CHAPTER ELEVEN _UKRAINE AT THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY_ The Zaporozhian Sich was destroyed by the forces of Catherine the Great of Russia on June 5, 1775 and on August 3 of the same year the Empress by an edict abolished the very name of the Zaporozhian Kozaks. This was the symbolic ending of the old Ukraine, of the old struggle for liberty and independence. More than the Hetman state with its shadowy hetmans and its confused Russianized Little Russian Board, the Sich had embodied the ideals and aspirations of the Kozaks. Around it had gathered the memories and the traditions of the days when the Kozaks had formed an independent body of free men, administering their affairs and choosing their enemies in popular assemblies. It had typified the Kozak spirit of individual daring and of individual resource. Now its destruction meant that all that was past and that the autocratic sovereign of Russia felt it had no place in her domain. It is interesting and significant that this took place barely two months after the outbreak of the American Revolution at the battles of Lexington and Concord. It took place just two weeks before the battle of Bunker Hill, when for the first time the American army met a determined attack from British regular forces. It took place just a month before George Washington assumed at Boston his post as Commander-in-Chief of the American Army. The eleven years that followed, during which the Empress methodically eliminated every trace of Ukrainian independent rights, were the same that saw the successful carrying on of the American Revolution and the beginning of plans for the forming of the American Constitution. The year 1783, which witnessed the definite recognition of the independence of the United States, saw the elimination of the Kozak regiments from the already defunct Hetman state. In a word the old Ukraine passed away just as the new United States was coming into existence. It would be easy to draw sentimental parallels between these two events but there is something even more important that this, for it was only three years after the final liquidation of Ukraine that the French Revolution broke out and an era opened when all of the intellectual ferment of the eighteenth century turned into political activity. The new Europe, the new Europe of the nineteenth century, was in the making and Ukraine by the narrowest of margins missed being included in it. The new current of nationalism was beginning to run its course. In ten years more, Kotlyarevsky with the _Eneida_ was to create the modern Ukrainian literary language. The various nations and peoples included within the Hapsburg Empire were to begin their agitation for national recovery by the simple expedient of linguistic revival, and by the demand for the restoration of old and forgotten rights and privileges that had fallen into disuse, though they had never been officially abrogated.