the Empress Catherine, but she decreed that it should be called New Russia instead. Imperial Russia's view of New Russia was described in 2006 by the historian Willard Sunderland:

The administrative center of the Novorossiysk Governorate was at the Fortress of St. Elizabeth (today in Kropyvnytskyi) in order to protect the southern borderlands from the Ottoman Empire, and in 1765 this passed to Kremenchuk.