It had been said that the boundaries of the putative future Poland would draw themselves with the blood of insurgents. Predictably, they did not stretch very far into Ukraine, where only groups of Polish szlachta came out. In Belorussia, they included much of the old Commonwealth, with not only the peasants, but also the Jews of towns such as Pińsk joining the cause. In Lithuania and even southern Livonia, they corresponded to the borders of 1772, with mass participation by all classes. It was a slap in the face to the Russian policy carried on in these areas since the first partition.
On 2 March 1864 the Tsar pulled the carpet from under the feet of the insurrectionary government by decreeing the emancipation of the peasants with full possession of land. In April Traugutt was arrested. Sporadic fighting went on for another six months, but the uprising was over. The Tsar issued a ukase changing the name of the Kingdom of Poland to the ‘Vistula Province’. All Polish institutions were abolished, and a period of intense repression began. General Muravyov, known in Russia as ‘Hangman’ Muravyov, scoured the Western Gubernias for signs of dissent and carried out a thorough purge. Brutality was meted out on a hitherto unknown scale, the path to Siberia was trodden by chain gangs numbering tens of thousands of young people who would never return, and the nation went into mourning.
It went into mourning not only for the failure of the insurrection, but for the whole tradition of insurgency. The 1863 rising was an uncommon achievement—it was no mean feat for 100,000 intellectuals, noblemen, workers and peasants to keep Europe’s largest military machine tied down for eighteen months. It had also proved that the szlachta were not alone, and the very last engagement was fought by a detachment of peasants. Nevertheless it was the end of an era in Polish history.
SIXTEEN
The ‘Polish Question’ haunted nineteenth-century diplomacy like an uneasy conscience, inducing as much discomfort in Poland’s friends as in its enemies. Britain made many a diplomatic
But as the tide of support for the Polish cause ebbed in the chancelleries it surged in other quarters. It was characteristic that a Polish commemorative meeting held in London in 1841 should have had as its principal speaker a black man from Haiti. As Engels pointed out, every workers’ movement of the nineteenth century only ventured beyond its own sphere of interests to make a gesture or a pronouncement on the Polish Question. In 1848 the Paris mob marched on the Hôtel de Ville to cries of ‘
In the resolution he submitted to the Central Council of the First International, Karl Marx explained that the Poles’ struggle for freedom was carried on in the common interest, as without an independent Poland the whole of Europe was threatened by Russian autocracy, and what happened in Poland had an immediate and crucial bearing on the course of events elsewhere. In 1792 the Russian armies which Catherine had hoped to use against Revolutionary France were deployed instead in Poland. The same happened in 1830. As Lafayette explained to the French Chamber: ‘The war had been prepared against us…Poland was to form the vanguard: the vanguard has turned against the main body of the army.’ Had Poland regained her independence it would have been more difficult for Austria to maintain its hegemony in northern Italy, for Russia to expand its influence in the Balkans, and for Prussia to establish its ascendancy in Germany. At the same time, a Poland carved up between the three powers sealed their cooperation with the enduring bond of complicity and mutual self-interest which was the greatest impediment to change of any kind.