The house of the dead, p.17
The House of the Dead, page 17
After he met Volkonsky in Paris in the summer of 1861, the long-time dissident writer Herzen hailed the Decembrists as the progenitors of a long line of revolutionaries who would continue the struggle against the autocracy: ‘The ghosts of these venerable old custodians will rise from the earth and, summoning their grandsons over the graves of their sons, they will show them the way.’71 In the 1860s, the returning exiles became a living connection between the democratic and patriotic ideals of the Decembrists and a new generation of radicals who emerged to challenge the autocracy: the Populists.
Maria Volkonskaya died in 1863 and Sergei two years later. In the final months of his life, Sergei sat down to write his memoirs. He was unapologetic about his part in the rebellion and everything that had flowed from it: ‘The path I chose took me to the Supreme Court, to Siberia, to penal labour and into a thirty-year-long exile from my homeland, and yet, I do not renounce a single one of my words.’72
6
Sybiracy
Long after night fell on the sleepy garrison town of Uralsk in southern Russia on 21 November 1839, a young man stepped from one of the wooden cabins with a knapsack on his back. He made his way purposefully through the searing frost and along barren streets to the edge of town. Plunging into open fields, he tramped through knee-deep snow to the banks of the Ural River, some 3 kilometres away. The meandering waters were sealed by a layer of ice thick enough to support the weight of a man. With a cautious tread, the figure searched the river for a point where the ice was thinner and weaker. He finally discovered an ice hole used by some nearby Cossack cabins to draw water from the river. By stamping on the thin film of ice that had formed that evening, he was able to reopen the hole. Casting furtive glances into the inscrutable darkness, he snatched a bundle of clothes from his knapsack and scattered them on the ice around the hole. His task complete, he regained the riverbank and fled. He ran for the first 500 metres, panting heavily in the frosty air as he hurried towards the town. He stole along the deserted streets, avoiding the occasional pool of light falling from the cottage windows he passed. Taking every care not to be seen or heard, he reached his cabin. He climbed the steps and opened the door, and was greeted on the threshold by a dark-haired young woman, her eyes flashing with alarm. She flung her arms around his neck, they exchanged some flustered words of reassurance and endearment, and he hurried inside. Moments later, the young man stepped into a large wardrobe in the bedroom, pulled aside a false wall and clambered through. Drawing the partition back into place, he settled down to wait. A mere half an hour passed before the first knock at the door ruptured the silence. The young man was an exiled Polish revolutionary named Wincenty Migurski; the woman was his wife, Albina. Together, they had just staged his death.1
Wincenty Migurski was born in 1805 into a modest landowning family of the Polish nobility, or szlachta, in Sandomierz, in today’s south-eastern Poland. The region’s turbulent fortunes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were part of Poland’s bitter history. In 1772, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, comprising the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, was partitioned by the neighbouring powers of Russia, Austria and Prussia. Sandomierz passed to Austria. Further partitions in 1792 and 1795 saw what remained of Poland annexed by the three empires. Desperate to regain their independence, the Poles turned to Napoleon in 1806, only to see their territory further dismembered in the wake of his defeat. At the Treaty of Vienna in 1815, the European powers established Congress Poland and placed it under the protection of Tsar Alexander I on condition that he safeguard Poland’s constitutional liberties. Migurski grew up amid the Romanticism and the ardent republicanism of young Polish noblemen who were inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution and by their fathers’ experience of fighting alongside the Grande armée. Thousands of Poles captured during Napoleon’s chaotic retreat from Moscow in 1812 had been exiled to penal battalions in Siberia and the Caucasus, where they were held until Napoleon’s defeat in the west.2
In the 1820s, the Polish nobility grew increasingly restive under rule from St Petersburg. Alexander had never really accepted Polish autonomy, and Nicholas I’s repressive regime alienated many. Throughout the 1820s, St Petersburg steadily undermined many of the terms of the Treaty of Vienna – freedoms of the press were withdrawn, taxes were imposed without the consent of the Polish parliament and liberal opponents of tsarist rule found themselves persecuted. Such policies only laid bare the tensions between Polish constitutionalism and nationalism, on the one hand, and Russian autocracy and imperialism, on the other.
In 1823, the authorities uncovered a secret society of Polish students, the Philomaths, at the University of Wilno (Vilnius). The leaders of the group, which included the great Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, were steeped in a European Romanticism and political nationalism. They moved from the study of patriotic Polish and Lithuanian literary works to a more active role in promoting Poland’s independence from the Russian Empire. Betrayed by one of their number, the group was exposed. After a trial lasting several months in 1824, 104 students were convicted of subversive activities and twenty of them were imprisoned or exiled to Siberia. In the same year, the director of the Wilno high school investigated a small number of students who had scrawled patriotic slogans on the classroom blackboard. Their history teacher had made no efforts to remove them and had delivered his lecture standing before them. Other unknown persons daubed anti-Russian graffiti on the walls of the Dominican monastery in Wilno. Such instances of anti-Russian feeling and pro-Polish sentiment even drew the attention of the heir to the Russian throne and governor of Congress Poland, Grand Duke Konstantin.3
Konstantin was unpopular in many quarters because of his often arbitrary rule and casual brutality in the barracks and on the parade ground. Strained relations between the Polish nobility and the Russian autocracy finally snapped when St Petersburg insisted that the Polish army assist in the suppression of the July Revolution in Paris in 1830. Inspired by events in France and by the almost simultaneous rebellion in Brussels that would see Belgium win independence from a United Netherlands and establish a constitutional order, a young republican named Piotr Wysocki instigated a revolt of young Polish officers in Warsaw. On the night of 29 November 1830, the rebels seized arms from their garrison and attacked the Belweder Palace, the seat of the grand duke, in a bid to kill Konstantin. The govern0r managed to escape, but Wysocki’s forces succeeded in capturing the city’s arsenal and forced the withdrawal of Russian forces from the Polish capital.4
The Polish rebels shared the republican ideas of the Decembrists; theirs was a political and cultural nationalism that saw itself working in concert with the progressive nations of Europe, especially France and Italy. They sought to replace the autocratic ‘Holy Alliance of Monarchs’ born of the Congress of Vienna in 1815 with a ‘Holy Alliance of Peoples’. Wysocki and his comrades rebelled under the slogan ‘For our freedom, and yours!’ – making clear that their enemy was the Russian Empire, not its people. In Warsaw, the ceremonial dethronement of the Romanovs was preceded by a ceremony in honour of the Decembrists, organized by the Polish Patriotic Society. Five empty coffins, symbolizing the five executed ringleaders of 14 December 1825, were paraded through the streets of the Polish capital, and a religious service was held in the Orthodox Church, after which Wysocki addressed the crowd in front of the Royal Castle.5
If the Poles had looked abroad for inspiration, their own insurrection catapulted them to the forefront of the European republican movement. There was an outpouring of support in the European press for the ‘French of the North’ and calls (resisted by Louis Philippe I) for France to intervene in support of the rebels. French republicans, such as Godefroi Cavaignac and his fellow members of the Society of the Rights of Man, acknowledged their own debt to the Poles for having deflected Nicholas’s armies from intervention in France itself. The French general and hero of both the American War of Independence and the July Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, pushed unsuccessfully for France to recognize Poland. In Britain, there was a surge of indignation, followed by meetings and rallies in support of Poland, denouncing Russia and pushing for British intervention in the conflict. In July 1831, The Times fulminated: ‘How long will Russia be permitted, with impunity, to make war upon the ancient and noble nation of the Poles, the allies of France, the friends of England, the natural, and, centuries ago, the tried and victorious protectors of civilized Europe against the Turkish and Muscovite barbarians?’ Across the Atlantic, there was also a tide of American public sympathy for the Polish rebels.6
The November Insurrection, as it became known, quickly erupted into a full-scale military confrontation between the Poles and the Russians, with both sides fielding the largest armies Europe had witnessed since the Napoleonic Wars. The insurgents had, however, overplayed their hand. They faced the might of the Imperial Russian Army while they were internally divided and commanded by hesitant men who could not decide whether to fight the Russians or negotiate with them. On 25 February 1831, a Polish force of 40,000 repelled 60,000 Russians on the Vistula to save Warsaw but managed to secure not a decisive victory but only a postponement of defeat. As Russian reinforcements poured into Poland, the rebels found themselves outnumbered and overwhelmed. After months of stubborn Polish resistance, tsarist troops ground their way back towards Warsaw and finally retook the city in October 1831.7
Russian retribution fell heavily on the prostrate Polish provinces. A government edict of 15 March 1833 reassigned 11,700 Polish officers and soldiers to penal battalions and fortress labour at a variety of remote and unattractive locations throughout the Russian Empire. Several thousand more were sentenced to penal labour and settlement in Siberia. The tsar was especially vengeful in the Western Provinces of Russia, in today’s Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, which were better integrated into the empire than the Kingdom of Poland. The insurgents there, many of them Polish noblemen, were tried by field courts martial and summarily shot. Russian allies of the Poles were singled out for especially brutal treatment. One of many, Nikita Gumbarsky from Vyborg province, north of St Petersburg, was sentenced for ‘participation in the rebellion of 1831, for murder, arson and other criminal acts’ to 120 blows of the birch rod and lifelong penal labour.8
Wysocki himself was sentenced to death. When the court suggested that he appeal to the tsar for mercy, Wysocki replied, ‘I did not take up arms only to then ask the tsar for mercy but rather so that my people would never again have to ask for it.’ Perhaps reluctant to avoid a repeat of the martyrdom of the Decembrists’ leaders, Nicholas commuted his sentence to twenty years of penal labour in Siberia.9 Throughout the 1830s, thousands of Poles were marched eastwards in convoys that took up to two years to reach their destination. Between 1832 and 1835 alone, some 900 Polish political prisoners passed through the Tobolsk Exile Office.10 This was the first of two major deportations of Poles in the nineteenth century; the second was to follow in the 1860s. These Poles came to be known as the Sybiracy, Polish for ‘Siberians’.
Polish exiles struggled in the inhospitable terrain of Siberian penal settlements to preserve their political ideals and their cultural identity. If Siberia had liberated the Decembrists from the stifling hierarchies of Russian society and enabled them to put their republican ideals into practice, it brought the exiled Poles only oblivion. Yet in their lonely, tormented struggles to maintain their roots and ideals, the Sybiracy yielded a searing tale of martyrdom that did much to cement Polish Romantic nationalism. None exemplified that struggle better than Wincenty Migurski.
In the wake of the suppression of the November Insurrection, between 7,000 and 8,000 insurgents fled the threat of Siberian deportation, crossing over the Kingdom of Poland’s western and southern borders into emigration. Many became active in various republican organizations that made up Young Europe (Young Poland was itself modelled on Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy). Entering this continent-wide revolutionary underground, frequently centred in masonic lodges in eastern French towns and cities, the Poles saw themselves as the vanguard of a revolutionary movement that would liberate their own homeland from autocratic rule and thereby inspire revolution in Russia proper. One of the first actions of the Polish National Committee in Paris was to issue a friendly proclamation to the Russians (partly authored by Mickiewicz). It paid homage to the Decembrists, promoted the idea of a free federation of Slavic nations, and summoned the Russians to overthrow the autocracy, abandon their conquests and unite with the Poles in a common fight for freedom.11
Migurski was one of those plotting against St Petersburg. In 1831, he had fled to France, spending two years in Besançon, where he actively participated in the Polish organizations of republican émigrés from across Europe. Migurski’s group lobbied for British and French support in the liberation of Poland and believed that an active partisan war on Polish soil would secure the support of powerful geopolitical allies.12
Following the ‘Great Polish Emigration of 1831’, many of the defeated rebels stole back into the Kingdom of Poland, organizing conspiratorial networks that were to prepare the ground for a renewed uprising. Migurski himself was dispatched to the Austrian-held territory of Galicia. Laying low in a provincial town in March 1834, he met and fell in love with Albina Wiśniowska, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a provincial nobleman. Their romance was cut short a month later when Migurski received orders to make his way to Warsaw to liaise with his comrades.13
En route, however, Migurski was arrested on suspicion of having false papers, and when he finally arrived in Warsaw, it was under armed guard. During sustained interrogation in the city’s notorious citadel, Migurski was overcome with despair: he ‘had done nothing to serve his country and had ruined Albina, robbing her of happiness forever’. He took poison in a bid to end his life, but the retching convulsions that resulted saved him. Undeterred, Migurski seized a knife that he had successfully smuggled past his captors and, grasping a heavy book, hammered the blade five times into his stomach and once into the area of his heart. He folded his hands on his chest and, ‘with a prayer on my lips, waited for death’. But death never came. His guards discovered Migurski’s prone figure in the cell and sounded the alarm. The ministrations of a doctor saved him, and two months of convalescence saw his strength eventually return. The investigative commission established by St Petersburg to uncover Polish conspiracies had by then finished its work. In January 1836, in a sentence apparently softened by compassion at his sufferings, a military tribunal exiled Migurski to the town of Uralsk, 500 kilometres north of the Caspian Sea, to serve as a private in the Imperial Army.14
Some of Migurski’s most committed fellow emissaries were followers of Szymon Konarski, a disciple of Mazzini, a radical republican and one of the founders of Young Poland. Konarski had also taken refuge in France before returning to the Kingdom of Poland intent on instigating a partisan war against the Russians. In February 1835, he set up the ‘Commonwealth of Polish People’, an umbrella organization based in Cracow that aimed to unite the various underground groups in the Western Provinces to the east of the Kingdom of Poland. It sought the creation of a sovereign and independent Poland, but one which saw the aspirations of the Polish nation as indivisible from those of humanity as a whole. For ‘people of all countries are brothers . . . members of a great and united brotherhood. They are obliged to offer each other help in securing and defending their common freedom. Men, families, castes, peoples who ultimately seek to oppress other peoples, become the enemies of all mankind.’ Konarski’s conspiratorial efforts took him deep inside the territory of the Russian Empire to today’s Lithuania.15
The tsarist secret police, the Third Department, eventually infiltrated the Commonwealth of Polish People. Konarski was arrested near Wilno in May 1838 and executed by firing squad the following February. The Third Department succeeded in forcing some of Konarski’s followers to confess their plans and reveal the identities of their co-conspirators. Many were arrested and exiled to Siberia. A military tribunal convicted one, Josef Antoni Beaupré, a 38-year-old physician from Krements in Volhynia province, of having been active in the Commonwealth of Polish People. Working as chief secretary in the provincial administration under the nom de guerre ‘Tojad’, or ‘Wolf’s Bane’, after the bright but lethally poisonous flower, Beaupré had allegedly used his position to gather statistical data ‘in order to carry out a partisan war . . . with the aim of galvanising minds for the revival of Poland’. He was found to have supplied other conspirators with money, letters and books. Beaupré was sentenced to death on 21 February 1839, a sentence subsequently commuted to twenty years of penal labour and the confiscation of his estates.16 One of Beaupré’s close associates in Krements and another of Konarski’s followers was Ewa Felińska. Also caught up in the Third Department’s dragnet, Felińska was the first female political exile banished to Siberia. On the personal intervention of Nicholas, who had declared: ‘I have no reason to like Polish men, but I cannot abide Polish women’, she was sentenced to the confiscation of her estates and ‘permanent settlement’ in Tobolsk province, but not to the loss of her noble rights. Felińska spent five years in exile and, upon her return to Poland, published her Siberian memoirs, Revelations of Siberia. By a Banished Lady, in London in 1852. Full of astute and amusing anthropological observations of life in Siberia, it fascinated a sympathetic British audience. Within two years the book was already in its third edition.17
