The Lessons of Poland 317
Radziwills, and the Czartoryskis; and it shaded off, as an incipient national party,
into the ranks of the middling gentry and of those burghers who were emerging
from the timidity of second- class citizenship, and beginning to have opinions on
political subjects.
The patriots awaited the momentary embarrassment of Russia to begin action
on their program. The opportunity came in 1788, when Russia became involved in
the Turkish war. A diet, to be called the Four Years’ Diet, met at Warsaw in Octo-
ber 1788. It soon “confederated” itself, that is, took an action which freed it from
the Liberum Veto in matters of taxation and the army. In the Diet three parties
soon appeared. One called itself Republican; these were the conservative mag-
nates, with their hordes of glota, the barefoot gentry who were their retainers. Nos-
talgic for the old- time freedom, quick to sniff out despotism in the plans of their
opponents, they were also pro- Russian. In the middle was the party of the King,
humane and benevolent, brought by Mazzei and others to share the ideas of the
American Revolution, yet deterred and frustrated by the belief, which was realistic
enough, that any effective reform in Poland would awaken the displeasure of Rus-
sia. Bolder than the King’s party were the Patriots, a mixed group which ranged
from those who wanted only a few constitutional changes, such as a stronger ex-
ecutive, through those who felt a need for economic legislation to stimulate pro-
duction, on to true radicals like Kollontay, who hoped, in addition, for emancipa-
tion of the serfs. The Patriots accepted the friendly approaches of Prussia, which,
for its own purposes, to offset the Russian influence, and in the hope of obtaining
Danzig and Thorn in exchange, decided in 1788 to support the party of reform.
The Patriots allowed themselves to make the most inflammatory anti- Russian
speeches. They succeeded in getting rid of the Permanent Commission, which they
detested as a Russian device, and even in inducing Catherine to withdraw the Rus-
sian soldiers. With Russian pressure thus relieved, the way seemed clear for an in-
tegral reconstruction. For a long time nothing much happened except more ha-
rangues in the Diet. Oratoribus periit Graecia, the King wrote to Mazzei, for he was
keenly aware of the passage of time, and was afraid that after all the insult and
provocation to Russia, when the Turkish war ended, as it soon would, the Russian
hold would be clamped more firmly upon the country.
Outside the Diet not much happened, at least in Poland itself. There was no un-
usual violence, no popular upheaval bringing pressure on the Diet from outside. The
Polish revolution remained, as it were, within parliamentary channels—for which in
some quarters it was later much praised. It may be that in this Polish revolution the
greatest event was the revolution in France. Mazzei, in Paris, denounced the ob-
structionism of French aristocracy in his bulletins to Warsaw.^14 News of the fall of
the Bastille created a sensation. Conscious of a revolution in their own midst, learn-
ing excitedly of the one in Paris, and remembering the one in America at the op-
posite extremity of Western Civilization, where Kosciusko and Pulaski and a dozen
14 On Mazzei’s service to Poland see Fabre, Stanislas- Auguste, 507–22 and passim; R. Ciampini,
ed., Lettere di Filippo Mazzei alia corte di Polonia (Bologna, 1937). There seems to be no special study
of any influence of the American Revolution in Poland, but M. Haiman, Poland and the American
Revolutionary War (Chicago, 1932), gives details on over a dozen Poles in America during the
Revolution.