worked as an amateur doctor, taught his children, and read the books sent to him by his friends. Soon after Catherine’s death in 1796, her son, Paul, terminated Radishchev’s exile and allowed him to return to his estate near Moscow. In 1802, deeply depressed, he committed suicide, leaving behind the dying words of Cato: “Now I am my own master.” His
When partitioning Poland in 1772, Russia, Austria, and Prussia had imposed on that nation a constitution that limited the authority of the king and the Diet and left power in the hands of an independent, conservative aristocracy that refused to govern or be governed, leaving the country in a perpetual state of near-anarchy. Stanislaus Augustus, the king installed by Catherine, reigned for the next sixteen years, but in all important matters, Poland’s government was overseen by St. Petersburg. Territorially, Poland remained large, and through these years the resentment of many Poles against the partitioning powers, particularly Russia, continued to fester. In September 1788, with both Catherine and her ally Joseph II of Austria involved in war with Turkey, Poles saw their chance to make a change. A Polish Diet, hostile to Polish dependence on Russia, met and was almost immediately confederated. The liberum veto was set aside, enabling the Diet to make decisions by majority vote. Amid an eruption of anti-Russian feeling and much verbal abuse of Catherine, Stanislaus warned of the danger of making unilateral changes in a constitution approved by the empress. He was ignored. During the following months, the confederated Diet proceeded to overturn the governmental structure endorsed by Russia for sixteen years. With her army in the south, Catherine could do nothing—for the moment, at least—but pretend not to notice.
The following year, 1790, Catherine suffered a series of political setbacks. In March, King Frederick William of Prussia, who in 1886 had succeeded his uncle Frederick the Great, surprised Russia and Austria by signing a defensive treaty with Poland, pledging military assistance against foreign interference. On May 3, 1791, the emboldened Polish confederated Diet, knowing that Russia was still enmeshed in war on the Black Sea, and also believing that Poland was now protected by its treaty with Prussia, voted to adopt a new constitution, providing for a hereditary, rather than elective, monarchy. The present ruler, Stanislaus, would be allowed to remain during his lifetime, but on his death, the crown was to become hereditary, passing from father to son in the house of the electors of Saxony. The liberum veto was to be abolished and replaced in the Diet by majority rule. The purpose of the new constitution was to weaken the old nobility and provide Poland with a more effective national government.
Catherine, realizing the extent to which the new constitution diminished the power of the old Polish nobility, on whom she relied to keep Poland weak, was alarmed. The Russian-Polish treaty of 1772 had been unilaterally scrapped. She had no troops available to uphold the old constitution, but, in her anger and frustration, she quickly found allies among the Poles themselves. The conservative Polish nobility, knowing that a weak central government was necessary if they were to keep power in their hands, also rejected the May 3 constitution. These noblemen, meeting in Grodno, formed their own new federation, proclaimed the restoration of the 1772 constitution, and sent a delegation to St. Petersburg to ask Catherine to help them.
Catherine was eager to help. The May 3 constitution was far from radical, but to Catherine there seemed a disturbing similarity between it and the developing attack on the monarchy in France. By July 1791, peace with Turkey was near, and the Russian army would soon be available to support the conservative Poles. She had already told Potemkin, during his last visit to St. Petersburg, that she intended to appoint him commander in chief in this new campaign. There were risks to be considered. Both Leopold of Austria and Frederick William of Prussia, concerned about the deteriorating situation in France, and hoping to calm the increasing turmoil behind their backs in eastern Europe, had agreed to accept Poland’s new May 3 constitution. Frederick William did so as Poland’s new ally; Leopold because he wished to be free to concentrate on France. Both monarchs urged Catherine to join them.
Catherine, who had already decided to act alone if necessary, refused. She tried instead to persuade the Prussians and Austrians to support her approach. She bluntly told her own College of Foreign Affairs in December 1791 that she would never agree to the new Polish political structure, and that she was determined to act. Prussia and Austria “will oppose us with only a pile of written paper,” she predicted. She anticipated protest, but Austria, facing war with France, would do nothing, and if Prussia’s agreement to ignore its treaty with Poland had to be bought with additional Polish territory, she would agree to another partition. As for the Poles themselves, she understood that to restore the 1772 constitution, an invasion by the Russian army would be necessary.
Behind Catherine’s militant new Polish policy was the fact that, despite her talk of a crusade against France, her real worries lay closer to home. She was angered by the steps the Poles had already taken and alarmed by what might follow. An effective, potentially revolutionary regime in Poland would be dangerous to Russia. Was she to ignore this possible threat in order to fight Jacobinism in France? Her duty was to deal with the enemy in the place most threatening to her. She was determined, she told Grimm, to “exterminate that nest of Jacobins in Warsaw.” This was the facade of her argument, but she revealed her real strategy in an outburst to her private secretary on November 14, 1791: “I am breaking my head to push the courts of Vienna and Berlin to involve themselves in the affairs of France. The Austrian court is willing but the court of Berlin refuses to move.… There are reasons which I cannot explain [to them]. I wish to engage them in these affairs in order to have elbow room. I have in mind much unfinished business and it is necessary that they be kept busy so that they cannot hinder me.” Her “unfinished business” was to restore Russian control of Poland.
On April 9, 1792, France unintentionally assisted Catherine by declaring war on Austria. The empress could now be certain that Austria would not honor its promises to Poland to support the May 3 Polish constitution. At the end of April, she informed Berlin and Vienna of her intention to invade Poland; on May 7, sixty-five thousand Russian troops crossed the Polish border, followed by another thirty-five thousand a few weeks later. Poland immediately appealed to Frederick William of Prussia on the basis of the 1790 defensive treaty. The king of Prussia behaved as Catherine had foreseen. Anticipating war with France, he betrayed his treaty obligation to assist Poland, declaring that he had not been consulted about the May 3 constitution and that this absolved him of treaty commitments. He was not, he declared, “obliged to defend a constitution drawn up without his knowledge.” Stanislaus, again playing both sides, first swore to fight for the May 3 constitution and then attempted to negotiate with Catherine by offering to give up the throne to her grandson Constantine. She was not interested. Having nothing further to offer, the Polish king ordered the Polish army to lay down its arms.
The military occupation proceeded smoothly, but Russia soon found itself caught in a thicket of political difficulties. The conservative Polish leaders Catherine was supporting fell to squabbling among themselves and proved unable to govern. By December 1792, Catherine had decided that the only solution to growing chaos was to formalize the occupation in a second partition. Frederick William was offered the areas in the north and west that Prussia had long desired. He accepted. Both Russia and Prussia declared that their actions were aimed at fighting Jacobinism in Poland. Frederick William announced that he was forced to send his army to protect Prussia from the raging Jacobinism across his border. Catherine continued to use this argument. “Apparently you ignore that the Jacobiniere of Warsaw were in correspondence with the Jacobin Club in Paris,” she wrote to Grimm. In January 1793, Russia and Prussia secretly signed a treaty that sealed the Second Partition of Poland.
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
