After the Decembrist rebellion of 1825, Nicholas I was even more suspicious of the Poles, and was not satisfied that Polish courts dealt firmly enough with those he believed to have been involved in treason. Matters came to a head when in November 1830 one of the patriotic societies tried to assassinate the Viceroy, Grand Duke Konstantin, and to disarm the Russian garrison. They failed in their immediate aim, but did seize control of the city of Warsaw, turning discontent into an armed insurrection and polarizing the situation. Every Pole had to decide for or against participation in the revolt, and Czartoryski reluctantly sponsored it, becoming head of an independent Polish government at war with Russia.
As before, however, Poland remained divided, both between moderates and radicals in the capital, and more generally between the szlachta and the peasants. A land reform was urgent if the insurrection was to gain the support of the peasants, and without that support it had no chance of success against the much larger Russian army. But the Polish government temporized until it was too late. In spite of the sterling fighting qualities which the Polish army displayed then, the Russians were able to restore complete control by the autumn of 1831.45
The result was the destruction of Poland’s distinctive institutions. Nicholas I warned in 1835: ‘If you persist in nursing your dreams of a distinct nationality, of an independent Poland … you can only bring the greatest of misfortunes upon yourselves.’ The Sejm and the separate army were abolished, and most of Poland’s affairs brought under Russian ministries. The ruble replaced the zloty. The University of Warsaw was closed, and all schools subjected to direct Russian control. The Russian language became officially acceptable alongside Polish in administration and justice, and the Russian criminal code replaced the Polish one. The Uniate Church in former Lithuania was assimilated into the Orthodox Church.46
In short, Poland, a proud and independent European nation, was treated as if it were less than a steppe khanate. Officers who had served in the rebellious army were cashiered and deported to Siberia, and nobles lost their estates. Many forestalled this fate by emigrating, mostly to France, which became the home of an alternative Poland. At the Hotel Lambert Czartoryski became a kind of king in exile. The Polish Democratic Society in Paris mocked Europe’s diplomatic arrangements by talking of a ‘Holy Alliance of Peoples’. Naturally the Russians were cast in the role of principal enemy of this ‘Alliance’, and the Polish emigration, with its brilliant poets, musicians, soldiers and elder statesmen aroused lively anti-Russian sentiment over most of Europe. The ‘saviour of Europe’ in 1812–15, Russia now became the ‘gendarme of Europe’, a reputation which was to hamper her diplomatic efforts greatly for the rest of the nineteenth century.
Even worse, when the Russian government resumed the path of reform in Poland, in the 1860s, the result was more or less a repetition of the 1830 rebellion. By making concessions to the church, permitting the re-opening of part of Warsaw University and encouraging serious discussion of reforms, including the abolition of serfdom, Alexander II aroused exaggerated hopes and also provoked bitter disagreements. The result was an armed insurrection in 1863–4, which aimed to restore Polish independence. It proved very tenacious: for a time it succeeded in driving the Russian army almost out of Poland and in establishing an alternative administration, effective at least in the rural areas. But as before the rising was undermined by its own internal divisions and by the failure to attract support from any European power. By the end of 1864 the Russian army regained complete control, and this time Poland lost the last vestiges of its separate status: what had been the ‘Congress Kingdom’ became merely ‘the Vistula region’.47 The debacle was not only disastrous for Poland, but led to a decisive souring of the reform efforts of Alexander II [see Part 4, Chapter 1].
THE JEWS The partitions of Poland brought some 400,000 Jews into the empire.48 They confronted their new masters with problems analogous to those of the Poles, yet also different. They were yet another ‘awkward nationality’ as far as Russian administrators were concerned, resistant to assimilation and difficult to fit into the empire’s categories of population. They had an ancient religion and culture, a level of literacy and communal cohesion far higher than those of the Russians. They usually excelled at any trade, manufacture or profession they practised, so that they were dangerous competitors for others. They were widely resented among the population, partly for this reason, and partly because of religion: talk of the ‘murderers of Christ’ found a sympathetic echo among some believers, both Catholic and Orthodox.
Yet, in spite of their remarkable culture and talents, the Jews were nearly all poor, partly owing to discrimination long practised against them, partly because of the economic decline of eighteenth-century Poland. Their poverty, together with the economic functions they usually filled – as shopkeepers, traders, artisans, stewards, innkeepers and moneylenders – made it out of the question that any of them should be assimilated into the Russian nobility. They thus remained condemned to a conjunction of high achievement and low status: an unstable and explosive mixture.
From the outset the Russian government was concerned not only to integrate them, but also to protect other nationalities against them. When Moscow merchants petitioned in 1791 to be shielded from their competition, the government responded with a decree forbidding them to settle in the capital cities: this became the basis for the creation of the Pale of Settlement, which confined them, with few exceptions, to the former territories of Poland, plus the rest of Ukraine and New Russia.
For much of the nineteenth century, however, the Russian authorities did attempt to find some way of integrating Jews into society. The Jewish Statute of 1804 in some respects exemplified European enlightenment thinking about how this might best be accomplished. Jews were, for example, to be admitted without restriction to education at all levels, or, if they wished, to their own schools, where, however, they would be obliged to learn Russian, Polish or German. Their right of self-government in the kahal was confirmed in so far as it was separate from the rabbinate. They were allowed to set up and own factories, and to buy or lease land in New Russia and certain other provinces. On the other hand, even here there were restrictions: Jews were forbidden to engage in the liquor trade, which had been a major source of income for them in Poland. They were barred from military service, and required instead to pay a special tax. Above all, the Pale of Settlement was confirmed.49
In practice, the assimilatory aspects of the Statute remained a dead letter, while the restrictive ones were applied in full. Russian schools at all levels were so sparse that the Jews were scarcely able to take advantage of them. Even those who did could find it difficult to obtain appropriate employment afterwards: when one Simon Vul’f graduated in law at Dorpat University in 1816, he was briefly hired by the Ministry of Justice, but soon dismissed on the grounds that he could not handle cases involving ecclesiastical law.50 As for the prospect of agricultural settlement in New Russia, the government never backed it up with funds. In local government, it proved impossible to separate the secular functions of the kahal from the religious function of the rabbinate: Russians made the distinction without difficulty, but it was quite alien to Jewish tradition. In 1844 the kahal was officially abolished, but in practice continued to exist, since the authorities were unable to replace it with anything effective. Henceforth, however, it had no acknowledgement or protection at law.
Overall, the Jews suffered from the