Rosyjski korpus posiłkowy (auksyliarny) na służbie Augusta II w Rzeczypospolitej i Saksonii. Nowe spojrzenie na sasko-polsko-rosyjską współpracę polityczno-militarną w czasie wielkiej wojny północnej
Russian Auxiliary Corps in the Service of August II in Poland and Saxony. A New Perspective on Saxon-Polish-Russian Political and Military Alliance during the Great Northern War

Summary/Abstract: Since the beginning of the Great Northern War (1700–1721), the Saxon-PolishRussian political and military alliance didn’t go as Augustus II had planned. He was losing battles against Charles XII and, after Peter I was defeated in the battle of Narva in 1700, he took on the burden of leading the warfare. The Tsar feared that the Saxon-Polish king might have made separatist peace with the king of Sweden and hoped for the Polish– Lithuanian Commonwealths involvement in the conflict, therefore he attempted to aid Augustus II’s Saxon army by organizing a Russian auxiliary corps which, in time, turned out to be more of a political strategy than a military one. The present article reviews this issue through an analysis of Vladimir Sergeevich Velikanov’s latest work. The scholar used Russian archives to characterise the corps and its operations and thus addressed an area that has hardly been discussed by either Russian or Polish historiography, forming a new baseline for further research by historians from both countries.

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