Chapter 2: Inheritors At home, 1832-1845 1. The defeat’s aftermath: repressive measures Emperor Nicholas comprehended the Polish revolution as an insane rebellion against the legitimate and sanctified authority. Any and all measures called for were taken in order to knock out from the Poles’ heads any similar designs, and turn them into obedient and grateful subjects of the Russian Empire. Such intent­ was however burdened with a contradiction. The emperor and his ministers primarily charged the military and civil leaders of the insurrection – mostly, the ­nobility – with responsibility for this rebellion. Still, they did not intend or ­actually will to alter the composition of social relations in Poland, as such a pat- tern could have been dangerous for Russia itself. Thus, the nobility deserved its punishment, its political rights taken away, its nobility patents verified with competent offices; but apart from confiscated properties of émigrés and of some deportees, the nobility was still to have its proprietary rights and primacy in ­access to offices and military grades. A similar instability was the case with administrative reforms as well. The Kingdom’s autonomy was abolished together with the constitution, sejm ­assemblies and Polish army; all the same, the Kingdom was protected against being formally incorporated in the Kingdom by the legitimistic attitude of the ­European powers – signatories to the 1815 Vienna Treaty. Although the politi- cal lot of Poles was of little significance to the superpowers’ rulers and minis- ters, a ­renouncement of the Vienna Congress provisions would imply an upset of the European balance. This being the case, Field Marshal Ivan Paskevich, the ­Russian emperor’s favourite, raised to the honour of Prince of Warsaw was from now on to exercise a tough soldierly rule in Warsaw. The civil administration subordinate to him, save for a few key positions, was to be cast by loyal Poles – those who stayed away from the ‘past disorders’. Although learning Russian was recommended to all the officials, French, of which both parties had a command, remained meanwhile the language of communication between the Polish min- isters and the Petersburg court. The existing Polish (or, Polonised) codes of law were preserved in the Kingdom. The conqueror’s punishing hand fell with all ruthlessness on the Polish edu- cational institutions in the Kingdom and in the Lithuanian-Ruthenian lands. Jerzy Jedlicki - 9783631624029 53 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/24/2021 07:49:15PM via free access To Tsar Nicholas’s mind, and quite rightly so, universities and lyceums (upper- secondary schools) offered the primary breeding ground for rebels. He con- sequently ordered the shutdownof the University of Warsaw and the Warsaw Lyceum (made a guberniya school from then on), the University of Wilno, and the famous Lyceum of Krzemieniec. Remnants of theological faculties re- mained of these closed-down schools; the Medical School of Wilno still op- erated, for a short time. Even the zealous tsarist officials in Warsaw believed that these were all merely extemporaneous repressive measures, after which the suspended schools would be gradually reinstated, at least as far as their less menacing departments were concerned. But wrong they were: the emperor resolved to deprive the Poles of higher education opportunities once and for- ever, and the order to take over and export to Petersburg the lion’s share of the Warsaw University Library and the collections of the Warsaw Society of the Friends of Learning, dissolved together with the University, as well as the Royal Castle treasures, was evidence of his willpower. To take the inventory, plenipotentiary commissioners were delegated from the capital, who, sparing no effort on the job, packed up a hundred thousand books, plus manuscripts, maps, music scores, a collection of Stanislaus Augustus’s engravings, coins, paintings, medals, armoury, old banners from the Arsenal and from St. John’s Cathedral, minerals, shells, and many private keepsakes and mementos from the palaces of emigrants absent at the time. “Since we have entered into Warsaw by force of arms”, Nicholas wrote to Paskevich, “then any like objects constitute our trophies.”41 For the Polish educated and studying classes, it proved a serious disaster, the ­final burial of the epoch-making labour of the Commission of National Education (1773-94) and an act of brutal strangulation of Polish cultural aspi- rations. And this was the point. Considering the fact that a few thousand stu- dents and graduates of both universities joined the émigré community, and their ­hard-to-assess number was induced to the tsarist army or deported ‘deep into Russia’, it becomes evident that the Kingdom, Lithuania, and Ukrainian guberni- yas, stripped of their enlightened strata and their skills-and-tools, were meant to be turned into an intellectual desert, submissive to the will of the rightful monarch. This intent could not fully succeed. The management itself of a subdued coun- try demanded that the natives, with at least the basic skills, be involved in this 41 Zofia Strzyżewska, Konfiskaty warszawskich zbiorów publicznych [‘Confiscations of Warsaw public collections’], p. 12. 54 Jerzy Jedlicki - 9783631624029 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/24/2021 07:49:15PM via free access work. To reopen gymnasiums (lower-secondary-level schools) in the Kingdom, remaining shutdown for two years after the Insurrection, imposed itself as an urgent need. The tsarist government did make this step but superimposed on the Kingdom a school law compiled by the Petersburg-based commission. Teachers were subject to verification, checking their conduct during the uprising. Those who maintained their posts were instructed in summer 1833 by the governmen- tal Public Education Council that the purpose of school education and upbring- ing be, ever since, “godliness, unrestricted attachment to the Throne, obedience to the Government, submissiveness to the law, passion for the virtues and order”. The teachers’ task was to instil in their pupils’ or students’ hearts the princi- ples of a morality “not contaminated with the spirit of the age”, their minds to be enriched with information “with no exuberant imagination or detrimental strivings”.42 These platitudes summarised the entire doctrine of Nicholas’s politi- cal philosophy. The pedagogical doctrine comprised in the instructions for the school au- thorities assumed that “children brought up according to the fashionable rules, in forbearance and freedom, spoiled already at their parental-house stage, arrive at their schools with the worst inclinations; that, therein, among the numerous gathering of their fellow-companions of this same sort, while not restrained by the strictness of school regulations, they tend to be confirmed in their depravity, they develop the addiction of maleficent unanimity; and, that, lastly, increas- ing in the spirit of unsubmissiveness, not only do they learn how to offend the authority they first meet once having left their family home, the authority of their teachers and leaders, but go as far as overtly stand up against the same”.43 The entire pile of punishments was to remain at the disposal of educators or form-masters, so that those evil inclinations could be eradicated, while the rules- and-regulations for students (made more severe in the western guberniyas of the Empire than in the Kingdom) filled up their day down to the minute, leaving not a split second unsupervised. Obviously, Russia was not in those years the only country in Europe where it was recommended that discipline be extorted from the youth by means of severe rigour, if not lashing, in extreme cases. The practice was still rather common- place, even in some otherwise liberal countries. All the same, compared to the Polish pedagogical thought of the twenties, Nicholas’s system meant a retrograde 42 Quoted after: Jan Kucharzewski, Epoka Paskiewiczowska w Królestwie Polskim: losy oświaty [‘The Paskevich epoch in the Kingdom of Poland’], Warszawa 1914, pp. 163-4. 43 ‘An exposition of the reasons indicative of the need to alter the regulations re. school discipline’, as quoted idem, p. 185. Jerzy Jedlicki - 9783631624029 55 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/24/2021 07:49:15PM via free access step, motivated as much by fear of new political fomentations as with the fun- damental legitimism of tsarism which regarded “unbound submission toward the authority” as the utmost virtue.44 No surprise, then, that education became the first department of the Kingdom’s civil service that was made directly sub- ordinate to Petersburg. The Warsaw Education District, established 1839, with a Russian curator, was to report to the tsarist minister of education – the post held at the time by Sergei Uvarov, the codifier of the ideological doctrine of tsarist autocracy. Each of the guberniyas (formerly, voivodeships) was from that point on to have one eighth-grade – since 1840, just seventh-grade – gymnasium, so-called philological, with a more-or-less traditional syllabus, including Latin – an inces- santly ‘ennobling’ element; the obvious difference being that history was from then on to be taught using Russian textbooks recognising the Partition of Poland as a righteous historical verdict. A useful novelty was the establishment of a few ‘real’, i.e. middle (junior-high), schools, with a more pragmatic curriculum, more easily accessible to boys of non-privileged classes but not opening the way to a higher education. These ‘philological gymnasiums’