In three partitions in 1772, 1793 and 1795, Russia, Prussia and Austria annexed the whole of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the largest state in central Europe, and erased it from the map for 123 years. The final partition followed the defeat of the Kosciuszko Uprising in 1794; the three powers agreed in 1797 to suppress the name of the kingdom entirely. Roughly 12-14 million people passed under new sovereigns. Partition was not accompanied by mass expulsion, but it created the political conditions for later coercive population measures in the atlas — the confinement of Jews to the Pale of Settlement in the annexed Russian provinces, the Siberian exile of insurgents after 1831 and 1863, and Prussian settlement policy in Poznania. It is the largest single act of territorial extinction in modern European history and its absence from the atlas would be conspicuous.
Russia, Prussia and Austria annexed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in three stages and abolished the state
The Commonwealth held no modern census; estimates from hearth-tax and church records put its population at roughly 12-14 million in 1772, falling to about 8.8 million in the reduced state counted by the 1789-91 fiscal census. The three partitions transferred all of it: Russia took roughly 62 per cent of the territory and 45 per cent of the people, Austria about 18 per cent of the land and 32 per cent of the people, and Prussia about 20 per cent of the land and 23 per cent of the people.
The partitions themselves were diplomatic and administrative acts and produced no mass death toll. The associated fighting — the Confederation of Bar, the 1794 uprising and the Praga massacre in which Russian troops killed several thousand civilians in a Warsaw suburb — caused deaths in the thousands to low tens of thousands.
Poland