In the course of the Great Northern War, it reached the stage where a Russian protectorate could be established in all but name. Then, after decades of turmoil between would-be Polish reformers and Russian-backed agents of the status quo, it moved towards the logical conclusion of the Partitions. Between 1772 and 1795, Russia led the feast in which the Republic was totally consumed.
John Sobieski (r. 1674–96) earned glory abroad whilst neglecting problems at home. The Siege of Vienna showed that the Republic was still a first-rate military power; but it was the final fling. Lithuania was left to stew in civil war; the Sejm was repeatedly broken by the
liberum veto;
the magnates went unpunished; central legislation and taxation ground to a halt. By the unratified ‘Eternal Treaty’ with Moscow in 1686, Ukraine was abandoned. The King spent his strength fighting for the Holy League, hoping to carve out a base for his son in Moldavia. Many years later, gazing at Sobieski’s statue in Warsaw, a Russian Tsar was to remark: ‘Here is another [like me] who wasted his life fighting the Turk’.
32
The royal election of 1697 dashed all the Sobieskis’ schemes. Jakub Sobieski did not gain the electors’ confidence; the Austrian candidate was outbribed; the French candidate, the Due de Conti, was shipwrecked off the coast of Danzig. Thanks to Russian gold and a timely conversion to Catholicism, the prize was won by Friedrich-August, Elector of Saxony, who took to the throne as Augustus II. The exiled Sobieskis had nothing left but to marry their daughter to the exiled Stuarts, who came to grief at the same time. Bonnie Prince Charlie had a Polish mother.
The Saxon period—under Augustus II (r. 1697–1704, 1710–33) and Augustus III (r. 1733–63)—is generally judged to be the nadir of Polish history. The Great Northern War, in which the Polish King, in his capacity as Elector of Saxony, was a leading combatant, brought endless disasters and divisions. Poland-Lithuania was fought over as the main theatre of operations between Swedes and Russians, each of whom was supported by a rival confederation of Polish nobles (see above). It was treated by the Saxon court as a counterweight to neighbouring Prussia and as a source of plunder. The Saxon army, when deployed in Poland, was immune to the protests of the Sejm. Its depredations led to the conflict between King and nobility which had much in common with the parallel conflict in nearby Hungary. This in turn gave an opening for direct Russian intervention.
After the Russian victory at Poltava in 1709, Augustus II only recovered his Polish throne with the aid of Russian troops. Thereafter he was seen as a double danger, both as a pawn of the Tsar and as an ‘absolutist’ in his own right. In 1715–16 open warfare broke out between the King and his opponents. For the Tsar, it was a heaven-sent opportunity. By acting as mediator, Peter the Great could save the Polish nobles from their Saxon king whilst imposing conditions that would reduce the Republic to dependence. At the ‘Silent Sejm’ or ‘Dumb Diet’ summoned to Warsaw in January 1717, the Russian army stood by as the following pre-arranged resolutions were passed without debate:
POTEMKIN
I
N
1787 Field Marshal Prince Gregory Potemkin (1739–91), Governor of I New Russia, organized a river journey down the Dnieper for the Empress Catherine and her court. His aim was to prove his success in colonizing the province, recently wrested from the Ottomans. To this end he assembled a number of mobile ‘villages’, each located at a strategic spot on the river bank. As soon as the imperial barge hove into sight Potemkin’s men, all dressed up as jolly peasants, raised a hearty cheer for the Empress and the foreign ambassadors. Then, as soon as it turned the bend, they stripped off their caps and smocks, dismantled the sets, and rebuilt them overnight further downstream. Since Catherine was Potemkin’s lover at the time, it is not possible to believe that she was ignorant of the ploy; the principal dupes were the foreign ambassadors. ‘Potemkin Villages’ has become a byword for the long Russian tradition of deception and disinformation.
1
Force and fraud are the stock-in-trade of all dictatorships. But in Russia Potemkinism has been a recurring theme.
On this subject, the views of a professional deceptionist may not be entirely irrelevant. According to a senior KGB defector, Western opinion has been skilfully and systematically duped ever since Lenin’s NEP. The control of all information, combined with selective leaks and plants, enabled the Soviet security service to feed the West with an endless stream of false impressions. The ‘de-Stalinization’ of the 1950s was only a modified form of Stalinism. The ‘Sino-Soviet split’ of 1960 was jointly engineered by the CPSU and the CPC. ‘Romanian Independence’ was a myth invented for the convenience both of Moscow and Bucharest. Czechoslovak ‘democratization’ in 1968 was orchestrated by progressive elements in the KGB. ‘Eurocommunism’ was another sham. Even ‘Solidarity’ in Poland was run by Moscow’s agents. Published in 1984, before Gorbachev’s rise to power, this exposé of the KGB by an insider is obligatory reading for anyone pondering the ambiguities of
glasnost’
and
perestroika’
, or the mysteries of the 1991 ‘Putsch’. The problem is: when do professional deceivers stop deceiving?
2
Apart from his ‘villages’, Prince Potemkin is most often associated with the battleship named after him, whose mutinous crew sailed out of Odessa during the Revolution of 1905. People inevitably wonder whether that mutiny, too, was a fake.
3
[SOVKINO]
The proponents of conspiracy theory hold that all historical events mask the designs of tricksters, plotters, and evil ‘unidentified forces’. Their opponents suggest the opposite, that conspiracy and deception do not exist. Both are badly mistaken,
[PROPAGANDA]
1.
The King’s Saxon army was to be banished from the Republic
. (In other words, the King lost all semblance of an independent power base.)
2.
The ‘golden liberties’ of the nobility were to be upheld
. (In other words, through the preservation of the
liberum
veto, the central government of the Republic could be paralysed whenever convenient)
3.
The armed forces of the Republic were to be limited to 24,000 men
. (In other words, Poland-Lithuania was to be rendered defenceless.)
4.
The armed forces were to be financed through allocations from a list of royal, ecclesiastical, and magnatial estates
. (In other words, they were put beyond the control of king or Sejm.)
5.
The settlement was to be guaranteed by the Tsar
. (In other words, the Tsar could intervene in Poland-Lithuania at any time, and could legally suppress any movement for Reform.)
Henceforth, to all intents and purposes the Republic of Poland-Lithuania became a Russian protectorate, a mere appendage to the Russian Empire, a vast buffer-state which sheltered Russia from the West but cost nothing to maintain,
[EROS]
Under Augustus III the central government collapsed completely. The King had to be installed by a Russian army which had overturned the re-election of Stanislaw Leszczyński, thereby sparking off the War of the Polish Succession; but he usually stayed in Dresden. The Sejm was regularly summoned, but regularly blocked by the
liberum veto
before it could meet. Only one session in 30 years was able to pass legislation. By an extreme example of the principle of subsidiarity, government was left to the magnates and to the provincial dietines. The Republic had no diplomacy, no treasury, no defence. It could enact no reforms. It was the butt of the
philosophes
. When the first volume of the French
Encyclopédie
was published in 1751, the prominent article on ‘Anarchie’ was all about Poland,
[CANTATA] [SZLACHTA]
The reforming party fled abroad, thereby starting the unbroken Polish tradition of political emigration. Stanisław Leszczyński, twice elected king and twice driven out by the Russians, took refuge in France. Having married his daughter to Louis XV he was given the Duchy of Lorraine where, at Nancy, as
Ie bon roi Stanislas
he could practise the enlightened government forbidden at home.
Stanisław August Poniatowski (r. 1764–95), the last King of Poland, was a tragic and in some ways a noble figure. One of Catherine the Great’s earlier lovers, he was put in place with the impossible task of reforming the Republic whilst preserving the Russian supremacy. As it was, shackled by the constitution of 1717, he provoked the very convulsions which reform was supposed to avoid. How could one curtail the nobles’ sacred right of resistance without some nobles’ resisting? How could one limit the Russians’ right of intervention without the Russians intervening? How could one abolish the
liberum veto
without someone exercising the
liberum veto
7
. The King tried to break the vicious circle on three occasions; and on three occasions he failed. On each occasion a Russian army arrived to restore order, and on each occasion the Republic was punished with partition. In the 1760s the King’s proposals for reform led to the war of the Confederation of Bar (1768–72) and to the First Partition. In 1787–92 the King’s support for the reforms of the Great Sejm and the Constitution of 3 May (1791) led to the Confederation of Targowica and the Second Partition (see Chapter IX). In 1794–5 the King’s adherence to the national rising of Tadeusz Kościuszko led to the final denouement. After the Third Partition, there was no Republic left over which to reign. Poniatowski abdicated on St Catherine’s Day 1795, and died in Russian exile.
CANTATA
I
N
October 1734, when the newly crowned King of Poland returned home at short notice, his music master had to compose an entire nine-part
Cantata Gratulatoria
in three days flat. The words were as baroque as the soaring music:
| 1. Chorsatz | Preise dein Glücke, gesegnetes Sachsen |
| | (Praise Thy Good Fortune, blessed Saxony) |
| 4. Rezitativ | Was hat dich sonst, Sarmatien, bewogen …? (What has stirred thee, Sarmatia …?) |
| 5. Arie | Rase nur verwegner Schwarm… (Bluster now, presumptuous swarm, in thine own bowels!) |
| 7. Arie | Durch die von Eifer entflammeten Waffen … (To punish one’s enemies with weapons inflamed by zeal…) |
| 8. Rezitativ | Lass doch, o teurer Landesvater, zu |
| | (Grant then, O Father of our country, that the Muses may honour the Day when Sarmatia elected thee King.) |
| 9. Chorsatz | Stifter der Reiche, Beherrscher der Kronen … (Founder of Empires, Lord of Crowns …) |
The events which prompted the cantata have been long forgotten. But the music could be reworked into later compositions, and became immortal. No. 7 became No. 47 in the
Christmas Oratorio
. No. 1 now forms the ‘Hosannah’ of the B Minor Mass. For the King of Poland was also the Elector of Saxony, and his music master was Johann Sebastian Bach.
1
Throughout the terminal agony of the Republic, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania preserved its individuality. Its political weakness did not preclude a vigorous life which made it the source of four lasting traditions. Its capital city—Wilno-Vil’na-Vilnius—was a true cultural crossroads. The dominant Polish élite was doubly reinforced, first by the National Education Commission after 1773 and later by a
regional board of education, based on the University of Wilno, which was to flourish under tsarist rule until 1825. Lithuania’s Yiddish culture was to be strengthened when the Grand Duchy was made the basis for Russia’s Jewish Pale of Settlement. The Lithuanian and Ruthenian (Byelorussian) peasantry, having preserved themselves from polonization, retained enough of their substance to withstand all the russifications of the future. Once absorbed by the Russian Empire, the Grand Duchy would never revive as an administrative entity. But its inhabitants would not completely forget their origins. They would participate in all the Polish risings of the nineteenth century. The Polish and Jewish traditions would hold out until the murderous era of Stalin and Hitler. The Lithuanian and to a lesser extent the Byelorussian traditions would survive hell and high water to reach independence in the 1990s.
[B.N.R.][LIETUVA]
The international relations of the eighteenth century were concerned, above all, with the balance of power. All the general wars of the period were designed to maintain it (see Appendix III, pp. 1282–3). No one state felt strong enough to attempt the military conquest of the entire Continent; but relatively minor regional disturbances could provoke a chain reaction of coalitions and alliances to contain the perceived threat. Few matters of ideology or national pride were involved. Alliances could be rapidly permutated, and small professional armies could march swiftly into action to settle the disputes in tidy, set-piece battles. With the Concert of Europe in full operation, a series of diplomatic congresses could weigh out the consequences of the fighting and draw up the balance sheet of colonies, fortresses, and districts won or lost. Generally speaking, these wars served their purpose. No major redistribution of power and territory took place in Europe as the direct result of military conquest. Such adjustments that war did provoke—notably through the cession of Spanish territories at Utrecht or through Prussia’s seizure of Silesia—cannot compare to the greatest of all the territorial redistributions of the era, the Partitions of Poland, which were arranged without recourse to war.
[DESSEIN]
The three Partitions of Poland-Lithuania furnish the finest examples which European history can boast of peaceful aggression. Completed in three stages, in 1773, 1793, and 1795, they divided up the assets of a state the size of France. They were carried out by gangsterish methods, where the unwritten threat of violence underlay all the formal agreements and where the victims were forced to condone their own mutilation. Many contemporary observers, thankful for the avoidance of war, were conditioned to accept the partitioners’ explanations. Many historians have accepted the view that the Poles brought disaster on themselves. It took a Burke, a Michelet, or a Macaulay to call a crime a crime.