THE RUSSIAN PARTITION 61Witebsk, Mscislaw, and the south-eastern area of the Palatinate of Minsk; at the
Second Partition in 1793, by the right-bank Ukraine, including the Palatinates of
Kiev, Braclaw, Podolia, and Volhynia and by parts of Bresc, Minsk, and Wilno;
and at the Third Partition in 1795, by the remaining lands of the Grand Duchy up
to the line of the Bug and Niemen. After 1864, it absorbed the Congress Kingdom
of Poland, which, renamed Vistulaland, was ruled as part of the Empire.
The more easterly areas of Russian Poland were only 'Polish' in the pre-
Partition sense: that is, that their traditions had developed within the multi-
national community of the old Republic. The more westerly areas were Polish
in the ethnic and linguistic sense also. Most of the cities, even in the east, such
as Vilna, Dvinsk, Minsk, Pinsk, or Kamieniets, retained a strong Polish flavour.
Yet to the outside world, the whole region was gradually dressed up as 'Western
Russia'. By the end of the nineteenth century, no Russian was prepared to talk
of 'Poland' except as an informal geographical area lying to the west of the Bug.
In later administrative terms, at its maximum extent Russian Poland
comprised the gubernias of Vilna, Grodno, Kovno, Minsk, Vitebsk, Mohylev,
Volynia, Podolia, Kiev, plus, from 1866, the ten gubernias (government dis-
tricts) of Vistulaland-Warsaw, Kalisz, Ptock, Piotrkow, Radom, Kielce, Lublin,
Siedlce, Lomza, and Suwatki.^1 (See Map 2.)
Russian political attitudes centred on the threefold principles of Pravoslaviye
(Orthodoxy), Samoderzhaviye (Autocracy), and Narodnost (Nationality). They
grew from deep roots in the Empire's Muscovite past, and inspired the institu-
tions created during the reforms of Peter and Catherine the Great. In the reign
of Nicholas I (1825-55), they crystallized in to a fixed ideology called 'Official
Nationality'. Different Tsars gave different points of emphasis; and interpreta-
tion of the three principles meandered considerably with the times. Paul I
(1796—1801) set a very different tone from his mother, Catherine (1763—96);
Alexander I (1801—25); Alexander II (1855—81), and Nicholas II (1894—1917)
have been pictured as liberal rulers who through bent or necessity introduced a
degree of flexibility; whilst Alexander III (1881-94) has been seen as a reversion
to the hard line of Nicholas I. Such judgements are purely relative, however, and
refer only to the scale of Russian values. By European standards, - all the Tsars
were despots, varying in their outlook from the harsh to the humane. They had
no interest whatsoever in liberalism in its western sense, where the will of the
ruler is subordinated to the consent of the governed. They sat at the controls of
a cumbrous governmental machine, which was staffed by a closed elite, ani-
mated by ideals decades if not centuries behind those of intellectual circles, and
possessed of an inertia all of its own. In relation to their Polish subjects, they all
accepted the desirability of the same, simple goals of ultimate assimilation, inte-
gration, conformity, and standardization. Their policies were designed to turn
the Poles into 'true Christians, loyal subjects, and good Russians' - and varied
only as to speed, tactics, and methods. They all stood for the programme of
'Faith, Throne, and Fatherland', whose most assiduous exponent was perhaps
Sergei Uvarov, Nicholas I's long-serving Minister of Public Enlightenment. In