Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  Most of Catherine’s lovers played no role in history and have been long forgotten. Grigory Orlov, who helped kill her husband, is an exception, as is Grigory Potemkin – although the latter’s fame owes less to his naval victories than to a later tsar naming a battleship after him and Eisenstein’s monumental film of the crew’s mutiny. None of her other lovers, however, rose as high, or fell so low, as Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski.

  Poniatowski’s story reflects the turbulent and confused nature of the region on which Catherine had set her sights. His father was the Palatine of Krakow and had been the close companion of the Swedish king Charles XII in his campaigns against the Russian army of Peter the Great; Stanislas himself became an officer in the Russian imperial army before becoming the Polish plenipotentiary ambassador at the imperial court in St Petersburg. There the British ambassador introduced him to the Grand Duchess Catherine Alexievna and the two became lovers. In 1758 he was suddenly recalled home, when the Polish authorities realised he was conspiring to deprive Catherine’s husband of the throne. Catherine quickly replaced him with Grigory Orlov, who then helped her seize power.

  Two years later the Polish throne became vacant. Poland was ruled by an elected monarch and this apparently democratic mechanism led to constant power struggles among the nobles who formed the electorate. Catherine sent in her Cossacks to ‘persuade’ the voters to elect her former lover as King Stanislas II. His was to be the first of a long series of puppet regimes that Russia imposed on eastern Europe, but this puppet promptly cut his strings. Stanislas instituted a series of dramatic reforms reducing the power of the aristocracy and strengthening the authority of the state. Civil war broke out between Stanislas and reactionary nobles supported by Catherine, and in 1772 she used the resultant instability as an excuse to engineer with Austria and Prussia the First Partition of Poland, in which Russia grabbed 36,000 square miles and nearly 2 million inhabitants, mainly ‘White Russians’. Just as the Americans were to do in their western conquests, Russia followed a policy of biting off parts of its victims, signing treaties promising to respect the new frontier, regrouping and then invading again.

  Russia was still treated as a second-class nation by the western European imperial powers, but this was starting to change.

  Britain, France and Spain, who were constantly at war with each other, had no respect for neutrals in general and neutral shipping in particular. The rules of the game were changed on 28 February 1780 when Catherine II signed the Declaration of Armed Neutrality. This asserted that neutral ships should be able to travel freely anywhere, including along the coastlines of nations at war, and that cargo in neutral ships (with the exception of munitions) could not be seized even if it belonged to enemy citizens. What made the declaration more than just a pious aspiration is that Catherine backed it up by force. She dispatched three powerful naval squadrons to the Atlantic, Mediterranean and North Sea. Furthermore she declared that other neutral nations were free to join her for collective security: Denmark, Sweden and Holland were among the first to do so. The Declaration of Armed Neutrality lasted just three years, but Catherine had not only established the reputation of the Russian imperial navy but established significant new principles of international law – principles that were to be followed a quarter of a century later by another, and much newer, imperial power when the US navy intervened decisively in the Mediterranean.

  Catherine was determined to humiliate her former lover, Stanislas Poniatowski, and in 1782 compelled him to accompany her and her latest lover, Potemkin, on their triumphal progress through the newly conquered Crimea. Stanislas, however, continued with his reforms, encouraged by the revolutions in America and France, giving new rights to both the peasants and the increasingly important urban population. Catherine and the Polish aristocracy were appalled, and in 1792 the Russian army poured across the border with the support of Prussia and of reactionary Polish aristocrats. They were met by the hero of the American revolutionary war Tadeusz Kosciuszko.

  Kosciuszko had returned to Poland in 1784, and at first was unable to get a commission in the Polish army because of his liberal views. He settled on his family estate, where in a startling gesture he freed many of his serfs. As Poland under Stanislas became more liberal Kosciuszko returned to favour, helped by the woman with whom he had tried to elope fourteen years earlier (who was by now married to a Polish prince). When Catherine invaded, Kosciuszko took command of 5,000 Polish troops confronting 20,000 Russians at Dubienka near the Austrian border. When the Russians crossed through Austrian territory in an attempt to encircle the Poles, Kosciuszko fought his way out inflicting massive casualties. The battle of Dubienka was Poland’s only ‘victory’ and Stanislas was forced to abandon his reforms. In the Second Partition of Poland Catherine grabbed most of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Kosciuszko escaped to France, where the revolutionary government made him an honorary French citizen.

  Under the Second Partition Prussia and Russia grabbed two-fifths of Poland and Russian troops occupied the rest. Even the Polish nobles who had initially welcomed the invasion objected and, as in America twenty years earlier, the spirit of rebellion stirred. Kosciuszko, returning to Poland, was given command of the rebel forces and led them to victory at Raclawice. However, the forces ranged against him were enormous. As in America the rebels turned to France for support, but this time in vain (even though by distracting Prussia and Austria the Poles enabled the French republic to survive). Kosciuszko lost Krakow and retreated to Warsaw, where he was besieged by Prussian and Russian forces for nearly two months before uprisings elsewhere brought him relief.

  Eventually at the battle of Maciejowice Kosciuszko was wounded and taken prisoner – allegedly proclaiming ‘Poland is not dead while we live’, words now incorporated into the Polish national anthem. The Russian army then completed the destruction of the Polish forces in the traditional manner, attacking the Warsaw suburb of Praga and massacring the entire population. The remaining rebels surrendered, and hundreds were executed or deported to Siberia. King Stanislas was forced to abdicate and eventually died in exile in St Petersburg. Kosciuszko was imprisoned.

  The battles of Fallen Timbers and Maciejowice occurred within two months of each other, and illustrate both the similarities in fact between the two empires and the differences in perception. Maciejowice is still remembered as one of the key events in eastern European history; no serious history of the region can fail to dwell on its significance. Fallen Timbers on the other hand, when it is remembered at all, is just one more of the many minor skirmishes that marked the westward march of civilisation. In reality Fallen Timbers was one of the most important battles ever fought on the North American continent.

  Both battles, Fallen Timbers and Maciejowice, resulted in devastation for the losers. In the Treaty of Greenville the natives were forced to give up much of the Midwest from Ohio to Michigan. In the Third Partition of Poland, Poland-Lithuania was removed from the map of Europe in the words of the treaty ‘now and for ever’. Austria, Prussia and Russia carved up the territory between them. Russia took the old Grand Duchy of Kurland from where the Empress Anna had come exactly seventy years before.

  The difference between the two conflicts was not in the fighting or the subsequent peace settlement but in the differing population dynamics. The Shawnee and other tribes, not particularly numerous before Fallen Timbers, were simply swamped afterwards. Native villages were replaced by cities like Chicago, Cleveland, Toledo and Detroit. Had the natives been victorious at Fallen Timbers it is possible that the history of the world would have been very different. If the British forces stationed just a few miles away at Fort Miamis had come to the aid of their native allies the Americans could have been denied a victory. Almost certainly the United States would have agreed to the creation of a native buffer state north of the Ohio between them and the British pushing south from Canada. Such a state would probably have been short lived, but rather than being conquered by America it might well have chosen to be
annexed by the British; thousands of migrants to the New World may have settled in the Canadian provinces of Illinois and Michigan and in the great Canadian cities of Chicago, Detroit and, in succeeding decades, Seattle and even San Francisco. However, the natives lost and the resultant demographics made it impossible to ever conceive of their reversing the tide of history. In Poland on the other hand the Poles remained, and the tide was free to flow back and forth again and again as history unrolled.

  The eradication of Poland was Catherine the Great’s final triumph, and the next year she died. The daughter of a minor German noble had changed the face of Russia for ever. Having destroyed Poland, as she thought, it is another of history’s ironies that her Prussian birthplace, Stettin, is now the Polish city of Szczecin.

  The nature of any society is often illustrated by the way power is transferred from one leader to the next: simple inheritance or bloody coup, peaceful election or violent revolution, dynasty or democracy. Between the death of Catherine the Great in 1796 and the murder of the last tsar in 1917 there were six Russian tsars and twenty-eight US presidents. The American system by and large provided a means of ensuring the peaceful transfer of power from one leader to the next and the peaceful transition from one political creed to another (with the glaring exception of the civil war). Three of the twenty-eight presidents were assassinated, but in each case by deranged fanatics rather than as part of a calculated seizure of power. In contrast three of the six tsars met violent ends, the first being Catherine’s successor – murdered in 1801 in a palace power struggle.

  Catherine’s murdered husband, Peter III, had not been the most intelligent of men, but her son and successor, Tsar Paul, was worse. (This does not imply a genetic link: Catherine’s husband was almost certainly not her son’s father.) Catherine herself recognised her son’s unsuitability. She wanted her grandson Alexander to succeed but had not got around to formalising the arrangement when she died. Paul’s five-year reign started bizarrely (he had his father’s skeleton exhumed and laid alongside his mother’s body) and ended violently when he was assassinated by a group of guards officers. Alexander succeeded him as Catherine would have wished.

  The dawning of the nineteenth century saw the arrival of the last batch of Romanov tsars, the Alexanders and Nicholases (Alexander I, Nicholas I, Alexander II, Alexander III and finally Nicholas II). It would be simplistic to say that the Romanov line deteriorated as the century went by, but it certainly started with one of the towering figures of world history (Alexander I was the only great tsar not to be labelled Great, perhaps because the sobriquet Alexander the Great had already been taken) and ended with the vacillating Nicholas II’s abdication and murder.

  Each of the five tsars was different, but through the whole century a consistent picture emerges: an ebb and flow of timid reform and draconian but ineffective reaction at home, and abroad the constant expansion of empire. The pattern of reform and repression can be summarised very simply:

  • Alexander I (1801–25): reformer; became religious reactionary

  • Nicholas I (1825–55): thorough reactionary

  • Alexander II (1855–81): emancipated the serfs but became reactionary

  • Alexander III (1881–94): thorough reactionary

  • Nicholas II (1894–1917): forced into reform and abdication.

  If imperialism is one element of continuity in Russian history, over the final century of the Romanov regime this pattern of creeping reform and panicked reaction is another.

  One of the first actions of Catherine’s successor, the short-lived Tsar Paul, was to release Tadeusz Kosciuszko. Still recovering from his wounds, Kosciuszko travelled to the United States where he was welcomed as a returning hero and given a stipend by Congress, but he remained at heart a European and moved back to France. Kosciuszko’s fame literally towers over others – Australia’s highest mountain is named after him – but the two figures who were truly to tower over the early nineteenth century were now striding on to the European stage. One, Napoleon, everyone has heard of; the other, Tsar Alexander I, is much less well known, but in the end it was Alexander who brought down Napoleon.

  Napoleon and Alexander

  Napoleon left his mark on nearly everything he touched, from the principles of European law to the minutiae of weights and measures, and he reinforced French delusions of grandeur and Russian paranoia. But in some ways his most lasting legacy was to double the size of the United States of America.

  Americans were outraged when waning Spain ceded Louisiana to powerful France, but Napoleon was more interested in suppressing a slave rebellion in the wealthy French West Indies than in trying to enforce claims over 828m square miles of what was largely wilderness. Although France now laid claim to an enormous territory encompassing all or part of modern Montana, North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, Napoleon soon abandoned his initial dreams of mightily extending the French empire in North America. President Jefferson was able to purchase the whole of French Louisiana for just $15m in cash and cancelled debt. The American envoys who negotiated the Louisiana Purchase had been intending to buy a much smaller area, indeed they had no authority to make the deal they eventually agreed, but Napoleon needed money to finance his campaigns in the east. After much debate the US Congress gave their retrospective approval. The United States assured its generally unhappy new citizens that they were fortunate that it preferred ‘justice to conquest’ – preferred purchase to conquest might have been more apposite.

  There remained one problem for the US negotiators – how to raise the cash. The problem was solved by the British banker Alexander Baring, who arranged a loan of $11.25m in the form of twenty year bonds paying 6 per cent interest; Alexander Hamilton’s insistence twenty years earlier on honouring the revolutionary war debt paid off, as the credit rating of United States was now rock solid. Napoleon accepted the bonds and promptly sold them to raise cash; ironically the largest purchaser was the Russian tsar. The wealth of the Romanovs ultimately made possible not only Napoleon’s assault on their empire but also the massive expansion of the empire that in the next century would surpass theirs to dominate the world.

  When Napoleon staged his coup d’état in November 1798, Alexander’s father Paul was still tsar. It would be difficult to think of two societies further apart than tsarist Russia and revolutionary France, but Tsar Paul believed he sensed a kindred spirit in Napoleon. France was disintegrating into chaos as the terror of the guillotine was followed by virtual civil war. Tsar Paul was not alone in seeing the need for a voice of authority to lift France out of chaos; as so often, a military strongman seemed to be the answer. Tsar Paul’s admiration for Napoleon was one of the factors that divided the Russian emperor from his people, and eventually led to his assassination. Alexander came to the throne determined to reverse his father’s pro-French policy. The stage was set for conflict on a massive scale.

  As so many times before and after, Poland was central to Russia’s priorities. The overwhelming characteristic of Russia’s attitude to the outside world was fear of invasion – dating right back to the first Slav tribes, through the Mongol period and more recently invasion from Poland. Catherine had determined to remove the Polish threat by dismembering the Polish commonwealth and dividing it between Prussia, Austria and herself. Alexander had a different agenda. He wanted to build on Catherine’s imperial legacy by reuniting Poland as part of an expanded Russian empire. Napoleon also had his sights set on Poland, and his war chest was swollen by selling France’s North American possessions. The clash between the two men produced the catastrophic French invasion, which confirmed all the worst fears Russia had about the rest of the world.

  The two opponents could not have been more different physically: Napoleon short and stout, Alexander tall and handsome. Compared with the sixty-five-year-old Catherine the Great and the near-insane Paul, the new tsar, just twenty-eight, was the Princess Diana of his day – and he knew
it. Ignoring more experienced and cautious voices he decided to personally lead his armies into battle at Austerlitz in Bohemia. Napoleon won a stunning victory. (The battle is usually described as being between French and ‘Austro-Russian’ forces; the reality is that most of the Austrian army had already been smashed at Ulm and Russian losses outnumbered Austrian by three to one.) Napoleon’s armies went on to occupy Berlin and Warsaw. After the disaster at Austerlitz Alexander decided to let his generals take command, but they did no better; following a winter campaign in Poland, Russia suffered an even greater defeat at Friedland and Alexander was forced to make peace. Napoleon and Alexander met on a raft in the middle of the river Niemen to sign the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807.

  In an uncanny prefiguring of the Hitler-Stalin pact 132 years later the treaty contained a secret annexe allowing Alexander to occupy Finland, which he invaded the next year. Finland became a grand duchy within the Russian empire, with Alexander himself the grand duke. Alexander was also expanding on other fronts, taking territory from Persia and annexing Bessarabia after a six year war with Turkey. Important as these gains were for Alexander, it was the competition with Napoleon that presented both the greatest threat and the greatest opportunity, and the place where both threat and opportunity were most apparent was once again Poland.

  Under the Treaty of Tilsit Russia had agreed to the creation of a French puppet state, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, which included those parts of Poland not controlled by Russia. Napoleon immediately started recruiting a Polish army that could have only one objective: moving east. Napoleon turned to the hero of the American Revolution and Poland’s battles with Russia, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who was now living in exile in France, and offered him command of the Polish Legion. Kosciuszko demanded a commitment to Polish sovereignty, something the French emperor had no intention of giving, and the two men went their separate ways.