The 1863 uprising and the shared legacy of the Commonwealth

Polish mounted standard-bearer of the January Uprising 1863. Photo: Public Domain

Animated by the historical tradition of the Commonwealth and by innovative notions of mass politics, 1863 was at the same time the last political act committed in the name of the old Commonwealth. It was also a milestone marking the birth of the modern Polish, Lithuanian and Belarusian nations. A century and a half later, 1863 holds new significance for the future of Central and Eastern Europe.

In order to understand who fought the January 1863 uprising and for what, let us start at the end of the 18th century, when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned out of existence. Its memory survived among its politically-conscious elite, who now aspired to independence and liberty.

Birth of politics

Just around the time that the partitions of the Commonwealth took place, between 1772 and 1795, a novel and groundbreaking political process begun unfolding in Europe which changed the way people perceived politics, as well as the semantic toolbox they used to describe it. Throughout the Middle Ages and for the better part of the early modern era, politics on a scale any larger than local was habitually a sphere reserved for only a handful of people proximate to royal authority – the king, the aristocracy, the Church and occasionally tradesmen and financiers. The entire medieval and early modern ancien régime derived its legitimacy from divine providence and royal patrimony. All political decisions were justified using vocabulary derived from this realm. If the concept of “nation” was used at all – like in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth where the “nation” chose its own kings – it meant at most the politically enfranchised aristocracy.

By the late 18th century, however, the scope of politics started expanding perceptibly. The French Revolution in 1789 was at first an attempt by the educated, materially comfortable and politically-conscious parts of the vast “third estate” to gain entry into politics. This sphere was previously controlled by the ancien régime, with its exclusive vocabulary of blood rights, patrimony and divine providence. The rejection of this vocabulary and embrace of at least notional equality was one of the key strands of Enlightenment thought. By questioning divine and hereditary rights; resolving to treat the temporal Earth as the place where the pursuit of human happiness was to be realised; and aspiring to found human relations on rationality; the dominant intellectual current of the 18th century laid the foundations for a new type of politics. The same way of thinking found its way into the discourse of the struggling Commonwealth.

The Constitution of May 3rd 1791, inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment and passed by the reforming Great Sejm held in Warsaw between 1788 and 1791, was an attempt to create a modernized society. It did so by easing the burden of the peasants, giving more rights to burghers and funnelling poor noblemen into the growing bureaucracy away from oligarchic magnate cliques, thereby expanding the scope of politics across society. In this way, a civic nation in a modern centralized state was being constructed. It is for this nation, not the purely aristocratic one, that the Polish-American revolutionary hero Tadeusz Kosciuszko fought the 1794 insurrection against the Russian and Prussian absolutist occupation that overthrew the Constitution in 1792. While leading Commonwealth revolutionaries that year, he declared: “I will not fight for the nobility alone; I want freedom for the entire nation and for this only I will risk my life.”

After Kosciuszko’s defeat, the third partition wiped the Commonwealth off the map in 1795, thereby extinguishing the flame of liberty that Central and Eastern Europe generated parallel to France and America. Stanisław Poniatowski, the last king, despaired after the partitions that Poland was lost forever. In textbook ancien régime terms he equated the nation with the monarchical state. In a rebuke to such thinking, by singing in 1796 “Poland has not yet perished so long as we live,” Commonwealth patriots fighting under the banners of revolutionary France for their homeland’s restoration became the third in history after the French and Americans to identify the nation explicitly with the democratic masses. Overall, they derived legitimacy from people and not from royal patrimony or divine right.

Political community

The achievements of the Commonwealth statesmen, Enlightenment figures and revolutionaries of the late 18th century are often reduced to an exclusively Polish legacy. This is often understood in modern ethnonational terms, and therefore excludes Lithuanians, Belarusians and Ukrainians. Oftentimes, those nations exclude themselves from this legacy by rejecting pre-19th century history, which they also understand as Polish and therefore alien. It is not hard to identify the origins of this misconception. Commonwealth citizens and subsequent patriots fighting for its restoration thought of themselves as “Polish” and spoke the Polish language when engaged in politics. But the 18th and early-19th century “Polish” nation of the Commonwealth that Kosciuszko and subsequent generations fought for, thought of itself in ways very different from how we understand politics today. It was not yet an ethnic nation of today but a political community derived from centuries of common statehood and culture. It was defined by civic patriotism in an era when today’s concept of ethnicity did not yet exist and when language did not define political identity. It was perfectly logical to be a Lithuanian or Ukrainian patriot of the larger “Polish” Commonwealth nation, and many thought of themselves in those terms.

In other words, the modern Lithuanian, Belarusian and Ukrainian nations did not yet exist. But neither did the Polish one. To think of Polishness in the way late 19th century nationalists did was as much a break with the Commonwealth’s legacy as conceptualizing Lithuanian or Belarusian communities as separate from the larger whole. In 1795, this idea was still many decades away. Even after the partitions, the Commonwealth remained very much alive in people’s minds. The political idea of the civic nation kept encouraging successive generations to fight for its restoration, first during the Napoleonic Wars and then in the Polish-Russian War of 1830-31.

The Congress of Vienna in 1815 established a truncated Kingdom of Poland, whose liberal constitution the tsar habitually violated and whose unification with the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands of the Commonwealth under Russian occupation he repeatedly denied. In 1830, roused by gossip that Russia was going to send them to suppress the July revolution in France, Polish troops consisting of Napoleonic veterans rose in revolt against the tsar. The Polish-Russian War brought about an uprising across the Russian-occupied parts of the former Commonwealth, with many waging a partisan struggle and flocking to join the armies in Warsaw.

Lithuanian peasant partisans fighting Russian troops at that time sang a version of the 1796 hymn: “Poland is not yet lost while the Samogitians live” (Dabar lenkai naprapule kol Žemaitiai gyvi). The uprising leaders promised, in the appeals written in three languages, that the peasantry would no longer be muzhiks but “genuine free Poles”. This was not a promise of ethnic conversion as nationalists would understand it today but of political rights. In the language of the Commonwealth, to be a Pole was to participate in the life of the nation.

Last fight for a common political nation

The landscape in which political identity functioned in our region started changing in the second half of the 19th century. The end of the 1830-31 uprising significantly weakened the stateless political community of the Commonwealth, resulting in mass emigration and brutal Russian repressions including executions, confiscations of property, as well as the destruction and robbery of material heritage. More broadly and importantly, industrialization and globalization created the grounds for mass politics based on ethnicity and language. In an era in which people needed common frameworks to organize complex economic structures and compete for the resources and attention of the administrative state, language and the concept of “ethnicity” started to be the most effective tools for constructing identity. Slowly but surely, this fostered exclusive ethnic nationalisms and narrowed the space for broader and more inclusive ones like “Commonwealth Polish”. The 1863 uprising happened at a historical crossroads, after which lies the era of ethnic nationalism that we know and understand from our vantage point today.

Thus, while the insurgents of 1863 fought for a multi-ethnic “Poland”, many already thought in terms close to modern national identity. The best example would be Kastus Kalinouski, the present-day hero of democratic Belarus, who mobilized the Belarusian peasant masses for the cause of the uprising. He utilized their own language and a spirit of the Belarusian culture connected to but inherently autonomous from its Polish or Lithuanian counterparts. From this comes the tripartite coat of arms of the uprising, representing a modernized union that the insurgents sought to restore: the White Eagle (Poland), Vytis/Pahonia (Lithuania-Belarus) and the Archangel Michael (Ukraine).

Although Ukraine figured as a co-equal part of the common fatherland that the January insurgents fought for, the uprising was not very popular there due to class tensions between Polish-speaking noblemen and Ruthenian peasants. These issues were much more pronounced in these areas than anywhere else, alongside the imperial legacy of the Commonwealth in Ukraine. In Ukraine the separation between the Polish and Ukrainian nationalist movements happened earlier. This occurred in 1848 and was based on the Uniate clergy and a rising Ukrainian intelligentsia, as well as a much stronger imperial Russian presence. As a result, by the time of the January Uprising the Commonwealth’s ideals already felt outdated.

In the decades following the suppression of the uprising in 1863, the early modern political nation of the Commonwealth fragmented into separate and exclusive Polish, Lithuanian, Belarusian and Ukrainian national movements. Of course, these were defined by language and ethnicity. Another way to put this would be that the Lithuanian, Belarusian and Ukrainian national movements crystallized as independent forces and defined themselves against both Poland and Russia, while the old idea of “Poland as Commonwealth” lost its meaning and folded into a similarly ethnic and exclusive Polish national movement.

The last attempt to revive the common idea, imagined by Leon Wasilewski as a Polish-led multinational federation and directed by Józef Piłsudski, failed in 1920. The newly independent Lithuanian nation-state rejected Piłsudski’s overtures and declared it wanted nothing to do with Poland, while the joint Ukrainian-Polish offensive on Kyiv aiming to establish an independent Ukraine was repulsed by the Bolsheviks. After the Polish-Russian war ground to a standstill following a narrow Polish victory in the battle of Warsaw, supporters of federalism in Poland were weakened and discredited. A nationalist-led Polish peace delegation abandoned Poland’s Ukrainian allies and sign a peace treaty with Soviet Russia, dividing Eastern Europe between a Polish nation-state and a multinational Soviet empire. Despite the efforts of some of Piłsudski’s followers in the 1930s, notably Henryk Józewski and Tadeusz Hołówko, to steer Polish policy towards conciliation with the Ukrainian national project, interwar Poland was remembered by its national minorities more as oppressor than common civic home.

Common legacy

Across the first half of the 20th century, most prominently between 1917 and 1921 and later during the Second World War, these exclusive nationalist movements fought many often genocidal battles over lands and cities in a bloody division and cleansing of the multi-ethnic inheritance of the Commonwealth. This era ended in the late 1940s when, as a result of the movement of borders and various periods of ethnic cleansing, separate political entities came into being for all four descendants of the old Commonwealth: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus.

Throughout this time, one idea that united those who sought a return to the kinship of 1863 was the struggle against Russian imperialism. Figures such as the 20th-century strategist Jerzy Giedroyc saw reconciliation as a basis for national security and individual freedom. Finally, in the critical period between 1989 and 1991, these aspirations triumphed. The foundations for reconciliation were laid when Poland accepted its post-1945 territorial losses and the four states made steps to establish mutual relations on the basis of sovereignty, territorial inviolability and mutual tolerance for national minorities.

Today, with Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus having settled their existential disputes, the ethno‑nationalist conflict between them dating back to the middle of the 19th century has lost its basis, even if its echoes remain potent in people’s minds. Despite this, the overwhelming threat to all of them and their way of life remains Russian imperialism. In such conditions, the January uprising of 1863 holds a special symbolic and political meaning.

The year 1863 was the time of our last common struggle, and the year that we parted ways. Today, when no existential disputes exist between the independent nations of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus, the memory of 1863 should be a stepping stone to teaching the history of the Commonwealth as a common legacy. Its monumental achievements, especially the long tradition of civil society and the self-generated drive for liberty in the late 18th century that was snuffed out for 200 years by Russian and Prussian aggression, ought to belong to Lithuanians, Belarusians and Ukrainians as much as Poles. It gives us all a claim to participation in the European history of liberty no worse than that of any other European nation.

At the same time, the Commonwealth nation cannot be equated with modern Polishness. The rise of ethnic Polish nationalism was as much of a break with the Commonwealth’s traditions as that of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. This requires some adjustments on all sides. The Poles should stop basing their modern national identity on the entirety of Commonwealth history and start teaching it as a shared legacy. Ukraine, Lithuania and, in the future, Belarus should overcome the traumas derived from the struggles of their modern national movements with their Polish counterpart, and stop demonizing the common past.

Why should we bother about this issue at all? Because there is a future to be won. Memory of the past always, without fail, reflects a view of the present and aspirations for the future. In the conditions of nationalist struggle, it made sense to focus on narrow perceptions and demonize neighbours. It does not make sense anymore, when those neighbours no longer have hostile designs, are members of the same Euro-Atlantic community, and share the same aspirations of liberty and economic growth. Of course, they also share the same imperialist enemy.

National symbolism and historical memory are the cornerstones of modern politics. Reimagining the history of the Commonwealth, like we are already reimagining the January Uprising, can help us achieve common aspirations. When the Polish, Lithuanian, Belarusian and Ukrainian flags stand together in celebration of a common past, then we can go on to build a common European future.

Wiktor Babiński is a PhD candidate at Yale University studying modern East European history.

belarus, history, Poland, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Ukraine