Otto Magnus von Stackelberg (ambassador)

[1] During his stay in Warsaw, due to the Russian Empire's influence in the Commonwealth, he was almost the de facto ruler of Poland in the name of Empress Catherine II who became a protectress of this country.

The Partition Sejm, with many of its deputies coerced or bribed by the Russian embassy, indeed ratified the treaty (on 30 September 1773), as well as established the Permanent Council – a small body that both promised to reform the inefficient Polish governance and which could be easily controlled by Russia.

In 1776, Stackelberg permitted Polish King Stanisław August Poniatowski to carry out several minor reforms,[3] but in 1780 von Stackelberg's protest resulted in the derailing of Zamoyski's Codex, a proposed set of reforms drafted by kanclerz Andrzej Zamoyski which would have strengthened royal power, made all officials answerable to the Sejm, placed the clergy and their finances under state supervision, and deprived landless szlachta of many of their legal immunities.

However, as a large Polish army could be a threat to the Russian garrisons controlling Poland, von Stackelberg ordered his proxies in the Permanent Council to spend the money on a different goal: for the huge sum of 1 million zlotys (representing most of the surplus), the Council bought the von Brühl's Palace – and promptly donated it to 'Poland's ally', Russia, to serve as Russia's new embassy.

[5] His failure to prevent those reforms was one of the reasons he was recalled by St. Petersburg and reassigned to Sweden, where he became the Russian ambassador from 1791 to 1793.