A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1.

by Carlton J. H. Hayes

CATHERINE THE GREAT: THE DEFEAT OF TURKEY AND THE DISMEMBERMENT OF POLAND

It is hardly possible to feel much respect for the character of the Russian rulers who succeeded Peter the Great in the eighteenth century. Most of them were women with loose morals and ugly manners. But they had little to fear from Sweden, which, utterly exhausted, was now on a steady decline; and domestic difficulties both in Poland and in Turkey removed any apprehension of attacks from those countries. In policies of internal government, Peter had blazed a trail so clear and unmistakable that one would have difficulty in losing it.

[Sidenote: Character of the Tsarina Catherine II]

Of those female sovereigns of the Russian Empire, the most notable was Catherine II, usually called Catherine the Great (1762-1796). By birth she was not even a Russian, but a princess of Protestant Germany, whom dynastic considerations made the wife of the heir to the Russian crown. [Footnote: The marriage was arranged by Frederick the Great in order to minimize Austrian influence at Petrograd.]

No sooner was she in her adopted country than she set to work to ingratiate herself with its people. She learned the Russian language. She outwardly conformed to the Orthodox Church. She slighted her German relatives and surrounded herself with Russians. She established a reputation for quick wit and lofty patriotism. So great was her success that when her half-insane husband ascended the throne as Peter III in 1762, the people looked to her rather than to him as the real ruler, and before the year was over she had managed to make away with him and to become sovereign in name as well as in fact. For thirty-four years Catherine was tsarina of Russia. Immoral to the last, without conscience or scruple, she ruled the country with a firm hand and consummated the work of Peter the Great.

[Sidenote: Her Administration]

In the administrative system Catherine introduced the "governments" and "districts," divisions and subdivisions of Russia, over which were placed respectively governors and vice-governors, all appointed by the central authority. To the ecclesiastical alterations of Peter, she added the secularization of church property, thereby making the clergy distinctly dependent upon her bounty and strengthening the autocracy.

[Sidenote: Her Patronage of Learning]

The tsarina had some personal interest in the literary and scientific progress of the eighteenth century and was determined to make Russia appear cultured in the eyes of western Europe. She corresponded with Voltaire and many other philosophers and learned men of the time. She pensioned Diderot, the author of the great Encyclopædia, and invited scholars to her court. She posed as the friend of higher education.

[Sidenote: Her Foreign Policy]

Of the three foreign countries which in the eighteenth century blocked the western expansion of Russia, Sweden had been humbled by Peter in the Great Northern War and the treaty of Nystad. Poland and Turkey remained to be dealt with by Catherine the Great. Let us see what had lately transpired to render this task comparatively easy for the tsarina.

[Sidenote: Poland in the Eighteenth Century]

Poland in the first half of the eighteenth century was geographically a large state, but a variety of circumstances contributed to render it weak and unstable. In the first place, it was without natural boundaries or adequate means of defense. To the west it was separated from Prussia and Austria by an artificial line drawn through level plains or over low-lying hills. To the south a fluctuating frontier, fixed usually along the Dniester River, set it off from the Ottoman Empire. The fertile valleys of the Dnieper, to the east, and of the Dona, to the north, were shared by Russia and Poland. No chains of mountains and no strongly fortified places protected the Polish people from Germans, Turks, or Russians.

Nor was this wide, but indefensible, territory inhabited by a single homogeneous people. The Poles themselves, centering in the western cities of Warsaw and Cracow, constituted a majority of the population, but the Lithuanians, a kindred Slavic folk, covered the east-central part of the kingdom and a large number of Cossacks and "Little Russians" [Footnote: Ruthenians.] lived in the extreme east, while along the northern and western borders were settlements of Germans and Swedes. Between the Poles and the Lithuanians existed a long-standing feud, and the Germans regarded all the Slavs with ill-disguised contempt.

Religion added its share to the dissension created by race and language within Poland. The Poles and most of the Lithuanians were stanch Roman Catholics. Other Lithuanians—especially the great nobles—together with the Russians and Cossacks adhered to the Greek Orthodox faith, while Lutheran Protestantism was upheld by the western settlements of Swedes and Germans. The Dissenters, as the Orthodox and Protestants were called, demanded from the Catholic majority a toleration and a freedom of worship which at that time existed in no other country of Europe. When it was not forthcoming, they appealed to foreign Powers— the Lutherans to Prussia, the Orthodox to Russia.

[Sidenote: Wretched Social Conditions in Poland]

Worst of all were the social conditions in Poland. By the eighteenth century, the towns had sunk into relative insignificance, leaving Poland without a numerous or wealthy middle class. Of the other classes, the great nobles or magnates owned the land, lived in luxury, selfishly looked out for their own interests, and jealously played politics, while the mass of the nation were degraded into a state of serfdom and wretchedness that would be difficult to parallel elsewhere in Europe. With a grasping, haughty nobility on one hand, and an oppressed, ignorant peasantry on the other, social solidarity, the best guarantee of political independence, was entirely lacking.

[Sidenote: Weakness of Polish Political Institutions]

An enlightened progressive government might have done something to remedy the social ills, but of all governments that the world has ever seen, the most ineffectual and pernicious was the Polish. Since the sixteenth century, the monarchy had been elective, with the result that the reign of every sovereign was disfigured by foreign intrigues and domestic squabbles over the choice of his successor, and also that the noble electors were able not only to secure liberal bribes but to wring from the elect such concessions as gradually reduced the kingship to an ornamental figurehead. Most of the later kings were foreigners who used what little power was left to them in furtherance of their native interests rather than of the welfare of Poland. Thus the kings in the first half of the eighteenth century were German electors of Saxony, who owed their new position to the interested friendship of Austria, Prussia, or Russia, and to the large sums of money which they lavished upon the Polish magnates; these same Saxon rulers cheerfully applied the Polish resources to their German policies.

Another absurdity of the Polish constitution was the famous "liberum veto," a kind of gentlemen's agreement among the magnates, whereby no law whatsoever could be enacted by the Diet if a single member felt it was prejudicial to his interests, and objected. In the course of the seventeenth century the principle of the liberum veto had been so far extended as to recognize the lawful right of any one of the ten thousand noblemen of Poland to refuse to obey a law which he had not approved. This amounted to anarchism. And anarchism, however beautiful it might appear as an ideal, was hardly a trustworthy weapon with which to oppose the greedy, hard-hearted, despotic monarchs who governed all the surrounding countries.

[Sidenote: Steady Decline of Ottoman Power during Seventeenth Century]

The Ottoman Empire was not in such sore straits as Poland, but its power and prestige were obviously waning. In another place we have reviewed the achievements of the Turks in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—how they overran the Balkan peninsula, captured Constantinople, put an end to the ancient Græco-Roman Empire and under Suleiman the Magnificent extended their conquests along the northern coast of Africa and in Europe across the Danube into the very heart of Hungary. Although the sea-power of the Turks suffered a serious reverse at Lepanto (1571), their continued land advances provoked in Christendom the liveliest apprehension throughout the seventeenth century. After a twenty-five-years conflict they took Crete from Venice. They subjugated to their dominion the Tatars and Russians immediately north of the Black Sea. They exacted homage from the princes of Rumania and Transylvania. They annexed Hungary. For a time they received tribute from the king of Poland. In 1683 they laid siege to the city of Vienna and would have taken it had not the patriotic Polish monarch, John Sobieski, brought timely aid to the beleaguered Austrians. That was the high-water mark of the Mohammedan advance in Europe.

Thenceforth the Turkish boundaries gradually receded. An alliance of Venice, Poland, the pope, and Austria waged long and arduous warfare with the Ottomans, and the resulting treaty of Karlowitz, signed at the very close of the seventeenth century, gave the greater part of Hungary, including Transylvania, to the Austrian Habsburgs, extended the southern boundary of Poland to the Dniester River, and surrendered important trading centers on the Dalmatian and Greek coasts to the Venetians. Two subsequent wars between the sultan and the Habsburgs definitely freed the whole of Hungary from the Ottoman yoke. The reasons for the wane of Turkey's power are scarcely to be sought in the inherent strength of her neighbors, for, with the possible exception of Austria and Russia, they were notoriously weak and had seldom been able or willing to work together in behalf of any common cause. The real reasons lay rather in the character and nature of the Turkish power itself. Domestic, not foreign, difficulties prepared the way for future disasters.

[Sidenote: Nature of the Turkish Conquests]

It should be borne in mind that the Turks never constituted a majority of the population of their European possessions. They were a mere body of conquerors, who in frenzies of religious or martial enthusiasm, inspired with the idea that Divine Providence was using them as agents for the spread of Mohammedanism, had fought valiantly with the sword or cunningly taken advantage of their enemies' quarrels to plant over wide areas the crescent in place of the cross. In the conquered regions, the native Christian peoples were reduced to serfdom, and the Turkish conquerors became great landholders and the official class. To extend, even to maintain, such an artificial order of things, the Turks would be obliged to keep their military organization always at the highest pitch of excellence and to preserve their government from weakness and corruption. In neither of these respects did the Turks ultimately succeed.

[Sidenote: Corruption In the Turkish Government]

The sultans of the eighteenth century were not of the stuff of which a Suleiman the Magnificent had been made. To the grim risks of battle they preferred the cushioned ease of the palace, and all their powers of administration and government were quite consumed in the management of the household and the harem. Actual authority was gradually transferred to the Divan, or board of ministers, whose appointments or dismissals were the results of palace intrigues, sometimes petty but more often bloody. Corruption ate its way through the entire office- holding element of the Ottoman state: positions were bought and sold from the Divan down to the obscure village, and office was held to exist primarily for financial profit and secondarily as a means of oppressing the subject people.

The army, on which so much in the Turkish state depended, naturally reflected the demoralized condition of the government. While Peter the Great was organizing a powerful army in Russia, and Frederick the Great was perfecting the Prussian military machine, the Ottoman army steadily declined. It failed to keep pace with the development of tactics and of firearms in western Europe, and fell behind the times. The all- prevalent corruption ruined its discipline, and its regularly organized portion—the "janissaries"—became the masters rather than the servants of the sultans and of the whole Turkish government.

It was the fortune of the Russian tsarina—Catherine the Great—to appreciate the real weakness of both Turkey and Poland and to turn her neighbors' distress to the profit of her own country.

[Sidenote: Catherine's Interference in Poland]

No sooner had Catherine secured the Russian crown and by her inactivity permitted Frederick the Great to bring the Seven Years' War to a successful issue, than the death of Augustus III, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, gave her an opportunity to interfere in Polish affairs. She was not content with the Saxon line which was more or less under Austrian influence, and, with the astute aid of Frederick, she induced the Polish nobles to elect one of her own courtiers and favorites, Stanislaus Poniatowski, who thus in 1764 became the last king of an independent Poland.

With the accession of Stanislaus, the predominance of Russia was fully established in Poland. Russia entered into an execrable agreement with Prussia and Austria to uphold the anarchical constitution of the unhappy and victimized country. When patriotic Poles made efforts—as they now frequently did—to reform their government, to abolish the liberum veto, and to strengthen the state, they found their attempts thwarted by the allies either by force of arms or by bribes of money. The racial animosities and the religious differences within Poland afforded sufficient pretexts for the intervention of the neighboring Powers, especially Prussia and Russia.

A popular insurrection of Polish Catholics against the intolerable meddling of foreigners was crushed by the troops of Catherine, with the single result that the Russians, in pursuing some fleeing insurgents across the southern frontier, violated Turkish territory and precipitated a war between the Ottoman Empire and Russia.

[Sidenote: Catherine's War with the Turks, 1768-1774]

This Turkish War lasted from 1768 to 1774. The Ottoman government was profoundly alarmed by the Russian foreign policy, believing that the intrigues in Poland would end in the annexation of that state to Russia and the consequent upsetting of the balance of power in the East, and that, Poland once being disposed of, the turn of Turkey would come next. The Turks, moreover, were egged on by the French government, which, anxious also to preserve the balance of power and to defend the liberties of Poland, was too financially embarrassed itself to undertake a great war against Prussia and Russia.

This war between Russia and Turkey fully confirmed the belief that the power of the latter was waning. The Ottoman troops, badly armed and badly led, suffered a series of reverses. The Russians again occupied Azov, which Peter the Great had been compelled to relinquish; they overran Moldavia and Wallachia; they seized Bucharest; and they seemed likely to cross the Danube. Catherine went so far as to fan a revolt among the Greek subjects of the sultan.

[Sidenote: Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji (1774): Russia on the Black Sea]

At length, in 1774, the treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji was concluded between the belligerents. It was most important in marking the southern extension of Russia. By its provisions, (1) Turkey formally ceded Azov and adjacent territory to Russia and renounced sovereignty over all land north of the Black Sea; (2) Turkey recovered Wallachia, Moldavia, and Greece, on condition that they should be better governed; (3) Russia obtained the right of free navigation for her merchant ships in Turkish waters; and (4) Russia was recognized as the protector of certain churches in the city of Constantinople.

Within a few years after the signature of the treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji, Catherine established Russian control over the various Tatar principalities north of the Black Sea, whose sovereignty Turkey had renounced, and by a supplementary agreement in 1792, the Dniester River was fixed upon as the boundary between the Russian and Ottoman empires.

The Turkish policy of Catherine the Great bore three significant results. In the first place, Russia acquired a natural boundary in southern Europe, and became the chief Power on the Black Sea, whence her ships might pass freely through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles out into the Mediterranean to trade with western Europe. Russia's second "window to the west" was gained. Then, in the second place, Russia was henceforth looked upon as the natural ally and friend of oppressed nationalities within the Turkish Empire. Finally, the special clause conferring on Russia the protectorate of certain churches in Constantinople afforded her a pretext for a later claim to protect Christians throughout the Ottoman state and consequently to interfere incessantly in Turkish affairs. Since the treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji, Turkey has declined with ever-increasing rapidity, and Russia has become an eager candidate for a liberal share of the spoils.

[Sidenote: Catherine and the Partition of Poland]
[Sidenote: First Partition, 1772]

Even while the Turkish War was in progress, Catherine the Great had not lost sight of her Polish policy. Frederick of Prussia had doubtless hoped that she would, in order that he might have a free rein to direct a distribution of territory entirely satisfactory to himself and to Prussia But the wily tsarina was never so immersed in other matters that she neglected Russian interests in Poland. In 1772, therefore, she joined with Frederick and with Maria Theresa of Austria in making the first partition of Poland. Russia took all the country which lay east of the Dona and Dnieper rivers. Prussia took West Prussia except the town of Danzig. Austria took Galicia and the city of Cracow. In all, Poland was deprived of about a fourth of her territory.

[Sidenote: Second Partition, 1793]
[Sidenote: Third and Last Partition, 1795]

The partition of 1772 sobered the Polish people and brought them to a full realizing sense of the necessity of radical political reform. But the shameful and hypocritical attitude of the neighboring sovereigns continued to render their every effort abortive. For another twenty-one years the wretched country struggled on, a victim of selfish foreign tutelage. Although both Frederick and Maria Theresa died in the interval, their successors proved themselves quite as willing to coöperate with the implacable tsarina. In 1793 Russia and Prussia effected the second partition of Poland, and in 1795, following a last desperate attempt of the Poles to establish a new government, they admitted Austria to a share in the final dismemberment of the unhappy country. Desperately did the brave Kosciuszko try to stem the tide of invasion which poured in from all sides. His few forces, in spite of great valor, were no match for the veteran allies, and the defense was vain. "Freedom shrieked when Kosciuszko fell." King Stanislaus Poniatowski resigned his crown and betook himself to Petrograd. Poland ceased to exist as an independent state.

By the partitions of 1793 and 1795, Austria obtained the upper valley of the Vistula, and Prussia the lower, including the city of Warsaw, while the rest—the major share—went to Russia. Little Russia (Ruthenia) and approximately all of Lithuania thus passed into the hands of the tsarina. Russia thenceforth bordered immediately on Prussia and Austria and became geographically a vital member of the European family of nations.

Catherine the Great survived the third and final partition of Poland but a year, dying in 1796. If it can be said of Peter that he made Russia a European Power, it can be affirmed with equal truth that Catherine made Russia a Great Power. The eighteenth century had witnessed a marvelous growth of Russia in Europe. She had acquired territory and a capital on the Baltic. She had secured valuable ports on the Black Sea. She had pushed her boundaries westward into the very center of the Continent.

The rise of Russia was at the expense of her neighbors. Sweden had
surrendered her eastern provinces and lost her control of the Baltic.
Turkey had abandoned her monopoly of the shores and trade of the Black
Sea. Poland had disappeared from the map.

[Illustration: THE ROMANOV FAMILY: RUSSIAN SOVEREIGNS (1613-1915)]