Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (105 page)

Unaware of this treaty, Poland’s conservative leaders asked Catherine for assurance that she would protect the physical integrity of their country. It was too late; early in April 1793, Russian and Prussian manifestos announcing the new partition were published. Attempting to give their actions a cloak of legality, Catherine and Frederick William forced Stanislaus to leave Warsaw for Grodno, the center of the failing conservative confederation, and there to preside over a Diet that was to come to “an amiable understanding with the partitioning powers.” To help the Diet make this decision, the Russian ambassador announced
that “
soldiers of Her Imperial Majesty would occupy the lands of any deputy who opposed the will of the nation.” In July, members of the Diet sullenly gave consent to the new partition treaty with Russia, but, hating Prussia more, they refused to ratify the cession of territory to a nation that had betrayed them. The Diet building in Grodno was surrounded by Russian troops, and the deputies were told that no one would be allowed to leave until the partition treaty was approved. The session continued into the night. At first, the deputies shouted and refused to sit; then they lapsed into total silence and sat immobile in their seats. At 4 in the morning, the marshal of the Diet asked three times: “
Does the Diet authorize the delegates to sign the treaty?” No deputy replied. Whereupon, the marshal announced: “
Silence means consent.” In this manner, the partition treaty was approved by the Polish Diet.

In effect, the treaty with Russia turned newly truncated Poland into a protectorate—or, as one Polish deputy said bitterly, “a Russian province.” All domestic and foreign policies were to be submitted for Russian approval; the personnel of the government would be approved by St. Petersburg; the Polish army would be reduced to fifteen thousand men. Stanislaus kept his throne. Politically impotent, superfluous, and pathetic, he returned to his palace in Warsaw, despised by his subjects.

Russia’s new share of Poland was large: eighty-nine thousand square miles of eastern Poland, including the rest of Belorussia, with the city of Minsk; further extensive slices of Lithuania, including Vilnius; and the remaining Polish Ukraine. In all, three million people were added to Catherine’s empire. Prussia took twenty-three thousand square miles, finally acquiring the long-coveted regions of Danzig and Thorn, as well as other territory in western Poland; Prussia’s gain was one million inhabitants. Austria had no share in the spoils this time, but Francis II was promised that Prussia would remain an active ally in Austria’s war against France. Poland now was reduced to one-third its original size and a population of four million. When the treaties were signed, Catherine told herself that not only had she fended off the revolutionary virus spreading from France, but she was simply reoccupying lands that had once belonged to the great sixteenth-century principality of Kiev, “lands still inhabited by people of the Russian faith and race.”

By the spring of 1794, when Robespierre was supreme in France, many Poles had concluded that the further mutilation of their country and the humiliating constitutional settlement imposed were intolerable. In
March, when the disarming of the Polish army was attempted, the nation rose up. Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a Polish officer trained in France who had fought beside Washington and Lafayette in the American War of Independence, suddenly appeared in Kraców and took command of Polish rebel forces. On March 24, with four thousand soldiers and two thousand peasants armed with scythes, he defeated seven thousand Russian soldiers near Kraców. The revolt spread, moving so quickly that when it reached Warsaw, the Russian occupation garrison of seven thousand men was caught by surprise. Three thousand Russian soldiers were killed or taken prisoner; the bodies of the dead were stripped and thrown naked into the streets. Frederick William of Prussia was denounced as a betrayer, and a portrait of Catherine, taken from the Russian embassy, was publicly torn to pieces.

When reports of these events reached St. Petersburg, Catherine told Prussia and Austria that the time had come “to extinguish the last spark of the Jacobin fire in Poland.” Frederick William, smarting from the personal insults hurled at him by the Poles, asked for the honor of personally strangling Polish resistance. Catherine suggested that he take charge of putting down the revolt in Poland west of the Vistula River, and then advised Francis II of Austria to move into the south. Both hurried to oblige, and both expected to be paid for their efforts; thus, still another partition of Poland became an expectation of all parties. Frederick William divided the army he had deployed against France and sent twenty-five thousand men to the east against Poland. By mid-July, these twenty-five thousand Prussians and fourteen thousand Russians were advancing on Warsaw from two directions. Late in July, Frederick William himself arrived before Warsaw to direct a siege of the city. The Prussians made little progress, and in September, the king, declaring that he needed his troops to face threats from France, lifted his siege and withdrew.

By then, the Russians needed no help. Indeed, Catherine had realized that if Russia were to crush the revolt without assistance, she would be able to dictate a settlement. She placed Rumyantsev in overall command of her army in Poland and Suvorov in tactical command. On October 10, Suvorov defeated Kosciuszko in a battle in which thirteen thousand Russians overwhelmed seven thousand Poles. Kosciuszko was severely wounded, captured, and sent to St. Petersburg, where he was locked in the Schlüsselburg Fortress. Suvorov next appeared before Praga, the fortified suburb across the Vistula from Warsaw.

Before launching his attack, Suvorov reminded his soldiers of the April slaughter of the Russian garrison in Warsaw. The assault began at dawn; “three hours later,” Suvorov reported, “
the whole of Praga was strewn with bodies, and blood was flowing in streams.” Estimates of the dead ranged between twelve and twenty thousand. The Russians later claimed that Suvorov was unable to restrain his soldiers from taking revenge for the slaughter of their comrades in the spring—an argument that failed to explain the killing of women, children, priests, and nuns. Suvorov then used the carnage as an example to warn Warsaw that if it did not surrender, it would be treated as another Praga. Warsaw capitulated immediately, and armed resistance throughout Poland came to an end.

Catherine regarded Kosciuszko as an agent of revolutionary extremism and believed him to be in correspondence with Robespierre. It was in this context that she and her council decided what was to be done with a prostrate Poland. They agreed that because the dangers of Jacobinism continued to threaten Russia, it was unwise to allow any Polish government to exist. Bezborodko insisted that centuries of experience had shown that it was impossible to make friends with the Poles; they would always support any future enemy of Russia, be this Turkey, Prussia, Sweden, or somebody else. Further, the buffer state concept did not apply to ideas that could cross frontiers. The council’s decision, therefore, was to treat Poland as a conquered enemy: all Polish regalia, banners, and state insignia, along with archives and libraries, were collected and sent to Russia. Suvorov was to govern by decree.

The next step was to agree on a new division of territory. Catherine would have preferred outright Russian annexation of all that remained of Poland, but she knew that this would be unacceptable to Prussia and Austria. Accordingly, she proposed a third and final partition. Austria hesitated, suggesting a return to the status quo but with greater supervision from outside. Prussia favored partition, either total or leaving a small, insignificant buffer state between the partitioning powers. Catherine’s proposal was the most extreme: she wanted to subdivide the entire remaining territory of Poland and thereby simply erase this dangerous neighbor from the map. Her proposal was accepted.

On January 3, 1795, Russia and Austria agreed to the third and final partition of Poland. Prussia, still at war with France, was told that the
territory it desired could be taken whenever it was ready to do so. On May 5, Prussia made peace with revolutionary France and occupied its allotted slice of Poland. Russia’s prizes were Courland, what was left of Lithuania, the remaining part of Belorussia, and the western Ukraine. Prussia took Warsaw and Poland west of the Vistula. Austria took Kraców, Lublin, and western Galicia. Afterward, Catherine repeated that she had annexed “not a single Pole,” and that she had simply taken back ancient Russian and Lithuanian lands with Orthodox inhabitants who were “now reunited with the Russian motherland.”

On November 25, 1795, Stanislaus, his kingdom dismembered, abdicated. When Catherine died a year later, the new emperor Paul invited the former king to St. Petersburg, where he was housed in the Marble Palace that the empress had built for Gregory Orlov. He died there in 1798. For Poland, the Third Partition meant national extinction. Not until the signing of the Versailles Treaty after the First World War, when the Russian, German, and Austrian empires had collapsed, did Poland physically reemerge. In the interim, for 126 years, the people and culture of Poland did not possess a nation.

72
Twilight

I
N
1796, C
ATHERINE
, in her thirty-fifth year on the Russian throne, was the preeminent royal personage in the world. Age had affected her appearance, but not her devotion to work or her positive attitude toward life. She was heavier, and her gray hair had turned to white, but her blue eyes were youthful, bright, and clear. Even at sixty-seven, her complexion was fresh, and dentures preserved the illusion that her teeth were intact. Dignity and grace were embodied in her bearing, particularly in the way she held her head high and nodded graciously in public. From friends, officials, courtiers, and servants, she drew deep affection as well as respect.

She rose at six and wrapped herself in a silk dressing gown. Her movements awakened the family of small English greyhounds sleeping on a pink satin couch next to her bed. The oldest of them, whom she had named Sir Tom Anderson, and his spouse, Duchess Anderson,
were gifts from Dr. Dimsdale, who had inoculated her and her son, Paul, against smallpox. They, with the help of Sir Tom’s second wife, Mademoiselle Mimi, had produced numerous litters. Catherine attended them; when the dogs wanted to go out, Catherine herself opened the door into the garden. This done, she drank four or five cups of black coffee and settled down to work on the mass of official and personal correspondence awaiting her. Her sight had weakened, and she read with spectacles and sometimes used a magnifying glass. Once when her secretary saw her reading this way, she smiled and said, “
You probably don’t need this contrivance yet. How old are you?” He said that he was twenty-eight. Catherine nodded and said, “Our sight has been blunted by long service to the State and now we have to use spectacles.” Promptly at nine, she put down her pen and rang a little bell, which told the servant outside her door that she was ready for her daily visitors. This meant a long morning of receiving ministers, generals, and other government officials; of reading or listening to their reports; and of signing the papers they had prepared for her. These were working sessions; visitors were expected to object to her ideas and offer their own when they thought she was wrong. Her attitude almost always remained attentive, pleasant, and imperturbable.

An exception to this demeanor was her reaction to the visits of her brilliant general Alexander Suvorov. Devout as well as eccentric, Suvorov entered her room, bowed three times to the icon of Our Lady of Kazan hanging on a wall, and fell on his knees before the empress, touching the ground with his forehead. Catherine always tried to stop him, saying, “For heaven’s sake,
are you not ashamed of yourself?” Unabashed, Suvorov sat down and repeated his request to be allowed to fight the French army in northern Italy, commanded by a young general named Napoleon Bonaparte. “Matushka,
let me march against the French!” he pleaded. After many visits and many pleas, she agreed, and in November 1796, Suvorov was ready to march at the head of sixty thousand Russians. Catherine died on the eve of his departure, and the campaign was canceled. No battlefield meeting of these two famous soldiers ever took place.