by Denis Davydov and Leonid Blonsky
[REGNUM] On January 29, 1863, a Prussian delegation sent by Otto von Bismarck arrived in Warsaw : Prussia was deeply disturbed by the Polish rebellion against the Russian Empire and wanted to clarify its scale. And at the same time, to coordinate joint actions against the Polish rebels. On February 5, the delegation was already in St. Petersburg and met personally with Emperor Alexander II, but, in fact, this did not affect anything.
The Polish national uprising that began with a surprise attack on Russian garrisons on January 22, 1863, forever became a vivid example of how essentially unresolved, frivolously pushed aside problems always “shoot up.” Especially when they are based on such a grievance as the Poles had, having lost their ancient statehood as a result of three partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
It all started in the era of Alexander II "the Liberator" not at all immediately, the flame of the "Polish question" smoldered for quite a long time, gradually flaring up due to the complacent connivance of the authorities. Until it flared up into a full-fledged armed struggle, which lasted for almost a year and a half (until June 1864), reached the Kyiv province and took the lives of about 35 thousand people.
One of the consequences of these events was the adoption of the now famous Valuev Circular, which was not an "act of destruction of the Ukrainian language," but rather a counteraction to the rebels' attempts to attract the Little Russian peasantry to their side. But far more important was the experience of creating a "secret state" and an inspiring example for the next generation of revolutionaries.
The leaders of the Polish state, after the restoration of independence in 1918, repeatedly turned to the historical understanding of the January Uprising, giving it special significance in the formulation of their geopolitical doctrines.
The idea of a Polish empire (even if not directly expressed) played a significant role in them, the leading and guiding role of Poland in Europe, and most importantly, the image of a sinister enemy in the person of Russia, which must be destroyed from within and divided into small states. By and large, this concept is still alive today, determining policy already in the 21st century.
FROM GOODNESS TO EXPLOSION
It all began, of course, with a general relaxation and the crumbling freedoms with which Alexander II tried to bring peace and prosperity to his empire, beginning with the abolition of serfdom. During his visit to Warsaw in May 1856, the Tsar addressed the Polish nobility with a promise to give Poland everything that could be useful to it, “everything that my father promised to grant it and actually granted it.”
"Stick to reality, forming one whole with the empire, and abandon all dreams of independence as impossible to realize... It depends on you to facilitate the solution of the problem. You must help me in my work. You alone will bear the responsibility if my intentions meet any chimerical obstacles along the way. In order to prove to you my readiness to ease the lot of all the guilty, I will tell you that I have just signed an amnesty: I allow all emigrants who wish to do so to return to Poland," Nikolai Berg, the first military correspondent in Russia, translator and author of "Notes on Polish Conspiracies and Uprisings," quotes the emperor's very naive speech.
Alexander II offered Poland a peaceful development within the empire
In this case, what was meant was, first of all, the participants of the previous rebellion that took place in November 1830, when the Russian army had to take Warsaw by force. Then the actual autonomy of the Polish Kingdom, guaranteed by the constitution of 1815, was abolished - an appointed Russian viceroy began to rule.
But those who returned from Siberia or European countries, of course, were not at all inclined to “live in peace and prosperity,” just like all the bearers of the idea of Polish independence.
Numerous interest groups, among which was the organization of officers of Polish origin in St. Petersburg, received a powerful impetus in the development of political ideas, which were increasingly seeking an outlet in the public space. Complete connivance in the opening of a Polish printing house and the publication of Polish newspapers in the Russian capital, the transformation of Sunday schools into an agitation network provided a basis for the dissemination of propaganda "to raise the spirit of the people."
Street protests in Warsaw began with breaking windows, tearing down signs in Russian, intimidating Russian residents of the city, and petty mischief, to which teenagers were recruited. The first serious test of strength was the demonstration of the "Academicians" circle, Warsaw students, on the anniversary of the November Uprising, with songs, recitations, distribution of portraits of old heroes of Poland - and, ultimately, a memorial service for the Poles killed in 1830-31 with the singing of patriotic hymns.
The authorities did not react to all this, which inspired the conspirators. Just as they were inspired by Russian liberal circles with their "underground literature".
Subsequently, the revolutionary nobles would be sung by the Soviet authorities as fighters against tsarism: the allies of the Polish separatists in the destruction of the autocratic Russian state were representatives of the underground organizations "Land and Freedom" and "Committee of Russian Officers in Poland". They were sympathized with by Mikhail Bakunin, Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Ogarev, who published the newspaper "Kolokol" in London; the disgraced Nikolai Chernyshevsky spoke out for the separation of Poland.
The technologies also coincided: the future scenario of the Russian revolutionaries envisaged the use of the social expectations of the peasantry, caused by the liberation reform of 1861, to organize an anti-state rebellion with the aim of realizing the ideas of utopian socialism, social equality and federalism.
To set the lower classes against the upper classes and thereby provoke the Russian peasantry to mass violence against the Russian nobility, landowners and officials, that is, to unleash a fratricidal civil war - these ideas were by no means born of the Bolsheviks.
BATTLE FOR THE EMPIRE
The main political goal of the uprising eventually became not just independence, but the restoration of an independent Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth within the borders of 1772. According to the famous Slavic scholar Alexander Hilferding, “to recapture Western Russia was the main, essential task of the entire Polish movement from the very beginning. The fulcrum was Warsaw, but the goal was Vilna and Kiev.”
The trigger for the uprising that spread across the North-West and South-West regions of Russia was the recruitment campaign for the Russian Imperial Army. The draft dodgers left Warsaw and formed the first insurgent units (around thirty in total, with a total of up to 6,000 people). However, a far greater danger was posed by a ramified and powerful underground organization with its center in Warsaw, supported and directed by influential Polish emigration in Western Europe.
Representatives of the national Polish movement created a network of local authorities, organized underground press, police, courts, post office and treasury institutions that collected funds for the uprising. The Roman Catholic clergy, relying on the sympathy of the papal throne, played an energetic, mobilizing role.
The political and religious mobilization of the rebels took place under the slogans of patriotism, defense of the Catholic faith, aggressive Russophobia and bribing social promises. Underground propaganda and religious sermons of priests inflamed political and religious hatred in all classes of society towards the "Muscovite" and "schismatic", which meant Russia, the Great Russians and Orthodoxy.
An internal political enemy, supported from outside, armed, ideologically and religiously motivated, cruel, purposeful and organized, rose up against the state.
"Simple independence is not enough for him. He wants dominance; it is not enough for him to free himself from foreign domination, he wants the destruction of his triumphant enemy. It is not enough for him to be a Pole; he wants the Russian to become a Pole or to retreat beyond the Ural Mountains. He renounces his kinship with us, turns history into a phantom, and in place of today's mighty Russia there must be a mighty Poland along Kiev, along Smolensk, from the Baltic to the Black Sea," noted the famous Russian public figure and journalist of that time, Mikhail Katkov.
The rebellious państwo podziemne sought to involve all classes of Polish society in the armed struggle with the aim of giving the uprising national significance.
Państwo podziemne is a reference to the Polish underground in WWII, but instead being applied to the war between Russia and Poland.
However, neither in the Kingdom of Poland nor in the Western region of Russia did it acquire a large-scale, truly national character.
First of all, because the peasantry did not side with the rebels.
In the Western Territory of Russia, the rebels' support was the small Polish irredenta, consisting of the nobility, gentry, priests and their Catholic peasant and bourgeois flock. It was intended to overcome the narrowness of the class-clerical base of the uprising with the help of the Western Russian peasant population, the absolute majority of which were Orthodox Belarusians and Little Russians.
However, they did not understand the vague ideas of the uprising, and only about 20% of those who supported the rebellion throughout the territory it covered were from the peasant class: this is why literature was printed for Ukrainians in a more or less understandable "simple language". And in the territory of the South-Western region (in the Volyn, Podolsk and Kyiv provinces) only 35 clashes between regular troops and the rebels took place.
A RESERVE FOR THE FUTURE
At the peak of the uprising, the number of participants, both direct and indirect, on the territory of Right-Bank Ukraine hardly exceeded 3,000 people. The Czech historian and political figure František Palacký wrote about it as follows:
“Those Little Russians who, perhaps, are now fighting together with the Poles against the Russians, are not fighting under the Little Russian banners for the political independence of Little Rus', but, like the Poles, for the restoration of old Poland.”
For the Orthodox population of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the victory of the Polish uprising meant the transformation of the region into a "home" colony of the restored Polish state, the return of slavery and the defeat of the Russian Orthodox Church. After all, one of the slogans of the rebels was the restoration of the union, abolished in Russia by the decisions of the Polotsk Council of 1839.
The events in Lithuania and Belarus were much more large-scale (which then led to corresponding repressions). But this time it was not possible to provoke an all-Russian peasant revolt aimed at destroying state institutions of power and governance and destroying public order.
Most importantly, the claim to “imperial borders” was a decisive factor in the reluctance of Britain and France (primarily) to support the rebels – it was a violation of the “rules-based order.”
The head of the British Foreign Office, Lord John Russell, addressed the Polish National Government in the House of Lords with the following words: "What kind of Poland do you wish to restore? Should we include Poznan and Galicia in it? If so, then we will provoke the resistance of Prussia and Austria, and what then - a European war? Nothing can be more alien to the intentions of Her Majesty's Government; they will limit themselves to the ideas that the dignity of England demands of them."
Thus, France was effectively left harnessed to the Polish cart alone and, of course, did not want to pull it. And the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Prince Alexander Gorchakov, only wound up his European colleagues with carefully calibrated formulations, reporting that “the rebels do not demand amnesty, nor autonomy, nor more or less broad representation. … Their goal is dominion over the provinces in which the vast majority of the population is Russian… in a word, the expansion of Poland’s borders to the two seas.”
And, in general, he was absolutely right: the Poles created all their problems with their own hands - including, of course, the three partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. But they still did not calm down.
The actual creator of the Second Polish Republic (1918–1939) and its first leader, Józef Piłsudski, devoted an entire study to the January Uprising. During his own revolutionary-terrorist activities, he was inspired by the structure of the National Government of that time. From there, the dictator derived the enduring idea of Poland “from river to river” and the dismemberment of Russia into many small states through internal strife and civil war.
In fact, on the British side, Pilsudski's friend, one of the fathers of geopolitics, Halford Mackinder, proposed at the same time the creation of an anti-Russian political bloc in Europe, which would also include Georgia and Azerbaijan. Which would mean a reliable blockade of Russia from world trade, control over which has always been in the English interests.
So if you look closely at current events, you can clearly see in them everything that already happened in our history more than 160 years ago.