Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  After the Russian Empire’s annexation of the grand duchy, all the historic administrative structures were replaced by centralized gubernias or ‘governorships’, which took their orders from the tsarist government in St Petersburg. The six gubernias of Vilna, Kovno (including Courland), Grodno, Minsk, Mogilev and Vitebsk were grouped together in a north-western Kray or ‘Land’ ruled by a governor-general. The entire nomenclature was changed. Russian names took the place of Polish names, and map-makers round the world came to terms with ‘Western Russia’ or ‘the North-western Gubernias’. The old names of ‘Lithuania’ and ‘Belarus’ were banished. ‘White Ruthenia’ was presented as ‘White Russia’, and an international treaty was signed to suppress the name of Poland for ever.99

  In this first Russian period, the administrative rearrangements included the creation of the so-called Pale of Jewish Settlement in 1791. The Jewish Pale was a clearly defined region – essentially the lands of Russian-occupied Poland-Lithuania – within which all Jews were now required to reside. Henceforth, no Jew could legally reside elsewhere in the Russian Empire without special permission; and no Jew could reside in one of the closed cities, like Kiev, within the Pale. The boundaries of the Pale were to vary, but the legal restrictions remained in place until 1917. As a result, the former grand duchy, together with Austrian Galicia, and the Kingdom of Poland as resurrected by the Congress of Vienna, became the parts of Europe where the percentage of Jews within the general population was highest.

  The existing laws were too extensive and too firmly established to be replaced wholesale or overnight. Russian decrees were introduced gradually, and sections of the old Lithuanian Statutes remained in force for decades. Yet one area where radical change was introduced quickly pertained to the status of the nobility. In Poland-Lithuania, the nobles had formed an independent legal estate. They had elected the monarch, governed the localities, convened regional assemblies and enjoyed the rights to own land and to bear arms. Such ‘Golden Freedoms’ were unthinkable in the tsarist autocracy, so early in the 1790s the privileges of the grand duchy’s nobility were arbitrarily rescinded. The only families permitted to apply for noble status were those who could produce documents to prove it. Since no such documentation had been produced systematically in Poland-Lithuania, over 80 per cent of the existing nobility were cast into a legal limbo, uncertain about their title to their estates and land and their qualifications for public office.

  In 1806 the armies of Napoleon’s French Empire advanced eastwards, to establish the French-controlled Duchy of Warsaw. Hopes rose high that Napoleon would liberate the population of the whole region from both social and political oppression. In the event he did neither, although he did raise huge numbers of Polish troops for the French service. The peace negotiations held in 1807, between Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I on a raft moored in the Nieman, proved only temporary.

  Much of the fighting of the 1812 campaign, which Napoleon called his ‘Second Polish War’, was contested on lands which until recently had formed part of the grand duchy. The Grande Armée crossed the Nieman at Kovno, and reached Vilna on Sunday, 28 June. ‘Our entry into the city was triumphal,’ wrote one of Napoleon’s Polish officers.

  The streets… were full of people; all the windows were garnished with ladies who displayed the wildest enthusiasm… The Polish patriots of Vilna held a solemn [service] in the cathedral, followed by a ceremonial act of reunification of Lithuania and Poland… ‘Everyone, in the manor and the village, felt that they were going into battle in the Polish cause,’ wrote [a landowner]… In Grodno, the French forces were met by a procession with [icons], candles, incense and choirs. In Minsk… a Te Deum was held to thank God for the liberation. Resplendent in his full dress uniform, General Grouchy personally handed around the plate at Mass, but at the other end of town his cuirassiers were breaking into shops and warehouses… As soon as they saw how the French behaved, [the country folk] took themselves and their livestock off to the forests… ‘The Frenchman came to remove our fetters,’ the peasants quipped, ‘but he took our boots too.’100

  With some delay, the French moved off towards Moscow. The Battle of Borodino was fought on the first section of historic Russian territory that they entered. Moscow burned. Napoleon’s retreat, which began in December, proceeded over the same ground. The icy crossing of the River Berezina, an exploit that became legendary, brought the Grande Armée back into the former grand duchy. The Cossacks harassed the frozen French columns as they shuffled through the snow towards a mirage of safety. Long before the spring came, it was clear that all hope for the restoration of the commonwealth was lost.

  At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the victories of the tsar’s armies were reflected in political arrangements that would last until the First World War. A Russian-run Kingdom of Poland, of which the tsar was king, was established, but the former grand duchy in its entirety returned to being part of the Russian Empire. For the next three or four generations, Poles, Lithuanians, Ruthenians and Jews were subject to an unrelenting campaign to turn them into model subjects of the tsar.

  Before the Partitions, every elected Polish-Lithuanian monarch had borne the dual titles of ‘king of Poland’ and ‘grand duke of Lithuania’. After 1795, when the titles became vacant, they were snapped up by the tsars. Yet they were still kept strictly separate. As from 1815, all the Romanovs adopted the three-part style of ‘emperor and autocrat of all the Russias’, ‘tsar (or sometimes king) of Poland’ and ‘grand duke of Finland, etc. etc.’ Lithuania did not appear in the short title, being subsumed according to tsarist ideology in the category of ‘all the Russias’.101

  In time, as the nineteenth century progressed, a proportion of the wealthier and more influential landowners of the former grand duchy were able to have their nobility confirmed by the Office of Heralds in St Petersburg. Not surprisingly the Radziwiłłs were among those who adjusted well. But the tsarist authorities made political loyalty an iron condition of any such confirmation and refusals were common. So, too, were confiscations. A large number of estates, and all the most important offices, were taken over by incoming Russian officials, adventurers and carpetbaggers. At the head of them were figures like General Alexander Rimsky-Korsakov (1753–1840), who lived in the extravagant Tuskulanai manor near Vilnius, or Count Mikhail Muravyov (1796–1866), later known as Muravyov-Vilensky, who held a series of high government positions, and who was instrumental in suppressing local resistance. ‘What Russian guns can’t accomplish’, Muravyov once said, ‘will be accomplished by Russian schools.’

  In Muravyov’s time, serfdom was the burning social issue. It had been avoided during the Napoleonic Wars, and shelved during the ultra-conservative post-war era, but it arose again under Alexander II, the so-called ‘Tsar Liberator’ (r. 1855–81). Together with those in other parts of the Tsarist Empire, the serfs of the former grand duchy, an absolute majority of the population, were released from their feudal bonds in 1861, but not from the grinding poverty of backward rural life. Yet emancipation brought hope. It meant that the former serfs could move away to seek work, that they could learn new crafts and skills, and open businesses; and that they could educate their children. Reality moved slowly; aspirations rose fast.

  Education, therefore, became a battleground of competing interests. Tsarist officialdom saw an opportunity for far-reaching Russification, which involved not only the teaching of the Great Russian (Muscovite) language but also reverence for the tsar and the promotion of Russian Orthodoxy. For the population at large, the problem was how to give their children a schooling without handing them over unconditionally to the ambitions of the Russian state. Both the Poles and the Jews possessed their own school systems, and, from the 1840s, the Catholic bishops of Wilno (Vilnius) successfully sponsored primary classes for Lithuanian-speaking children. The harshest battles centred on the fate of White Ruthenians, whose language was treated as a Russian dialect and whose conversion to Russian Orthodoxy was taken for granted.

 
; The overall effectiveness of Russification is hard to measure. The currency of Russian certainly increased, and a proportion of the people became functionally bilingual. One of the few groups to be more thoroughly Russified belonged to a sector of the Jewish community who adopted Russian in place of their native Yiddish. These people were known as Litvaks, literally ‘Jews of the grand duchy’; their linguistic choice marked their desire of escaping from traditional Jewish society. They naturally made up most of the first wave of Jews who decided to emigrate.

  Religion remained a bone of contention. Some groups and individuals were willing to bear the civil penalties which their religious allegiance entailed. Yet there was no move to close down either Roman Catholic churches or Jewish synagogues. Tsarist animosity focused on the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Uniates, who were treated as traitors to the nation. In 1839 and again in 1876 decrees were issued to ban Greek Catholicism outright and to force its adherents into Russian Orthodoxy. In order to practise their religion, many Uniates fled to Austrian-ruled Galicia.

  Nonetheless, despite the tensions, the human mass of the former grand duchy stayed largely in situ. For the first two or three generations, prevalent attitudes were characterized by mainly passive resistance to Russian rule, although it sporadically turned active. For two or three generations after that, the former grand duchy was deeply affected by the rise of a variety of new political and national movements. Until 1864, the sense of disillusionment was heightened by the bitter consequences of three successive failed risings – in 1812, 1830–31 and 1863–4. On each occasion, patriots from the former kingdom fought and died alongside volunteers from the former grand duchy, hoping that the late Rzeczpospolita could somehow be revived. On the contrary, the risings were crushed; repressions multiplied; tsarist rule was strengthened.

  The former grand duchy supplied many of the insurrectionary leaders. Romuald Traugutt (1826–64), head of a clandestine national government declared in Warsaw during the January Rising of 1863–4, was the son of a gentry family from the Brest palatinate. Jakub Gieysztor (1827–97), a Polish nobleman who had freed his Lithuanian serfs, believed that the rising was premature, but joined all the same. Antanas Mackievicˇius (1828–63), later seen as a Lithuanian nationalist, nonetheless fought for the restoration of the multinational grand duchy. Zygmunt Sierakowski (1826–64) led bands of rural guerrillas in Samogitia. Kastuś Kalinou˘ ski (1838–64), now counted among the pioneers of Belarusian identity, addressed social distress as well as national issues. All fought in vain. Traugutt and his associates were executed in front of Warsaw’s Russian citadel. Sierakowski and Kalinou˘ ski were executed in Vilnius. Their dreams of the grand duchy’s revival died with them.

  In this era of insurrections, the poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), born and raised in Novogrudok – the town in ‘Black Ruthenia’ where the very name of Litva was said to have been born – penned the most eloquent and lasting lament for the late grand duchy. His epic poem Pan Tadeusz (1834) has the subtitle ‘The Last Raid in Lithuania’, and describes the life of a rural community at the time of Napoleon’s invasion in 1812. In matchless language, it evokes both the colourful traditions of the past, and the dreams for liberation. Mickiewicz wrote in Polish, and the opening lines of Pan Tadeusz have become the most famous lines in the language:

  O Litwo! Ojczyzno moja, Ty jesteś jako zdrowie.

  Ile Cie˛ cenić trzeba, ten tylko sie˛ dowie,

  Kto Cie˛ stracił. Dziś pie˛kność Twa˛ w całej ozdobie

  Widze¸ i opisuje˛, bo te˛sknie˛ po Tobie.

  (‘O Litva! My homeland, you are like health. / How to gauge your worth, only he can know / who has lost you. Today I see your full beauty / and describe it, because I long for you.’) Irony of ironies, Poland’s national bard did not come from Poland. It is as if William Shakespeare had lived in Dublin. But such is his stature that Lithuanians, too, take ‘Adomas Mickievicˇius’ to be their own; and Belarusians consider ‘Mitskieyvitch’ to be theirs:

  All the millions of people who still read this poetry, translate it, learn it by heart, or teach and study it in school as part of the official curriculum, are perpetuating the grand duchy’s heritage.

  Opposition to tsarist rule after 1864 was channelled in new directions. The anarchists, for example, believed in direct action. The Narodna Vol�ya (‘National Will’) organization, attracted recruits from all over the Russian Empire. But the man who threw the bomb that killed Tsar Alexander II in 1881 was a déclassé nobleman from the district of Bobruisk, Ignacy Hryniewiecki (1856–81). The socialists long remained undistinguished from the anarchists, and until the end of the century were largely undifferentiated between the democratic and undemocratic tendencies. Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935), who hailed from a minor landowning family from the Vilna district, became a leading light in the illegal Polish Socialist Party (PPS), having spent five years in exile in Siberia. He was to emerge in 1918 as the first head of state of a reborn Poland. Yet he always stayed true to the multinational traditions of the grand duchy, contesting nationalism in all its forms and longing for close co-operation between Poles, Jews, Lithuanians and Belarusians. The Bund, or Jewish Labour League, came into being in Minsk in 1897. (Ironically enough, Piłsudski’s ethnic, social and geographical origins were almost identical to those both of Ignacy Hryniewiecki and of Feliks Dzierz˙yński (1877–1926).

  In late nineteenth-century Europe, nationality issues rose to the top of the agenda almost everywhere. Any number of national movements took to the field in opposition to the central authorities, aiming in the first instance to capture cultural affairs – to promote a national language, to publicize national literature and to formulate a national history. Then they moved on to demand political autonomy, and, as the final stage, the creation of a national state.

  In this context, the lands of the former grand duchy offered abundant, politically fertile ground. The brutal tsarist regime invited resistance, and social structures were crumbling due to the proscription of the nobility and the liberation of the serfs. The result was fierce competition, not only between tsarist officialdom and its opponents, but equally between nationalist and socialist groupings and between rival national movements. A spectrum of separate national dreams arose that could not be satisfied without conflict.

  The Russians had developed a state-backed nationalism of their own that was projected from Moscow and St Petersburg into the imperial provinces. It viewed the Poles, dominant in the former ruling class of the Rzeczpospolita, as the prime enemy. The Lithuanians (though Roman Catholic) and the Jews were seen as prospective allies against the Poles, while the Ruthenians were classed as Russians. In the past ‘Polishness’ had been associated both with the landowning nobility and with Roman Catholicism, but these associations gradually broke down. Increasingly it was linked to all Polish-speakers, irrespective of social, economic or religious status. A large group of déclassé Polish nobles strove to keep up appearances. A Polish bourgeoisie held the fort in Wilno, as they called it, and a sizeable Polish sector of the peasantry was concentrated in the surrounding district. All tended to show solidarity with their compatriots in the former kingdom.

  The Ruthenians, almost entirely enserfed until 1861, possessed little awareness of nationality. If asked about their national affiliation, they were famous for replying that they were tutejsi or ‘locals’. Nonetheless, they were deeply offended by the forcible introduction of Russian Orthodoxy, and grew more receptive to the activists who were collecting and publishing Belarusian folklore and codifying the Belarusian language for educational purposes. Contrary to some predictions, they never sought to join their fellow Ruthenians in Ukraine. Instead, some of them sought to imitate Polish culture. Jan Czeczot (1796–1847), who was Polish, is often regarded as the pioneer of Belarusian identity. Vincent Dunin-Marcinkiewicz (1807–84) initiated the Belarusian literary tradition by translating Pan Tadeusz.

  The Lithuanian national movement started from similarly humble beginnings. Church-based Lithu
anian primary schools had long functioned, but a sixty-year struggle with the Russian authorities had to be fought before permission was given for Lithuanian to be written in the Latin alphabet. By the early twentieth century, however, the first generation of Lithuanian-educated Lithuanians was coming to the fore. They were passionate about language and literature, about separating their own ethnic history from that of their neighbours and about gaining recognition.

  In 1800 the Jewish community of the former grand duchy had been defined exclusively by religion. By 1900, after exposure to an unprecedented demographic explosion, to pogroms and to a series of modernizing movements, it had emerged as a recognized nationality. The Haskalah or ‘Jewish Enlightenment’, which urged Jews to assimilate into public life while preserving their religious practices in private, operated throughout the century. Yet the spread of the Hasidic movement, demanding new forms of strict religious observance, worked in the opposite direction. One of its prominent sects, the Lubavicher, gained many devotees in the southern districts.102

  Zionism, in contrast, grew out of Jewish secular culture and the Hebrew Revival, that is, the campaign to adapt the Hebrew language to everyday purposes. The Second Zionist Congress, held at Minsk in 1902, revealed the existence of a fully fledged Jewish nationalist movement. Its main goals were to sharpen Jewish identity against other nationalities, to encourage emigration to Palestine and, like nationalists the world over, to complain of discrimination and persecution (quite justifiably, in this case, after the passing of the discriminatory May Laws of 1882). It inevitably collided with the Bund, which sought to reconcile Jews with their neighbours and to build a better world for all.