Ending the Stagnation

In 1787 King Stanislaus approached Catherine of Russia with a bargain. Poland will raise a substantial army and support Russia in her war with the Ottomans, and make flanking maneuvers against potential attacks from Prussia or Sweden. The move was smart as it would mean that the king would have an army that could defend the country from enemies abroad and within, but Catherine did not fall for. She preferred having Poland as a piece of no-man's-land in between her and Prussia and Austria. As this failed, the King stood without a plan and a decent foreign policy. The next year members of the so-called 'Patriotic Party' took matters in their own hands in the Great Sejm. It voted an increase of the army and vested control over it in a Sejm Commission. It placed the conduct of foreign policy in the hands of another Sejm Commission. It also abolished the Permanent Council that had governed the country since 1772 and imposed tax on incomes from lands, 10 percent for the Szlachta and 20 percent for the Church. In 1791 the king arrived from his isolation since the failure with Catherine and together with Stanislaw Potocki and Hugo Kollataj he drafted the New Constitution of May 3. This became the first written Constitution in Europe and a satisfactory compromise between the republicanism of Potocki, the radicalism of Kollataj and the monarchism of the king. Again Catherine the Great reacted, and as circumstances went against Poland, peace was signed between the Ottomans and Russia, and 89000 seasoned veterans now stood against the 37000 staunchly heroic, but no less, newly recruited Poles. No one helped Poland and the outcome was devastating. Thus, the Effort to end stagnation brought the Second Partition of Poland.