Catherine the Great

There was much to be done. When Peter the Great took sole possession of the throne in 1694, Russia was a landlocked giant, lacking a year-round, ice-free, saltwater port. Sweden dominated the upper Baltic, and the Black Sea was controlled by the Ottoman Turks. Later, as a result of his triumph in the Great Northern War, Peter broke the Swedish grip, extended Russian possessions down the Baltic coast to include the great port of Riga, and built a new national capital, St. Petersburg, on the Gulf of Finland. In the south, fighting the Turks, he tried to reach the Black Sea, succeeded at first on the mouth of the Don River at Azov, and then lost this prize when the Turks defeated him on the river Pruth. When Peter died in 1725, Russia still had no southern opening to the sea and the outside world. Along Russia’s western border lay the huge, chaotically governed kingdom of Poland, which in earlier times had stripped away huge stretches of Russian and Ukrainian territory. For Catherine, therefore, wishing to emulate Peter by expanding her empire and creating new pathways to the world, the places to look were to the south and west. South lay Turkey; west, Poland.

The terminal illness of a king determined that her first objective would be Poland. The Polish Commonwealth, which merged the kingdom of Poland and the grand duchy of Lithuania, was as large as France. It stretched east to west between the Dnieper and the Oder, and north to south from the Baltic to the Carpathians and Turkey’s Balkan provinces on the Danube. The frontier between Poland and Russia meandered north and south for nine hundred miles. In earlier centuries, under native kings, Poland had been one of the most powerful states in Europe; in 1611, a Polish army had occupied the Kremlin. More recently, the tsars had won back some of these lost lands—Smolensk, Kiev, and the western Ukraine were Russian again—but large areas of western Russia populated by Orthodox Slavs still remained a part of Poland.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, Poland was in steep decline. The Polish Diet was a weak, quasi-parliamentary body, elected by the Polish and Lithuanian nobility with each of its thousand aristocratic members possessing a single equal vote. The office of king of Poland—not a hereditary position but the result of an election by unanimous vote of the Diet—was weaker still. The king was elected only by unanimous vote and was therefore beholden to every member of the Diet. Furthermore, the Diet had been reduced to choosing a foreigner as king because the powerful figures in the Polish nobility could not agree and unite behind one of their own. Since 1736, the crown had been on the head of the elector Augustus of Saxony, who simultaneously reigned as King Augustus III of Poland. Now Augustus was dying and a successor was needed.

Along with the weakness of being a republic ruled by an elected king, Poland suffered from other uniquely harmful political arrangements. Any single member of the Diet could interrupt and terminate a session by exercising the liberum veto. This procedure empowered one member to veto any decision of the assembly even when the decision had been approved by every other member. This single negative vote also overturned and negated all previous decisions made in that session of the Diet. As one deputy’s vote could always be bought, the liberum veto made reform impossible. The Polish government lurched and staggered from crisis to crisis, while powerful, immensely wealthy landowners ruled the country.

There was, however, a political procedure by which the liberum veto could be neutralized. This was the establishment of a temporary “confederation,” a gathering of a group of nobles assembled for the purpose of achieving a single specific goal. Once summoned, a confederated Diet could make decisions by majority (rather than unanimous) vote and then, having achieved what it wanted, dissolve itself, allowing Poland to lapse back into routine political anarchy.

Not surprisingly, this repeated convergence of dissension and incompetence opened wide the door to foreign interference; indeed, no system could have been better devised to enable powerful neighbors to intervene in internal Polish affairs. Meddling was never more likely than in 1762, when the king of Poland was on his deathbed. It was generally assumed that his son would succeed him both as Saxon elector and Polish king; he was the candidate favored by Austria and France and by many Poles.