The Foreign Foreign Minister

The tragic life of Adam Czartoryski

On July 15, 1861, in Paris, an old man who had occupied a rather remarkable place in European history breathed his last after a life of disappointments and betrayals, a life that embodied the difficult love-hate relationship that has existed between Russia and Poland for centuries.

Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski was born in 1770 into one of Poland’s most distinguished families. He came of age at a time when his country was being gradually erased from the face of the Earth by the neighboring powers. The first partition of Poland by Russia, Prussia, and Austria was carried out when he was two years old, and the third, after which the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth disappeared from the map of Europe, came when he was 25. The young prince, like many Polish nobles, took part in the fight for his country’s independence. After their cause was defeated, in 1795, Catherine II invited Adam and his brother to enter Russian service. This was not an act of altruism. Nobody used the word “hostages,” but that sense of the situation hung in the air.

Judging by Czartoryski’s memoirs, he did indeed feel like a hostage in St. Petersburg. Both during the final years of Catherine’s reign and later, under her son Paul, the young Pole was shunned at court. Despite what might have seemed to be a privileged position, his life there was dreary and lonely. But then Czartoryski suddenly found a friend.

The heir to the throne, Grand Duke Alexander, also felt out-of-place in the court of his rather unfriendly father. The future Tsar Alexander I was kept on edge by the temperamental Paul’s outbursts and even worried that he could be arrested and exiled. He felt burdened by his status as heir apparent and spoke enthusiastically of the republican form of government and of his dream of later renouncing the throne. This strange, reserved, indecisive man suddenly decided to make friends with the young Pole. The grand duke suggested the two go for a stroll on the palace grounds (since the palace walls undoubtedly “had ears”), where he delivered some surprising news: it turned out that both Alexander and his wife disapproved of the partitioning of Poland. Not only that: he assured his new friend that, when he became tsar, he would restore Poland’s independence. This conversation marked the beginning of a friendship that endured even after rumors started circulating that Czartoryski was having an affair with Alexander’s wife.

Then came 1801. Paul was murdered by conspirators who were acting with the complicity of his own son. Alexander ascended the throne to universal rejoicing but with a terrible weight on his conscience. He would never be able to forget the role he had played in his father’s death, but he could at least console himself with the thought that Paul had died for the welfare of the Russian Empire. In other words, the young tsar had to do everything he could for the betterment of his country. The time had come to fulfill his promises.

Young Alexander had always planned to abolish serfdom and reform Russia’s system of autocracy, if not today, then tomorrow, or, at the very least, the day after tomorrow. For that he would need helpers – young and energetic people like himself. The tsar created a Secret Committee (Негласный комитет, often translated as Unofficial Committee) made up of some of his young friends, an informal council that was not actually all that secret. After dining with the tsar, the members pretended to bid him farewell while in fact they all snuck away to a meeting of the Committee, one member of which was Adam Czartoryski.

The young tsar took what he thought was a clever approach: he placed elderly Catherine-era magnates in charge of all the ministries (after switching to this more modern form of government from the antiquated collegium system) but gave them all deputies (товарищи, or comrades, as they were called back then). The deputy ministers were all Alexander’s close associates, and the true power rested in their hands. One appointment that was particularly shocking for the Russian nobility was that of Adam Czartoryski, a man who just ten years earlier had engaged in armed rebellion against Russia. He was first named deputy foreign minister and then, in 1804, minister. There was whispering throughout St. Petersburg that the Pole would betray Russia.

Czartoryski, meanwhile, was truly devoted to Alexander and confident that, by promoting his foreign policy at a time when Russia’s standoff with Napoleonic France was beginning, he would also be helping Poland – surely the tsar would carry through with his earlier promise.

For the time being, however, it was France rather than Russia that was advancing the Polish cause. In 1807, when Alexander was forced to conclude a peace with Napoleon after French victories, the French emperor created the Duchy of Warsaw out of Polish lands that the partitions had given to Austria and Prussia. Of course, the duchy was a French client state, but at least it gave Poles some sort of political nationhood. The lands that had gone to Russia in the eighteenth century remained outside the duchy, in Russian hands. One can only assume this state of affairs posed a challenge to Czartoryski’s loyalties.

By then he was no longer foreign minister. The tsar had become disenchanted with the Secret Committee and his young friends were given new positions that sounded good on paper but were less important. Czartoryski retained a post Alexander had given him several years earlier, even before he was appointed foreign minister, overseeing the Wilno educational district, which gave him authority over Wilno (Vilnius) University, an important intellectual center for Poles. He remained in that post for twenty years (although during some of this tenure he carried out his duties from abroad). Over the course of those years, Alexander defeated Napoleon and established his own Kingdom of Poland, a semi-autonomous entity that even had its own parliament, the Sejm, but was still part of the Russian Empire. It also had a king: Alexander himself. It is doubtful whether Czartoryski saw the Kingdom of Poland, with a Russian tsar on the throne, as fulfilling the promise Alexander had made to him in their youth. In any event, Czartoryski began spending less time in Russia and more in France.

For many years, Nikolai Novosiltsev served as a de facto ruler of the Kingdom of Poland. He had also been a member of the Secret Committee, but his path and thinking had diverged from those of his former comrades. Novosiltsev instituted a draconian program of russification. In 1823, a secret society was uncovered at Wilno University and the arrests began. At that point, Czartoryski relinquished his duties overseeing education and retreated to his Polish estate.

Seven years later came the uprising known as the November Night. Alexander was dead by then, and the hopes of his young years were left unfulfilled: serfdom was still in place and there was no more talk of limiting autocratic powers. For now, there was little hope for the rebirth of a truly autonomous Poland.

The bloody uprising of 1830-31 had been provoked by heavy-handed russification, and now the Russian tsar’s former friend became head of the Polish National Government resisting the Russian crackdown.

Russian troops put down the rebellion. This is when Pushkin wrote his famous poem, “To the Slanderers of Russia,” appealing to the Western countries to stay out of the conflict between Russia and Poland, because it was “an argument of Slavs among themselves” that outsiders were incapable of understanding. Czartoryski was forced to leave Poland, and henceforth made his home in Paris, where his house became a gathering place for Polish emigres. Prince Adam was elected as the uncrowned king of Poland, but he never saw his native land again. Neither did he live to see the next Polish uprising, which was put down even more brutally than the uprising of 1830-31.

The many tragic twists and turns of Czartoryski’s life in some ways mirror those of his long-suffering motherland, whose people revere Dostoyevsky but remember the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In some ways, his fate also resembles that of the country Czartoryski represented as foreign minister, a country that loves Polish cinema but does its best to forget the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.