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

As things stood in the mid-i79os, Poland’s prospects were very bleak indeed. For many of its political and intellectual elite their once free and glorious republic, like the great polities of the ancient world, had disappeared for ever; many educated Poles doubted at first whether their nation could survive without a state. The Austro-Prussian-Russian convention of January 1797, removing the very name of Poland from official usage, seemed only to confirm such a pessimistic verdict. The leaders of the movement of national regeneration of 1788-94 had to flee abroad or languished in prison: Košciuszko in St Petersburg until 1796, and Koflątaj in the Austrian fortress of Olmiitz until 1803. All attempts to renew armed resistance within Poland between 1796 and 1798 were likewise brutally crushed. At the same time, many men of property felt that to save their fortunes they had little choice but to adapt to the new political realities and to swear fealty to their new masters. Two young Czartoryski princes were sent as supplicants to the Russian court in the hope of recovering their family’s sequestrated estates; the court of Berlin succeeded in winning over Prince Antoni Radziwill, who even married a Hohenzollern princess, and Prince Jozef Poniatowski, the nephew of Poland’s last king, who settled down to a life of revelry in Prussian-occupied Warsaw. By the same-token, many Galician aristocrats established fine residences in Vienna.

While delighted to receive such submissions from the Polish aristocracy, the three partitioning powers pursued contrasting policies towards their vast ex-Polish territories in the immediate post-1795 period. Although in her propaganda Catherine II had claimed that she was recovering the lost lands of old Kievan Rus’, Russia lacked the more sophisticated bureaucratic machinery of her Germanic neighbours to embark on a thorough policy of russification in a region that was markedly different from the old Muscovite lands. Much of the distinct social order of the western gubernii (governorships) of the Russian Empire was to remain unchanged for many decades: the local Polish-Lithuanian landed gentry retained many of its social and legal privileges, and some vestiges of local self-government. Polish schools continued to function, as well as the Lithuanian legal system which had been in operation in the eastern part of the Commonwealth since the sixteenth century. Nor did the Russian authorities do anything to alleviate the conditions of the serfs, whose labour exactions were even increased. This suited many landowners, especially in the southern (Ukrainian) districts, who looked with glee at the attractive prospects of exporting their grain through Odessa, the newly founded Russian emporium on the Black Sea. Only in the area of religion did Catherine attempt to strengthen the ‘Russian’ character of these lands: most of the Greek Catholic Ukrainian peasants were obliged to return to the Orthodox fold. In the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, where Catholicism had struck deeper roots, this policy was abandoned by Tsar Paul. The resulting contrast between the Catholicism (both Roman and Uniate) of the Lithuanian-Belarusian north and the Orthodoxy of the Ukrainian south, where social tensions were also more acute, was to contribute markedly to the shaping of very different regional attitudes to the Polish national movement in the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century.

In the Polish lands acquired by Prussia in 1793 ^and ^z795 the Hohenzollerns introduced a centralized and highly staffed system of administration and the Prussian legal system (Landrecht); consequently, many noble privileges were respected but the serfs did acquire a degree of protection against seigneurial exploitation. The Polish secondary school system was largely dismantled and German-language education was promoted. Easy credits in Berlin banks and the prospect of handsome profits from grain exports via the Baltic ports helped to mollify the local Polish landowners’ feelings of national resentment, although in the long run many estates would be ruined by high mortgages and would fall into German hands. In Austrian Poland the centralized Josephinist system of administration which had been introduced in ‘Old’ Galicia in the 1780s was now extended to ‘New’ Galicia acquired in 1795. The amorphous Polish noble estate was reclassified on the Austrian model into a titled hierarchy, the Polish school system was abandoned, and censorship introduced. The Polish university in