The Cossacks were a considerable regional problem for Nikolai Repnin. Harsh measures were used to resettle them to the south in 1820. The Cossack settlers left their homeland in late fall but failed to reach the new place of residence by winter. The government received 3,000 complaints, and Repnin had to acknowledge them as well-founded and apologize before the Committee of Ministers because the Cossacks were not allowed to sell their lands and, besides, they were forced to pay off arrears.
It was then, in the early 1820s, that Repnin changed his attitude to the Cossacks. He first showed this when he tried to relieve Cossack families of the fiscal arm-twisting in matters pertaining to land ownership.
In 1829 the government again decided to resettle the Cossacks. This time Nicholas I instructed two governors — Repnin and Mikhail Vorontsov, Governor-General of New Russia — to discuss the conditions for resettlement and submit their proposals to the respective ministers. Repnin was the first to report. In his opinion, if the state is interested in the Cossacks, it should cover part of resettlement costs. First of all, one must allow the Cossacks to make free use of their property and encourage them to resettle by offering various benefits and privileges. Second, the state should provide financing for an escort and meals during resettlement, the construction of dwellings, a year’s stock of grain, and sowing winter crops.
The resettlement was to take place between May 15 and October 15. Not a single batch of settlers was allowed to travel before or after these dates. It was specified that the Cossacks had to have a reserve of grain that would last until the new harvest. Vorontsov suggested dividing settlers into two groups: one would sow crops and prepare dugouts in southern lands and the rest would harvest in fall in the old lands.
Repnin rejected this proposal because he knew all too well the mentality of the Cossacks: each of them considered himself an individual owner and would never care about other families. So he suggested giving every family of settlers a 100-ruble benefit, cereals, food grain, and seed grain, and the Cossacks would deal with other matters themselves.
Already in 1821, Repnin challenged the propriety of the finance minister’s ban on selling lands inherited by the Cossacks, calling it “a violation of the natural rights of Little Russia’s half a million people.” To justify his viewpoint, Repnin turned to the history of the Cossacks. A Brief Note on Little Russia’s Cossacks was prepared for the central government at his request and perhaps with his participation. The note contained 11 items that offered evidence for the Cossacks’ property rights and their privileges over peasants.
Tracing the Cossacks’ roots back to the times of Gediminas, the Grand Duke of Lithuania (1320), the author proved, step by step, that the Cossacks were autochthonous people that settled in the frontier lands at their own will when Russia was suffering under the Tatar yoke. The governor-general quoted the letters and edicts of Polish kings from the 14th to 16th centuries, the Sejm resolutions of 1590, 1601, and 1626, and other documents. He convincingly proved that the Cossacks had land ownership rights also at the time when they served the Polish Kingdom.
Repnin’s note went on to say that the Cossack estate had come close to that of the nobility and in many cases enjoyed the same privileges. For example, the Cossacks were subject to Lithuanian Law in courts and, like the nobility, had the right to trade in alcoholic drinks, etc. After “conquering their own land” under the leadership of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the Cossacks “presented themselves as a gift,” as the note says, to Muscovite Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, who confirmed by his decrees the Cossacks’ rights and freedoms. Citing the paragraphs of tsars’ and hetmans’ decrees, Repnin gave a detailed account of the Cossacks’ property rights, which had undergone changes in the course of time, but had never been canceled and had always been recognized by sovereigns as equal to the rights of the nobility. The quitrent that the Cossacks paid was a state tax, not a rental for land use.
When in April 1831 the Chief of the General Staff asked Repnin to help suppress the Polish uprising, the governor saw it as a good opportunity to show his Cossack military prowess. It was necessary to form a Cossack reserve army. On April 15 a messenger arrived in Poltava to hand Repnin an official order, and as early as April 20 he left for St. Petersburg with the military governor’s opinions on this matter. Repnin believed that the Cossacks were much poorer after 1812 due to the high cost of the uniform, accouterments, and horses. Besides, they were disappointed at the failure of the government represented by Governor-General Yakov Lobanov-Rostovsky to keep its promises.
Poor crops, loss of cattle, and rising taxes in the last years of Alexander I’s reign essentially undermined the Cossacks’ households and farms. To revitalize them, it was necessary to cut taxes payable by the Cossacks and exempt the nobles from the per head excise duty on alcoholic drinks.
On May 6, 1831, Nicholas I issued a rescript that the prince should form eight cavalry units because light horse was exactly what the Russian Army needed. The rescript also included royal consent to reduce taxes. The prince went round the villages near the “Polish” provinces and personally read out Nicholas’s edict. On Repnin’s submission, the emperor duly acknowledged the prince’s readiness to serve the throne.
In 1833 the governor came to the final conclusion about the way the Cossacks had to be used. He suggested that they be granted the status of free farmers rather than be used as a military force. The government at last responded to his repeated proposals with some concrete steps. Under the 1834 statute, the overall supervision and care of the Cossacks were entrusted to the military governor of Little Russia, who exercised this control via provincial and district committees.
What deserves special consideration is Repnin’s attitude to peasants. He repeatedly called upon the local nobility to be kinder to them and reduce the feudal services. His appeals to the Poltava and Chernihiv nobility evoked mixed reactions in the contemporaries. He indeed shared the views of Alexander I and was privy to the emperor’s plans to abolish serfdom. Yet, Repnin’s speeches at the meetings of the nobility, in which he would only hint broadly at the necessity of caring about peasants, caused confusion in the retrograde sections of society and were considered by Alexander I as premature. One of his speeches, rewritten in hand, widely circulated in Russia, and subsequently published in the journal Dukh zhurnalov, was banned and the journal’s publisher was administratively reprimanded.
When Repnin was dismissed as military governor of Little Russia and later stripped of State Council membership, he fell into disgrace. The newly appointed acting Governor-General of Chernihiv, Poltava, and Kharkiv, Count Aleksandr Stroganov, son-in-law of Interior Minister Viktor Kochubei, found a major shortage of public funds. The government set up a commission which accused Repnin of embezzlement. For the duration of the investigation the prince was barred from leaving St. Petersburg for Little Russia.
The problem was that Repnin, as the military governor, headed a committee overseeing the construction of the Poltava Institute for Noble Maidens. The investigation ascertained that accounting records were missing and concluded that the governor had abused his authority by giving an oral instruction to withdraw 200,000 rubles from the Public Works Department’s account for the needs of the construction. Repnin took this money on his own responsibility because the officially allocated funds were insufficient. The commission found no other abuses. An estimated 465,000 rubles were spent on the construction, which clearly showed that the funds had been used for building the institute’s residential quarters.
Repnin had a close mutual understanding with Alexander I. As for Nicholas I, the military governor of Little Russia did not share many of his public administration principles. It was in this area that he, a local government official, had most disagreements with the sovereign imperial authorities.
There are not so many of Repnin’s written comments at our disposal, but what little we have allows us to say the following. Repnin was convinced that repressive measures could not be a method for attaining a goal. As a far-seeing statesman who witnessed the breaking up of European monarchies, he believed that the state should take preventive measures and be able to meet the needs of various social strata in exercising their rights.
Historical literature offers several versions of why Repnin was dismissed as military governor of Little Russia: the prince’s “separatism” and “Ukrainophilia,” embezzlement of public funds for his personal needs during the construction of the Institute for Noble Maidens, conflicts with Count Stroganov and Grand Prince Nikolai Pavlovich, the future emperor.
I think there were several indirect reasons for Repnin’s dismissal. The legally ambiguous status of a military governor and his relationship with the center allowed Repnin to effectively oppose the government from time to time, relying on the support of Alexander I and Nicholas I. The constant trust of these two emperors, his long tenure in this office, and administrative experience caused the prince to believe that he was always flawless and economically independent as a large landlord.
These factors also led him to overestimate his prestige of a noble official and his impact on the central government. Repnin failed to notice changes in the attitudes of Nicholas I, who was increasingly fascinated by the idea of a centralized state with limited regional autonomy and local rulers abiding by nationwide laws. An authoritative and sometimes even independent policy of military governors and governor-generals no longer suited Nicholas I.
