Victories of the Counter-Revolution 489
The denunciations of Jacobinism in Poland were no mere high- sounding justifi-
cations for territorial ambition. They did indeed serve that purpose. But when we
find the rulers of Russia and Prussia expressing their dread of Jacobinism in Po-
land, not only in public to the world at large, or to the British government, but
privately to their own confidential and trusted servants, we have more reason to
accept such sentiments as genuine. “I feel keenly,” wrote the King of Prussia to his
ambassador at Vienna, referring to the insurrection in Poland, “how essential it is
to crush in its germ this new and dangerous revolution, which touches so closely
on my own states, and which is also the work of that diabolical sect against which
a majority of the powers have combined their efforts.”^24 And Catherine II wrote to
Marshal Suvorov that, “for the good of Russia and the entire North [as much of
Eastern Europe was then called] she had to take arms against the wanton Warsaw
horde established by French tyrants.”^25
The military power of the Russians and Prussians soon prevailed. In October
Kosciuszko lost the battle of Maciejowice. He was taken prisoner, but soon man-
aged to flee with his friend Niemcewicz to America, where Niemcewicz lived for
years with an American wife in New Jersey. Hugo Kollontay, after desperate last-
minute efforts to arouse the peasants by adding redistribution of land to emanci-
pation, was also captured, and spent several years in prison in Austria.
Suvorov, fresh from the wars against the Turks, on November 3 occupied Praga,
a suburb of Warsaw, and, though the battle and the whole war were decided, al-
lowed his troops to slaughter six thousand civilians crowded against the river in
full sight of the inhabitants of the capital. Polish nationalists long remembered this
dénouement as a “massacre.” On the same day the claimant to the throne of
France, Louis XVIII, having received news at Verona of Kosciuszko’s defeat by the
Russian General Fersen, wrote humorously to a feminine correspondent: “I should
like to establish a chair for professors of anti- republicanism in some university, and
make this General Fersen the first incumbent.”^26 The three monarchies moved in
and effectuated the Third Partition. That was the end of Poland, and of revolution-
ary threats in Eastern Europe—for a long time.
The failure of the Polish effort in 1794 has been attributed to many causes, of
which the overwhelming might and the mutual rivalries of the surrounding pow-
ers would not be the least. The misfortune of Poland, however, lay in its internal
divisions, which no institutional superstructure had been devised to overcome.
There were ethnic divisions, whereby in large parts of the country only the ruling
nobles were Polish, divisions and rivalries within the large and scattered Polish
nobility, divisions between classes, and especially between free men and serfs.
Given these circumstances, it was probably true that national independence could
not be maintained without some kind of internal revolution. But the same internal
divisions made successful revolution impossible. It was the tragedy of the Poles, in
24 Quoted by Lesnodorski in Pologne au Xe Congrès, 216.
25 Quoted by P. K. Alefirenko in Istoricheskiye Zapiski (1947), 236.
26 See Montfort, Drame de la Pologne, p. 246 for the slaughter at Praga, and p. 242 for Louis
XVIII’s letter. General Fersen, of the nobility of the Baltic provinces of Russia, was unrelated to Axel
de Fersen.