GalleryTHE PARTITIONS OF POLAND
The most delicate chapters in Russo-Polish history are the partitions of Poland. In these partitions it is interesting to note that, whatever the reasons were, the territory taken by Russia was not Polish. The Catholic Encyclopedia states: "In 1772-92-95 the territory of Poland was divided among the three adjoining slates. Lithuania, White Russia, and Little Russia were given to Russia, the purely Polish territory to Prussia and Austria." However, after the Napoleonic wars, Russia did acquire purely Polish territory as well, when the so-called Duchy of Warsaw, created by Napoleon, was re-divided. Then, as part of the European settlement made at the Congress of Vienna, a section of Poland was given to Prussia, a section to Austria, and the bulk to Russia as an autonomous Polish kingdom under Russian suzerainty, known in Polish history as Congress Poland.1
It was, therefore, by the Treaty of Vienna and not by the partitions of Poland that Russia first acquired a Polish problem. The Catholic Encyclopedia declares: "The Poles under Tsarist rule are found chiefly in Congress Poland, also in small numbers in Lithuania, Volhynia and the Ukraine"; and it adds as to East Galicia, then under Austrian rule, "The San divides Galicia into an Eastern and Western half, the latter occupied by Poles, the former by Ruthenians" (Ukrainians).2
| 1 | "Autonomy" was largely fictional, as the Kingdom of Poland, as it was more formally known, was still ruled from Russia by the tsar. By the mid-19th century, it had been divided into and was governed as Russian provinces (guberniya). |
| 2 | Regardless of the minutia of historical time-tables, the Treaty of Vienna left Russia with control of roughly two thirds of the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The use of the term "Polish problem" is subsequently made clear. |
