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Ambassadors and envoys from Russia to Poland in the years 1763-1794 were among the most important characters in the politics of Poland. Their powers went far beyond the those of most diplomats and can be compared to those of viceroys[1] in the colonies of Spanish Empire, or Roman Republic's proconsuls in Roman provinces. During most of that period[2] ambassadors and envoys from the Russian Empire, acting on the instructions from Saint Petersburg, held a de facto position superior to that of the Polish king, Stanisław August Poniatowski. Backed by the presence of the Russian army within the borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and leveraging the immense wealth of the Russian Empire, they were able to influence both the king and the Polish parliament, the Sejm. According to their demands, the king dispensed the Commonwealth offices among the Russian supporters, and the Sejm, bribed or threatened, voted as the Russians dictated. The agenda of the Permanent Council (Polish government) was edited and approved by the Russian ambassador, and the members of the Council were approved by him.
Their power was also seen in many aspects of the daily life, especially in the Polish capital of Warsaw: for example, a performance in the theatre would be delayed until the Russian ambassador arrived, even if the Polish king himself was present. In another incident, a Russian ambassador who arrived late in the theatre, with the Polish king again present, demanded that the spectacle should be restarted[3]. Eventually this forceful expression of Russian diplomacy, backed by the military might of the Empire, and despite a few setbacks like the Bar Confederation, Constitution of May 3, 1791 and Kościuszko Uprising, achieved its goal of expanding Russian control over most of the Commonwealth territory and population.
Beginning in the second half of the 18th century, the unique political system of the Commonwealth, the quasi-democratic[2] Golden Liberty, was turned into anarchy[3]. The Polish nobility's (szlachta) privilege of liberum veto, first introduced as a safeguard against tyranny of the monarch, allowed any deputy to the Sejm to stop and annul the entire session. This was soon seen by the neighbouring powers - especially Prussia and Russia - as the perfect opportunity to disrupt the Commonwealth from inside, and soon many Sejms were dissolved by a deputy bribed by one of the foreign powers[4] [5]. With an impotent Sejm, the Commonwealth stagnated, as it was impossible to reform the government, raise taxes or increase the size of the army.
In 1717, Russia cemented its position as the dominant force in Poland, in the aftermath of the Great Northern War and amid the growing likelihood of a civil war in Poland between the Polish king August II the Strong and the Polish nobility. Russian tsar Peter I the Great, posing as the conciliator between the Commonwealth king and the szlachta, ordered units of the Russian army to enter Polish territory - using the treaties of alliance from the Great Northern War - and coerced the Polish Sejm of 1717 into accepting his 'compromise'. During that Sejm (known as the Silent Sejm, as only one person was allowed to speak aloud), laws were passed that not only eliminated the possibility of August strengthening his power, but also ensured by means of restricted taxation (and thus a constrained Polish army) that Poland would not be able to interfere with similar Russian interventions in the future. In reality, if not law, the reforms of the Silent Sejm meant that the Commonwealth became a Russian protectorate,[4] [5] [6] and it would be Russian ambassadors and envoys who would be responsible for this territory under the tsar. In 1730 than Russian ambassador to Poland, Karl Gustav von Löwenwolde, was instrumental in the Alliance of the Three Black Eagles (or Löwenwolde's Treaty), an agreement between Commonwealth's neighbours to preserve the dysfunctional state of affairs within it. Russian influence on Poland further increased during the War of the Polish Succession (1733-1738), when Russian military intervention overturned the result of the free election of Stanisław Leszczyński. [7]
Russian influence would not become permanent until the death of
the Polish king August III the
Saxon in 1764. During the free election that followed his
death, one of the Polish magnate families, the Czartoryski's family
party, known as the Familia,
allied itself with Russia and, backed by the Russian army, forced
the election of their relative (and former lover of Russian tsarina
Catherine II the Great) Stanisław August
Poniatowski. The Russian envoy overseeing the Familia's action
and the election of Poniatowski was Herman Karl von Keyserling.
Among other things, to ensure Poniatowski's victory he bribed the
interrex
of Poland, Władysław Aleksander
Łubieński, with a significant sum of 100,000 Russian rubles [8]. The Russian
army entered Poland again under the pretext of protecting Polish
citizens from civil war[9]. With such
support, Poniatowski was soon elected king.
Keyserling, who died in September, was soon replaced by Nicholas Repnin, who would become perhaps the most infamous of the Russian envoys of that period. In order to strengthen the Russian influence, he encouraged the civil war within the Commonwealth, also encouraging the conflict between Protestant and Catholic factions within the Polish nobility. This led to the formation of two Protestant konfederacjas (of Sluck and Toruń) and later, one Catholic (Radom Confederation, led by Karol Stanisław "Panie Kochanku" Radziwiłł) [10].
Before the Sejm of 1767, he ordered the capture and exile to Kaluga of some vocal opponents of his policies[11] [12], namely Józef Andrzej Załuski [13] and Wacław Rzewuski.
Through the Polish nobles that he bribed (like Gabriel Podoski, primate of Poland [14]) or threatened by the presence of over 10,000 Russian soldiers in Warsaw[15] and even in the very chambers of the parliament (EB)[16], Repnin, despite some misgivings about the methods he was ordered to employ[17] [18], de facto dicated the terms of that Sejm[19] [20]. The intimidated Sejm, which met in October 1767 and adjourned till February 1768[21], appointed a commission (the so-called Delegated Sejm) which drafted a Polish-Russian treaty, approved in "silent session" (without debate) on February 27, 1768 [22]. The legislation undid some of the reforms of 1764 under Stanislaw II and pushed through legislation which ensured that the political system of the Commonwealth would be ineffective and easy to control by its foreign neighbours. The liberum veto, free election, neminem captivabimus, rights to form the confederation and rokosz—in other words, all the important old privileges of the nobility, which made the Commonwealth political system (the Golden Liberty) so ungovernable[23]—were guaranteed as unalterable parts in the cardinal laws. [24]
Repnin's Sejm marked one of the important milestones in increasing Polish dependence on the Russian Empire, and its devolution into a protectorate. This dependent position was bluntly spelled out in Nikita Ivanovich Panin's letter to King Poniatowski, in which he made it clear that Poland was now in the Russian sphere of influence.[25]
Nonetheless the Russian intervention led to the Confederation of Bar, which practically
destroyed the ambassador's handiwork. The resulting civil war in
Poland, involving Russia, lasted from 1768 to 1772[26].
For his failure in preventing the formation of Bar
Confederation, Repnin was dismissed. On 22 May 1769 he was
replaced by the envoy and minister Prince Mikhail Volkonsky, a high
ranking officer in the Russian Army who had been stationed in
Poland since 1761. Volkonsky's orders were even more direct; in
1770 he demanded that the Czartoryski family be
exiled from the Commonwealth,
and when King Poniatowski asked what authority the ambassador had
to demand the punishment of foreign citizens, he threatened the
king with the reporting of his opposition to the Russian court.
Kaspar von Saldern, protegé of Nikita Ivanovich Panin, became
the ambassador in April 1771. His service was marked by a
significant change in Russian policy. When the Bar Confederates
attempted to kidnap king Poniatowski on 3 November, 1771, in
Warsaw, it sent a signal that Poniatowski's position was weak and
Poland had not been entirely turned into a Russian protectorate. In
order to protect some of its gains, and with the approval and
encouragement of Prussia and Austro-Hungary,
Catherine II started to consider the first partition of Poland. He fell into disfavor
with Catherine, and after he was excluded from the negotiations
related to the first partition of Poland, he asked for his own
dismissal.[27]
After the treaty of the First Partition, signed in February, was made public on 5 August 1772, Otto Magnus von Stackelberg became the new ambassador[28]. His task was to ensure that the Polish Sejm would ratify the treaty. The Partition Sejm, with many of its deputies bribed by the Russian embassy, indeed ratified the treaty (on 30 September 1773), as well as establishing the Permanent Council - a small body that both promised to reform the inefficient Polish governance and which could be easily controlled by Russia.
In 1776, Stackelberg permitted King Poniatowski to carry out several minor reforms[29], but in 1780 von Stackelberg's protest resulted in the derailing of Zamoyski's Codex, a proposed set of reforms drafted by kanclerz Andrzej Zamoyski which would have strengthened royal power, made all officials answerable to the Sejm, placed the clergy and their finances under state supervision, and deprived landless szlachta of many of their legal immunities. Russia did not want a completely governmentless Poland, as was seen in their support for the Permanent Council, yet the Zamoyski Codex, which offered a chance for the significant reform of the Polish governance, was also not friendly to Russia. Stackelberg also opposed most reforms proposed by Poniatowski from 1778 to 1786[30].
On 27 May 1787, he derailed yet another Polish policy which seemed threatening to Russia. With few major wars in the past decades, the economy of the Commonwealth was improving, and its budget had a notable surplus. Many voices said that the money should be spent on increasing the size, and providing new equipment for, the Polish army. However, as a large Polish army could be a threat to the Russian garrisons controlling Poland, von Stackelberg ordered his proxies in the Permanent Council to spent the money on a different goal: for the huge sum of 1 million zlotys (representng most of the surplus), the Council bought the von Brühl's Palace - and promptly donated it to 'Poland's ally', Russia, to serve as Russia's new embassy.
Nonetheless, von Stackelberg, and the entire Russian control
over Poland, was soon to suffer a major defeat. With Russian
attention being diverted to the Russo-Turkish War, 1787-1792 and the Russo-Swedish War (1788-1790), Catherine
approved some limited reforms in Poland, with the goal of
transforming Poland into a more useful (and efficient) ally[31]. However when
the opportunity for major reform presented itself during the
"Great" or "Four-Year Sejm" of 1788–1792, which opened
on October 6, 1788, and from 1790 — a new alliance between the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Prussia seemed to provide even
further security against Russian intervention[6],
the Polish reformers managed to carry out increasing numbers of
reform despite Stackelberg's opposition[32].
The Polish-Prussian alliance angered Catherine
II, who recalled von Stackelberg and replaced him with Yakov Bulgakov[33]. This,
however, changed little: Russia was still occupied with the
Ottomans, and the Prussians played their own game, further giving
Catherine a pause before ordering any intervention. Bulgakov was
further outmaneuvered by the Polish reformers when King Stanisław August drew closer to leaders of
the reform-minded Patriotic Party (Stanisław Małachowski, Ignacy Potocki, Hugo
Kołłątaj, Stanisław Staszic and others).
Finally the reformers pulled a quasi-coup d'etat, voting for
a new constitution, the Constitution of May 3,
1791, when most of the pro-Russian deputies (Muscovite Party)
were away for the Easter
recess. The Constitution which drastically reformed the
Commonwealth coincided with the end of the Russo-Turkish war. The
members of the Muscovite Party, who felt secure with the previous
status quo
and under Russian protection, formed the Targowica Confederation, and
requested Catherine II to intervene to restore their freedoms[34]. A month after
the Constitution was signed Bulgakov informed the Polish king that
Russian forces were responding to their request and entering Poland
in order to 'restore order' - although in fact they were there to
abolish the constitution which threatened the Russian control over
Poland[7]
[35]. The Prussians
were also appalled at the possibility of strong constitutional monarchy at
their border[8].
Poland forces, numerically inferior to Russians (at about 1:3),
were eventually defeated in the War
in Defense of the Constitution. The Constitution was abolished,
and the Second Partition of Poland took place.
On 16 February 1793 Bulgakov was replaced by Jacob Sievers, envoy and minister. His orders were to ensure the ratification of the treaty of the Second Partition. Russian representatives bribed some deputies and the Russian army's presence influenced the election of their favoured candidates at local sejmiks[36].
At the Grodno
Sejm, the last Sejm of the Commonwealth, any deputies who
opposed the Russian presence or demands were threatened with
beatings, arrests, sequestration or exile [37]. Many deputies
were not allowed to speak, and the main issue on the agenda was the
project of 'Eternal Alliance of Poland and Russia', sent to the
Sejm by Russian Tsarina Catherine the Great, and presented to the
Sejm as the 'request of Polish people' by the Polish supporters of
Russia[38]. Eventually
with all the deputies cowed into agreement by Russian soldiers
present in the chamber, and with none willing to speak out against
the treaty, the Second Partition was declared to have passed by
unanimous vote.[39][40]
In December 1793 Sievers was replaced by the last Russian envoy and ambassador, Iosif Igelström (German: Otto Heinrich Igelström), who already from late 1792 was the commander-in-chief of the Russian forces in Poland. His main goal was to ensure the demobilization of most of the Commonwealth army; however he was interrupted by the Kościuszko Uprising which started in March 1794 - first in the series of several uprisings against the partitioners of Poland that would shake Poland over the next century. In April 1794 during the Warsaw Uprising (1794) Russian garrisons, commanded by Igelström, sustained heavy losses. The Russian embassy had a special fund, Jurgielt, from which hundreds of Polish politicians and officials were receiving a stable yearly pension. During the Uprising, the Russian embassy was captured, and among the captured documents were the lists of various Polish officials on the Russian payroll;[9] many of them - including several prominent leaders of the Targowica Confederation - were later executed. For his failure to prevent the uprising Igelström was demoted; nonetheless, after the Kościuszko Uprising, the Third Partition resulted in the complete destruction of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Most of its territories were partitioned among its neighbors, and the new incarnation of Poland, Congress Poland, was an obvious Russian puppet state [41] [42]. Therefore Russian diplomacy, backed by the military might of the Empire, and despite a few setbacks like the Bar Confederation, the Constitution of May 3, 1791 and the Kościuszko Uprising had achieved its goal, expanding Russian control over most of the Commonwealth territory and population.
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