(Cambridge Concise Histories) Jerzy Lukowski, Hubert Zawadzki - A Concise History of Poland-Cambridge University Press (2006)

The man elected king in September 1764 was Stanislaw Ponia-towski, nephew to Michael and August Czartoryski. In St Petersburg on diplomatic business in .1754-5, he had become the grand duchess Catherine’s lover. He desperately wanted to reform Poland - he even adopted the coronation name of ‘August’ as a sign of his wish to be his country’s renovator, just as Augustus had been of the Roman world. Catherine saw in him, however, nor a reformer, but a pliant, accommodating puppet. Her ambitious plans to succeed where Peter the Great had failed - to thrust back the frontiers of the Ottoman Porte and to project Russian influence into the Holy Roman Empire - posited a manageable, not merely anarchic, Poland. A soft intellectual reliant on her financial bounty (she even paid for Stanislaw August’s coronation) seemed ideal.

The empress sought to further her control by reversing the disadvantaged position of Poland’s Protestants. The r73 3 Convocation parliament had barred them from the Sejm. But Protestants continued to be the recipients of crown estates, local offices, even army officerships, up to and including general rank. They played a key role in the public life of Royal Prussia and its towns. The execution of ten leading burghers in the aftermath of a religious riot in Thorn in 1724 barely dented the dominance of the town’s Lutheran elite. That the overwhelming majority of the Polish nobilit}’ were hostile to the Protestants is unquestionable - yet at a time when Catholic nobles constantly complained at the lack of offices and rewards open to them, their Protestant counterparts continued to play a role in public life far more prominent than that enjoved by religious minorities in countries such as Britain or the Netherlands which regarded themselves as the van of European civilization. Catherine counted on the Protestants to form a dependent, reliable agency. In a Europe whose intellectuals despised the backwardness of the Catholic Church, her supposedly enlightened intervention might even help cleanse the stigma of her murderous way to the Romanov throne. Of course, she went through the motions of improving the position of Poland’s Orthodox - but

Orthodox nobles of any standing had almost disappeared. Her real energies centred on the Protestants.

No Polish politician seriously dared endorse a massive, sudden restoration of the old Protestant position. The empress’s efforts in this respect collided with those of Stanislaw August to implement his own reform agenda. Catherine could accept the shackling of hitherto irresponsible ministers such as the military generalissimos, the hetmani or the treasurers by collegiate boards; she could not accept major restrictions on, let alone the abolition of, the liberum veto - precisely what the king hoped to secure at the 1766 Sejm. The Russian ambassador warned that his troops would tear Warsaw down ‘stone by stone’ unless the assembly reaffirmed the veto in full. Any form of military resistance with the feeble forces available was out of the question. A reluctant and humiliated Sejm gave way, conscious of what the full reaffirmation of the veto meant.

The szlachta could accept even the imposition of a king from Russia. They had so far swallowed transit marches and occasional military intervention. But Catherine’s systematic, sustained application of force to bend their constitution to her plans was something new. The last straw was the Russian treatment of the confederated Sejm of 1767-8. It was only by the use of force, terror and even the deportation of opponents to the Russian interior that Catherine secured her aims: the opening up of the Sejm and Senate to dissenters; a senatorial seat for the Orthodox bishop of Mohylew (a Russian subject, imposed on the Poles); a restructuring of parliamentary procedures, obviating its total disruption, but retaining the veto for all but the most insignificant legislation. To cap it all, the Poles were made to accept a Russian guarantee of their laws and constitution, and even for their territory, binding them hand and foot to their seemingly irresistible neighbour.

Even before the Sejm ended, a group of nobles gathered at Bar, in Podole, in late February 1768, to set up a confederacy aiming explicitly to reverse the new religious settlement. Their further, as yet unstated, plans called for the overthrow of Poniatowski and a restoration of the Saxon Wettins. The Russians easily crushed the initial outbreak; but the Confederacy of Bar opened the way to four years of civil and guerrilla warfare, with uncontrollable international repercussions.