The Papacy, intent on preserving its diminishing temporal status, was wary of antagonising the partitioning powers, and went so far as to condemn the uprisings of 1794 and 1830. It was in no position to protect the Polish hierarchy in the lands of the former Commonwealth. The Josephine reforms had subjected the clergy of Austria to the state, and this was extended to Galicia. Prussia gradually confiscated Church property in the course of the century and took over the appointment of bishops, but stopped short of the kind of measures adopted by Russia.
In 1801 the Polish Church was subjected to a secular administrative body in St Petersburg. After 1831 half of the convents and monasteries on former Polish territory were closed down. After 1864 all Church property was confiscated and monastic orders disbanded. The clergy were forbidden to write to Rome. Seminaries and other Church institutions were placed under a police inspectorate, and sermons had to be passed by the censor. In 1870 the government decreed that the Catholic liturgy was henceforth to be said in Russian. Recalcitrant priests were flogged or deported to Siberia and peasants were terrorised by the police, but there was such determined resistance that the authorities relented and in 1882 signed a Concordat with Rome, which laid down the conditions under which the faith could be practised. But this did not herald any fundamental change of attitude. When the young Nicholas II visited Warsaw in 1897, he gave orders for the building of a vast Orthodox church dedicated to St Alexander in the middle of its largest central square.
Russian policy towards the Uniates was even more draconian. In 1773, after the first partition, Catherine II sent troops into the villages to convert them to the Orthodox faith. The persecution abated after her death, but Nicholas took up the crusade for Orthodoxy with a vengeance. Between 1826 and 1838 a huge operation was mounted which has been likened to Stalin’s purges. Uniate peasants were ordered to abjure their faith, and children were mutilated and butchered before their mothers if they refused. Where even this failed, massacres and deportations ensued. A further such campaign was carried out in the 1870s. These crusades failed to stamp out the Uniates, who would hold undercover services in woods or across the border in Galicia. Instead of inspiring loyalty to St Petersburg, it made them look to Poland and to Austria as havens of toleration, and contributed to the rise of Ukrainian nationalism.
Whether they were Ukrainians or Poles, the peasants tended to identify first and foremost with religion and language. It followed that they remained loyal to their Church, and not always just for religious reasons: throughout the nineteenth century the village priest was the peasant’s adviser and support in the struggle against oppression and injustice. They also resented state interference in education, particularly when it came to language.
The educational system in the Western Gubernias had been Russified after 1831. After 1864 a set of new edicts forbade the use of Polish in printed form, even on shop fronts and hoardings, while written Polish was forbidden in official correspondence. At one stage it even became illegal to give Polish Christian names at baptism.
Legislation in the Kingdom was less harsh. Nevertheless, in 1869 the Warsaw Main School, founded in 1862 as a substitute for the university, abolished in 1831, was shut down and in turn replaced by a Russian university. In 1885 Russian was substituted for Polish as the teaching language, even in elementary schools. Children were not allowed to address each other in anything but Russian within the precincts of the school.
As the tsarist government clamped down, secret classes were organised to teach Polish and history as well as religious instruction. A ‘flying university’ operated lectures and exams for hundreds of students at secret locations. According to Russian sources, clandestine education at some level involved one-third of the entire population of the Kingdom by 1901. Conspiracy, illegal presses and the smuggling of books once again became part of the everyday experience of Polish society.
Poles lived out the nineteenth century in a continuously changing state of dislocation: life went on, children were born, money was made and lost, in a physical environment that would have been familiar to any contemporary in England, France or Germany, but one that was sporadically shaken by the intrusion of brutality from above and subversion from below, most of it irrational and groundless, necessitating changes of outlook and positioning with regard to the system and within society. The attendant strain, mental, emotional and psychological, marked Polish society all the more as it refused to accept this state of affairs, and continually tried to regain control of its destiny, by rational means, through word, print and, where possible, action.
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