He left the administration of the country entirely in the hands of the Officers’ Council, which did its best to reorganize the administration after the changes that had been made during the reign of Anne. It was really a thankless task, for in the last analysis they had the job of remodeling an administration which had never been quite suited to its purposes. The regimental areas still retained the purely military form, but the practical independence of the colonels separated them to a considerable degree from the Officers’ Council which handled the general affairs of the country. There were the same changes in the laws, whereby the smaller villages were theoretically under the army courts and the cities possessed their own courts, under the Magdeburg Law and the Lithuanian Law, both organized before the union of the Host and Russia. The great difficulty was that during the eighteenth century there had vanished almost the last remnants of the old Kozak democracy. The power of Russia rested outside of the tsars and bureaucrats in the hands of the great landowners, and the Kozak officers loved to think of themselves as the gentry of Little Russia and acted accordingly. Yet they were still proud of many of their ancient liberties and the hetmanate of Cyril Rozumovsky allowed at least the officers to be happy and contented. As for the peasants they were on the whole no worse off than they had been for decades, so that this period had really some justification for seeming the best part of the eighteenth century. It was however a period of cultural Russification. The abolition of the independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church brought the teaching of the Academy of Kiev into a purely Russian system. The richer people preferred to send their children to the newer and more fashionable schools in St. Petersburg and other Russian centres, and there was repeated again what had happened in the sixteenth century, when the older Ukrainian aristocracy became almost completely Polonized and there were left only the Kozaks and the townsmen to carry the burden of the cultural revival. Now the higher Kozak officers had become the aristocratic element and were Russianized superficially at least, and the towns had lost most of their original importance. The situation, such as it was, rested too largely upon the close bonds between Cyril Rozumovsky and Elizabeth. When she died in 1761, her nephew Peter III ascended the throne, only to be overthrown in a few months by his wife, Catherine, who then became Empress.