These developments were closely connected to Russian policy. Between 1819 and 1822 the Kingdom was part of the same customs area as Russia. In 1831 a tariff barrier was imposed between the two states. These tariffs were imposed and lifted several times, often for political reasons, creating enormous problems for Polish industry. In the 1870s Russia switched to protectionist policies, within which the Kingdom was included, and this created the conditions for the Polish boom of the next decades. Three-quarters of the cotton produced in Łódź in the 1880s was exported to Russia. The metallurgical industry of Warsaw and the Old Polish Basin increased its output by over thirty times in the last quarter of the century, largely as a result of the expansion of railways in the Russian Empire. The Lilpop railcar and rail factory in Warsaw was the largest in the whole empire and grew fat on the spread of the Russian network. By the 1890s Russia accounted for 90 per cent of Poland’s trade, a huge captive market.
In the late 1890s Russia began her own industrial revolution, which meant that engineers and technicians trained in Poland found new scope for their skills. Hundreds of these men invaded the empire to build bridges, lay tracks and manage mines and factories from the Urals to Manchuria, some building up vast fortunes in the process. After digging tunnels for the Trans-Siberian railway, Alfons Koziełł-Poklewski went on to become one of the richest men in the Russian Empire, owning goldmines, diamond mines, steel mills, distilleries and a string of other concerns. Even some of those who had been exiled to Siberia for revolutionary activity ended up building sizeable fortunes in cities such as Tomsk and Irkutsk. At the economic level, the colonial relationship was reversed and favoured the Poles rather than Russians.
This was not so in agriculture, which, being the economic base of the szlachta, was subject to political considerations. It also involved the peasants and their relationship with the szlachta, which had a direct bearing on their ability to mobilise the masses in support of the Polish cause. The manner in which peasant emancipation was introduced in 1864 was almost entirely shaped by such considerations. The decree was rich in phrases such as ‘the lords who have oppressed you’, which were supposed to give the peasants the impression that it was the Tsar who was liberating them from the szlachta. The idea was to drive a wedge between the szlachta and the peasant, and to ruin the minor szlachta, perceived as the most patriotic section of society.
There were five areas which the decree tackled: the abolition of labour-rents; the commutation of money-rents into freehold possession of land; the distribution of land to landless peasants; grazing and wood-gathering rights on manorial land; and finally the setting up of peasant councils under tsarist administration which would put an end to landowners’ influence over village affairs.
The consequences were not long in making themselves felt. The landless peasants were given too little land to survive on. The compensation to the landlords was paid out not in cash as in Russia, but in negotiable bonds which immediately plummeted in value. Thousands of small landowners had to sell up and move to the towns. Large estates were hardly affected. Their owners had mostly switched to money-rents long before, they had capital reserves to employ farmhands and bribe local officials, and they could afford to fight in the courts over pastures and grazing rights.
The richer peasants bought out the hitherto landless who had been given plots too small to survive on. While land in peasant ownership increased by nearly 10 per cent in the next twenty-five years, the number of landless peasants increased by 400 per cent during the same period. The doubling of the population in the second half of the century only aggravated the land hunger.
The economic ruin of thousands of szlachta families did not have the hoped-for consequences. Many of those who remained in the country assimilated with the richer yeoman-peasants, strengthening defiance in the villages. Those who drifted to the cities brought their values and their patriotism into the middle classes into which they married.
Russian policies were similarly counter-productive when it came to matters of religion. The partitions had pulled the Polish province of the Church to pieces. Six dioceses found themselves in Austrian Poland, under the primacy of the Metropolitan of Lwów. Warmia (Ermland) and Wrocław (Breslau) were directly affiliated to Rome. The rest of the dioceses incorporated into Prussia were placed under the administration of the Protestant Church of Prussia. The dioceses of the Western Gubernias were subordinated to the Metropolitan of Mogilev, while those of the Kingdom were placed under the newly created Archbishopric of Warsaw. After 1830 there was not even a nominal Primate.