Victories of the Counter-Revolution 483
ticipated neither the Second Partition nor the continued Russian control over
what was left of the Polish state, and were increasingly ready, therefore, to take
sides with those who had opposed Russia all along.
Many leaders of the defeated party, those who had produced and vainly de-
fended the Constitution of 1791, fled from the country when the Russians came
in. An important colony of émigrés formed at Dresden around Ignace Potocki and
Hugo Kollontay. The latter, who has been called the Polish Robespierre, had long
been active in the Polish Enlightenment and the Four Years’ Diet; although him-
self born into the lesser gentry, he had been among the most vehement in insisting
on rights for the burghers in 1791, and was even known to favor an eventual
emancipation of the serfs. Other émigrés went to France, among them Thaddeus
Kosciuszko. A professional soldier, Kosciuszko had spent seven years in the War of
American Independence, after which he returned to Poland and played a second-
ary military role against the Russian invasion of 1792. He reached Paris in January
1793, at the moment of the execution of Louis XVI. In the following months, with
the defection of Dumouriez and the Austrian invasion of France, he was unable to
get more than verbal expressions of French sympathy. In fact, by its decrees of
April and September the National Convention, as already explained, disavowed
any program of “world revolution” that might be read into the so- called Propa-
ganda Decrees of 1792. The fact that the Poles planned to avoid an attack upon
Austria, since it had had no part in the Second Partition, made their enterprise of
less interest to the French, for whom Austria was at the moment the most danger-
ous of their enemies.
Throughout 1793, with no loss of time, under the noses of the occupying au-
thorities, a Polish resistance movement formed against them. It arose spontane-
ously in many places, in secret meetings of angry gentry in country houses, and in
the clubs and discussion groups which still existed in Warsaw, where men of noble
and burgher status could meet together. The Masonic lodges now proved conve-
nient for this purpose also. The various groups established contact with each other
and with the émigrés. Together they began to prepare an armed insurrection, for
which they chose Kosciuszko as the leader.
General Ingelström, the Russian commander in Warsaw, obtaining a fragmen-
tary knowledge of the conspiracy, attributed it to French machinations. He made
some arrests and ordered the immediate disbandment of certain Polish regiments.
The conspirators could wait no longer; they were counting on the organized Polish
armed forces to take the first step in revolt; they were obliged to act before their
plans were fully laid. Kosciuszko reached Poland early in 1794; and after an upris-
ing at Cracow he was able to defeat a force of Russians at the neighboring village
of Raclawice. Upon news of this victory, in April, revolts broke out elsewhere. At
Vilna the movement was very strong. The leader, Jasinski, became the best known
of Lithuanian “Jacobins,” and in their act of adherence to Kosciuszko several hun-
dred citizens of Vilna pledged their “lives and fortunes” to recover “the rights of
liberty and equality.”^15 The most decisive events occurred in Warsaw. In this city of
over 100,000 inhabitants thousands of civilians joined with soldiers in assaults on
15 Angeberg, 373.