Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (52 page)

The reign of Jan Sobieski (1673–96) is most often viewed, especially by outsiders unfamiliar with internal affairs, as the last grand flourish of Polish-Lithuanian power and glory. Certainly, as a fearless warrior and war leader, who had made his name as crown hetman during the Swedish wars, he put on a grand show. By breaking the Ottoman Siege of Vienna in 1683, he secured his place as one of Europe’s greatest heroes. Yet Sobieski’s foreign wars, financed by foreign subsidies, masked deep internal weaknesses. One of his most intractable problems persisted in the grand duchy, where the vendettas of the magnates ran completely out of control. While the king-grand duke battled the Turks on the Danube, the Sapieha faction battled the Pac faction in the grand duchy, and all semblance of co-ordinated government broke down. In itself, the breakdown was not terminally destructive – the
Rzeczpospolita
had recovered from similar episodes before – but the timing was fatal. The grand duchy was paralysed at a juncture when Swedish–Muscovite rivalry was coming to a head in the adjoining lands; any major war between Sweden’s Baltic Empire and Muscovy was bound to see the grand duchy trampled between the two.

In 1696, on Sobieski’s death, the official language of the grand duchy’s administration was changed from
ruski
to Polish. The change marked the point where the ruling nobility had become so Polonized that the grand duchy’s principal native language was no longer readily intelligible to the upper classes and to the bureaucracy. The Chancellery scribes had to make another adjustment. What for centuries had been either VKL or MDL now became WXL: ‘W’ for
Wielkie
, ‘X’ for
Ksie˛stwo
and ‘L’ for
Litewskie
; and Vil’nya, for official purposes, became Wilno. It was highly ironic; the Polishness of the grand duchy’s elite was intensifying at the very time when Russian influences among them stood on the brink of marked expansion.

The era of the Saxon kings that followed Sobieski is traditionally seen as the nadir of the
Rzeczpospolita
’s fortunes, although some historians have sought to rehabilitate it.
⁸⁸
August II the Strong (r. 1697–1733), elector of Saxony, and his son, August III (r. 1733–63), accepted the Polish-Lithuanian throne in order to outflank their German neighbours and rivals in Brandenburg-Prussia. They only achieved their goal by pocketing Russian gold, by bribing electors with fake coins, by promising to convert to Catholicism, and afterwards by signing up to a permanent alliance with the tsar. In the ensuing decades, they used their new acquisition as a milch cow and dragged it into endless wars, quarrels and occupations, from which, whatever their wishes, they were impotent to escape. Formally, they held the triple title of ‘elector, king and grand duke’.

The Great Northern War (1700–21) essentially pitted Russia against Sweden, although other powers were also involved. Peter the Great, the aspirant emperor of Russia, and Charles XII, king of Sweden, were the principal combatants. The former, a physical giant, was ‘a typical fanatic, who never questioned the correctness of his ideas’; the latter, sexually ambiguous, was eulogized by Voltaire as ‘a king without weaknesses’.
⁸⁹
August the Strong, however, was deeply enmeshed in the political intrigues from the start, and much of the fighting was conducted in Poland and Lithuania. His entry into the war as Peter’s ally sucked Charles XII’s army into the
Rzeczpospolita
, and the Swedes’ long march to destruction at Poltava in 1709 brought a trail of devastation throughout the grand duchy. The Polish-Lithuanian nobility were divided into pro-Russian and pro-Swedish factions: a Swedish placeman, Stanisław Leszczyński (later duke of Lorraine) contrived to sit on the throne between 1704 and 1709; and the subsequent arrival of the Russian army virtually turned the
Rzeczpospolita
into a Russian protectorate. In 1717, when Russian mediators did nothing to calm interfactional animosities, the noble deputies were driven into passing laws in silence, at a cowed
Sejm
that assembled under the menace of Russian guns, effectively depriving the state of the means of its own defence. Military spending was drastically curtailed. State taxation could only support a standing army limited to 18,000 men, at a time when the Prussians could field 200,000 and the Russians 500,000. The grand duchy’s military establishment was now smaller than the Radziwiłłs’ private army.

Under August III, the central organs of the
Rzeczpospolita
ceased to function. The elector-king-grand duke resided in Dresden, and ruled through viceroys. Attempts to convene the
Sejm
, and hence to raise taxes, were repeatedly blocked by use of the
liberum veto
. For thirty years, the
sejmiki
, the regional noble assemblies, provided the sole source of co-ordinated administration. The magnates grew stronger than ever. They cultivated an outlook called ‘Sarmatism’, proclaiming – ostrich-like – that ‘Polish freedom’ was incomparably wonderful. Both the Prussians in northern Poland and the Russians in the grand duchy billeted their troops on the countryside for free, by charging the cost of their upkeep to the local population. Europe of the Enlightenment looked on, and complacently equated ‘Poland’ with ‘anarchy’.

Nothing better illustrates the political decadence of the Saxon era than the workings of the so-called ‘Familia’. A group of magnates headed by the Czartoryskis and Poniatowskis took advantage of the political vacuum, seeking to replace the authority of the absent monarch with their own. They came together in the 1730s, when a royal election was in prospect, and were active until the 1760s, when one of their number was the successful candidate in the next. Proposing a single centralized state, the abolition of the
liberum veto
, and a modernized financial system, they aroused the opposition of the Potocki faction in the kingdom and of the Radziwiłłs in the grand duchy. Among the Familia’s most active members among the older generation was General Stanisław Poniatowski (1676–1762), sometime adjutant to Charles XII and treasurer of the grand duchy, and in the younger generation, Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski (1734–1823), probably the most enlightened reformer of the age. Their flamboyant aristocratic lifestyles contrasted blatantly with that of the countless serfs who maintained it. One sees parallels with progressive elements among the French nobility of the
ancien régime
, and with the more enlightened slave-owners, who, a continent away, were preparing the American Revolution.

It would be unwise, however, to generalize too drastically about the peasantry. It is true that the society of the grand duchy was marked for centuries by serfdom, and the misery of the serfs could be dire. In 1743–4, in the
starostvo
(county) of Krychev in eastern White Ruthenia, a local war was fought between the Radziwiłł regiments and an ‘army’ of rebellious
serfs. Petitions to the lords, known as
supliki
, begging for easement, were sometimes granted, sometimes ignored. Yet islands of hope could flourish amid the sea of poverty. Although about 30 per cent of the population was controlled by the magnatial estates, about 70 per cent was not. A class of free peasants held their own in the eastern palatinates, paying rent and prospering from the production of flax and timber. In the southern palatinates, flight to ‘Cossackdom’ or to estates in Ukraine, where colonists received favourable terms, was always an option for disaffected peasants.

Moreover, the later eighteenth century saw a considerable increase in the overall size of the economy, in agricultural improvements, and even in manufacturing. Efforts to rationalize river transport were crowned in 1785 by the opening of canal systems linking both the Nieman and the Dniepr and, via the Royal Canal, the Pripyat’ and the Bug. The grand duchy was well placed to export corn, timber and potash. The improvers aimed to direct trade both to the Vistula and to the Black Sea, in addition to the traditional exit via Riga. The great estates were equipped with flour mills, lumber machines and breweries. The first textile factory in the grand duchy began working in 1752 at Nieświez˙, and the Radziwiłłs thereafter constructed twenty-three further industrial works, producing everything from glass to paper, bricks to gunpowder.
⁹⁰

Stanisław-August Poniatowski (r. 1764–95), the last king-grand duke of Poland-Lithuania, was the Familia’s candidate for the throne and a former lover of the Russian empress, Catherine the Great. As a young diplomat employed in St Peterburg by both the British and the Saxon embassies, he had made a huge impression on the German-born future empress, who selected him for protracted romantic services. A decade later, he easily won her support in the royal election. As monarch, however, he saw his task as one of urgent reform, reanimating the vital organs of the moribund state, modernizing society, promoting culture and relaxing the stranglehold of the pro-Russian magnates elevated by his Saxon predecessors. The empress wished to maintain the status quo from which Russia greatly benefited. The two of them were on a collision course. Every time the beleaguered monarch showed signs of pulling his country from the quagmire, his patroness pushed it back in.
⁹¹

The three decades of Stanisław-August’s reign witnessed a dramatic spectacle rarely seen in European history. One of the largest states in Europe fought for its life, while the wisecrackers of the Enlightenment, led by Voltaire, mocked its impotence. Stanisław-August and his circle desperately sought to restore the
Rzeczpospolita
to health and viability, while the so-called ‘Enlightened Despots’
*
sought not only to obstruct him, but to exploit their victim’s vulnerability and to dismantle the repairs. A maritime metaphor might be appropriate. The captain and crew strive valiantly to keep their stricken vessel afloat, while pirates moored alongside help themselves to the ship’s timbers chunk by chunk. The captain is then declared (by the pirates) to have been a poor seaman, and his ship a wreck that was not worth saving. The drama usually appears in the history books as the ‘Partitions of Poland’, but this, of course, is a misnomer. The state being dismantled was not ‘Poland’, but the dual ‘Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania’. Moreover, the catastrophe was less catastrophic in the long run for Poland than for the grand duchy. Though the kingdom was dismembered like the grand duchy, large parts of Poland were destined to be salvaged. The wreck of the grand duchy would sink for ever.

The First Partition, in 1773, was enacted as punishment for a decade of successful progress. It was conceived by Frederick II of Prussia, approved by Catherine the Great and then foisted on a supposedly reluctant empress of Austria, Maria Theresa. As the Prussian king explained: ‘She wept as she took, and the more she wept the more she took.’ Since the
Rzeczpospolita
was essentially defenceless, the international bandits were able to carve out large slices of territory for themselves, and then to persuade the victim to cede their plunder by formal treaty. The Prussians took a slice out of northern Poland. The Austrians were given a bigger slice in the south. The Russians annexed roughly one-quarter of the grand duchy, including the palatinates of Polatsk, Vitebsk and Mtislav. A chorus of Russian spokesmen and apologists explained that the noble empress was merely repossessing her own property.
⁹²

The following decades nonetheless saw the heyday of the Polish Enlightenment. The leading spirits of the movement, inspired by the king-grand duke himself and resigned to the futility of political activities, made great strides in education, agriculture, administration, history and the arts. Modern schools were opened, the latest farming methods introduced, a national history project launched, civil servants were trained, and writers and painters sponsored. The magnates played their part, some of them voluntarily emancipating their serfs. The banishment of the Jesuit Order in 1773 threatened to devastate schooling, but the National Education Commission that was tasked with addressing the crisis set up a far-flung school system, which functioned far into the nineteenth century. It would train several generations in the language, culture and heritage of the
Rzeczpospolita
. ‘If there are still people in two hundred years time who think of themselves as Poles,’ declared Stanisław-August, ‘my work will not have been in vain.’ The Commission’s first director was Jakub Massalski (1727–94), bishop of Vil’nya. The
Korpus Kadetów
, founded to train an administrative elite, was pioneered by Prince Michał Kazimierz ‘Rybeńko’ Radziwiłł; while his son, Prince Karol Stanisław, ‘Panie Kochanku’ (1734–90), though a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary, raised his palace at Nieświez˙ into a major centre of theatre, music and opera.
⁹³