Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman

by Robert K. Massie

On January 3, 1795, Russia and Austria agreed to the third and final partition of Poland. Prussia, still at war with France, was told that the territory it desired could be taken whenever it was ready to do so. On May 5, Prussia made peace with revolutionary France and occupied its allotted slice of Poland. Russia’s prizes were Courland, what was left of Lithuania, the remaining part of Belorussia, and the western Ukraine. Prussia took Warsaw and Poland west of the Vistula. Austria took Kraców, Lublin, and western Galicia. Afterward, Catherine repeated that she had annexed “not a single Pole,” and that she had simply taken back ancient Russian and Lithuanian lands with Orthodox inhabitants who were “now reunited with the Russian motherland.”