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]