In this year of 1757 the studious Czartoryskis decided that if Stanislaw was ever to become king, he had better learn kingly manners, and they arranged for him to be sent to St. Petersburg to catch a taste of court life. He arrived there one snowy day, a twenty-five-year-old handsome diplomat with good manners and a command of French, German and Russian; within a week of his arrival he had attracted the serious attention of a headstrong, beautiful German noblewoman, Sophia Anhalt-Zerbst, who would be known to history under a more glamorous name, and within the second week he was in bed with her.
They enjoyed a passionate love affair: sleigh rides over frosted fields, with wolves howling in the forest; a duel in military barracks; concerts at court; and when spring came, endless bucolic picnics. Young Sophia obtained from this flattering attention a strengthening of her ego; Poniatowski gained notoriety as her Polish lover, a young man of enormous promise, and it was here in the Russian court that he was first publicly mentioned as a possibility for the Polish throne. ‘With Russian help,’ Sophia said several times, ‘you could become king.’
‘And how would I get Russian help?’ he asked.
‘Through me,’ she replied.
‘You’re a German,’ he said.
‘I intend to be a Russian,’ she said with a grimness he had not observed when they were in bed.
The possibility that she might help him to the throne burgeoned spectacularly in 1762 when the tough old Empress of Russia, Elizabeth, the daughter of Peter the Great, died. This meant that by a series of improbable events, Sophia Anhalt-Zerbst’s pitiful husband, Peter, became czar, in which position he proved himself as incompetent as he had been in bed. His brief rule of 185 days was so inept, so totally chaotic that Sophia had to take steps to protect her interests. Rallying about her a group of officers, many of whom had shared her favors, she proclaimed herself Empress and Autocrat of all the Russias; as Catherine the Great she would rule for thirty-four tumultuous years. Eight days after her self-coronation her husband was found murdered.
Young Poniatowski trembled with excitement as these events unfolded, and imagined himself Catherine’s new consort—in Russia, husband of the czarina; in Poland, king—and he made plans along these lines. But Catherine had moved far beyond her interest in this rustic Pole; she was now so enamored of an authentic count, Grigorii Orlov, that poor Poniatowski became an embarrassment; he was hustled out of Russia without wife or crown.
However, his ambitious uncles in Pulawy did not intend to allow this unique opportunity for family advancement to slip through their fingers. Intimate friendship with a czarina, even though it had evaporated, was negotiable, and they sent emissaries to St. Petersburg outlining the advantages which would accrue to Russia if Catherine threw her considerable support to Stanislaw: ‘If he is not elected King of Poland, some German or Austrian will be, greatly to your loss. If you help him to the throne, you will have bought yourself a constant ally.’
Catherine repaid her former lover in a most dramatic way. When the Saxon king died, last of a pathetic chain of bumblers, the magnates of historic and distinguished lineage like the Lubonskis and Radziwills refused to allow upstarts like the Czartoryskis and Zamoyskis to put one of their members on the throne; as so often before, the Polish magnates would much rather see a weak German or Frenchman or Portuguese as king than a strong Pole, and they made it clear that young Poniatowski was not acceptable. He and his family seemed to have lost their bold gamble.
But Catherine was unwilling to see her one-time favorite abused, especially when he might prove to be of service to her in the future, so after a disgracefully protracted interregnum, in which five nations pressed large sums of money upon the voting magnates, she told her advisers: ‘We cannot maintain a festering Poland on our doorstep.’ As a reward for Poniatowski’s love, she dispatched a full Russian army to the place in Poland where the magnates were conducting their circus. Surrounding the voting area, the Russians let it be known that Catherine insisted upon the election of Poniatowski and that if any magnates refused to abide by her wishes, they would be shot. In this crude and even brutal manner, Poland elected the king who would prove to be her last.
So Stanislaw August ascended the throne thinking that Catherine had awarded it to him because she still loved him, and he told his uncles: ‘With her support we can achieve all we dreamed of. A bright new day has dawned for Poland.’
He miscalculated dreadfully. Catherine, watching the debacle in Warsaw from her command post in St. Petersburg, chuckled with the knowledge that she had solved her Polish problem so easily: ‘Poniatowski will prove a miserable king. He has the heart
of a poet. He proved that many times. But he’s weak. He knows not his own mind. He will be despised by the senior magnates because he’s so obviously nouveau riche. And in the end he will destroy the nation he loves.’
‘What will happen to Poland?’ an adviser named Fyodor Kuprin asked.
‘It will break into a thousand pieces,’ Catherine said. ‘And you are to be there when it happens, my dear Kuprin. To pick up our share of the pieces.’ When he bowed obediently, she added: ‘Go there quickly, Kuprin, and encourage it to fall apart.’
It can be seen from this peculiar chain of events that Venus proved as adroit as Mars in altering the destiny of nations, but the scandalous affair with Catherine the Great represented only half the goddess’ intervention, with the second episode the more interesting. The Czartoryski uncles recommended that in order to reinforce the concept of dynasty, with members of the family inheriting the throne perpetually, it would be prudent for King Stanislaw August to marry one of the Czartoryski girls, a somewhat heavy, gawky young woman his own age named Izabella. She was not from one of the historic families, nor was she what even her friends could call a beauty; what was worse, she was already spoken of in the Pulawy district as a young woman with a sharp mind of her own.
The uncles made the embarrassing mistake of spreading the rumor—‘The king is going to marry Izabella’—and there was even speculation as to when the wedding was to be. But the king, having known the splendor of the Russian court and the excitement of a love affair with a czarina, could not imagine himself wedded to a drab like Izabella, and he rejected her: ‘Too plain. Too lacking in courtly graces.’ He chose instead a woman with a lineage more distinguished, a face more standard and a mind more vapid, with tragic consequences which would become apparent only thirty years later.
In the year 1771, after Catherine the Great had done everything possible to weaken Poland and prevent King Stanislaw August from instituting the reforms the Czartoryski-Zamoyski cabal proposed, a strategy in which she was supported by Prussia and Austria, it became apparent to Poland’s neighbors and to Europe generally that the amorphous nation surrounded by great powers was no longer viable. Prussian diplomats sent messages to Russia: ‘As long as Poland is allowed to exist, she will form a danger spot between us,’ and Russian diplomats wrote to Austria: ‘The time approaches when we should settle the Polish question lest it become a bone of contention between us,’ and Austria sent a démarche to Prussia: ‘If you and Russia are prepared to settle the Polish question once and for all, we will join you.’
What animosity did these three powers have toward Poland? There were religious differences—Poland was devoutly Roman Catholic; Russia was Orthodox Catholic, with all the bitterness which that implied; and Prussia was Lutheran—but even such fundamental contrasts had rarely caused open breaks. Economically the interests of the four nations interlocked and provided no cause for warfare or invasion. Dynastic struggles would be eliminated with the establishment of a Czartoryski-Poniatowski ruling family, and since each of the adjoining nations had conspicuously larger armies than Poland’s, she posed no military threat.
But even so, the danger she represented to the others was real, and each of the great powers sensed it. Poland loved freedom; it was a restricted freedom, to be sure, and it applied only to the very rich, but nevertheless it was freedom. Specifically,
every incident in Polish history testified to the nation’s determination to avoid autocracy and dictatorship. King Jan Sobieski had been a noble king, no doubt about it, and he had saved Poland, but the nation did not want his inept son inheriting the throne. Nor did Poland want to spend its good money supporting a large army which might, like the armies of ancient Rome and modern Turkey, become the agents of repression.
Very rich people—in all nations—can be divided into two categories; those with brains and those without. Those with brains make a great effort to hold on to every penny they have while preaching to the general population that freedom and dignity and patriotism are possible only under their protection; in this way they elicit the support of the very people they hold in subjection. The magnates of Poland used this tactic brilliantly, preaching loudly: ‘The most insignificant member of the gentry with one horse and sword is the equal of the most powerful magnate in his castle,’ while at the same time depriving landless gentry of almost all rights and treating them with contempt. The peasant was kept happy by being assured that it was the magnate who defended Christianity. The townsman, who was allowed no rights whatever, was reminded: ‘It is the magnate who protects your freedom and your shop.’ And all were told repeatedly: ‘If the magnate is left free to accumulate his great wealth, you can be sure that some of it will sift down to you.’
Rich people without brains, such as those in France who were heading blindly into a revolutionary debacle, saw no reason to defend themselves with words and built no philosophical justification for their position of privilege. ‘Let them eat cake’ would soon be their response to demands for freedom. No Polish magnate, in public, ever uttered such inflammatory words, although Janusz Radziwill, father-in-law of Count Lubonski, did one day proclaim during a drinking bout at Castle Gorka: ‘The petty gentry, those who clutter the palaces of the magnates, jumping at every command, they’re nothing but horse manure. And the peasants whom some of our fools worry about, they’re the ugly little beetles that burrow in the dung.’ But such opinions were kept to the privacy of the great halls, where they were believed and acted upon.
And yet, despite all its cynicism, Poland was a democracy; it did know freedom, and its gentry were both more numerous than in any other nation of the time and more involved in the rights of government. It was the nation’s misfortune to espouse these relative freedoms at the precise time when her three neighbors were developing the most powerful autocracies Europe had known for a thousand years. The Habsburgs in Austria, the Hohenzollerns in Prussia and the Romanoffs in Russia were perfecting techniques which would keep them in dictatorial power for more than a century, constantly enlarging their prerogatives at the expense of the burgher and the peasant. At the precise time when good-hearted King Stanislaw August was honestly attempting to improve the lot of his peasants, Catherine was depriving hers of what few privileges they had, and she would not stop until ninety-seven percent had been driven into the most abject serfdom. To Russia, which was enforcing such a cruel dictatorship, it was offensive for neighboring Poland to strive to build a workable democracy, for if the Polish worker attained even the slightest freedom, it might encourage the Russian to attempt the same, and that could not be tolerated. Poland must be crushed.
Adroitly Catherine enlisted Prussia and Austria in her plan, and together they devised a program in which the internal weaknesses of Poland could be cleverly used to destroy her, and in the winter of 1771 three foreign diplomats convened at the Granicki palace in Warsaw to ensure that destruction.
‘Poland’s grief,’ said the Prussian minister, addressing the committee that would decide how the country should be divided, ‘is that no other nation can take her seriously.’
‘Quite right,’ the Austrian ambassador agreed. ‘Three times now they’ve elected two different kings at the same time, and the ultimate winner had to be decided by warfare. Preposterous.’
‘One would think,’ said the Russian agent, Fyodor Kuprin, ‘that they would have learned from our history. One of the worst things that can happen to a nation is an interregnum. That fearful period when no one knows who is to be the next king.’
‘With every election Poland has that,’ the Prussian said. ‘We would never permit it in our country.’
‘I disagree with you, sir, on your basic point,’ the Austrian ambassador said reflectively. ‘Poland could have survived dual kings the way Rome survived two Popes. And could have weathered the interregnums. Other nations have. But no country could exist for long with the liberum veto. The day that started, Poland was doomed.’
‘No,’ said the Russian. ‘She could have survived even that monstrous wrong if she had defended herself.’ Turning to the German, he asked, ‘How big is Prussia? I mean in people?’
‘Two and a half million.’
‘And you support an army of a hundred and forty thousand.’
‘We do. At great cost, but we do.’
‘And what is the population of Poland?’
‘About twelve million,’ said the Austrian.
‘But has an army of only eighteen thousand.’
‘In truth,’ said the Prussian, who knew about such matters, ‘it’s an army of eleven thousand. They tell the king it’s eighteen thousand and he pays for eighteen thousand, but there is so much deception and falsification.’ The minister shook his head. ‘In Prussia they would all be shot.’
‘They do our work for us,’ the Austrian said, and then, without philosophical preparation of any kind, he asked bluntly: ‘Are we to partition the entire country, so that nothing remains …’
The German laughed, a thin-lipped, grudging laugh, more in contempt than jollity: ‘You know what my king once said of Poland? “Let us eat it as we would an artichoke, leaf by leaf.” I no longer subscribe to that. Let us with one stroke finish this pitiful country, each of us taking his just share.’
‘No,’ said Fyodor Kuprin, who had a clever, devious mind. ‘Russia wants a truncated Poland to stand forever, no strength of her own and subservient to whatever we three decide, but existing.’ He paused, either to find the right French words to explain his position or to allow time for the others to appreciate the gravity of what he was about to say. ‘We feel it would be best to retain something called Poland as a permanent buffer between Russia and Germany, between Russia and Austria.’
The German representative was a tall, thin man skilled in negotiation, Baron Ottokar von Eschl, whose family had served the German states for centuries and who had acquired from his hard-thinking ancestors a distinct vision of what eastern Europe should be. Only forty-one years old, he had many reasons to believe that Poland would never be viable, regardless of how much land the present partition allowed her. ‘There is no need in the future history of Europe for an entity called Poland. If we offer a partial solution now in 1771, we shall have to come back in 1781 and finish it, and if we offer another partial in 1781, we will be called back to our task in 1791. Let us erase the foolishness now, once and forever.’
He found no support for this daring proposal: Kuprin adhered to his belief that eastern Europe needed Poland as a buffer, and to Von Eschl’s surprise, the Austrian ambassador said that he would have moral qualms about eliminating a free nation entirely.
Von Eschl was sharp in his rejection of that timorous attitude: ‘Prussia is Lutheran. Russia is Orthodox. Only Austria is Roman Catholic, and I think, sir, that that colors your attitude.’
‘It certainly does!’ the Austrian agreed with surprising enthusiasm. ‘Poland is a Christian country deserving of Christian rights.’
‘So you will carve off a small piece for Austria—’ Von Eschl began, but Kuprin interrupted: ‘Not so small, either,’ and Von Eschl concluded: ‘You’ll take some but not all?’
‘I think that represents a significant moral difference,’ the Austrian said, but Von Eschl was still reluctant to concede that Prussia’s proposal had failed: ‘Is it settled, then? Austria and Russia refuse to allow total elimination?’
However, when those two plenipotentiaries nodded, he acquiesced with a graciousness he did not often display: ‘So be it. A partial cutting away. But in years to come, please remember what I prophesied this day. We three will return to this table, and sooner than you imagine, to complete our task. Poland is doomed, but we allow her a short breathing space before the death rattle sets in.’ Amiably he rose, shook hands with his colleagues, and said brightly: ‘Let’s bring out the maps.’
This meeting, which would initiate the dismemberment of Poland, took place in the very heart of Warsaw, in the Granicki palace, and when the large oak table was cleared and Von Eschl had spread his carefully drawn map, the others gasped, for the Prussian cartographers had awarded themselves all of western Poland including Warsaw, with the huge expanses of the east going to Russia and an insultingly small section in the south to Austria. No entity called Poland remained. But before the others could point out that this total elimination was precisely what they had rejected, Von Eschl crumpled his map and threw it on the floor, saying with a cold smile: ‘Obviously, that’s not what we want … at this time.’
When Kuprin revealed Russia’s map, both Von Eschl and the Austrian ambassador were visibly surprised, for the area to be absorbed by Russia was astonishingly small, not much larger than what would be given to Austria, but as the three men studied the map, Von Eschl began to appreciate the cleverness of Russia’s proposal. ‘You win Poland’s sympathy by taking little, but from your foothold, you intend to dominate all.’
Kuprin smiled. He was fifty years old, a man who had served on many delicate missions and who knew that he could not hoodwink this clever Prussian. ‘To dominate what’s left of Poland? Isn’t that what we all aspire to?’
The three plotters interrupted their map study to discuss this interesting point, each disclosing what plans his nation had for the disciplining of Poland, but after a few exchanges Von Eschl said with some impatience: ‘Let us see the Austrian map,’ and when it was spread on the table, he saw that to a marked degree it resembled Russia’s.