A Short History of Russia

by Mary Platt Parmele

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.

CHAPTER XIX

NAPOLEON IN EUROPE—ATTITUDE OF RUSSIA

Paul was forty-one years old when he ascended the throne he had for twenty years believed was rightfully his. The mystery surrounding the death of his father Peter III., the humiliations he had suffered at his mother's court, and what he considered her usurpation of his rights—all these had been for years fermenting in his narrow brain.

His first act gave vent to his long-smothered indignation and his suspicions regarding his father's death. Peter's remains were exhumed—placed beside those of Catherine lying in state, to share all the honors of her obsequies and to be entombed with her; while Alexis Orlof, his supposed murderer, was compelled to march beside the coffin, bearing his crown.

Then when Paul had abolished from the official language the words "society" and "citizen," which his mother had delighted to honor—when he had forbidden the wearing of frock-coats, high collars, and neckties, and refused to allow Frenchmen to enter his territory—and when he had compelled his people to get out of their carriages and kneel in the mud as he passed—he supposed he was strengthening the foundations of authority which Catherine II. had loosened.