Two part question:
-1. What PODs would work to avoid the Polish partitions and allow the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (or a successor state) to survive down to the present day. I'm willing to take any answer, so long as it doesn't prevent the Commonwealth from developing in a recognizable fashion, but the closer to the OTL partitions, the better. (My favorite, personally, is Prussia getting massively beaten down in the Seven Years War-if it gets kicked down enough, perhaps it won't be able to participate in anything like the partitions, and Poland can continue as a buffer between Russia and Austria)
-2. What would a surviving Commonwealth look like? I think its interesting to speculate how Poland's "Democracy for Nobles" would have evolved had it lasted into the 19th century-I think demands from the bottom would eventually topple it, but would that produce a democacy for everybody, or some kind of populist dictatorship/absolute monarchy?
Also, how would the Commonwealth most likely treat its Belarussian and Ukranian minorities? What, religiously, would it look like? (Several wikipedia articles claim that at the time of the Partitions, a comfortable majority of Belarussians were actually Greek Catholic rather than Orthodox, but I find this extremely difficult to believe bar any other sources.)
-1. What PODs would work to avoid the Polish partitions and allow the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (or a successor state) to survive down to the present day. I'm willing to take any answer, so long as it doesn't prevent the Commonwealth from developing in a recognizable fashion, but the closer to the OTL partitions, the better. (My favorite, personally, is Prussia getting massively beaten down in the Seven Years War-if it gets kicked down enough, perhaps it won't be able to participate in anything like the partitions, and Poland can continue as a buffer between Russia and Austria)
-2. What would a surviving Commonwealth look like? I think its interesting to speculate how Poland's "Democracy for Nobles" would have evolved had it lasted into the 19th century-I think demands from the bottom would eventually topple it, but would that produce a democacy for everybody, or some kind of populist dictatorship/absolute monarchy?
Also, how would the Commonwealth most likely treat its Belarussian and Ukranian minorities? What, religiously, would it look like? (Several wikipedia articles claim that at the time of the Partitions, a comfortable majority of Belarussians were actually Greek Catholic rather than Orthodox, but I find this extremely difficult to believe bar any other sources.)