January Uprising

• 1. Introduction

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  The January Uprising began on the night of the 22nd of January 1863 with a single piece of bureaucratic spite. Aleksander Wielopolski, head of civil administration in the Congress Kingdom of Poland, moved up the conscription schedule by months, ordering young Polish activists drafted into the Imperial Russian Army for twenty-year terms of service. He did it deliberately, hoping to drain the underground resistance of its most passionate members before they could organize. Instead, he lit the fuse. The very outcome he had worked to prevent exploded into the most sustained Polish armed revolt against Russian rule in the nineteenth century.

  What followed was not a conventional war. It was eighteen months of guerrilla skirmishes, secret governments, diplomatic crises stretching from Paris to St. Petersburg, and a reckoning with who, exactly, belonged to the Polish nation. The uprising involved peasants armed with scythes, Italian and French officers who crossed borders to fight for a cause not their own, and a clandestine state that issued decrees, ran a diplomatic corps, and ultimately sent its leaders to the gallows at the Warsaw Citadel. Its failure would reshape Polish society, language, and political thought for generations.

• 2. The Two Polands

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  Andrzej Zamoyski stood at the center of one vision of what Poland should become. Landed, liberal-conservative, and influential, he led the faction that came to be called the Whites. They wanted a return to the constitutional arrangements that had existed before the 1830 November Uprising, the relative sovereignty that Congress Poland had briefly enjoyed. Compensation for landowners, orderly reform, and patience.

  Against them stood the Reds, a democratic movement drawing together peasants, workers, and clergy. The Reds saw the liberation of the peasantry not as a bargaining chip but as the entire point. Every political calculation flowed from that single question: who would own the land, and on what terms. Conservative estate owners favored abolishing serfdom only if they received compensation. The democratic movement insisted that emancipation without strings was the only foundation on which a genuine national movement could stand.

  Blood entered the argument early. In February 1861, the Russian Army attacked a demonstration in Warsaw's Castle Square on the anniversary of the Battle of Grochów. Five people died. That April, Russian fire killed two hundred and wounded five hundred more. Martial law descended on Warsaw, and organizers in Warsaw and Vilna were deported deep into Russia. In Vilna alone, one hundred and sixteen demonstrations were held in 1861. By October of that year, an urban Movement Committee had formed in secret. By June 1862, it had grown into the Central National Committee, whose leadership included Stefan Bobrowski, Jarosław Dąbrowski, Zygmunt Padlewski, Agaton Giller, and Bronisław Szwarce.

• 3. The Secret State

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  Future leaders of the uprising gathered in cities spread across the continent: St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Vilna, Paris, and London. The Central National Committee planned to strike no earlier than the spring of 1863. When Wielopolski's conscription order forced its hand in January, the committee issued a manifesto declaring all sons of Poland free and equal citizens without distinction of creed, condition, or rank. It decreed that land worked by peasants, whether through rent or labor service, would become their unconditional property. Compensation to landlords would come from state funds.

  The underground government that prosecuted the uprising was called the Rada Narodowa, or National Council. It ran a virtual coalition of Reds and Whites, with civil and military structures reporting upward through it. Zygmunt Sierakowski, Antanas Mackevičius, and Konstanty Kalinowski led its operations in the Lithuanian territories. The diplomatic corps operated from Paris under Władysław Czartoryski, who worked to convince western European capitals that the Polish cause deserved international support.

  This shadow government issued currency, appointed military commanders, ran courier networks, and held jurisdiction over territories it did not physically control. When the Archbishop of Warsaw, Zygmunt Feliński, resigned his position under the Russian government and signed allegiance to the newly constituted insurgent administration, it signaled how far the secret state's authority had reached into Polish institutional life.

• 4. Guerrilla in the Forest

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  About ten thousand men rallied to the revolutionary banner in those first days. They came chiefly from urban working classes and minor clerks, with younger sons of the poorer nobility and lower-ranking priests among them. The Russian government had ninety thousand men under General Anders Edvard Ramsay in Poland. Against that force, the insurgents had almost nothing by way of weapons or formal military training.

  The first major military engagement came on the 2nd of February 1863, when Lithuanian peasants armed mostly with scythes faced a squadron of Russian hussars outside Čysta Būda, near Marijampolė. It ended in a massacre. By late spring and early summer, the historian Jerzy Zdrada records, thirty-five thousand Poles faced a Russian Army of one hundred and forty-five thousand in the Kingdom alone. Yet the insurgents, organized in small partisan groups, avoided large-scale battles and turned to irregular guerrilla warfare instead.

  In February alone, volunteers fought in eighty skirmishes against Russian forces. Supplies and weapons trickled in from Galicia and the Prussian Partition. Italian, French, and Hungarian officers crossed borders to join them. Francesco Nullo, an Italian general who headed the Garibaldi Legion, died at the Battle of Krzykawka. François Rochebrune, a French officer, formed and commanded a unit called the Zouaves of Death. The uprising spread on the 1st of February 1863 to the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and by April and May it had reached Latvia, Belarus, northern Ukraine, and the Wolynian Voivodship. Despite the liberation manifesto, the peasantry of many regions could not be mobilized; without prior ideological agitation among Ruthenian peasants, some even assisted Russian forces in capturing rebels.

• 5. The Alvensleben Convention

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  On the 8th of February 1863, Prussia and Russia signed the Alvensleben Convention in St. Petersburg. It committed the two powers to suppress the Polish movement jointly, placing Prussian railways at Russia's disposal for moving troops through former Commonwealth territory. The British Ambassador to Berlin, Sir Alexander Malet, informed his government of arrangements that had already been finalized by the 14th of February.

  The convention, when it became public, transformed the character of the uprising. Otto von Bismarck's step provoked protests from several governments and gave western European capitals a reason to engage. Napoleon III of France, sympathetic to the Polish cause, turned his political attention toward provoking a confrontation with Prussia and sought an alliance with Austria simultaneously. Britain, in turn, worked to prevent a Franco-Prussian war and block a Franco-Austrian alignment. Austria competed with Prussia for leadership of the German territories, rejected French approaches, and spurned Napoleon III.

  In June 1863, France, Britain, and Austria issued diplomatic notes calling for an amnesty, a national representative structure, autonomous concessions across the Kingdom, and a recall of the signatories of the Congress of Vienna. Those conditions fell well below what the Polish leadership expected. Alexander II, secure in the support of his own people, rejected the proposals. Russia broke off negotiations entirely in September 1863. Napoleon III abandoned the Polish cause outright in April 1864. Władysław Czartoryski wrote to Romuald Traugutt: "We are alone, and alone we shall remain."

• 6. Traugutt's Last Gambit

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  Romuald Traugutt, a lieutenant colonel of German descent in the Russian Army, took matters into his own hands on the 17th of October 1863. He assumed leadership of the uprising with the aim of uniting all classes under a single national banner. On the 27th of December 1863, he enacted the earlier land decree, granting peasants the land they worked, with compensation to owners to come from state funds after the uprising's successful conclusion.

  The response was moderate. Russian authorities had already been moving among the peasantry with their own offers of generous land grants. Those peasants who accepted Russian terms did not engage with Polish revolutionaries. Traugutt's spring offensive depended on a European-wide war that never came. In the Świętokrzyskie Mountains, General Józef Hauke-Bosak distinguished himself by seizing several cities from vastly superior Russian forces, but he suffered a crushing defeat on the 21st of February 1864. On the 29th of February, Austria imposed martial law. On the 2nd of March, the tsarist authorities abolished serfdom in the Polish Kingdom. Both acts neutralized Traugutt's strategy of mass mobilization.

  Arrests eliminated position after position in the secret state. Traugutt was taken on the night of the 10th of April. On the 5th of August, he and the last four members of the National Council, Antoni Jezioranski, Rafał Krajewski, Józef Toczyski, and Roman Żuliński, were hanged at the Warsaw Citadel. The last recorded insurgent, the priest and commander Stanisław Brzóska, clung to resistance in Podlasie and Samogitia until the spring of 1865. The war had lasted eighteen months and comprised six hundred and fifty battles and skirmishes. Twenty-five thousand Polish and other insurgents died in it.

• 7. Reprisals and Russification

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  According to official Russian figures, three hundred and ninety-six persons were executed and eighteen thousand, six hundred and seventy-two were exiled to Siberia. The historian Norman Davies recorded the total deportation figure as eighty thousand, noting it was the single largest deportation in Russian history. Another historian, George Kennan, described thousands of Polish insurgents transported to the Nerchinsk silver-mining district. One hundred and twenty-eight men were hanged under the personal supervision of Mikhail Muravyov, known as Muravyov the Hangman. Nine thousand, four hundred and twenty-three men and women were exiled to Siberia according to Russia's own estimates. In total, over sixty thousand persons were imprisoned and exiled to distant regions of Russia.

  The economic punishment was calibrated to destroy the szlachta as a class. The Russian government confiscated one thousand, six hundred and sixty estates in Poland and one thousand, seven hundred and ninety-four in Lithuania. A ten percent income tax was imposed on all estates as a war indemnity. The government took over all church estates, abolished monasteries and convents, and ordered all schooling except religious instruction to be conducted in Russian. Russian became the exclusive official language of government at every level. The Kingdom of Poland was divided into ten provinces, each governed by an appointed Russian military governor answering to the Governor-General in Warsaw. Count Fyodor Berg, the newly appointed Namiestnik of Poland, intensified systematic Russification in an effort to eradicate Polish traditions and culture.

  Ninety-five percent of those punished for participation were Catholic. Insurgents of landed background constituted sixty percent of participants overall; in Ukraine the figure reached seventy-five percent. The abolition of serfdom was deliberately enacted to ruin the szlachta: peasants received their land at market price, while the average redemption price across the Russian Empire had run thirty-four percent above market.

• 8. What the Uprising Left Behind

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  The cultural erasure was only partially successful. In 1905, forty-one years after the uprising's collapse, Poles rose again in the Łódź insurrection. Two political movements that shaped the following century grew directly from the January Uprising's aftermath. Józef Piłsudski, a descendant of Lithuanians, built the Polish Socialist Party. Roman Dmowski led the National Democracy movement, known as Endecja, rooted in Catholic conservatism and committed to reversing forced Russification and Germanisation through the Polonisation of partitioned territories.

  The uprising also entered Polish literature and art. The poet Cyprian Norwid wrote a poem titled "Chopin's Piano" describing how Russian soldiers threw the composer's instrument from a second-floor Warsaw apartment during the uprising. The novelist Eliza Orzeszkowa, a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, set her novel Nad Niemnem in and around Grodno in the uprising's aftermath. Jules Verne's initial draft of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas gave Captain Nemo a backstory as a Polish nobleman whose family had been murdered by Russians during the January Uprising; Verne's editor Pierre-Jules Hetzel removed it because France had recently concluded an alliance with the Russian Empire.

  Among those who fought were people who went on to define their fields elsewhere: Apollo Korzeniowski, Polish playwright and father of Joseph Conrad; Bolesław Prus, a leading writer of historical novels; and Saint Albert Chmielowski, who after surviving the uprising founded the Albertine Brothers and Sisters. Saint Raphael Kalinowski, born Joseph Kalinowski in Lithuania, resigned his Russian Army captaincy to serve as Minister of War for the insurgents, was sentenced to death, had his sentence commuted to ten years in Siberia, and survived a nine-month overland trek to reach his place of exile.