(Cambridge Concise Histories) Jerzy Lukowski, Hubert Zawadzki - A Concise History of Poland-Cambridge University Press (2006)

The reactionary trend after 1819 in the internal and external policies of the so-called ‘Holy Alliance’ of the three eastern powers was to press heavily on their respective Polish provinces. The resulting restrictions were primarily of a political nature and were not aimed at ‘denationalizing’ the Poles; indeed, by twentieth-century standards they were very mild. Nevertheless, they were perceived by many contemporaries as inimical to rhe Polish national cause. The most vivid public expression of discontent in the Congress Kingdom came from a small group of enterprising gentry liberals led by the Niemojowski brothers from the western province of Kalisz. Their campaign in defence of the constitution prompted Alexander to warn the Polish Sejm in 1820 against the ‘abuse’ of liberty, and to authorize Constantine to use any means to maintain order in the Kingdom. The Sejm was not convened until 1825, when its debates were also closed to the public. The reactionary trend was supported by the Kingdom’s episcopate and its native conservative champions of ‘Altar and Throne’. The remaining representatives of the ideals of the Enlightenment came under direct attack; in December 1820 the anticlerical S. K. Potocki was replaced as education minister by the obscurantist Stanislaw Grabowski. Decrees against secret societies led to the dissolution of masonic lodges which Alexander had himself once encouraged to promote ideas of social and cultural improvement and Russo-Polish reconciliation. Now also outside the law were clandestine patriotic societies committed to education and national reunification, which had grown since 1817 under the cover of masonic forms, and which attracted Napoleonic veterans, young officers and university students, many of poor szlachta backgrounds. Their first martyr was Walery Lukasinski, an army major, who was arrested in 1822 and who eventually spent most of his remaining forty-four years in a fortress dungeon outside St Petersburg. Reluctant to seek careers in the tsarist civil service and facing limited job prospects at home, the large student body in Wilno proved to be a particularly fertile ground for early Romantic ideas, but then faced the wrath of the authorities. Members of the Society of Philomats in Wilno, including Adam Mickiewicz, the most promising Romantic poet writing in Polish, were exiled into the Russian interior. In 1823 Czartoryski was replaced as curator of the Wilno educational district by Novosiltsev, nicknamed ‘the Herod of Lithuania’ for his brutal interrogation of the students.

Much of Polish public opinion took a dim view of the retreat from ‘liberalism’ during Alexander’s last years. There was disappointment in many quarters when Alexander’s successor in 1825, Nicholas I, further integrated the western guhernii with the rest of the Russian Empire, thereby dashing hopes that the Kingdom might be enlarged in the east. The trial in Warsaw, in 1828, of members of the revived National Patriotic Society for their contacts with the Russian Decembrists further damaged the already uneasy Polish-Russian relationship. Tsar Nicholas was furious when the Polish Senate, in its capacity as the Kingdom’s High Tribunal, could not quite bring itself to condemn the conspirators’ ideal of national reunification and acquitted the defendants of high treason. Only Russia’s involvement in a new Turkish war in 1828-9 prevented the outraged Nicholas from overriding the Senate’s verdict and bringing about a major constitutional crisis.

To appease his Polish subjects, Nicholas attended a formal coronation ceremony in Warsaw in May 1829, presented Warsaw with Turkish guns from Varna (the place of death in 1444 of the crusading Polish king Wladyslaw Jagiellon), and agreed to summon the practically defunct Polish Sejm in June 1830. Even so, Nicholas found the role of constitutional monarch not at all to his taste; it had to be politely explained to him that the rejection of a government bill (in this instance to abolish civil marriages) was not unusual in a parliamentary system and was nor intended as an affront to majesty. Grand Duke Constantine’s behaviour also improved in the late t 820s; he felt increasingly at home in Warsaw with his morganatic Polish wife, and even espoused Polish irredentist aspirations in the east.