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.