In this way the Jews of the Ukraina became a second time the victims of typical Russian pogroms, the outgrowth of national and caste antagonism, which was rending Poland in twain. The year 1768 was a miniature copy of the year 1648. A commonwealth in which for many centuries the relationship between the various groups of citizens was determined by mutual hatred, could not expect to survive as an independent political organism. A country in which the nobility despised the gentry, and both looked down with contempt upon the calling of the merchant and the burgher, and enslaved the peasant, in which the Catholic clergy was imbued with hatred against the professors of all other creeds, in which the urban population persecuted the Jews as business rivals, and the peasants were filled with bitterness against both the higher and the lower orders--such a country was bound to perish. And Poland did perish. The first partition of Poland took place in 1772, transferring the Polish border provinces into the hands of the three neighboring countries, Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Russia received the southwestern border province: the larger part of White Russia, the present Governments of Vitebsk and Moghilev. Austria took the southwestern region: a part of present-day Galicia, with a strip of Podolia. Prussia seized Pomerania and a part of Great Poland, constituting the present province of Posen. The annexed provinces constituted nearly a third of Polish territory, with a population of three millions, comprising a quarter of a million Jews.[170] The great Jewish center in Poland enters into the chaotic "partitional period" (1772-1815). Out of this chaos there gradually emerges a new Jewish center of the Diaspora--that of Russia. FOOTNOTES: [120] [Pronounced _Ookraïna_. The spelling "Ukraine" is less correct. The meaning of the word is "border," "frontier."] [121] [The author refers to the compulsory establishment of the so-called Uniat Church, which follows the rites and traditions of the Greek Orthodox faith, but submits at the same time to the jurisdiction of the Roman See. The Uniat Church is still largely represented in Eastern Galicia among the Ruthenians.] [122] [A contemptuous nickname for Pole.] [123] [The word "Cossack," in Russian, _Kazak_ (with the accent on the last syllable), is derived from the Tataric. "Cossackdom"--says Kostomarov, in his Russian standard work on the Cossack uprising (_Bogdan Khmelnitzki_, i. p. 5)--"is undoubtedly of Tataric origin, and so is the very name _Kozak_, which in Tataric means 'vagrant,' 'free warrior,' 'rider.'" Peter Kropotkin (Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition, vii. 218) similarly derives the word from Turki _Kuzzãk_, "adventurer," "freebooter."] [124] [Derived from the German word _Hauptmann_.] [125] [From the Russian word _Za porogi_, meaning "beyond the Falls" (scil. of the Dnieper).]