REWOLUCJA ALSO BY ROBERT E. BLOBAUM Feliks Dziertynski and the SDKPiL: A Study of the Origins of Polish Communism REWOLUCJA *" RUSSIAN POLAND, 1904-1907 ROBERT E. BLOBAUM CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS IT HACA AND LONDON Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges a subvention from the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences of West Virginia University, which aided in bringing this book to publication. Copyright © 1995 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 1995 by Cornell University Press. First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2016. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Blobaum, Robert. Rewolucja : Russian Poland, 1904–1907 / Robert E. Blobaum. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-3054-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-5017-0713-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Poland—History—Revolution, 1904–1907. I. Title. DK4385.B57 1995 943.8'033—dc20 94-33165 The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ CONTENTS List of Illustrations vii Preface IX A Note on Dates, Names, and Sources xvii Abbreviations and Acronyms xix I. Russian State, Polish Society I 2. The Making of a Revolution, 1904 41 3· The Emergence of the Labor Movement 72 4· The Revolution in the Countryside lIS S· The Struggle over Education IS7 6. The Transformation of Political Culture 188 7· The Church and the Revolution 234 8. The Impact of Martial Law 260 Index 293 v ILL USTRATI ONS Map of the Kingdom of Poland in 1897 5 "A Peasant before a State Official" 1 5 L6di: as viewed from the south 25 Textile workers from Hielle and Dietrich in Zyrard6w 26 Working-class dwellings on the outskirts of Warsaw 27 Triumphal Gate and street decorations on the occasion of the visit of Tsar Nicholas II to Warsaw, 1897 31 Distribution of flour in Warsaw 55 "Street Demonstration" 60 Mourning the victims of the May Day Massacre in Warsaw, 1905 92 Workers from the Karol Scheibler Mills in L6di: after the Proclamation of the Great Lockout, December 1906 I 12 Striking farm workers from Gostynin County, Warsaw Province 120 A gmina assembly meeting 134 A servitudes dispute 139 Emblem of the Polska Macierz Szkolna, 1907 179 An adult literacy course at the Rudzki Factory in Warsaw 181 Publishing Gornik (The Miner), the PPS Newspaper in Sosnowiec 200 Imprisoned members of the PPS Fighting Organization in Radom, 1907 208 Victims of fratricidal fighting in the L6di: suburb of Baluty, 1907 225 "The Emperor and Witte. The Pain of the People Is the Pain of the Monarch." 227 Political demonstration in Warsaw, November 1905 268 Artist's depiction of the Theater Square Massacre in Warsaw, November I, 1905 269 vii vii i ILLUSTRATIONS The delegation to Count Witte 271 George Skalon, Warsaw Governor-General from August 1905 to February 1914 278 Street arrests in Warsaw, 1906 282 "Freedom of the Press" 290 PREF ACE This book, which is about dramatic change and transformation in a turbulent era of Polish history, was researched and written against the back­ drop of an equally profound and revolutionary turn of events in contem­ porary Poland. Although the first conceptual seeds were planted in 1980 during work on an earlier book, I could not begin the present undertaking until that project's completion in 1984. In Poland, the first "self-limiting" revolution of Solidarity had come and gone, while many of the repressive features of martial law, imposed by General Wojciech Jaruzelski at the end of 1981, remained in place. Three periods of research in Poland followed: in 1985-1986, at the height of the so-called normalization; in 1988, on the eve of the Polish "Round Table" negotiations; and in 1991, during the Republic of Poland's first truly free parliamentary elections since the in­ terwar era. The crisis and then collapse of communism in Poland influ­ enced, at the very least, the circumstances of my research, if not my thinking about it. While I have tried to remain cognizant of the dangers "presentism" poses to historical analyses, I have found the social science methodologies that have informed the best scholarship of more recent events, as well as contemporary debates about such critical issues as the meaning and nature of "civil society," not without value in pondering the causes and significance of an earlier, and admittedly different, revolution. The revolutionary upheavals of the early twentieth century in Russian Poland-or, more accurately, in the Kingdom of Poland that the Congress of Vienna had created in 18ls-have not been well illuminated by histo­ rians. The Polish upheavals of 1904 to 1907, although characterized by an undeniable specificity, have been eclipsed by their concurrence with rev­ olution throughout the vast Russian Empire. Until recently, Western stu- lX x PREFACE dents of late imperial Russian history, when dealing with the Revolution of 1905, have focused almost exclusively on the central Russian provinces, and more particularly on Moscow and St. Petersburg. If the peripheral "borderlands," including Russia's Polish provinces, were discussed at all, it was usually in reference to developments at the center. This is not to say that such crucial events as "Bloody Sunday" and the proclamation of the October Manifesto were without influence in Russian Poland, only that these events occurred within an economic, social, cultural, and political context that in many ways was vastly different from what prevailed in the empire's Russian heartland. Hence, the revolution in the Kingdom of Po­ land, more often than not, took its own route, with a point of departure in the final months of 1904, several weeks before Bloody Sunday. By certain criteria often applied to the study of revolutions-for example, social mobilization and organization, the incidence of political terror and coun­ terterror, and the formation of alternative governing structures-develop­ ments in the "peripheral," Polish provinces were, if anything, more "revolutionary" than elsewhere in the empire, including the two Russian capitals. The paucity of Western-language literature on the Revolution of 1905 in Poland thus provided one important justification for my work. At the same time, Polish historiography, in its nationalist, romantic, and Marxist variants, at home or in emigration, had excessively politicized this initial chapter of twentieth-century Polish history. Consequently, the up­ heavals of 1 904 to 1 907 were conventionally rendered as struggles between and among political personalities, ideologies, tactics, and parties. Such par­ tisan historical writing, which reached its apogee in the Polish People's Republic, culminated in the "definitive" second edition of Stanislaw Kal­ abhlski and Feliks Tych's Czwarte powstanie czy pierwsza rewolucja: Lata 1905-1907 na ziemiach polskich (Fourth uprising or first revolution: The years 1905-1907 on Polish lands), published in 1976. Despite the promise implied in Kalabinski and Tych's title that their study would address the transitional social and political significance of the revolution, Czwarte powstanie remained preoccupied with issues of political "treachery" and ideological (i.e., Marxist-Leninist) "correctness." Aside from the occa­ sional inclusion of a statistical table, the social history of the revolution in Russian Poland remained in relative obscurity. Movements among urban workers, middle school and university students, agrarian laborers and small peasant proprietors, Catholic clergy and religious communities, and pro­ fessional groups, as before, were readily assigned to the influence of one or more of the competing political agents and thus denied any tangible significance in their own right. The same tendentiousness also applied to the numerous "local histories" of the revolution written in the 1960s and PREFACE Xl 197os, although in hindsight the best works in this genre, by Halina Kie­ purska (on Warsaw) and Wladyslaw Lech Karwacki (on LodZ), were be­ ginning to break away from the traditional mode. My purpose became twofold as work proceeded: to examine the revo­ lutionary upheavals in the Kingdom of Poland in their own light, "eman­ cipated" as it were from dubi�us Russian revolutionary "parentage," and to study far more carefully the Polish revolution's social actors, much neglected in the political preoccupations of Polish historians. By the time I embarked on the lengthy journey that, I hoped, would lead me to an ideal intersection of social and political history, a new generation of Polish historical writing relieved me of the overly ambitious task of rewriting the entire history of the revolution from the bottom up. In the late 1970S and especially in the 1980s, important studies, informed by the methodologies of modem social historical research well established in the West, began to appear in Poland; and if they did not focus on the revolution per se, they nevertheless helped define many of its principal issues within a larger social historical context. These works, by Anna Zarnowska and Wladyslaw Lech Karwacki on labor history and workers' culture, Elzbieta Kaczyllska and Jan Molenda on urban and rural crowd behavior, Maria Nietyksza on urban demography, Krzysztof Groniowski on agrarian labor, Andrzej Chwalba, Maria Kowalska, and Tadeusz Krawczak on popular religious conscious­ ness, Jozef Ryszard Szaflik and Jolanta Niklewska on volunteer firemen and private middle schools, and Jerzy Jedlicki on the origins of modem Polish political culture, marked a radical historiographic breakthrough. Even the era's political parties were subjected to new and objective social analysis, especially in the work of Pawel Samus on socialist party organiza­ tion in LodZ and that of Tadeusz Wolsza on the nationalist movement in the countryside.