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earlier in secret conclave with her counsellors, and theusual view that in this first partition she was duped byFrederick is incorrect, though she may have had herhand forced.The Polish element in the region was very weak, andtaken by itself the loss to Poland was not serious and itsacquisition by Russia could be justified. But what wasextremely serious was that its acquisition, unlike thegains of 1667, was the result of a deal between thethree eastern powers. Henceforward the solution of thequestion of ' the western lands' in a sense favourable toRussia was tied up with Prussian and Austrian designs,which unlike the Russian had little or no religious,national, or historic backing. It was no longer an inter-Slav problem, but a catspaw of European diplomacy.Twenty years later, in the second and third partitions(1793 and 17Q5), the whole of 'the western lands' fellto Russia, while' Prussia and Austria divided the remainderof Poland. For the first time their frontierswere contiguous with those of Russia. The Russians,and to a lesser extent the Prussians, had hard fightingagainst the Polish army, in the end nobly led not byany of the magnates but by one of the minor gentry,Kos'ciuszko, like so many foremost Poles by origin fromthe disputed eastern territory, an engineer veteran ofanother War of Independence, across the Atlantic.The mass of the Polish peasantry proved unreliablewhen it became clear that the fight for national independencewas not to be accompanied in fact by theirown liberation from their Polish masters. In thefinal struggle (1794), despite striking initial successes,the Poles were soon overborne once the Russian commandwas given to Suvorov. Thus Polish independencein the eyes of Poles was extinguished primarily byRussian arms (stained by one wholesale massacre), eventhough the Polish heart of their country was carved upbetween Prussia and Austria.The destruction of Poland was a crime against thePolish people and the best standard of internationalmorality of the age, and it proved a curse for each of thepartitioning powers. Frederick the Great was mainly210