378 WETTIN
demands. Political factions rose or fell not merely in relation to popular support
in Poland, but principally in response to the favour, or disfavour, of St.
Petersburg. The Polish political classes, appalled by the realization of their sub-
jugation, flitted easily from abject indifference to desperate rebellion, defending
their remaining privileges with a truculence that always seemed to invite the
impending disaster. In the short term, indeed for the rest of the Saxon period,
the establishment of the Russian protectorate reduced Polish politics to
unplumbed depths of corruption and paralysis. In the long term, it provided an
unwavering stimulus to the growth of modern national consciousness.
The effects on the Republic were immediate and profound. The campaigns of
the Great Northern War, which were largely contested on the territory of
Poland and Lithuania, had devastated the countryside and divided the nobility
into armed camps. The economy was shattered. The restoration of Augustus II
in 1710 was achieved at the price of ratifying the Grzymultowski Treaty with
Russia, resisted since 1686. The eastern lands were lost forever. The King's con-
stitutional manoeuvres in Saxony excited exaggerated fears in Warsaw.
Ridiculous as it seems, the szlachta genuinely suspected him of
'absolutism'. Religious passions were revived. Seeing the restrictions placed on
Catholics in Saxony, the Sejm answered by restricting the civil liberties of 'dis-
sidents' in the Republic. The Tumult of Thorn of 1724, with all its sorry conse-
quences, was characteristic of a situation where foreign meddling and
home-grown suspicions fed on a diet of basic mistrust. The Sejm was repeatedly
broken; government was interrupted; the Republic was defenceless. In return
for the cancellation of the King's non-existent plans of subversion, and for the
guarantee of their dubious privileges, the nobility watched as massive limita-
tions were placed on the organization of their finances and their army.
Henceforth, it was illegal for the citizens of the Republic to reform their state
without the Tsar's permission. By venting their spleen on their harmless Saxon
King, the Poles saddled themselves with a protector whose absolute pretensions
were clear for all to see. Such was the disillusionment of August II with his
Polish realm that twice, in 1721 and again in 1732, he openly talked of auction-
ing it off.^7
The Saxon connection was not in itself prejudicial to Poland, therefore. The
fault with the Wettins was that they themselves had fallen into the hands of
Russia at an early stage. As a result, far from strengthening Poland's position in
the European arena, they served only to lead the Polish Republic into the
Russian camp by the nose, and thus to initiate that political bondage from which
the Poles have never fully escaped.
The powerlessness of the King, and the collapse of the Sejm, left the govern-
ment of the country in the hands of the magnates. The management of the
dietines, of the Tribunals, of the Army, and of the Church hierarchy, fell by
default to a narrow oligarchy of magnatial patrons, who monopolized all the
great offices of state and treated with the Saxon Resident as with an equal. Each
member of the oligarchy ruled in his own domains like a princeling in his own