Kiev, p.11
Kiev, page 11
On September 14, 1859, Kiev University students petitioned Pirogov to open a Sunday school in Podil where the sons of artisans might acquire basic literacy and arithmetical skills. Pirogov assented, and other schools throughout the city and region followed, numbering more than three hundred in the empire by 1862, one hundred in Ukraine alone. Kiev’s Podil Sunday school grew from 125 students in 1859 to 818 in 1862. Students and professors gave open lectures on Tuesdays and Thursdays, on topics ranging from popular mechanics to literature, to an audience that ranged in age from seven to thirty. Poles were more active in the countryside than in Kiev itself, but overall these Sunday schools provided a cover for political agitation and undermined Pirogov’s position. St. Vladimir history professor Platon Pavlov (Pawlow), who supervised the Sunday schools, was fired from the university and banished from Kiev. Under pressure, Pirogov departed in 1861. However, civil authority in Kiev tended to be “apathetic and lacking in civic consciousness and courage” in the early 1860s. Governor-General Prince I. Vasilchikov (1805–1862) seemed unequal to the task and upon his death was replaced by the inept Prince N. N. Annenkov, “an old duffer” who knew so little about the region that he often confused it with Galicia!47
Although Warsaw was the headquarters of those who conspired to rise against the tsar, Kiev’s Contract Fair continued to provide a convenient place for Poles from around Europe to gather, cement ties, and coordinate strategies. The Society for the Education of Polish People, which ran secret schools in Right-Bank Ukraine, for example, elected its ruling committee of twelve annually at the fair. St. Vladimir professors were active in this organization, which ran a library for young children in Kiev. Most of the schools taught democratic values, much to the chagrin of nationalistic, but more politically conservative, Polish noblemen. Adam Mickiewicz was often read by Poles. His son, Władysław-Józef Mickiewicz (1838–1926), spent time conspiring in the homes along Kuznechnaia Street, helping to organize schools in churches, factories, and other places where detection could be avoided. Ivan Krylov (1768–1844) was popular with the Russians, Taras Shevchenko with the Ukrainians. Although salaries for “teachers” were often paid in firewood or some other commodity, special agents traveled about collecting substantial amounts of money, often in a box with the inscription “Jałmużna dla biednych” (charity for the poor).48
The Polish conspiratorial leaders called themselves “The Central Committee in Rus,” and outside of Warsaw their activities seemed to be concentrated mainly in St. Petersburg and Kiev. In August 1862 they reorganized themselves into “The Provincial Committee in Rus,” which planned the uprising for the three Right-Bank provinces. Edmund Różycki (1827–1893), the son of 1830–1831 insurrectionary Karol Różycki (1789–1870), headed this group whose leaders also included Kopernicki, St. Vladimir student Antoni Juriewicz (1839–1868), a priest, and two Kiev gymnasium students. Another participant, Stefan Bobrowski (1840–1863), the uncle of the writer Joseph Conrad, was sent from Warsaw in 1860 to coordinate activities with the center, and his death early in 1863 complicated these efforts. Wladyslaw Rudnicki, university riding master Romauld Olszański (1826–64), and Second Lieutenant W. Borowski were also very active in Kiev, organizing some 3,550 men within Kiev Province into infantry and cavalry units. Olszański’s home and stable were primary meeting places, for students and others often came there to ride or take instruction in horsemanship. Olszański had an illegal printing press where copies of the Golden Gramota, promising land to supportive peasants, were printed, and on his property caches of arms and provisions were hidden. As if to underscore their disdain for local authorities, conspirators met in the apartment of Lieutenant Borowski, located in the home of the famous architect V. Beretti, in the orangery in the Tsar’s Garden, in the garden of the governor-general himself, and in the flat of the lover of Kiev’s notoriously cruel policeman, Officer Tur! Because of the relationship between Tur and his mistress, her house was not under surveillance.49
The Cave Monastery also played an unintended role in the conspiracy. A certain Gustaw Hoffman, who had come from Warsaw, managed to get a job in the monastery’s print shop, where in 1861 he and Stefan Bobrowski began to publish an illegal Polish paper, Odrodzenie (Rebirth). Influenced by Alexander Herzen, it called for the emancipation of the serfs, the liberation of Poland, and self-determination for Ukrainians. They managed to print only a handful of issues, as well as one hundred copies of a leftist St. Petersburg paper called Velikoruss (Great Russia) before their discovery and arrest in 1862. These publications were illicitly distributed at the Contract Fair.
In February 1861 troops fired on a Warsaw demonstration, killing five. In March the families of those killed participated in a requiem mass in Kiev that turned into a political demonstration. That same month, Polish student Konrad Paszkowski was arrested for walking past a public reading of the tsarist emancipation decree without doffing his cap or putting out his cigarette. His expulsion from the university for “disrespect” sparked more political demonstrations, and Paszkowski was allowed to return to the university. Students carried clubs, intimidating and sometimes beating up police and suspected informers. They also had contacts with sympathetic or bribable guards who provided assistance to compatriots who had been jailed. Large demonstrations, which began at the Catholic church, occurred in the fall of 1861. On October 9 demonstrators marched down the Khreshchatyk, broke windows, and destroyed a portrait of Alexander II at the university. Sixty were arrested. Police seemed unable to deal with large demonstrations, but fear of police infiltration remained very real, and suspicion of spying quickly led to duels. Governor-General Vasilchikov considered closing the university and declaring martial law (martial law was declared in Zhytomyr after an estimated one thousand participated in a demonstration there), but instead chose the more moderate course of requiring students to sign pledges that they would not demonstrate, expelling those who refused. In all, 429 demonstrations were recorded on the Right Bank in 1861. They reflected the growing militancy of Polish nationalism, but in Kiev, at least, politically dissatisfied Russians and Ukrainians commonly joined these protests.50
In 1862, in preparation for the uprising, 176 St. Vladimir students stopped paying tuition. Another 236 declined to pay in 1863. The government tried to get these students to reenroll and even committed financial aid to them, feeling they could be better supervised if enrolled at the university.51 In 1861 Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians had started to wear national costumes to class, and reports from 1863 indicate that despite the threat of arrest, Kiev’s taverns and confection shops were filled with people symbolically dressed in national attire.
In tsarist Poland insurrection broke out on January 23, 1863. In Kiev officials predicted its imminence, as did insurrectionary leaflets that appeared on city streets. “I received ten copies [of a leaflet], and gave two out to people unknown to me whom I met on the street and one to the university riding-master Olszański,” one student recalled.52 Fortress Kiev provided good opportunities to purchase black-market weapons. This particular student had purchased a pistol from a Jewish soldier, and canteens and cartridge belts were readily available in local bazaars.
However, in Kiev the insurrection did not begin until April 26 when Antoni Juriewicz led a detachment of twenty-one men into the surrounding villages, trying to win peasant support. Archival sources indicate that up to five hundred insurrectionaries, mostly students, left Kiev in the ensuing days, usually in small detachments which mobilized at Olszański’s stable. About eight thousand Poles lived in Kiev at this time, and perhaps three hundred of the city’s six thousand homeowners were Poles. No doubt many were seasonal residents who spent summers on their rural estates. Podhorodecki asserts that most of Kiev’s Poles were sympathetic to the uprising, and he is probably correct, but within the city itself there seem to have been no disorders. On April 29, in fact, Annenkov reported to the tsar that “in Kiev, peace has not been violated.” In June “Orthodox” Kievans attempted to form a city militia to protect themselves, presumably from Poles. Their request, which must have smacked of reviving the banned city militia, was denied.53
News of the rising spread quickly in the surrounding countryside, and many peasants living on land owned by Polish magnates turned out in village squares to listen to the rebels. Some joined the insurrection, but most did not. Juriewicz’s unit was quickly ambushed in a village. Twelve were killed, and nine were wounded, including Juriewicz himself. Attacked by government troops, thirty-four men in Olszański’s unit were killed and sixty-eight were taken captive in a two-hour battle. Only a handful escaped into the woods to join up with Władysław Rudnicki, who had rallied some local peasants, calling himself the “Cossack Savva.” In general, around Kiev, Polish units had only isolated successes and suffered from the absence of a carefully coordinated overall military plan and from inadequate arms. Some insurrectionaries carried only sabers and hatchets. Units were sometimes unable to find one another. A telegram from Annenkov to Alexander II on April 29 reported fighting in five districts in Kiev Province but pointed to another reason for failure: the local peasantry remained loyal to the government. One anecdote suggests why hostility between peasant and lord had not been overcome. In the midst of the insurrection, when a peasant swore at a Pole in a tavern, “the impertinent chłop” was charged with witchcraft and sentenced to Siberia. Not surprisingly, in Berdychiv District peasants were said to have captured one hundred insurgents. Meanwhile, anti-Semitism rose as Jews were accused of helping finance the disorder and of contributing to the general panic by buying up and hoarding copper coins.54
In all, perhaps six thousand men took up arms in Kiev and Volyn Provinces, an estimated 90 percent of them Poles. In Podil Province, the insurrection never got off the ground.55 Some eighty thousand to one hundred thousand Poles, many from Ukraine, were ultimately exiled. Estates were seized, and many families lost everything. Olszański was captured and shot, while Rudnicki managed to escape to Austria. Amnesty for Poles involved in the 1863 uprising was not granted until 1896. At least twelve hundred Poles were imprisoned in the Pechersk fortress, at least for a time before their exile. On their way to exile, captives were led through Kiev’s streets to be taunted and humiliated, though Podhorodecki notes that the city’s Polish community came out to display public support for these unfortunates, an act which must have required courage in a city riven by ethnic tension.56
After 1863 Kiev continued to serve as an underground center of a network that smuggled letters, diaries, money, memoirs, and political literature to and from the exiles. In September 1863 Kazimierz Bobrowski, brother of Stefan, was arrested on a boat in Kremenchuk while carrying a packet of written materials. He convinced local authorities not to open the letters because they were personal and might compromise the reputations of young women.57 Sympathetic officers at the Kiev garrison and university students helped some Poles escape, generally through an underground network to Odessa, then to Constantinople where a secret agent at the Russian mission provided money and assistance.
Archival reports indicate the extraordinary role St. Vladimir students played in the insurrection on the Right Bank. Of a total enrollment of 900, 600 participated in the revolt. Of the 1,336 convicted in Kiev Province for their role in the affair, about 400 were university students. As a result, the university’s enrollment was cut back to fewer than 600 students, and admission was commonly denied to Poles. By 1878–1879 enrollment had risen to 805, but 593 were Orthodox, only 136 were Catholic (Polish), and 76 were Jewish.58
THE DECLINE OF POLISH INFLUENCE IN KIEV
Prior to 1863 Kiev’s Polish community was small in number but, as a whole, prosperous and influential. In the 1850s Ivan Aksakov observed that “in Kiev the Polish element is still very strong.” Kiev is “a mixed city” of scholars, monks, soldiers, and traders, of Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and Jews, “among whom there are striking differences in dress.”59 Some Poles looked upon everything Russian with scorn, but then again so did some Russians at this time. Clashes, even duels, occurred, often between civilians and army officers, but there is no evidence that these duels commonly grew out of grievances that were ethnic in nature. Count Buturlin, then living in Kiev, recalled that “with few exceptions, Poles and Russians got along well in Kiev’s high society.” Polish and Russian professors were honored guests at the homes of local officials, and Russian and Polish students from appropriate backgrounds also traveled in Kiev’s beau monde. “In Kiev we lived in a continuous social whirl,” Buturlin recalls.60 Kiev’s social elite may have talked more of debt than of national issues, for more than two-thirds of the province’s landowners and more than half of the peasants were in debt in 1856.61 It all seemed very civilized, and the uprising must have presented a real dilemma for many Kiev Poles who perhaps harbored deeply patriotic thoughts about independence, but who otherwise seemed much at home within the city’s cosmopolitan elite.
According to the census of 1874, very few Poles were employed in the “physical” crafts such as carpentry. Of 7,498 Polish speakers (in a city population of 127,000), nearly half were said to belong to the “privileged classes,” nearly one-fifth were soldiers, and nearly 400 were secondary or university students.62 Of the Polish craftsmen, 247 were tailors who owned their own shops and employed 86 additional Poles. Fifty-seven Poles owned carpentry or furniture shops, and there were 26 Polish physicians and 42 midwives. Poles could be found in almost all occupations, but only 23 were listed as having agricultural professions, an indication, perhaps, that some Polish noblemen had been exiled from the city or had lost their land.63
In her study of St. Petersburg, ethnographer N. V. Iukhneva found that affluent Poles joined the wealthy of other nationalities in prestigious high-rent districts; middle civil servants congregated in their own neighborhoods; working-class Poles joined their proletarian brothers in the outskirts near the factories.64 In Kiev as well, wealth and occupation were probably the most important determinants of where one lived, but it is also true that Poles tended to reside in certain neighborhoods. In 1874 more than half of Kiev’s Poles lived in the upscale Old Kiev or Lypky Districts, constituting about 15 percent of the population of each. This fact indicates a high level of Polish prosperity in Kiev, but it probably indicates as well that many Poles sought to settle in neighborhoods where there were other Poles. Although I found no references to identifiably Polish neighborhoods in Kiev, Kuznechnaia Street was one example of what seemed to be a “Polish street” that, prior to the insurrection, served as a center of Polish political intrigue.
Already small in size, the Polish community was dwarfed in the latter decades of the century by the influx of Ukrainian peasants and Jewish traders and craftsmen. Poles no longer dominated St. Vladimir’s student body. With the advent of the railroad, the Contract Fair declined in size and importance. The flaming sense of honor, which had helped foment insurgency, gave way to realism, and realists kept quiet.
Despite the repression that followed 1863, some Poles continued to involve themselves in political activities. Kiev’s Union of Polish Youth resurfaced in the 1870s as a continuation of the student movement of the 1860s. Socialist tracts were translated from Russian to Polish and Polish to Russian. A Polish woman, Helena Kowalska, was important in the organizational efforts of the South Russian Workers Union in Kiev in the late 1870s, and in 1878, of 134 students expelled from the university for political activity, several dozen were Poles. At the end of the 1870s, Kiev’s gmina published an underground leaflet, Voice from the Ukraine, which was characterized as “patriotic” (nationalistic). The Voice from Lithuania, published in Vilnius, was said to be more socialistic, urging struggle against both the tsar and Polish capitalists. In 1883 some Kiev Poles tried to organize a ball on March 1, the anniversary of Emperor Alexander II’s assassination. Local officials talked them out of it. In Zhytomyr a sugar refinery owner named Gurowski tried the same thing, and Governor-General Alexander Drenteln (1820–1888) expelled him from the region.65
By the 1890s an estimated twenty-five small Polish circles of various political shades operated in the city, and Poles were very visible in the early socialist movement. Student sympathies divided between the Social Democrats and the more nationalistic Polish Socialist Party. In 1894 Kiev’s leftist underground was strengthened with the arrival of radical students from Warsaw who had been exiled for commemorating the 1794 uprising. Polish Social Democrats merged into a common Marxist organization in 1897 and do not appear to have acted as a significant separate political force in Kiev after that time.66
In examining the Polish community in late-imperial Russia, R. F. Leslie observes that
the Kingdom of Poland could not provide the opportunities for a déclassé szlachta, which constituted about 10 percent of the population, but the great Russian empire with its slowly evolving industry required a managerial class. The Polish colonies began to expand in all the major Russian cities, especially St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev, as a result of the influx of engineers, technologists and commercial representatives, bringing with them a host of tailors, shoemakers, valets and pastry cooks.67
Kiev’s Polish population grew from 16,500 in 1897 to 44,000 in 1909, although Poles made up about 7 to 9 percent of the total population throughout the period. Skilled Polish workers were highly competitive in Kiev’s labor markets, and migration eastward had become easier because of Russia’s expanding railway network. There were, in fact, many Polish railway workers in Kiev. The city’s Catholic church, St. Alexander, had been built between 1817 and 1842 and could accommodate only two thousand parishioners. In response to the growing Polish population, a second Catholic church, St. Nicholas, was built in the Gothic style in the 1890s, and a third (St. Joseph) was started but never completed.
