Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (53 page)

The Second Partition was preceded by an intense period of political reform embodied in the Great
Sejm
of 1788–92. It was a race against time between the reformers, who sought to regain the
Rzeczpospolita
’s independence, and the pro-Russian opposition, hampered by Russia’s preoccupation with an Ottoman war. If the Turks continued to pin the Russians down, the Polish-Lithuanian reformers might find the space to attain their goals. If not, a Russian expedition would march. At first, the reforms prospered: taxes were voted. A professional standing army was financed and put into training, and the core offices of a modern administration were established. Finally, on 3 May 1791, on the initiative of the king-grand duke, a fine written constitution was passed, the first in Europe and second in the world only to that of the United States of America.
⁹⁴

By this time, however, and tragically for the reformers, the international climate had fundamentally shifted. The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 had convinced Europe’s absolute rulers that moderate constitutionalists and flaming Jacobins were indistinguishable. The Polish-Lithuanian experiment was doomed. A Russo-Turkish truce cleared the ground, and in St Petersburg the empress collected a group of hand-picked Russophiles, all subjects of the
Rzeczpospolita
, who raised the flag of rebellion on the south-eastern frontier at Targowica. Then the Russian army marched in their support.

The Russo-Polish war of 1791–2 was not a foregone conclusion. The forces of the
Rzeczpospolita
, though outnumbered, slowed the progress of the advancing Russian columns. At two battles in Ukraine, at Zielénce and Dubienka, General Kościuszko proved to be a commander of unusual talent. But then the king-grand duke lost his nerve and capitulated, the constitution was declared invalid, and the traitorous victors were invited by their Russian paymasters to plunder and to persecute. Those treacherous ‘Targovicians’ included General Szymon Kossakowski, the grand duchy’s grand hetman, and his brother Josef Kossakowski, bishop of Livonia.

General Tadeusz Kościuszko (Tadevish Kastiushka, 1746–1817) was a professional soldier, the son of Polonized gentry from the Brest region of White Ruthenia. Educated in Warsaw and Paris, he had spent 1776–83 in the service of the infant United States, where he is remembered as a friend of Thomas Jefferson and a founder of the West Point military academy. His views on freedom and democracy were strengthened by his American experience. He was about to become the chief hero of the
Rzeczpospolita
’s demise.
⁹⁵

The details of the Second Partition were worked out in protracted negotiations. By a Russo-Prussian treaty of 23 January 1793, the Prussians were to take Danzig and the Russians were to absorb most of the grand duchy’s palatinates except for Vil’nya, Brest and Samogitia. This time the Austrians were left out. By a second treaty, signed at Hrodna on 25 September by representatives of Prussia and of the
Sejm
of Poland-Lithuania, the king-grand duke was obliged to accept the emasculation of his regal powers. The treaties were implemented later in the year.
⁹⁶

For two years, what was left of the
Rzeczpospolita
– a clutch of territories in central Poland and the rump of the grand duchy, including Warsaw, Lublin, Poznań, Kraków and Vil’nya – fought desperately to survive. Kościuszko raised his standard in March 1794, swearing the oath to king and country in the Great Square of Kraków. In one battle, at Racławice, the Russians were routed. In Vil’nya, a soldier of Jacobin leanings, Jakub Jasiński, expelled the Russian garrison. But at the Battle of Maciejowice, Kościuszko fell wounded from his horse; according to legend, his last words before capture were ‘
Finis Poloniae
’. In Warsaw, a true Jacobin-style rising broke out, and a number of clerics and nobles were strung up by the mob. Finally, as the Russian General Suvorov entered the capital, the whole population of the suburb of Praga were massacred. Suvorov’s laconic message to the empress read: ‘Hurrah. Praga. Suvorov.’ Her reply read, ‘Bravo Fieldmarshal, Catherine.’ After that, the Third Partition, an act of liquidation, could be imposed without any pretence of negotiation.
⁹⁷

During those two final years, the territory of the grand duchy was systematically overrun and pillaged. The Russians retook Vil’nya, and formally abolished the ancient state of which it was the capital. All nobles who had taken up arms lost their lands, and all the traditional civil and military offices were closed. Lithuania and Poland had been joined, for better and for worse, for 409 years. They were now extinguished together, and the link was severed.

The exact moment at which a body-politic dies is sometimes hard to determine. In legal terms, it could be defined by an act of abdication unaccompanied by an act of succession, or by the withdrawal of international recognition. In the kingdom-grand duchy, it arrived for practical purposes on the day when the last of the offices of state stopped functioning: 25 November 1795, symbolically St Catherine’s Day. By then, Warsaw had been handed over to the Prussians, who expelled all remaining foreign diplomats. The Austrians were organizing Galicia. The Russians were digesting the grand duchy whole.

One last scene was enacted. After the formal abdication of Stanisław-August on the morning of 25 November, he was escorted from Warsaw under guard, and condemned without trial to lifetime captivity in Russia. He was, as it were, acting out the fate of his ex-subjects. After crossing the border and stopping in Hrodna in ‘Black Ruthenia’, the military column attending his carriage wound its way through the wintry landscape from one end of the grand duchy to the other. His captors would have been told that they were crossing ‘western Russia’. Such was the formula that would henceforth be taught to the world at large. But Stanisław-August knew otherwise. He and his memories were bound for St Petersburg on a journey of no return.

III

The legacy left by the demise of a state is markedly more complex than that which follows the death of an individual. There is, to begin with, a large physical residue of land, cities, government buildings and other assorted assets that have to be reallocated by the new owners. There is a considerable collection of legal and financial issues – claims, titles, debts and outstanding cases – that must somehow be resolved. As likely as not, there is also a huge cultural deposit, the accumulated literature, music, art, legends, history, languages, laws and customs that live on even when their authors do not. Most importantly, there is a community of people, thousands or millions strong, the former citizens, subjects and servants of the defunct state, who will now be pressed to change their identities, their attitudes and their allegiances. Finally, there are, or there ought to be, the state archives: the collections of official files and government records, which attest to the functioning of the late body-politic, and which enable historians to trace its progress and to preserve its memory. In the case of the grand duchy, all these elements can be identified, and more besides.

After 1793 the lands and peoples which had for centuries formed part of the grand duchy passed in their entirety to the Russian Empire. They were supplied not only with a new administration, a new ruling class, a new official language and a new Russian-based educational system, but also with a new history. They were declared, quite falsely, to have been reunited with the ancient Russian homeland, from which, supposedly, they had once been torn away. The Empress Catherine celebrated her acquisitions in true Spartan manner by striking a notorious medal which read: ‘That which was torn away, I have recovered.’
⁹⁸
Wilno/Vil’nya, no longer a state capital, became the provincial city of Vilna. Hence, when Napoleon arrived on the Nieman only a dozen years later, the world was told he was about to invade ‘Russia’.

Everyone interested in international affairs knows that shorthand forms are widely used in place of cumbersome state titles. People say ‘America’ instead of ‘the United States of America’, ignoring the protests of the Canadians. They still say ‘England’ instead of ‘the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’, though ‘the UK’ is increasingly common. And throughout the twentieth century, they have invariably said ‘Russia’ when referring to ‘the Empire of all the Russias’, ‘the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’, or, since 1992, ‘the Russian Federation’. This practice is bearable so long as its users understand what the short forms are replacing. There is a very real danger, however, that by hearing nothing but the short forms endlessly repeated, the unwary public may be misled. For it is all too easy – and completely erroneous – to believe that the UK is equivalent to ‘the land of the English’ or to assume that ‘Russia’ is inhabited exclusively by Russians.

The issue is particularly relevant to the fallout from the suppression of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The peoples of the former grand duchy disappeared from view in the late eighteenth century and, with a brief exception during the Russian Revolution, only resurfaced in the late twentieth. Suddenly in 1989–91, the world woke up to the news that the western regions of the Soviet Union had not really been Russian at all. New nation-states, such as Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine appeared as if from nowhere, and precious few commentators were able to explain where they came from.

After the Russian Empire’s annexation of the grand duchy, all the historic administrative structures were replaced by centralized
gubernias
or ‘governorships’, which took their orders from the tsarist government in St Petersburg. The six
gubernias
of Vilna, Kovno (including Courland), Grodno, Minsk, Mogilev and Vitebsk were grouped together in a north-western
Kray
or ‘Land’ ruled by a governor-general. The entire nomenclature was changed. Russian names took the place of Polish names, and map-makers round the world came to terms with ‘Western Russia’ or ‘the North-western Gubernias’. The old names of ‘Lithuania’ and ‘Belarus’ were banished. ‘White Ruthenia’ was presented as ‘White Russia’, and an international treaty was signed to suppress the name of Poland for ever.
⁹⁹

In this first Russian period, the administrative rearrangements included the creation of the so-called Pale of Jewish Settlement in 1791. The Jewish Pale was a clearly defined region – essentially the lands of Russian-occupied Poland-Lithuania – within which all Jews were now required to reside. Henceforth, no Jew could legally reside elsewhere in the Russian Empire without special permission; and no Jew could reside in one of the closed cities, like Kiev, within the Pale. The boundaries of the Pale were to vary, but the legal restrictions remained in place until 1917. As a result, the former grand duchy, together with Austrian Galicia, and the Kingdom of Poland as resurrected by the Congress of Vienna, became the parts of Europe where the percentage of Jews within the general population was highest.

The existing laws were too extensive and too firmly established to be replaced wholesale or overnight. Russian decrees were introduced gradually, and sections of the old Lithuanian Statutes remained in force for decades. Yet one area where radical change was introduced quickly pertained to the status of the nobility. In Poland-Lithuania, the nobles had formed an independent legal estate. They had elected the monarch, governed the localities, convened regional assemblies and enjoyed the rights to own land and to bear arms. Such ‘Golden Freedoms’ were unthinkable in the tsarist autocracy, so early in the 1790s the privileges of the grand duchy’s nobility were arbitrarily rescinded. The only families permitted to apply for noble status were those who could produce documents to prove it. Since no such documentation had been produced systematically in Poland-Lithuania, over 80 per cent of the existing nobility were cast into a legal limbo, uncertain about their title to their estates and land and their qualifications for public office.

In 1806 the armies of Napoleon’s French Empire advanced eastwards, to establish the French-controlled Duchy of Warsaw. Hopes rose high that Napoleon would liberate the population of the whole region from both social and political oppression. In the event he did neither, although he did raise huge numbers of Polish troops for the French service. The peace negotiations held in 1807, between Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I on a raft moored in the Nieman, proved only temporary.

Much of the fighting of the 1812 campaign, which Napoleon called his ‘Second Polish War’, was contested on lands which until recently had formed part of the grand duchy. The
Grande Armée
crossed the Nieman at Kovno, and reached Vilna on Sunday, 28 June. ‘Our entry into the city was triumphal,’ wrote one of Napoleon’s Polish officers.