The loyal poets were eager to adopt a new line. Vasilii Petrov, a poet who after the second partition had called Poles the “confidants of Russia,” now turned them into bloodthirsty monsters:
Having trampled on the sacred rights,
They threaten to plunder and raze the temples,
To take their fill of foreign property
And satisfy their greedy hands, mouths, and stomachs.
FOR MOST OF CATHERINE’S RULE, THE UKRAINIANS AND BELARUSIANS of the Commonwealth were defined by religious terminology as adherents of the Greek-Russian—or simply Greek—Church, suggesting that they were Orthodox. But the absolute majority of the “Belarusian nation” that Russia acquired in the partitions was non-Orthodox. This was true not only of the Polish or Polonized nobility, which was Catholic, or the Jews, who were not Christian at all, but even of the majority of the Eastern Slavs—they were Uniates. In the lands annexed to Russia after the second partition, only 300,000 people were Orthodox. More than 2 million were Uniates, while the lands attached as a result of the third partition had almost no Orthodox believers.
In April 1794, Catherine decided to remedy that situation by launching an official campaign to convert the Uniates to Orthodoxy. Her decision was triggered by an appeal from representatives of twenty villages in Right-Bank Ukraine—the battleground between Orthodoxy and the Union since the time of the 1768 uprising—who wanted to abandon the Union and convert to Orthodoxy. Catherine not only granted the request but also suggested it as a model for the “return” to Orthodoxy of other Uniate parishes, by force if necessary. According to a pastoral letter issued at her request, “during the troubled times of Russia, a great part of its subjects who confessed the Greek Orthodox faith, having been torn from the true body to fall under the Polish yoke… witnessed the greatest oppression of the free worship of their faith.” Catherine, claimed the pastoral letter, had returned “to her reign this people of the same tribe.”
Catherine’s own decree, addressed to the governor general of the annexed territories, was much more blunt and explicit than the pastoral letter about the goals of the new policies. She wrote about “the most suitable eradication of the Uniate faith” as a whole, not just the conversion of a few willing parishes. Catherine was prepared for major disturbances and protests against the liquidation of the established church and expected the governor to deal with it. With the support of the police force, he was to ensure that “any disorder and trouble be averted, and that none of the permanent or temporary landowners or spiritual and civil officials of the Roman and Uniate faith dare to cause even the smallest hindrance, oppression, or offense to those who are converting to Orthodoxy. Any such attempt directed against the dominant faith and indicating disobedience to Our will shall be regarded as a criminal offense, subject to trial and entailing confiscation of property until a court decision is reached.”
The empress who had defended the Orthodox of the Commonwealth in the name of religious toleration and had been acclaimed for that by Voltaire suddenly turned into the persecutor of another religion. How to explain this? Although the reference in the pastoral letter to Uniates as people of the same tribe can elucidate the background to her thinking about the connection between religion and ethnicity, the immediate reason should be sought elsewhere. By 1794, in response to the French Revolution and to what she saw as a French-style attack on the authoritarian order coming from Poland and its new constitution, Catherine had abandoned many elements of her earlier beliefs. The decree ordering the eradication of the Uniate faith was issued at the time of the Kościuszko Uprising, whose leaders sought support among the Uniate peasantry. The eradication of the Uniate Church under such circumstances could be regarded as an anti-insurgency measure. Catherine could count on the loyalty of Orthodox priests in the former Commonwealth, but she could hardly trust the Uniate ones.
Catherine’s erstwhile defense of religious toleration was not replaced with a justification of intolerance. What she now claimed to be doing was redressing the previous injustice done to the Orthodox. They had been forcibly converted to the Union by the Polish authorities, and now she was merely trying to bring them back to their ancestral faith. The return to “the faith of fathers and forefathers,” as the conversion campaign was called in official pronouncements of the Russian church and state, proceeded with spectacular success in Right-Bank Ukraine, where almost no Uniate parishes remained by 1796. The farther one went west and northwest, however, the more Uniate priests and parishes refused to convert, despite the pressure applied by the secular and religious authorities. Central Belarus and Volhynia remained largely Uniate. The number of Uniates further increased after the third partition of Poland. Altogether, close to 1.4 million Ukrainians and Belarusians remained Uniate after Catherine’s “reunification” campaign came to a halt following her death in 1796.
THE PROCESS OF MERGING EMPIRE AND NATION UNDER THE AUSPICES of a powerful state began under Peter and was highly developed under Catherine, who employed Enlightenment practices of rational governance to eliminate regional and ethnic particularities, thereby strengthening central control over the empire’s diverse lands. Besides reshaping the administrative structure and institutions of the state, empire-building involved the articulation of a historical mythology, the development of a common language, and the rethinking of the status of Orthodoxy in a multiethnic polity.
As for Russian identity and self-awareness, Catherine’s rule brought about a new understanding of the Russian imperial nation. As increasing centralism broke down regional loyalties and autonomous enclaves such as the Hetmanate, an all-Russian identity emerged. Social norms were also changing: Russians were now not only “sons of the Fatherland” obediently serving the state but also citizens endowed with rights. The Russian imperial outlook was still as opposed to the West as it had been in Elizabeth’s time, but it became less xenophobic.
The empress’s role as protector of Orthodoxy prompted Russia to intervene more than ever before in the Catholic-Orthodox conflict in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but Catherine regarded the Orthodox there as coreligionists, not ethnic compatriots of the Russians. For her, the borders of the Russian nation were coterminous with those of the Russian state. It was only toward the end of her reign that the partitions of Poland, which brought millions of largely non-Orthodox subjects into the Russian Empire, helped introduce ethnicity into official Russian discourse. Catherine and her advisers never accepted ethnicity as the main defining feature of the empire’s new subjects, but those subjects helped lay the foundations for a new understanding of Russian identity in the next century.
The partitions challenged the Enlightenment-era model of Russian imperial identity. Not unlike Ivan III in the fifteenth century, Catherine II claimed new territories in the eighteenth by invoking the historical rights of Kyivan princes. But Catherine faced a much more difficult task than Ivan had when it came to the integration of those lands into the Russian state. The partitions brought into the empire millions of Eastern Slavs (Ukrainians and Belarusians) whom Catherine depicted in her letters and decrees not only as coreligionists but also as people of the same Russian tribe. As most of those prospective Russians turned out to be Uniates, the imperial government refused to adopt a multi-religious model of the Russian nation, launching instead a program of forcible conversion of the Uniates to the faith of their “fathers and forefathers.”
Dictated largely by security concerns in the midst of the Polish uprising led by Tadeusz Kościuszko, the conversion campaign would provide an early model for the Russian authorities’ treatment of the borderland Ukrainian and Belarusian population in the face of the Polish challenge to the stability and unity of the empire for generations to come.
5
THE POLISH CHALLENGE
“ONE POLE IS A CHARMER; TWO POLES—A BRAWL; THREE Poles—well, this is the Polish question,” quipped Voltaire. The Russian Empire acquired more than three Poles as a result of the partitions enthusiastically supported by the F
rench philosophe, and, as for the Polish question, it was presenting an ever greater challenge to its Russian overlord. Catherine II, who did not believe in special treatment of lands annexed to the empire, abandoned the traditional practice of the Russian tsars, who had tolerated broad autonomy for newly acquired territories, including the Hetmanate and the Baltic provinces, for decades or even centuries. The annexed Polish lands were given no special status, which created tension between the imperial center and its new periphery.
Many in the St. Petersburg imperial establishment, including some of those appointed to rule in Poland, were sympathetic to fellow aristocrats in that country and considered the partitions both unjust and imprudent as an assertion of Russian interests in Europe. The sense of guilt toward a conquered but not fully vanquished neighbor was something new for the Russian imperial psyche and presented a special challenge to the rulers. Poland had been a regional power with a highly developed sense of its own imperial mission and an elite loyal to its state and fatherland. A full-fledged political nation, it was not prepared to give up the ideal of independent statehood. The resentment of the Polish nobility, which considered itself culturally superior to the conquerors (much more so than the elite of the Hetmanate had in the seventeenth century), created an additional problem for the traditional modus operandi of the Russian Empire. Its usual strategy had been to make a deal with local elites at the expense of the lower classes and thus establish its supremacy. A deal was made in this case as well, but the local elite was not fully cooperative and occasionally refused to cooperate at all.
The Russian Empire’s Polish question never remained in the purely theoretical realm, limited to the soul-searching of intellectuals. More than once the Poles took arms in hand, not just to make their voices heard or negotiate a better deal with the empire, but to throw off Russian rule altogether and restore the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in its pre-partition boundaries. They were marching forward with their heads turned back. For the Russian Empire, the Poles were dangerous enemies. The advent of nationalist ideology, with its emphasis on linguistic and ethnic particularism, created another obstacle to the successful integration of the annexed territories. The Polish nobles were not only bearers of a political culture opposed to absolutism, and adherents of a religion that the Russian Orthodox elites had always regarded with utmost suspicion, but as Western Slavs were ethnically distinct from the East Slavic core of the Russian imperial nation, and busily establishing the foundations of modern Polish identity based on a distinct history, political culture, language, literature, and religion.
The failure to resolve the Polish question by the traditional expedient of assimilating the elites of the conquered territories forced the Russian imperial elite to reexamine its own identity. It came up with a formula that combined its traditional loyalty to autocratic imperial rule and the dominance of the Orthodox Church with the new concept of nationality. In historiography, that triad came to be known as “official nationality.” It would define Russian imperial nation-building projects for the rest of the century.
NAPOLEON’S INVASION OF RUSSIA IN 1812 WAS OFFICIALLY CALLED the Polish campaign—the second Polish campaign, to be precise. In the first (1806–1807), Napoleon had defeated the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian troops and carved the Duchy of Warsaw out of the Prussian share of the Polish partition. The official goal of the second campaign was to restore the Kingdom of Poland, now including lands from the Russian sphere of the partitions. The implicit and, many believe, primary goal was to stop the Russian Empire from trading with Britain and thereby tighten the French economic blockade of Napoleon’s British enemy. But an economic issue could hardly serve as a battle cry for the French armies or for potential allies in the region, who were ordered or asked to invade the Russian Empire and march all the way to Moscow. The undoing of a major historical injustice through the restoration of the Polish state could and did rouse the martial spirit, inspiring mass Polish participation in Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and lending international legitimacy to the war.
Although the third partition had wiped Poland off the political map of Europe, and the partitioning powers had agreed not to use the country’s name in their titles or in the official names of the lands annexed as a result of the partitions, Poland had retained its place on the mental map of many Europeans—first and foremost, of course, the Poles themselves. Legend has it that upon his defeat at the hands of Russian troops in 1794, the leader of the Polish uprising, Tadeusz Kościuszko, exclaimed in desperation: “Finis Poloniae!” He later denied having said those words, and many Poles indeed refused to consider their country lost. Some of them joined Napoleon’s revolutionary army, fighting in the West Indies, Italy, and Egypt alongside the future emperor. Their marching song, later to become the national anthem of the restored Polish state, began with the words: “Poland is not dead as long as we are alive.”
Napoleon never forgot the loyalty of the Polish legionaries or the ultimate goal for which they were fighting. Addressing the Diet of the Duchy of Warsaw just before the invasion of Russia in June 1812, the emperor recalled the bravery of the Polish detachments in his army and his own readiness to fight for their cause. “I love your nation,” declared the French emperor. “For sixteen years now, I have seen your warriors fighting along with me on the fields of Italy and Spain. I applaud your deeds. I approve of all the efforts that you intend to make, and I will do everything in my power to support your intentions. If your endeavors are unanimous, then you may nourish the hope of forcing your enemies to recognize your rights.”
The intentions and rights Napoleon had in mind were reflected in the appeal prepared a few days earlier by the Polish Diet. It read:
We are restoring Poland on the basis of the right given to us by nature; on the associations of our ancestors; on the sacred right, acknowledged by the whole world, that was the baptismal font of the human race. It is not we alone, tasting the sweetness of Poland’s resurrection, who are restoring her, but all the inhabitants of various lands awaiting their liberation.… Regardless of their lengthy separation, the inhabitants of Lithuania, White Rus’, Ukraine, Podolia, and Volhynia are our brethren. They are Poles, just as we are, and they have the right to call themselves Poles.
Napoleon told the deputies that he could not violate the promises he had given to Austria and the peace he had concluded with her; hence, restoring the Austrian partition to Poland was out of the question. But there seemed to be no problem with the Russian one. “Let Lithuania, Samogitia, Vitsebsk, Polatsk, Mahilioŭ, Volhynia, Ukraine, and Podolia,” said Napoleon, “be inspired with the same spirit that I encountered in Great Poland, and Providence will crown your sacred cause with success.”
Later that month, Napoleon’s Grand Army crossed the Russian border and began its march through the territories annexed by Catherine II from Poland, aiming at the Russian hinterland. As far as the Warsaw Poles were concerned, the war for the restoration of their fatherland and reunification with their Polish brethren in the Russian partition was on. Close to 100,000 Poles entered Napoleon’s army—every sixth soldier serving in his Russian campaign was a Pole. Not surprisingly, the first major military encounter, in late June 1812, took place not between French and Russian troops but between Polish and Russian detachments. What the outside observer saw as the first test of forces between Napoleon and Alexander was in fact a battle between Polish cavalrymen and Cossacks. They were continuing their age-old struggle on familiar turf—the eastern provinces of the former Commonwealth. Although the Cossacks won, they had to retreat. Their whole operation was meant to gain time for the main Russian armies to withdraw to the interior, eventually leading Napoleon to the gates of Moscow.
Napoleon’s invasion and the Russian surrender of Moscow after the inconclusive Battle of Borodino in September 1812 aroused Russian patriotism and stirred anti-French and anti-Polish sentiments that had been building up in Russian society since the start of the Napoleonic Wars. Russian propaganda, spearheaded by the new
state secretary and head of the “Russian party” at court, Admiral Aleksandr Shishkov, reached out for symbols of patriotism and found them in the struggle against the Polish invasion during the Time of Troubles. The manifesto on Napoleon’s invasion issued by Emperor Alexander I called on the “faithful sons of Russia” and “the Russian people, valiant descendants of valiant Slavs,” to rise against the aggressor. “In every noble, let him encounter a Pozharsky, in every religious a Palitsyn, in every citizen a Minin,” wrote Shishkov, recalling the leaders of the resistance to the Polish invasion back in 1612. With Napoleon taking Moscow—the first presence of foreign troops in the capital since the Time of Troubles two hundred years earlier—parallels between the Polish capture of Moscow in 1612 and Napoleon’s in 1812 became inescapable.
What seemed to be the end of Russia in September 1812—the surrender of Moscow to the French army—turned out to be the beginning of the end of Napoleon’s empire. He had expected Russia’s surrender and negotiations, but there was nothing of the kind. The Russians were repeating the strategy used in 512 by the Scythians against the army of Darius the Great of Persia, who chased the Scythian horsemen across the Pontic steppe without getting the chance to fight a decisive battle. The Russians also employed a scorched-earth policy extending from villages and small towns to Moscow itself. Russian agents set the city on fire, forcing the French to protect the Kremlin from the blaze. Napoleon was shocked by this lack of manners on the part of what he believed to be a vanquished enemy. In fact, he had fallen into a trap.
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