The Partitions of Poland: How Russia Acquired the Right Bank

The Right Bank was not Russia but the Commonwealth

Ukrainian history of the 18th century has a “left-bank bias”: we speak a great deal of the Hetmanate and the Zaporozhian Sich, forgetting that the greater part of Ukrainian ethnic lands — all of the Right Bank — belonged at that time to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth^[1]. There, unlike on the Left Bank, there was not even a quasi-state Ukrainian structure around which one could rally, and the local nobility largely identified itself with the Polish language, culture, and state tradition. That is, these were Ukrainian lands — but within a European state, not Russia.

Why the Commonwealth fell

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the 18th century was itself a shaky, unreformed structure — rather a union of parts (Lesser Poland, Greater Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and others) with divergent interests. Its main body, the Sejm, ceased to be effective: the practice of “breaking the Sejm” (the liberum veto) spread, making it impossible both to pass laws and even to levy taxes (the Commonwealth had minimal taxation by European standards)^[2]. This internal weakness was precisely what provoked the neighbors to partition.

Partitions on mythical pretexts

The partitions themselves (from 1772) were justified by the neighbors on openly mythical arguments. The Russian Empire appealed to the “Kyivan princely inheritance,” Austria to the fact that Hungarian kings had once sat in Halych, and Prussia to the “protection of dissenters.” Russia, moreover, relied on the “Eternal Peace” of 1686 (the Grzymułtowski Treaty) with its clause on the mutual protection of co-religionists — a convenient pretext for intervention^[3].

The Russian argument here is especially telling: the claim to the “Kyivan inheritance” is the very myth on which the renaming of Muscovy as “Russia” also rests. The annexation of real lands was covered by an invented continuity from Kyiv.

The last attempt: the Constitution of 3 May 1791

The Commonwealth tried to reform itself. Its Constitution of 3 May 1791 — one of the first European constitutions — was an attempt to save the state. But it provoked another confederation, which was followed by new partitions that erased the Commonwealth from the map^[4]. It was in precisely this way that Right-Bank Ukraine came to be part of the Russian Empire — it did not “return” but was annexed as a result of an interstate partition.

What this means

The “primordiality” of Russian rule over the Right Bank is a historical fiction. These lands became part of the empire only at the end of the 18th century, through a concrete geopolitical event — the partitions of Poland — and under the invented pretext of a “Kyivan inheritance.” Before that, for more than four centuries, they belonged to the European, not the Muscovite, world.