1864–1915 · No Polish state
The Vistula Land
After the January Uprising the Kingdom loses everything but its name: its separate institutions are dismantled between 1864 and 1874, and officials increasingly call it the Vistula Land — ten governorates of the Russian Empire. Russification reaches the schools and the offices, and the Prussian partition gets Germanisation and the Kulturkampf. The one place Polish public life remains legal is autonomous Galicia. Łódź becomes one of Europe’s great textile cities, and some three and a half million people emigrate to find work.
Population
- about 5,000,000 (estimate, ±400,000) — The former Congress Kingdom after the January Uprising.
- From 1897: 9,400,000 (census data) — The Russian census of 1897, the Vistula Land. With Galicia (about 7.3 million) and the provinces of Posen and West Prussia (about 3.5 million in 1900), the Polish lands of the three partitions held about 20 million.
- From 1910: about 12,000,000 (estimate, ±1,000,000) — The Vistula Land on the eve of the First World War, by the Russian population registers, which counted higher than the census did; no census after 1897 covered it.
Rulers and leaders
- 1848–1916 Franz Joseph I — Emperor of Austria, from 1867 of Austria-Hungary — partitioning power occupying power
- 1861–1888 William I — King of Prussia, from 1871 German Emperor — partitioning power occupying power
- 1862–1890 Otto von Bismarck — Minister-President of Prussia, from 1871 Chancellor of Germany — partitioning power occupying power
Behind the Kulturkampf in the Prussian partition, the Prussian deportations of 1885 and the Settlement Commission of 1886.
- 1863–1864 Romuald Traugutt — dictator of the January Uprising, head of the National Government head of state
Led the uprising from October 1863 until his arrest in April 1864, and was hanged below the Warsaw Citadel in August. Ludwik Mierosławski and Marian Langiewicz had each been dictator briefly before him.
- 1863–1874 Fyodor Berg — Viceroy of the Kingdom of Poland — suppressed the January Uprising occupying power
The last viceroy; under him the Kingdom’s separate institutions were abolished.
- 1864–1881 Alexander II — Emperor of Russia — partitioning power occupying power
- 1881–1894 Alexander III — Emperor of Russia — partitioning power occupying power
- 1888 Frederick III — German Emperor for 99 days — partitioning power occupying power
- 1888–1918 William II — German Emperor and King of Prussia — partitioning power occupying power
- 1894–1917 Nicholas II — last Emperor of Russia — partitioning power occupying power
- 1915–1918 Hans von Beseler — Governor-General of Warsaw — occupying power occupying power
- 1915–1916 Erich von Diller — Military Governor-General at Kielce, from October 1915 at Lublin — Austrian occupying power occupying power
Events
- 1864The end of the Kingdom’s autonomy 2 March loss
A tsarist decree gives the peasants their land, to cut them off from the rising. The dismantling of the Kingdom’s separate institutions begins straight after and is finished by 1874: it was never formally abolished, but from now on it is ten governorates of the Russian Empire, increasingly called the Vistula Land.
- 1867Galician autonomy 26 June constitution
In the new constitutional Austria-Hungary Galicia gets autonomy: a Polish school board, and within a few years Polish in the offices, the courts and the universities of Kraków and Lviv. The one partition where Poles govern themselves trains the elite of the future state.
- 1914The First Cadre Company marches out 6 August turning point
On 6 August Piłsudski’s riflemen set out from the Oleandry in Kraków and cross into the Russian partition. The Kingdom does not rise as they had hoped, but the company grows into the Polish Legions, and the Legions into the officer corps and the governing class of the state after 1918.
Wars, uprisings and longer processes
- 1831–1870The Great Emigration resettlement
After the November Uprising falls, some ten thousand soldiers, politicians and artists go west, most of them to France: Czartoryski and the Hôtel Lambert, Lelewel’s democrats and the Democratic Society, Mickiewicz, Słowacki, Chopin. Beyond the censor’s reach they write the programmes of a future Poland and a culture that outlasts the partitions.
- 1863–1864The January Uprising uprising
The longest Polish rising: eighteen months of guerrilla war in the Kingdom, Lithuania and Belarus with no regular army, run by an underground state with its own government, taxes and courts. The National Government falls when the Russians arrest Romuald Traugutt in April 1864; the last units fight on into the autumn.
- 1864–1905Russification of Poles during the Partitions repression
After the January Uprising the Kingdom is folded into Russia’s system of provinces: the offices, courts and schools speak Russian, Warsaw University too from 1869, and under the school curator Apukhtin Polish is taught as a foreign language. Resistance is secret schooling; the first concessions come only with the revolution of 1905.
- 1870–1914Emigration for bread resettlement
About three and a half million people leave the overcrowded villages of all three partitions for America, the Ruhr and Brazil. The money they send home, and those who come back, change the Polish countryside.
- 1871–1878The Kulturkampf repression
Bismarck’s government curbs the Catholic Church, and in the Prussian partition the Polish language: German pushes Polish out of offices and schools, Archbishop Ledóchowski is imprisoned and parishes are left without priests. In Greater Poland the Church and Polishness grow together for good.
- 1885–1890The Prussian expulsions repression
Prussia expels some thirty thousand Poles and Jews without German citizenship, most of them Russian and Austrian subjects. A year later the Settlement Commission is set up to buy Polish land for German settlers.
- 1886–1918Germanisation in the Prussian partition repression
The Settlement Commission buys land for German settlers, school teaches only in German, and a law of 1908 allows Polish owners to be expropriated. The children of Września (1901) and the school strike of 1906–07 defend religion taught in Polish, and the banks and cooperatives of organic work compete with the Commission for land, and hold their own.
- 1905–1907The Revolution of 1905 uprising
After Bloody Sunday in St Petersburg strikes sweep the Kingdom: the workers of Łódź and Warsaw fight for labour rights, schoolchildren for Polish schools, and in Łódź the fighting goes to the barricades. Russia answers with martial law and executions, but gives way on language in private schools and the Kingdom elects deputies to the new Duma.
- 1914–1918The First World War war
The three partitioning powers fight each other across the Polish lands, and Poles in their armies fight each other. In 1915 Russia pulls out of the Kingdom; Piłsudski’s Legions and the Act of 5 November reopen the Polish question, and the defeat of all three partitioning powers lets it be settled.
People of the age
- 1846–1916 Henryk Sienkiewicz — novelist, author of the Trilogy and Quo Vadis, Nobel Prize 1905; in 1915 he co-founded a relief committee for war victims in Poland
- 1864–1939 Roman Dmowski — National Democracy leader; argued for Poland’s borders at the Versailles conference
- 1869–1907 Stanisław Wyspiański — playwright, painter and stained-glass designer; author of The Wedding (1901)
- 1867–1934 Marie Curie — physicist and chemist; discovered polonium and radium, Nobel Prize 1903 and 1911
- 1867–1935 Józef Piłsudski — led the PPS fighters and founded the Legions; imprisoned at Magdeburg in 1917
- 1878–1942 Janusz Korczak — doctor, educator and writer; ran the Orphans’ Home in Warsaw, murdered at Treblinka in 1942 with the children in his care
- 1874–1945 Wincenty Witos — three times prime minister, leader of the peasant movement
- 1860–1941 Ignacy Jan Paderewski — pianist and composer; during the war he lobbied in the United States, President Wilson included, for an independent Poland
- 1841–1910 Eliza Orzeszkowa — novelist, author of On the Niemen
- 1847–1912 Bolesław Prus — novelist and journalist, author of The Doll and Pharaoh
- 1842–1910 Maria Konopnicka — poet and short-story writer, author of the Rota (1908)
- 1864–1925 Stefan Żeromski — novelist, author of Homeless People, Ashes and The Coming Spring
- 1866–1936 Ignacy Daszyński — socialist leader; as Marshal of the Sejm (1928–30) he opposed Piłsudski’s government
- 1867–1925 Władysław Reymont — novelist, author of The Promised Land and The Peasants, Nobel Prize 1924
- 1882–1937 Karol Szymanowski — composer of the ballet Harnasie and a Stabat Mater; director of the Warsaw Conservatory and rector of the Higher School of Music formed from it
- 1885–1969 Kazimierz Sosnkowski — Piłsudski’s deputy in the Legions, war minister in 1920, Commander-in-Chief in 1943–44