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The process of Westernization continued under Catherine the Great, a highly intelligent German princess of polyandrous tastes (one husband, murdered under mysterious circumstances, and 21 known lovers). In the previous century the ^ Poles had occupied Moscow, but now Catherine wrote to King Frederick II of Prussia, "We will give a King to Poland." Moving Russian troops across the Polish border and spreading bribes liberally, Catherine got one of her discarded lovers, Stanislaw Poniatowski, elected King of Poland in 1764. This led to civil strife and a sudden intervention by the Turks. Catherine defeated both Poles and Turks handily, then joined with Prussia and Austria in a partial dismemberment of Poland.
By this partition of 1772, Russia acquired 55,000 sq. mi. of White Russia. From the Turks it won control of that Mongol relic, the khanate of Crimea. Both Turks and Poles tried to retake the conquered land and were again defeated. Russia annexed not only Crimea but the adjoining Ukrainian lands between the Bug and the Dniester. The Poles were partitioned again in 1793, with Russia gaining an additional 130,000 sq. mi., and then, in a third partition in 1795, all of Poland disappeared from the map for the next 125 years. "The more she wept for Poland, the more she took of it," said Prussia's admiring King Frederick II. Catherine had thus advanced Russia's western borders to the Prussian frontier and the headwaters of the Vistula.
The next man to attack Russia was Napoleon Bonaparte, and the man who had to defend it was Catherine's enigmatic grandson Alexander I, whom Napoleon once described as "the northern Sphinx." France and Russia were allies when Alexander came to the throne after the murder of his father in 1801, but he soon joined the British-led coalition against France. Napoleon skillfully defeated the coalition, captured Vienna and Berlin, then met with Alexander in 1807 on a raft in the Neman River, which separated their two empires. In the manner customary during this period, the two enemies pledged friendship and proceeded to redraw the map. Napoleon endorsed the idea of Alexander seizing Finland from the Swedes, which he did a few months later. The treaty also freed Alexander to expand southward in the Caucasus. Clashing with both the Persians and the Turks, he annexed the autonomous Christian state of Georgia and Muslim Azerbaijan. From the Turks he also took a slice of Bessarabia and won extensive rights in the Danubian provinces of Moldavia and Walachia (now Romania).
In June 1812, Napoleon tried to redraw the map once again by invading Russia. His Grande Armee of 600,000 men seemed invincible, and the Czar ordered a scorched-earth policy while his army retreated eastward. Seventy- five miles outside Moscow the Russians made a stand at Borodino (a battle later immortalized by one of the participants, Count Leo Tolstoy, in War and Peace). After a slaughter that inflicted 100,000 casualties, the Russians withdrew again, and Napoleon marched into deserted Moscow unopposed, the last invader ever to do so.