in view of growing state interference in socioeconomic spheres of public life and the activity of anti- Russian Polish societies. (The bureaucrats in his chancery supervised inquiries into these societies and exaggerated their number and significance.)
Bibikov then turned to a proposal made in 1831 by the first Kyiv governor-general, Vasilii Levashov, who had suggested the idea of creating a state-controlled village police service that would be independent of the Polish landlords. Even at that time the initiative aroused interest in the center, as it was radically different from what other Russian governors were proposing. Levashov recommended appointing a supervisor for each of the 12 districts into which povits would be divided and a sotsky (a low-grade police officer, literally “an officer in charge of 100 men”) for every 50 village households. Supervisors and sotskys were selected from among retired officials and literate non-commissioned officers and soldiers, who received their pay from zemstvo duties.
Above all, Bibikov sought to reinforce police stations in the gubernias of Volyn and Podillia. With Nicholas I’s consent he introduced the position of assistant to district police officers and one for a clerk for police officers investigating secret cases. Retired low-ranking officials who received fixed pay were appointed tysiatskys (village headmen, literally “officers in charge of 1,000 men) piatysotskys (mid-level police officers, “officers in charge of 500 men) and sotskys. Desiatskys (the lowest-grade police officers, “officers in charge of 10 men”) selected from among landlord-owned peasants were freed from the corvee.
Now the secret police had to be reformed. Aggressive administrative measures, deportations, arrests, searches, confiscation of property, and supervision over educational institutions — all this required a separate state service. Its functions were carried out by the Kyiv Secret Commission attached to Bibikov’s office. The commission’s activity was guided by his convictions, which he conveyed to Nicholas I in 1841: “There is no hope for the Poles. Today they are obedient, but when the circumstances change, they will betray honor, conscience, and the sovereign.”
Bibikov was so engrossed in keeping tabs on the spread of nationalistic ideas among the Polish nobility that he failed to notice the formation of a new worldview doctrine among young Ukrainians, members of the Slavic society, the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood. It appears that the governor-general became so frightened by the fact that a clandestine society existed right under his nose that he spent more than a month in Kyiv after launching an investigation into this case.
What struck him most was the fact that the society’s founders, who were members of the Commission for the Study of Old Documents, linked the history of the haidamaka movement and the Hetmanate with contemporary liberation aspirations. Bibikov himself brought the materials compromising the society’s members to St. Petersburg. During his sojourn in the city he hoped that the investigation would be assigned to the Kyiv Secret Commission, which would expose a wider circle of society members.
However, because Mykola Hulak, the main suspect, was based in St. Petersburg, the chief of the tsarist gendarmerie, Aleksei Orlov, rejected his proposal. After returning to rumor-filled Kyiv, Bibikov informed Orlov that the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood members had “images of the hetman’s mace” on their persons and that “a manuscript of The Law of God [The Books of Genesis of the Ukrainian People ] found in the possession of the Little Russians” was nothing more than a rehashing of Adam Mickiewicz’s work,” Books of the Pilgrims.
The realization that repression alone was not enough to achieve the desired level of Russification and assimilation forced Bibikov to adopt broader and more flexible measures aimed at changing the cultural “civilization.” Most of all, he relied on the empire’s educational priorities, in particular Kyiv University. He did not subscribe to Nicholas I’s opinion that the university had to be closed after the Kyiv branch of the Union of Polish People (1839) was exposed there. As a result of his intervention, studies were renewed before the designated term expired.
After the Polish professorial staff was fired, Bibikov looked after the university and fostered the development of its ancillary research institutions. He welcomed practically all of the academic council’s proposals to improve the quality of teaching and facilitate research. He coordinated his often ineffectual proposals with the council members. He managed to obtain a 6,000-ruble government subsidy with whose funds he constantly supplemented professors’ salaries. Rather than have university graduates become insurgents, his fairly flexible and consistent policy vis-a-vis the university was aimed at turning them into good future public servants on which the empire would be able to rely in order to carry out its agenda.
After the exposure of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood Bibikov, in addition to his governor-general’s post, also fulfilled the functions of trustee in the Kyiv Education District (1848-52). This allowed him to implement an intensive Russification policy in education and employ it in a novel way in order to assimilate young people of noble descent. Closed Polish schools were replaced by Russian ones. The purpose of the latter was not only to convey knowledge but also to implement the government’s policy of Russification as it was interpreted by the governor-general: “...the supremacy in colleges and especially in St. Volodymyr’s University of that moral spirit of submission and submissiveness, which must serve as the foundation of education in our country and without which the university would not be a breeding ground for future useful citizens but a place of their depravity and moral death.”
Naturally, pedagogical problems interested Bibikov the least. For him they boiled down to one global task-how to turn Polish and Polonized children into Russians, who would be faithful to the tsar and the fatherland. Girls, future mothers, were supposed to receive an education that was Russian both in terms of content and language of instruction: the Institute for Noble Maidens and exemplary private boarding schools were being opened for them.
Bibikov maintained that cultural-educational institutions had to be organized on a large scale in order to shape public opinion in favor of the “historical rightness” of Russia’s actions regarding Right-Bank Ukraine and to ensure that the public perceived the government’s actions as being legal. He sincerely believed that he was “merging the Western Russian territory with its ancient motherland” and “deflecting the criminal course of the local nobility.” He could not fail to take advantage of the wave of romanticism that was manifested in curiosity about local antiquities, and hence persuaded Kyiv-based historians to grant the status of a state institution to the newly created historical society and call it the “Interim Commission for the Study of Old Documents in Kyiv.”
Created in 1843 and headed by Bibikov himself, the commission operated as a separate research institution attached to the governor-general’s chancery. It launched vast research and publishing activity with the aim of proving the Russianness of this territory, based on evidence found in registers of official acts. The historical documents collected and brought by the commission to Kyiv laid the foundation for the Central Archive of Old Documents, which opened at Kyiv University in 1852.
In his chancery Bibikov also concentrated supervisory activity over the censorship of foreign publications. He appointed bureaucrats, who made sure that the reading public had no access to publications from Europe and in particular to Polish works published in France. Unlike his predecessor Levashov, Bibikov invited a Russian theater troupe to Kyiv rather than a French one and instituted financial awards for the best actors, which were funded by the municipal budget.
The policy of aggressive Russification and its wide scope were highly regarded by the tsar, and Bibikov was offered the position of the Russian empire’s foreign affairs minister, which he accepted. Historical sources record the Right-Bank population’s negative attitude to Bibikov. To a significant number of Poles his name had naturally become symbolic of the Russian imperial idea, which tolerated no difference of opinion and tried to crush it by any means, including military suppression. Bibikov’s contemporary, Taras Shevchenko, gave his own appraisal of the governor-general whom he nicknamed “Corporal Havrylovych Bezruky”: And many were the people whom they fleeced,
These satraps of their master officer,-
Especially that closely cropped Gavrilich
Who with his corporal, ill-tempered, lively
And brutal with extreme ferocity,
Would drill the people with so hard a hand
That in the sergeant there was roused amazement
At the sheer violence of their regime;
And for that reason he was well-disposed
And always liked his under-officers.
Meanwhile, we saw their deeds and held our peace
And scratched our pates in silence-dumb, base slaves,
You servile tsarist footstools, spineless lackeys
Of the drunk corporal!
(The Poetical Works of Taras Shevchenko: The Kobzar, trans. from the Ukrainian by C. H. Andrusyshen and Watson Kirkconnell, University of Toronto Press, 1964.)
The contemporary understanding of Bibikov’s personality derives from a historical analysis of the status of Right-Bank Ukraine within the empire, which is based on knowledge of the Russian state. The governor-general was the highest official in the region and the embodiment of personal rule — in large part owing to a lack of clearly formulated legislation specifying the bounds of his authority.
A professional military man, Bibikov tried to resolve social problems in public life by resorting to what resembled military methods. He overestimated the state machinery’s ability to transform the social structure that had been shaped over the centuries. His aggressive practice and desire to change the past overnight, without paying attention to the specific realities of local life, were counterproductive. The first little thaw — a change in the government’s policy of Russification- showed that Russian influence had not become very strong, as evidenced by the Polish uprising of January 1863. The perpetual conflict between the government and the bulk of society, and the competition between the Russian and Polish cultures, were two objective factors that had a significant influence on the spread of the Ukrainian national idea.
* The nickname that Taras Shevchenko gave to Governor-General Bibikov in his poem “The Idiot” (Yurodyvy). Bibikov was missing an arm.
