What Was the January Uprising of 1863?
The January Uprising began on the night of 22 January 1863, when detachments of young Polish conspirators attacked Russian gendarmerie posts in ten cities of Congress Poland. The uprising was the second of the two great Polish uprisings of the nineteenth century; the first, the November Uprising of 1830, had ended in Russian victory and the abolition of the Congress Kingdom’s constitution. The 1863-1864 uprising was different in kind: it was a peasant insurgency as much as a military revolt, and the Russian response — the appointment of General Mikhail Muravyov as governor of the Northwestern Provinces — set the template for the subsequent Russification of the Polish-Lithuanian borderlands (see Kieniewicz, The Emancipation of the Polish Peasantry, 1969).
The causes
The uprising had a long fuse. The Kingdom of Poland, in personal union with the Russian Empire, had been given a constitution by Alexander I in 1815, but the constitution had been progressively restricted. The Congress Kingdom’s army had been reduced and was, by 1860, a corps within the Russian Imperial Army under a Russian commander. The Polish educational system had been subordinated to the Russian Ministry of Education; the University of Warsaw had been closed after the 1861 demonstrations. The emancipation of the serfs in Russia, completed in 1861, was not extended to Congress Poland, where the question became a particular irritant.
The immediate cause was the Polish reaction to Alexander II’s reforms. The 19 February 1861 Emancipation Manifesto was greeted in Warsaw with demonstrations that turned into the first major Russian repression of the period: on 27 February 1861 Russian troops fired on a crowd in Castle Square, killing five. The “Warsaw Five” became the first martyrs of the coming uprising, and the underground Polish leadership — the Central National Committee, headed by Jarosław Dąbrowski, Zygmunt Padlewski, and others — began to organise a revolt. The manifestos of 22 January 1863 declared the uprising a national rising and called for land reform. The manifesto’s appeal to the peasantry was the most important single innovation: the 1830 uprising had been an officer’s revolt, the 1863 uprising was a national one (Wereszycki, 1863, 1963).
The campaign
The Russian response was the appointment of Count Andrey Berg as the viceroy of the Kingdom, with a free hand in suppressing the uprising, and the appointment of Mikhail Muravyov, the former commander of the Grodno Corps, as governor of the Northwestern Provinces (the Lithuanian and Belarusian parts of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth). The Russian force in the region was about 100,000 men by the spring of 1863, rising to 170,000 by the end of the year. The Polish forces were never able to mass for a decisive battle: the insurgents fought as guerrillas, in bands of 200 to 1,000 men, and the Russian counter-insurgency campaign relied on the cantonment system, the cultivation of informers, and summary execution.
The “branka” — the conscription levy of January 1863, which had been the immediate trigger of the uprising — was used by the Russian government to recruit further Polish manpower. By the end of 1863 the insurgency was effectively beaten in the field; by the end of 1864 it was over. The Polish National Government, which had directed the uprising from Paris and London, never held any of the territory it claimed to govern. Romuald Traugutt, the last dictator of the uprising, was captured by Russian agents in April 1864 and hanged in Warsaw in August (Wereszycki, 1963).
The Russian response
The Russian response was a comprehensive attempt to remove the basis of Polish national identity. Muravyov, in the Northwestern Provinces, closed the University of Vilna (which had been founded by Stefan Batory in 1579) and the Vilna Medical-Surgical Academy, replaced Polish-language schooling with Russian, and prohibited the use of Polish in official business. He deported some 10,000 Polish families to Siberia. The Polish lands in the “Vistula Provinces” were subjected to the same policy by Berg. In the Kingdom of Poland itself, the Polish army was disbanded, the University of Warsaw was Russified, and the Catholic Church was subordinated to the Russian civil administration. The Polish question, in this period, was effectively turned into a Russian question of how to rule a large Polish-speaking population that had no legal expression of its national identity (Kieniewicz, 1969).
The legacy
The uprising of 1863 was a turning point in Russian nationality policy. The pre-1863 Russian state had, in many respects, accommodated the Polish-Lithuanian nobility’s local privileges; the post-1863 state made a determined effort to abolish those privileges. The Polish-Lithuanian provinces were reorganised as ordinary Russian governorates, and the new policy of cultural Russification was extended to the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands. The Russian writer Alexander Herzen, who had been sympathetic to the Polish cause since 1861, used the émigré journal Kolokol to denounce the Russian repression; the loss of his Russian readership, in turn, was one of the events that pushed Herzen’s journal towards the broader European radicalism of the late 1860s. The 1863 uprising entered Polish literature and painting as a foundational event: Eliza Orzeszkowa’s novel Meir Ezofowicz (1878) and Stefan Żeromski’s The Faithful River (1912) treated it as a national parable (Walicki, Russia, Poland, and the West, 2011).