PARTITION OF POLAND--DEATH OF CATHERINE
European diplomacy at this period was centered about the perishing
state of Poland. That kingdom, once so powerful, was becoming every
year more enfeebled.
It was a defective social organization and an arrogant nobility that
ruined Poland. There existed only two classes--nobles and serfs. The
business and trade of the state were in the hands of Germans and Jews,
and there existed no national or middle class in which must reside the
life of a modern state. In other words, Poland was patriarchal and
mediaeval. She had become unsuited to her environment. Surrounded by
powerful absolutisms which had grown out of the ruins of mediaeval
forces, she in the eighteenth century was clinging to the traditions of
feudalism as if it were still the twelfth century. It was in vain that
her sons were patriotic, in vain that they struggled for reforms, in
vain that they lay down and died upon battlefields. She alone in
Europe had not been borne along on that great wave of centralization
long ago, and she had missed an essential experience. She was out of
step with the march of civilization, and the advancing forces were
going to run over her.
The more enlightened Poles began too late to strive for a firm
hereditary monarchy, and to try to curb the power of selfish nobles.
Not only was their state falling to pieces within, but it was being
crushed from without. Protestant Prussia in the West, Greek Russia in
the East, and Catholic Austria on the South, each preparing to absorb
all it could get away--not from Poland, but from each other. It was
obvious that it was only a question of time when the feeble kingdom
wedged in between these powerful and hungry states must succumb; and
for Russia, Austria, and Prussia it was simply a question as to the
share which should fall to each.
Such was the absorbing problem which employed Catherine's powers from
the early years of her reign almost to its close. Europe soon saw that
it was a woman of no ordinary ability who was sitting on the throne of
Russia. In her foreign policy, and in the vigor infused into the
internal administration of her empire, the master-hand became apparent.
As a counter-move to her designs upon Poland, the Turks were induced to
harass her by declaring war upon Russia. There was a great surprise in
store for Europe as well as for the Ottoman Empire. This dauntless
woman was unprepared for such an emergency; but she wrote to one of her
generals: "The Romans did not concern themselves with the _number_ of
their enemies; they only asked, 'Where are they?'" Her armies swept
the Peninsula clear of Tatars and of Turks, and in 1771 a Russian fleet
was on the Black Sea, and the terror of Constantinople knew no bounds.
If affairs in Europe and disorders in her own empire had not been so
pressing, the long-cherished dream of the Grand Princes might have been
realized.
A plague in Moscow broke out in 1771 which so excited the superstitions
of the people, that it led to an insurrection; immediately following
this, a terrible demoralization was created in the South by an
illiterate Cossack named Pugatchek, who announced that he was Peter the
Third. He claimed that instead of dying as was supposed, he had
escaped to the Ukraine, and was now going to St. Petersburg with an
army to punish his wife Catherine and to place his son Paul upon the
throne. As a _pretender_ he was not dangerous, but as a rallying point
for unhappy serfs and for an exasperated and suffering people looking
for a leader, he did become a very formidable menace, which finally
developed into a Peasants' War. The insurrection was at last quelled,
and ended with the execution of the false Peter at Moscow.
In the midst of these distractions at home, while fighting the Ottoman
Empire for the shores of the Black Sea, and all Europe over a partition
of Poland, the Empress was at the same time introducing reforms in
every department of her incoherent and disordered empire. Peter the
Great had abolished the Patriarchate. She did more. The monasteries
and the ecclesiastical estates, which were exempt from taxes during all
the period of Mongol dominion, had never paid tribute to Khans, had in
consequence grown to be enormously wealthy. It is said the clergy
owned a million serfs. Catherine placed the property of the Church
under the administration of a secular commission, and the heads of the
monasteries and the clergy were converted from independent sovereigns
into mere pensioners of the Crown. Then she assailed the receiving of
bribes, and other corrupt practices in the administration of justice.
She struggled hard to let in the light of better instruction upon the
upper and middle classes. If she could, she would have abolished
ignorance and cruelty in the land, not because she was a
philanthropist, but because she loved civilization. It was her
intellect, not her heart, that made Catherine a reformer. When she
severely punished and forever disgraced a lady of high rank for cruelty
to her serfs,--forty of whom had been tortured to death,--it was
because she had the educated instincts of a European, not an Asiatic,
and she had also the intelligence to realize that no state could be
made sound which rested upon a foundation of human misery. She
established a Russian Academy modeled after the French, its object
being to fix the rules for writing and speaking the Russian language
and to promote the study of Russian history. In other words, Catherine
was a reformer fully in sympathy with the best methods prevailing in
Western Europe. She was profoundly interested in the New Philosophy
and the intellectual movement in France, was in correspondence with
Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, and a student of the theories of
Rousseau.
Of course the influence exerted by French genius over Russian
civilization at this time did not penetrate far below the upper and
highly educated class; but there is no doubt it left a deep impress
upon the literature and art of the nation, and also modified Russian
characteristics by introducing religious tolerance and habits of
courtesy, besides making aspirations after social justice and political
liberty entirely respectable. Catherine's "Book of Instructions" to
the commission which was created by her to assist in making a new code
of laws contained political maxims which would satisfy advanced
reformers to-day; although when she saw later that the French
Revolution was their logical conclusion, she repudiated them, took
Voltaire's bust down from its pedestal, and had it thrown into a
rubbish heap. The work she was accomplishing for Russia was second
only to that of Peter the Great; and when she is reproached for not
having done more and for not having broken the chains forged by Boris
upon twenty million people, let it be remembered that she lived in the
eighteenth, and not the nineteenth, century; and that at that very time
Franklin and Jefferson were framing a constitution which sanctioned the
existence of negro slavery in an ideal republic!
A new generation had grown up in Poland, men not nobles nor serfs, but
a race of patriots familiar with the stirring literature of their
century. They had seen their land broken into fragments and then
ground fine by a proud and infatuated nobility. They had seen their
pusillanimous kings one after another yielding to the insolent demands
for their territory. Polish territory extended eastward into the
Ukraine; now that must be cut off and dropped into the lap of Russia.
Another arm extended north, separating Eastern Prussia from Western.
That too must be cut off and fall to Prussia. Then after shearing
these extremities, the Poland which was left must not only accept the
spoliation, but co-operate with her despoilers in adopting under their
direction a constitution suited to its new humiliation. Her King was
making her the laughing-stock of Europe--but before long the name
Poland was to become another name for tragedy. Kosciusko had fought in
the War of the American Revolution. When he returned, with the badge
of the Order of the Cincinnati upon his breast and filled with dreams
of the regeneration of his own land by the magic of this new political
freedom, he was the chosen leader of the patriots.
The partition of Poland was not all accomplished at one time. It took
three repasts to finish the banquet (the partitions of 1792-1793-1794),
and then some time more was required to sweep up the fragments and to
efface its name from the map of Europe. Kosciusko and his followers
made their last vain and desperate stand in 1794, and when he fell
covered with wounds at the battle of Kaminski, Poland fell with him.
The Poles were to survive only as a more or less unhappy element among
nations where they were aliens. Their race affinities were with
Russia, for they were a Slavonic people; their religious affinities
were with Catholic Austria; but with Protestant Prussia there was not
one thing in common, and that was the bitterest servitude of all. The
Poles in Russia were to some extent autonomous. They were permitted to
continue their local governments under a viceroy appointed by the Tsar;
their Slavonic system of communes was not disturbed, nor their language
nor customs. Still it was only a privileged servitude after all, and
the time was coming when it was to become an unmitigated one. But
effaced as a political sovereignty, Poland was to survive as a
nationality of genius. Her sons were going to sing their songs in
other lands, but Mickiewiz and Sienkiewicz and Chopin are Polish, not
Russian.
The alliance of the three sovereigns engaged in this dismemberment was
about as friendly as is that of three dogs who have run down a hare and
are engaged in picking nice morsels from its bones. If Russia was
getting more than her share, the Turks would be incited by Austria or
Prussia to attack her in the South; and many times did Catherine's
armies desert Poland to march down and defend the Crimea, and her new
fort at Sebastopol, and her fleet on the Black Sea. In 1787,
accompanied by her grandsons, the Grand Dukes Alexander and
Constantine, she made that famous journey down the Dnieper; visited the
ancient shrines about Kief; stood in the picturesque old capital of
Saraï, on the spot where Russian Grand Princes had groveled at the feet
of the Khans; and then, looked upon Sebastopol, which marked the limit
of the new frontier which she had created.
The French Revolution caused a revulsion in her political theories.
She indulged in no more abstractions about human rights, and had an
antipathy for the new principles which had led to the execution of the
King and Queen and to such revolting horrors. She made a holocaust of
the literature she had once thought entertaining. Russians suspected
of liberal tendencies were watched, and upon the slightest pretext sent
to Siberia, and she urged the King of Sweden to head a crusade against
this pestilential democracy, which she would help him to sweep out of
Europe. It was Catherine, in consultation with the Emperor of Austria,
who first talked of dismembering Turkey and creating out of its own
territory a group of neutral states lying between Europe and the
Ottoman Empire. And Voltaire's dream of a union of the Greek peoples
into an Hellenic kingdom she improved upon by a larger plan of her own,
by which she was to be the conqueror of the Ottoman Empire, while her
grandson Constantine, sitting on a throne at Constantinople, should
rule Greeks and Turks alike under a Russian protectorate.
Upon the private life of Catherine there is no need to dwell. This is
not the biography of a woman, but the history of the empire she
magnificently ruled for thirty-four years. It is enough to say she was
not better than her predecessors, the Tsaritsas Elizabeth and Anna.
The influence exerted by Menschikof in the reign of Catherine I., and
Biron in that of Anna, was to be exerted by Alexis Orlof, Potemkin, and
other favorites in this. Her son Paul, who was apparently an object of
dislike, was kept in humiliating subordination to the Orlofs and her
other princely favorites, to whose councils he was never invited.
Righteousness and moral elevation did not exist in her character nor in
her reign; but for political insight, breadth of statesmanship, and a
powerful grasp upon the enormous problems in her heterogeneous empire,
she is entitled to rank with the few sovereigns who are called "Great."
A German by birth, a French-woman by intellectual tastes and
tendencies--she was above all else a Russian, and bent all the
resources of her powerful personality to the enlightenment and
advancement of the land of her adoption. Her people were not "knouted
into civilization," but invited and drawn into it. Her touch was
terribly firm--but elastic. She was arbitrary, but tolerant; and if
her reign was a despotism, it was a despotism of that broad type which
deals with the sources of things, and does not bear heavily upon
individuals. The Empress Catherine died suddenly in 1796, and Paul I.
was crowned Emperor of Russia.