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

Targowica’s leadership embarked on an orgy of score-settling and self-enrichment. Poniatowski’s accession to the Confederacy, encouraged by his own ministers, in the hope that he could restrain its excesses, brought him only an opprobrium from which his memory has not yet recovered. It was clear within weeks that, even backed by Russian troops, the Targowica confederates were utterly incapable of providing effective rule in Poland-Lithuania.

The solution was simple: another Partition. Catherine’s latest lover, Platon Zubov, and his friends were all too eager to enrich themselves with the Polish Ukraine. The empress herself had gone fully native and decided that it was her historic mission to reunify the old Rus’ lands, so many of which still lay inside the Rzeczpos-polita's borders. Prussia could scarcely wait for a deal: since April 1792, it had been supporting Austria in the war against revolutionary France, in the belief that the democratic rabble who had taken over would provide easy pickings. Instead, in September, that rabble turned back the Prussians at Valmy. A humiliated Frederick William looked to Poland for ‘compensation’ for his trouble. Behind the back of the Austrians, who were committed to defending their possessions in the Netherlands against the French, the Prussians and the Russians signed a second treaty of Partition in St Petersburg on 23 January 1793. Catherine would take an enormous slab of land between the Dvina in the north and the Dniester in the south. Frederick William would acquire a triangle of territory between Silesia and East Prussia. A little buffer-state would be left - for how long? Prussian troops began to enter Poland on 24 January, without even waiting for news of the agreement to be confirmed.

The brutal pantomime of the 1773-5 Sejm was repeated at the parliament summoned to the Lithuanian town of Grodno (Warsaw was deemed too subversive) in June 1793. Consent to the cessions and a new constitutional package, formally reducing Poland to the status of a subservient Russian ally, was extracted from the assembly by the end of September. The rump state of some 4 million inhabitants remained under a Russian occupation which few doubted could be anything other than a prelude to final partition. In desperation, some Poles looked to revolutionary France for support; some even dreamed of a genuinely national uprising. General Tadeusz Košciuszko, who had played a distinguished role in the war of American Independence (on the colonists’ side), had good connections in France and had given sterling service against the Russians in the unhappy war of 1792, was chosen to head the insurrection. The rising itself was precipitated by a wave of Russian arrests and proposals to scale back the Polish army - demobilized men were to be pressed into Russian service. It began in Krakow on 25 March 1794. Even after Košciuszko’s tactical victory over a small Russian force at Raclawice on 4 April, it should have been rapidly snuffed out by the more numerous Russian veterans. But the news of the victory electrified Poland - not since Sobieski had the Poles won a set-piece encounter against a foreign army. Warsaw rose in bloody revolt and expelled the Russian occupiers. Wilno followed suit. Frederick William II, scenting easy victory, joined the Russians. Their combined forces defeated Košciuszko at Szczekociny in June. The Prussians went on to take Krakow but the siege of Warsaw which they undertook with the Russians ended in failure. Lack of heavy artillery, mutual mistrust and an uprising in his newly annexed Polish lands caused Frederick William to break off his operations in early September.

Košciuszko hoped that if the peasantry could be rallied to the cause of independence, revolutionary France might be persuaded to lend its assistance. But unless centuries of serfdom were overturned, the peasantry would never furnish enthusiastic support. Equally, Košciuszko could not fight without the szlachta and few of these were prepared to welcome the overturning of the only social and economic system that they knew. They wanted an independent

22 Poland that has disappeared. Two views of the Lubomirski palace in Rowne (now Rivne), Ukraine.

(a) The sketch by Napoleon Orda (1807-83) shows the palace, built in the 1720s by one of the greatest aristocratic families of Poland, the I.ubomirskis, as it was in the early 1870s. Orda spent some three years travelling around the territories of the partitioned Commonwealth, making sketches of buildings and monuments in an attempt to keep a sense of Polish national spirit alive.

(b) The photograph shows the same palace, as it was in T925. Its location placed it in some of the most bitterly contested lands between Russian and Austrian forces during the First World War, when it served as an Austrian hospital. It was devastated in 1920 during the Polish-Bolshevik war, and destroyed by fire in T92-. Now nothing remains.