SEVENTEEN
Captivity

Although the territory of the Commonwealth had been repeatedly cut and pasted since 1772, with almost every part of it coming under the domination of more than one of its neighbours, and in the case of the area around Warsaw under all three and the French as well, an immaterial but nevertheless real Polish world remained in existence throughout the period of partition. And at some level, most people who thought of themselves as Poles identified with that, not with the state they paid taxes to. Yet they were obliged to accommodate themselves to that state, and most were naturally inclined to do so, as it is the prosaic activities such as eating, working and breeding rather than spiritual issues that preoccupy men’s minds for most of the time.

It was the inability of the three powers to provide a congenial framework for ordinary life and accommodate minimal cultural aspirations that kept their Polish provinces in an explosive condition. During a century when states such as Britain and France were able to control and exploit vast and populous colonies, the three greatest powers of the European mainland devoted incomparably greater resources in troops, funds and gigantic bureaucracies to policing a small, thinly populated and easily accessible country in their midst, with lamentable results. The only thing that made Poland a difficult country to colonise was that the legacy of the Commonwealth did not include a native civil service or police force. The entire apparatus of social control had to be imported, with the result that authority never lost its alien garb.

It was Prussia that gained most in real terms from the partitions, and it should have had little trouble in digesting its share.

This was not large, it was hemmed in on three sides by Prussian lands, and it contained a significant number of people of German origin. The area that had fallen to Prussia in the first partition had been integrated into the Prussian kingdom, while Wielkopolska with the city of Poznań was defined in 1815 as the Duchy of Posen, a semi-autonomous province with its own (largely symbolic) representative bodies and a viceroy in the shape of Antoni Radziwiłł. The Prussian administration was heavy-handed, but on the whole conciliatory towards local Polish elites.

This changed in 1830, as many young men crossed the border into the Kingdom to take part in the insurrection (including about 1,000 from the Prussian army). When units of the Polish army sought refuge on Prussian territory in 1831, they were warmly greeted by Germans and Poles alike, but the Prussian army illtreated the disarmed soldiers and either handed them back to the Russians or encouraged them to leave for France or Britain. The rising in the Kingdom had alarmed the Prussian authorities and the province lost some of its autonomy, along with its viceroy, and assimilation replaced conciliation as the underlying policy. But repressive measures associated with this were relaxed after the accession of Frederick William IV in 1840.

In 1848, however, the Germans of Poznania began to feel threatened by Polish aspirations, and their fears, couched in strident calls for the ‘defence of Germandom’, met with a response from the nascent nationalism in Germany. The Poles were branded as ‘a nation of lesser cultural content’ by one speaker at the Frankfurt Parliament, and henceforth the emphasis was shifted onto a policy of Germanisation (Germanisierung). All remaining vestiges of autonomy in the Polish provinces were dismantled. Poles nevertheless took the majority of the thirty Poznanian seats in the Prussian Landtag.

The 1863 insurrection only confirmed the Prussian authorities in their view of the Poles as dangerous troublemakers. This was borne out further during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Although tens of thousands of Polish recruits fought in the Prussian ranks, the population staged pro-French demonstrations and failed to celebrate Prussia’s victory.

The unification of Germany and the promotion of the Prussian kings to the status of German emperors in 1871 placed the Poles in a curious and unenviable situation: from being foreign subjects of the King of Prussia they were suddenly transformed into members of an ethnic minority in an emphatically German Germany. At the same time, the incorporation of the former Polish provinces into the empire meant that Polish deputies were returned to the German Reichstag, in which they took some 5 per cent of the seats, giving them a far greater degree of representation than in the Prussian Landtag. What had been a marginal colonial question now became an internal issue of the empire.

When Bismarck declared his Kulturkampf—the war on Catholic and regionalist tendencies in the empire—Polish deputies found new allies in the Catholics of Bavaria and Westphalia. The equation of Catholicism with ‘foreignness’ prompted Catholic Germans living in Poznania and Pomerania to identify with the Poles. Similarly, Pomeranian peasants who had never asked themselves whether they were Poles or Germans but knew that they were Catholics declared themselves to be Polish, since this had become synonymous with being Catholic.

The original Prussian analysis had been that once the Polish nobility and clergy had been emasculated, the peasant masses would turn into loyal Germans. In fact, while the parish clergy and the smaller landowners were nationalist, the Church hierarchy and the aristocracy had on the whole accommodated themselves to the reality of Prussian rule and were only obliged to change their stance under German pressure. The Archbishop of Poznań and Gniezno, Mieczysław Ledóchowski, was fairly typical in his pro-German attitude, which made him unpopular with the Polish patriots and most parish priests. He did not protest too vigorously when, in 1872, Bismarck placed Catholic schools under German state supervision. But when priests who would not bow to all the new prescriptions were persecuted, he found himself obliged to make a stand. He was imprisoned as a result, in 1874, and turned into a national hero overnight. After this, Polish nationalists and the Catholic Church made a common front. Efforts by the authorities to arrest recalcitrant priests were thwarted by gangs of angry peasants. It was a formidable alliance, and it managed to blunt the main thrust of German colonial policy, which was aimed at the Polish language.

At the beginning of Prussian rule, Polish remained the language of instruction in the Polish schools of Poznania. In the 1870s it was gradually displaced by German, and in 1874 the use of Polish textbooks was forbidden. In 1876 German became the exclusive administrative language, and no other was countenanced in anything from a law court to a post office. In 1887 the study of Polish as a second language was abolished throughout the educational system. In 1900, the law that Polish be replaced by German even in religious education produced widespread school strikes. Instances of German police marching into churches to prevent children from praying in Polish, which were widely reported abroad, were counter-productive in more ways than one. Parish priests played a crucial role in the preservation of the language by holding clandestine classes, and this in turn endowed it with a degree of sanctity.

The clergy also helped the peasants in other ways, giving advice and information on everything from agriculture to taxation, and it was they who introduced the cooperative movement into Poznania in 1871. In 1886 Bismarck made a speech announcing a campaign to buy out Polish landowners, in which he suggested that they would be happier spending the cash at the roulette tables of Monte Carlo than farming their estates. A Colonisation Commission was set up with a capital of 100 million marks to finance this operation. The Polish landowners fought back by establishing their own Land Bank to bail out those in difficulty. In Pomerania the Prussian Junkers outpaced Poles in the battle for possession of land, but in Poznania the Poles held their own and even gained ground.

This was no mean achievement, as these provinces supported an intensive and competitive agricultural industry: by 1895 over 40 per cent of all farms had some machinery. This competitiveness created redundancy among the rural population (still 60 per cent of the whole), which led to large-scale emigration, particularly to the United States. Early emigrants set off in groups, often led by a priest, and established discrete settlements such as that founded in 1854 at Panna Maria in Texas, and later ones at Częstochowa, Polonia and Kościuszko in Texas, New Pozen in Nebraska, and others in Virginia and Wisconsin. This form of emigration merely relieved the pressure on land at home. But from the 1870s onwards new waves of emigration brought greater benefits. The later emigrants went primarily in search of work, and they found this in the industrial and mining centres of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Michigan and Illinois. As well as setting aside part of their salary to support Polish priests and build their own churches, they also regularly sent money back to their families at home. Alternatively, a landless peasant could return home after twenty years in the Chicago canneries with enough capital in his pocket to buy a comfortable smallholding.

The year 1890 marked the end of the Bismarck era. The new Chancellor Leo von Caprivi made concessions to the Poles in return for their votes in the Reichstag. But this change of mood was not to last. In 1894 three Junkers founded the Deutscher Ostmark Verein, an organisation dedicated to promoting German interests in the east. It played on German phobias, invoking pseudo-scientific theories of Slav inferiority and fecundity, and received support from ruling circles. When visiting Marienburg Kaiser Wilhelm II called on the spirit of the dead Teutonic Knights to ‘join the fight against Polish impudence and Sarmatian effrontery’.

The whole panoply of cultural, economic and political repression was once more brought to bear against the Poles. Government investment and officials poured into Poznania—the province had more of both than any other in the Reich. Officials and policemen who chose to retire there were given higher pensions. The Colonisation Commission bought up tracts of land and gave them to German colonists. Place names were replaced by German ones. In 1898 a series of special laws turned the Poles into second-class citizens.

As the pressure mounted, the Poles grew increasingly efficient and inventive. When it became illegal for them to buy land they set up cooperatives and, in 1897, a Land Purchase Bank, which bought the land and leased it back to them. When a law of 1904 forbade Poles to build houses on their land the peasant Michał Drzymała started a worldwide cause célèbre by setting up home in a circus caravan. It was a measure of the ingenious resilience of Poles of all classes that the government was finally obliged in 1908 to pass a stark expropriation law permitting compulsory purchase of Polish land by Germans.

What industry there had been in Poznania had all been in German hands, but in the 1870s the Poles began to take over. Hipolit Cegielski started a factory making agricultural machinery, then founded sugar refineries, and eventually built up a huge industrial complex in Poznań. Others followed suit. The need to help the Polish farmer impelled Poles into the cattle and grain markets, to cut out German and Jewish middlemen. Competition reached such a pitch that in the first decade of the twentieth century both sides began boycotting each other’s businesses and shops, and since the majority of the market was Polish, the Germans lost out. Although the draconian legislation continued, they could not win the battle for the province.

The German-speaking population of Poznań fell between 1860 and 1890 from 41 to 34 per cent, and in Danzig (Gdańsk) from 75 to 72 per cent. In rural areas the drop was much sharper. Far from smothering the Polish element, the German tactics had hardened it, and indeed furnished it with allies. Attempts to enlist the Kashubians (a small Baltic people native to Pomerania) and the Mazurians (the natives of the southern part of East Prussia) as Germans were a fiasco, and in the 1890s both areas returned Polish deputies to the Reichstag. In 1903 Upper Silesia, which had been cut off from the Polish state since the fourteenth century, also returned a Pole, Wojciech Korfanty.

The Jewish inhabitants of the former Polish lands which fell under Prussian and then German rule were not, unless they had assimilated and identified with the Polish cause, subjected to the same rigours. Most transferred their loyalty from the Polish to the Prussian king with little reluctance. They came across discrimination on the part of the smaller established Jewish colonies of the major German cities, and some social exclusion. But as the century wore on and they attempted to play a more active part in their adopted state, they came up against a range of restrictions, particularly in the public sphere, and were barred, amongst other things, from being teachers and army officers.

As an authoritarian, militaristic Lutheran state, Prussia could have been expected to make a mess of ruling its Polish dominions. Austria, the only Catholic one of the three powers, should have had little trouble in absorbing hers. But the partitions had coincided with the reforms of Joseph II, which introduced regulation, enforced by a rigid bureaucracy, into every sphere of life, and this offended a society used to the minimalist administration of the Commonwealth. It also introduced comparably astronomical levels of taxation.

A representative assembly was set up in Lwów (now Lemberg) in 1817, but it was hampered by an army of administrators. These administrators also encouraged antagonism between the Poles and the Ukrainian and Jewish inhabitants, who between them made up about half of the population of 3.5 million. The Jews suffered cruelly as a result of mass conscription into the Austrian army, as this forced them to sin by wearing uniforms that mixed wool with cotton and to eat non-kosher food. Reforms in peasant-landlord relations hardly improved the status of the peasant and managed to bind both parties in a complicated system of fiscal and legal obligations which soured relations between them.

In 1841 a group of wealthy landowners led by Leon Sapieha founded a Land Credit Society, followed in 1844 by a Savings Bank and a Technical Academy, and in 1845 by a Galician Economic Association, but when at his instigation the Lemberg Assembly asked Vienna for permission to explore the possibility of reforming manor-cottage relations, it met with refusal. The Austrian chancellor Metternich was not inclined to allow cooperation between the Polish elites and the peasants. Austrian policy was revealed in all its cunning in 1846, when the Governor of Galicia, Count Stadion, incited the peasants against their landlords. That year even the unthreatening Lemberg Assembly was abolished. In 1848 Austria granted personal freedom and the possession of land to the peasants, and at the same time began to foster a national movement among the Ukrainians of eastern Galicia to undermine Polish influence there.

Martial law imposed after the disturbances of 1848 remained in force until 1854. The appointment of a Polish governor, Agenor Gołuchowski, was little more than a piece of window-dressing, since he was a loyalist trusted in Vienna. But things began to change in 1859. Austrian defeats in Italy signalled the beginning of a protracted crisis that would transform the structure of the Habsburg monarchy. Taking advantage of the situation, the Poles carried out their own reforms and by 1864 they had forced Austria to grant autonomy, with their own Sejm, a Polish viceroy to represent the emperor, and the right to send deputies to the Reichsrat in Vienna, in which they held some 15 per cent of the seats. Polish became the official language of Galicia, and education was left in the hands of the Lemberg Sejm. The addition of the former Republic of Kraków, abolished by Austria in 1846, added substance to the province and enriched it culturally.

For the next fifty years the inhabitants of Galicia were allowed to rule themselves. They also supplied more than their fair share of ministers and even prime ministers—Alfred Potocki, Kazimierz Badeni, Agenor Gołuchowski junior, Julian Dunajewski and others—to the Vienna cabinet. The wealthy szlachta of Galicia were supported by an influential conservative intelligentsia, and together they managed to keep more radical elements under control. They operated within the bounds imposed, concentrating their patriotic efforts on areas such as education.

In economic terms, Galicia was the most backward of the Polish lands. Great estates continued to operate on traditional lines, while tiny farms barely supported large peasant families. This caused unrest and led, in 1895, to the foundation of a Peasant Party, which brought about a strike of farm workers in 1902. It also caused waves of emigration to the United States, which eased conditions in the villages (the money sent back by the emigrants in the early 1900s has been calculated as $50 million per annum). The large Jewish population was particularly vulnerable, and many of the shtetls in which they lived were sinks of poverty. The establishment of industries was hampered by competition from the Austrian empire’s well-established industrial province of Bohemia. The only exceptions were coalmining and oil drilling. Oil was struck at Borysław in 1850, and by 1910 Galicia was the largest single producer in the world, with 5 per cent of the world market. But this was as nothing to the development achieved in the Russian partition.

Russia’s Polish problem was more extensive and more crucial to its own internal affairs than was the case with either of the other two powers, and it offered a wider range of solutions. One was to incorporate all the Polish lands into the empire outright. Another was to leave them as a semi-autonomous unit which could be kept loyal by the promise that at some stage in the future a war against Prussia or Austria would lead to the recovery of Poznania and Galicia.

Russia tried both of these alternately. The lands of the Commonwealth taken by Russia were originally divided up into two categories: the large strip of Lithuanian, Belorussian and Ukrainian lands were incorporated into Russia as the Western Gubernias, while the rest, the Kingdom of Poland, was treated as a separate administrative and political entity. Between 1815 and 1830, and to a lesser extent between 1855 and 1863, Russia delegated its administration to the Poles themselves. For the rest of the century it ruled the area directly, with varying degrees of harshness. There were moments when the Western Gubernias were shunted closer to the Kingdom administratively, and others when the Kingdom itself was abolished and turned into a province of the Russian empire. This lack of consistency served Russian interests poorly. And in economic terms, the Kingdom on the whole profited from arrangements meant to disadvantage it.

The transformation of the Congress Kingdom from a predominantly agricultural economy began after 1815. Stanisław Staszic, who had been appointed Director of the Department of Industry in 1816, encouraged the development of mining and reactivated the production of steel in the Old Polish Basin around Kielce. He built the first zinc mills and the first steel-rolling mill, and organised a Mining Corps run on semi-military lines with a remarkable system of compensation and pensions. The production of iron, copper and zinc increased. Coalmining, which began to use steam power for pumping, doubled its output between 1824 and 1836. The 1830s and 1840s saw continued development in spite of political problems and a new smelting centre was developed in the Dąbrowa Basin, whose Huta Bankowa was one of the largest steelworks in the world.

The process was masterminded by Franciszek Ksawery Drucki-Lubecki. In 1821 he took over the Treasury, which became the leading entrepreneur. He sought to build up Poland’s economy in such a way as to make it industrially self-sufficient. His efforts were cut short by the 1830 insurrection, but some of his creations, such as the Bank of Poland established in 1828, carried on his programme. He brought new ideas to the Polish economic scene, including direct intervention, credit and protection. In 1825 he set up the Land Credit Society, which enabled private estates to clear debts and fund improvements or new ventures. Chief among these were sheep-rearing, distilling and the production of sugar-beet which, with the building of the first sugar refinery in 1826, opened up an important new avenue of agricultural industry.

The most spectacular product of Lubecki’s policies was the Polish textile industry. In 1821 the government assisted the establishment of a weaving centre in the village of Łódź. By 1830 Łódź had over 4,000 inhabitants and a number of steam-powered spinning machines. The production of wool tripled between 1823 and 1829, and the production of cotton quintupled between 1825 and 1830. Łódź exported to Russia and even China, and by 1845, when it was linked by rail to Warsaw, it had become the principal supplier of the Russian market. By then Łódź had 20,000 inhabitants, although it was now in competition with new textile centres at Białystok and Żyrardów, started in 1833. Between 1865 and 1879 the number of power looms in Łódź increased twenty-fold. The value of production of cotton rose from five million roubles in 1869 to 25 million in 1889. By 1900 Łódź had 300,000 inhabitants and over 1,000 factories.

This industrial revolution was unspectacular by European standards, yet the pace was breathtaking. The number of steam engines in use increased twenty-five times between 1853 and 1888. Overall industrial production increased by over six times between 1864 and 1885. Centres such as Łódź, Warsaw (which reached over half a million inhabitants in the 1880s) and the Dąbrowa Basin employed a workforce which doubled over the twenty years after 1860 to some 150,000. Fortunes were made and lost in the speculative ventures to which the boom gave rise. Foreign capital, often brought in by entrepreneurs who came to settle, flooded in from France, Germany, England, Belgium and Italy, accounting for up to 40 per cent of the entire industrial capital. A new class of Polish tycoons sprang up, mostly from the Jewish population of the cities. Families like the Kronenbergs, Rotwands, Wawelbergs and Epszteins amassed wealth, became assimilated into Polish society and married into the aristocracy.

These developments were closely connected to Russian policy. Between 1819 and 1822 the Kingdom was part of the same customs area as Russia. In 1831 a tariff barrier was imposed between the two states. These tariffs were imposed and lifted several times, often for political reasons, creating enormous problems for Polish industry. In the 1870s Russia switched to protectionist policies, within which the Kingdom was included, and this created the conditions for the Polish boom of the next decades. Three-quarters of the cotton produced in Łódź in the 1880s was exported to Russia. The metallurgical industry of Warsaw and the Old Polish Basin increased its output by over thirty times in the last quarter of the century, largely as a result of the expansion of railways in the Russian Empire. The Lilpop railcar and rail factory in Warsaw was the largest in the whole empire and grew fat on the spread of the Russian network. By the 1890s Russia accounted for 90 per cent of Poland’s trade, a huge captive market.

In the late 1890s Russia began her own industrial revolution, which meant that engineers and technicians trained in Poland found new scope for their skills. Hundreds of these men invaded the empire to build bridges, lay tracks and manage mines and factories from the Urals to Manchuria, some building up vast fortunes in the process. After digging tunnels for the Trans-Siberian railway, Alfons Koziełł-Poklewski went on to become one of the richest men in the Russian Empire, owning goldmines, diamond mines, steel mills, distilleries and a string of other concerns. Even some of those who had been exiled to Siberia for revolutionary activity ended up building sizeable fortunes in cities such as Tomsk and Irkutsk. At the economic level, the colonial relationship was reversed and favoured the Poles rather than Russians.

This was not so in agriculture, which, being the economic base of the szlachta, was subject to political considerations. It also involved the peasants and their relationship with the szlachta, which had a direct bearing on their ability to mobilise the masses in support of the Polish cause. The manner in which peasant emancipation was introduced in 1864 was almost entirely shaped by such considerations. The decree was rich in phrases such as ‘the lords who have oppressed you’, which were supposed to give the peasants the impression that it was the Tsar who was liberating them from the szlachta. The idea was to drive a wedge between the szlachta and the peasant, and to ruin the minor szlachta, perceived as the most patriotic section of society.

There were five areas which the decree tackled: the abolition of labour-rents; the commutation of money-rents into freehold possession of land; the distribution of land to landless peasants; grazing and wood-gathering rights on manorial land; and finally the setting up of peasant councils under tsarist administration which would put an end to landowners’ influence over village affairs.

The consequences were not long in making themselves felt. The landless peasants were given too little land to survive on. The compensation to the landlords was paid out not in cash as in Russia, but in negotiable bonds which immediately plummeted in value. Thousands of small landowners had to sell up and move to the towns. Large estates were hardly affected. Their owners had mostly switched to money-rents long before, they had capital reserves to employ farmhands and bribe local officials, and they could afford to fight in the courts over pastures and grazing rights.

The richer peasants bought out the hitherto landless who had been given plots too small to survive on. While land in peasant ownership increased by nearly 10 per cent in the next twenty-five years, the number of landless peasants increased by 400 per cent during the same period. The doubling of the population in the second half of the century only aggravated the land hunger.

The economic ruin of thousands of szlachta families did not have the hoped-for consequences. Many of those who remained in the country assimilated with the richer yeoman-peasants, strengthening defiance in the villages. Those who drifted to the cities brought their values and their patriotism into the middle classes into which they married.

Russian policies were similarly counter-productive when it came to matters of religion. The partitions had pulled the Polish province of the Church to pieces. Six dioceses found themselves in Austrian Poland, under the primacy of the Metropolitan of Lwów. Warmia (Ermland) and Wrocław (Breslau) were directly affiliated to Rome. The rest of the dioceses incorporated into Prussia were placed under the administration of the Protestant Church of Prussia. The dioceses of the Western Gubernias were subordinated to the Metropolitan of Mogilev, while those of the Kingdom were placed under the newly created Archbishopric of Warsaw. After 1830 there was not even a nominal Primate.

The Papacy, intent on preserving its diminishing temporal status, was wary of antagonising the partitioning powers, and went so far as to condemn the uprisings of 1794 and 1830. It was in no position to protect the Polish hierarchy in the lands of the former Commonwealth. The Josephine reforms had subjected the clergy of Austria to the state, and this was extended to Galicia. Prussia gradually confiscated Church property in the course of the century and took over the appointment of bishops, but stopped short of the kind of measures adopted by Russia.

In 1801 the Polish Church was subjected to a secular administrative body in St Petersburg. After 1831 half of the convents and monasteries on former Polish territory were closed down. After 1864 all Church property was confiscated and monastic orders disbanded. The clergy were forbidden to write to Rome. Seminaries and other Church institutions were placed under a police inspectorate, and sermons had to be passed by the censor. In 1870 the government decreed that the Catholic liturgy was henceforth to be said in Russian. Recalcitrant priests were flogged or deported to Siberia and peasants were terrorised by the police, but there was such determined resistance that the authorities relented and in 1882 signed a Concordat with Rome, which laid down the conditions under which the faith could be practised. But this did not herald any fundamental change of attitude. When the young Nicholas II visited Warsaw in 1897, he gave orders for the building of a vast Orthodox church dedicated to St Alexander in the middle of its largest central square.

Russian policy towards the Uniates was even more draconian. In 1773, after the first partition, Catherine II sent troops into the villages to convert them to the Orthodox faith. The persecution abated after her death, but Nicholas took up the crusade for Orthodoxy with a vengeance. Between 1826 and 1838 a huge operation was mounted which has been likened to Stalin’s purges. Uniate peasants were ordered to abjure their faith, and children were mutilated and butchered before their mothers if they refused. Where even this failed, massacres and deportations ensued. A further such campaign was carried out in the 1870s. These crusades failed to stamp out the Uniates, who would hold undercover services in woods or across the border in Galicia. Instead of inspiring loyalty to St Petersburg, it made them look to Poland and to Austria as havens of toleration, and contributed to the rise of Ukrainian nationalism.

Whether they were Ukrainians or Poles, the peasants tended to identify first and foremost with religion and language. It followed that they remained loyal to their Church, and not always just for religious reasons: throughout the nineteenth century the village priest was the peasant’s adviser and support in the struggle against oppression and injustice. They also resented state interference in education, particularly when it came to language.

The educational system in the Western Gubernias had been Russified after 1831. After 1864 a set of new edicts forbade the use of Polish in printed form, even on shop fronts and hoardings, while written Polish was forbidden in official correspondence. At one stage it even became illegal to give Polish Christian names at baptism.

Legislation in the Kingdom was less harsh. Nevertheless, in 1869 the Warsaw Main School, founded in 1862 as a substitute for the university, abolished in 1831, was shut down and in turn replaced by a Russian university. In 1885 Russian was substituted for Polish as the teaching language, even in elementary schools. Children were not allowed to address each other in anything but Russian within the precincts of the school.

As the tsarist government clamped down, secret classes were organised to teach Polish and history as well as religious instruction. A ‘flying university’ operated lectures and exams for hundreds of students at secret locations. According to Russian sources, clandestine education at some level involved one-third of the entire population of the Kingdom by 1901. Conspiracy, illegal presses and the smuggling of books once again became part of the everyday experience of Polish society.

Poles lived out the nineteenth century in a continuously changing state of dislocation: life went on, children were born, money was made and lost, in a physical environment that would have been familiar to any contemporary in England, France or Germany, but one that was sporadically shaken by the intrusion of brutality from above and subversion from below, most of it irrational and groundless, necessitating changes of outlook and positioning with regard to the system and within society. The attendant strain, mental, emotional and psychological, marked Polish society all the more as it refused to accept this state of affairs, and continually tried to regain control of its destiny, by rational means, through word, print and, where possible, action.