by Will Durant
From Italy came Antonio Rinaldi, who raised two luxurious mansions as gifts from Catherine to Grigori Orlov: the Marble Palace on the Neva, and, near Tsarskoe Selo, the Gatchina Palace, which became the favorite residence of Paul I. And from Italy came Giacomo Quarenghi, who had been fascinated by the Greek temples at Paestum and the masterpieces of Palladio in Vicenza. In 1780 he submitted to Catherine, through Grimm, plans and models for various structures that he hoped to build. Catherine was attracted, and from that date till 1815 Quarenghi raised, in or near St. Petersburg, a profusion of buildings in classic style: the theater of the Hermitage, the Smolny Institute (which he added to the Smolny Monastery of Rastrelli), the Bank of the Empire, the Chapel of the Malta Order, the English Palace at Peterhof, and the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo. This was designed for Catherine’s grandson the future Alexander I, who moved into it in 1793, two years after its completion. “It is one of the masterpieces of eighteenth-century architecture.”108 *
But were there no Russian architects fit to spend Catherine’s rubles? Yes. Hoping to leave a monument to her memory at Moscow, she commissioned Vasili Bazhenev to design a stone Kremlin to replace the brick Kremlin of Ivan the Great. Bazhenev conceived an immensity that would have dwarfed Versailles; those who saw the wooden model—which itself cost sixty thousand rubles—marveled at its architectural excellence. But the foundations laid for it sank as the soil subsided through the action of the Moscow River, and Catherine withdrew from the enterprise. However, she found funds that enabled Ivan Starov to build, on the left bank of the Neva, the Taurida Palace; this splendor she presented to Potemkin to commemorate his conquest of the Crimea.
Whatever the cost of her buildings, Catherine achieved her object. The contemporary Masson wrote: “A Frenchman, after winding along the inhospitable shores of Prussia and traversing the wild and uncultivated plains of Livonia, is struck with astonishment and rapture at finding again, in the midst of a vast desert, a large and magnificent city, in which the society, amusements, arts and luxuries abound which he had supposed to exist nowhere but in Paris.”109 And the Prince de Ligne, after seeing nearly all Europe, concluded that “in spite of Catherine’s shortcomings her public and private edifices make St. Petersburg the finest city in the world.”110 The flesh and blood of ten million peasants had been turned into brick and stone.
X. JOURNEY’S END
Catherine, like rulers throughout the ages, would have explained that since men must die in any case, why should not genius be employed by statesmen to direct those harassed lives and certain deaths to making the country strong and its cities great? Years of power, the challenges of revolt and war, the fluctuations of victory and defeat, had accustomed her to bear unflinchingly the sufferings of others, and to turn aside from the exploitation of the weak by the strong as beyond her means to cure.
Disturbed by a dozen conspiracies to unseat her, and frightened by Pugachev’s revolt, she was terrified by the French Revolution. She bore with it complacently when it promised to be only the overthrow of an idle aristocracy and an incompetent government; but when a Paris mob forced Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to leave Versailles and live in the Tuileries amid an unchained populace—when the Constituent Assembly declared itself supreme, and Louis consented to be merely its executive officer—Catherine shuddered at the encouragement so given to those who sought similar action in Russia. She allowed the clergy to forbid the publication of her once beloved Voltaire’s works (1789);111 she herself soon proscribed all French publications; she had the busts of Voltaire removed from her chambers to a lumber room (1792).112 She banished the idealistic Radishchev (1790), imprisoned the public-spirited Novikov (1792), and established an inquisitorial censorship over literature and plays. When Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were guillotined (1793) she broke off all relations with the French government, and urged the European monarchies to form a coalition against France. She herself did not join in that coalition; she used it to keep the Western powers busy while she completed her absorption of Poland. “Many of my enterprises are unfinished,” she told one of her diplomats; “the courts of Berlin and Vienna must be occupied so as to leave us unfettered.”113
Some vestiges of her early liberalism survived till 1793. In that year a courtier reported to her that Frédéric-César de Laharpe, who had been tutoring her grandsons, was an unregenerate republican. She sent for him and told him of the report; he answered: “Your Majesty knew, before entrusting me with the education of the Grand Dukes, that I was a Swiss, and therefore a republican.” He asked her to examine his pupils, and from their conduct judge his work. But she already knew how well he had taught them. “Monsieur,” she said, “be a Jacobin, a republican, or what you please; I believe you are an honest man, and that is enough for me. Stay with my grandchildren, retain my complete confidence, and instruct them with your wonted zeal.”114
Amid the turmoil she took her last lover (1789). Platon Zubov was twenty-five, she was sixty-one. She wrote to her amant-en-titre , Potemkin: “I have returned to life like a fly that the cold had benumbed.”115 Her new “pupil” proposed a three-pronged attack upon Turkey: a Russian army under his twenty-four-year-old brother Valerian was to cross the Caucasus into Persia and shut off all overland trade between Turkey and the East; another army, under Suvorov, was to go through the Balkans to besiege Constantinople; and Russia’s new Black Sea Fleet, led by the Empress herself, was to capture control of the Bosporus. After years of preparation this epic enterprise was begun (1796); Derbent and Baku were taken; and Catherine looked forward to victories that would complete her program and crown her career.
On the morning of November 17, 1796, she seemed as gay as ever. After breakfast she retired to her room. As time passed and she did not reappear, her female attendants knocked at the door. Receiving no answer, they entered. They found the Empress stretched out on the floor, the victim of the rupture of an artery in the brain. She was twice bled, and for a moment recovered consciousness, but she could not speak. At ten o’clock that evening she died.
Her enemies felt that she had not deserved so merciful a death. They never forgave her the contradictions between her liberal professions and her absolutist rule, her intolerance of opposition, her failure to carry out her proposed reform of Russian law, her surrender to the nobility in her extension of serfdom. Families impoverished by high taxes, or mourning the loss of sons in her wars, did not thank her for her victories. But the people as a whole applauded her for expanding Russia to wider and safer boundaries. She had added 200,000 square miles to Russia’s area, had opened new ports to Russia’s trade, had raised the population from nineteen to thirty-six million souls. She had been unscrupulous in her diplomacy—perhaps, in her absorption of Poland, a little more so than most other rulers of that time.
Her greatest achievement lay in carrying on the efforts of Peter the Great to bring Russia into Western civilization. Whereas Peter had thought of this chiefly in terms of technology, Catherine thought of it principally in terms of culture; by the force and courage of her personality she drew the literate classes of Russia out of the Middle Ages into the orbit of modern thought in literature, philosophy, science, and art. She was ahead of her Christian compeers (excepting the un-Christian Frederick II) in establishing religious toleration. A French historian compared her favorably with Le Grand Monarque:
The generosity of Catherine, the splendor of her reign, the magnificence of her court, her institutions, her monuments, her wars, were precisely to Russia what the age of Louis XIV was to Europe; but, considered individually, Catherine was greater than this Prince. The French formed the glory of Louis; Catherine formed that of the Russians. She had not, like him, the advantage of reigning over a polished people; nor was she surrounded from infancy by great and accomplished characters.116
In the estimate of an English historian Catherine was “the only woman ruler who has surpassed England’s Elizabeth in ability, and equaled her in the enduring significance of her work.”117 “She w
as,” said a German historian, “every inch a ‘political being,’ unmatched by anyone of her sex in modern history, and yet at the same time a thorough woman and a great lady.”118 We may apply to her the magnanimous principle laid down by Goethe: her faults were an infection from her time, but her virtues were her own.
CHAPTER XIX
The Rape of Poland
1715-95
I. POLISH PANORAMA: 1715-64
GEOGRAPHY, race, religion, and politics were the natural enemies of Poland. The country was as large as France, extending in 1715 from the Oder in the west almost to Smolensk and Kiev in the east; but it had no natural boundary—no mountains or broad river—on either front to protect it from invasion; it was named from pole , a plain. It had only one outlet to the sea—at Danzig; and the Vistula that found its exit there was no defense against adjacent Prussia. The nation had no ethnic unity: the Polish majority of its 6,500,000 souls (1715) was in intermittent strife with German, Jewish, Lithuanian, and Russian minorities; here the Teutons and the Slavs came face to face in spontaneous hostility. There was no religious unity: the Roman Catholic majority ruled and oppressed the “Dissidents”—themselves contentiously divided between Protestants, Greek Orthodox, and Jews. There was no political unity, for the jealously sovereign power lay in a Sejm, or Diet, composed exclusively of nobles each of whom had, through the liberum veto , the authority to nullify any proposal of all the rest, and at will bring any session, any elected Diet, to an end. The king was chosen by the Diet, and was subject to “conventions” signed by him as a condition of his election; he could pursue no long-term policy with any assurance of transmitting his crown or receiving steady support. The nobles demanded such limitless power over legislation because each wished to be completely free in ruling his lands and his serfs. But limitation is the essence of liberty, for as soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy. The history of Poland after Jan Sobieski was a chronicle of anarchy.
Nearly all the soil was tilled by serfs in a feudal subjection from which there was no appeal. The master was sometimes kind, but he was always absolute. His serfs not only owed him such part of their produce as he might demand; they were required also to give him gratis two or three days of work each week on his manor. Fortunately the well-watered land was fertile, and the peasants had enough to eat, but Coxe described them as “poorer, humbler, and more miserable than any people we have yet observed on our travels.”1 Their local masters were the lower nobility, or gentry (szlachta*), and these squires in turn were subject to some hundred magnates owning or controlling immense areas. The gentry held most of the executive offices in the state, and theoretically they dominated the Sejm; actually Polish politics was a strife of magnates or their families, manipulating szlachta groups by economic influence or direct bribery.2
In Poland the family still retained its primitive priority over the state. The Radziwills, the Potockis, the Czartoryskis were severally united by a sentiment of family solidarity more intense than any national bond; here patriotism was literally reverence for the father, and above all for the oldest father. The family was strong as an institution because it was the unit of economic production and moral discipline; there was no economic individualism scattering the sons over the country; normally the son remained on the patrimonial estate, subject to paternal command as long as the father lived; the family flourished through that same unity of authority whose absence weakened the state. All the wealth of the family was under centralized patriarchal control; in many cases it grew from year to year through the reinvested profits of exploitation and exportation, and in several cases it exceeded the wealth of the king. Twenty Polish families in the eighteenth century spent, each of them, over 200,000 livres per year on their households.3 Powerful families called their homes courts, with retainers, private armies, numerous servants, and semiroyal displays; so Prince Karol Radziwill, whose estate was half as large as Ireland, gave in 1789 a feast to four thousand guests at a cost of a million marks.4
The most famous of Polish families—so well-known that it was called “the Family”—was the Czartoryskis. It had held princely rank since the fifteenth century, and was related to the house of Jagiello, which had ruled Poland from 1384 to 1572. Prince Kasimierz Czartoryski (d. 1741), vice-chancellor of Lithuania, married Isabella Morstin, who brought a further infusion of French culture into the family. By her he had three children of note: (1) Fryderyk Michal Czartoryski, who became grand chancellor of Lithuania; (2) Alexander Augustus Czartoryski, who became Prince Palatine of “Red Russia”; and (3) Konstantia, who married Stanislas Poniatowski I, and bore to him Stanislas Poniatowski II, the most tragic figure in Polish history.
It was an added distinction of the Czartoryskis that their liberalism grew with their wealth. They had long been known for their humane treatment of their serfs; “if I had been born a serf,” said a contemporary, “I should wish to be the serf of Prince [Alexander] Augustus Czartoryski.”5 They organized schools for children, supplied them with textbooks, built chapels, hospitals, model cottages. To their estate and mansion in Pulawy (near Lublin) they brought teachers and scholars who trained promising youths, from any class, for the service of the state. Politically the Family opposed the liberum veto as making effective government impossible. Against them were ranged many families which felt that the veto was their sole protection against a centralized autocracy. Strongest of these were the Potockis, led by Prince Felix Potocki, who could ride thirty miles in one direction without leaving his land—three million acres in the Ukraine.
Industry and commerce, which in the sixteenth century had shared in making Poland great and its towns prosperous, had been retarded by the hostility of the landowners and their obedient Diet. Many towns were wholly within the private property of a magnate who, fearing the rise of an independent middle class, favored agriculture against industry. The competition of serf handicrafts on the manors had depressed the artisans of the towns. “The ruin of the cities,” wrote Antoni Potocki in 1744, “is so evident that with the single exception of Warsaw the first ones in the country can well be compared to dens of robbers.”6 Grass grew in the streets of Lvov, some city squares had become open fields, and Cracow, formerly one of the great cultural centers of Europe, had declined to a population of nine thousand, and its famous university to six hundred students.7
The decay of the towns was due in part to the Catholic reconquest of Poland. Many of the displaced Protestants had been merchants or artisans; their diminution in all but western Poland (where many Germans remained) left the Polish scene to the landlords; and these were either Roman Catholics or, in the east, Greek Orthodox or Uniates (Catholics using the Eastern ritual but acknowledging the pope of Rome). The Dissidents—Protestants, Greek Orthodox, and Jews, numbering eight per cent of the population—were excluded from public office and the Diet; all suits against them were tried before completely Catholic courts.8 Religious hostility reached the point where, in 1724, in predominantly Protestant Toruń (Thorn), the populace, infuriated by the behavior of a Jesuit student, desecrated the Host and trampled upon an image of the Virgin. Nine of the raiders were put to death. The Protestants of Poland appealed to Prussia, the Greek Orthodox appealed to Russia; Prussia and Russia offered protection, from which they progressed to invasion and partition.
Polish morals resembled the German at table and the French in bed. The peasants were inured to monogamy by care of the soil and their brood, but in the capital it was made difficult by the beauty and the “seductive manners”9 of the women, who did not allow their superior education to interfere with their charm. The ladies of Warsaw, we are told, were sexually as lax as those of Paris.10 Poniatowski assures us that he was a virgin till twenty-two,11 but he adds that such continence was exceptional in his class.—Drunkenness was endemic, and made no class distinctions. Among the peasants it gave periodic amnesia from poverty, hardship, or cold; among the nobles it solaced isolation and ennui; and in all ranks the males looked upon it as not a vice but an accompl
ishment. Pan Komarczewski was honored because he could empty a bucket of champagne at one draft without losing his head or his feet; Poniatowski was warned that he would never be popular unless he got drunk twice a week.12 Hospitality was universal, but it was judged by the amount of food and drink provided for the guests. Sometimes a magnate mortgaged a town to pay for a banquet.
The literate Poles colored the scene with their dress. The peasant, in summer, made shift with shirt and knee breeches of coarse linen, without stockings or shoes, and in winter he bundled himself up with no care for color and no time for art; but the gentry, numbering some 725,000, wore boots, sword, plumed hat, a colored robe of silk or lace, and, around the waist, a broad sash of patterned fabrics in rich hues. This proudly national garb had come up from Islam through the contact of the Lithuanians with Turks in the Ukraine; it reflected the occasional alliance of Poland with Turkey against Austria or Russia; and perhaps it expressed an Asiatic element in Polish manners and character.
Culturally Poland, from 1697 to 1763, was retarded by the indifference of its Saxon kings to Slavic literature and art, and by two devastating wars. The Catholic Church was not only the chief patron of the arts, it was also the dispenser of education and the main repository of learning and literature. It carefully quarantined Poland from the movement of science and philosophy in the West, but within its limits it spread and cultivated knowledge. Józef Zaluski, bishop of Kiev, gathered 200,000 volumes at Warsaw into one of the greatest libraries of the age; in 1748 he opened it to the public and presented it to the nation; meanwhile he himself lived frugally, and sacrificed himself in the struggle to preserve Poland’s independence.