Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations by Norman Davies Read Free Book Online

unrelenting campaign to turn them into model subjects of the tsar.
    Before the Partitions, every elected Polish-Lithuanian monarch had borne the dual titles of ‘king of Poland’ and ‘grand duke of Lithuania’. After 1795, when the titles became vacant, they were snapped up by the tsars. Yet they were still kept strictly separate. As from 1815, all the Romanovs adopted the three-part style of ‘emperor and autocrat of all the Russias’, ‘tsar (or sometimes king) of Poland’ and ‘grand duke of Finland, etc. etc.’ Lithuania did not appear in the short title, being subsumed according to tsarist ideology in the category of ‘all the Russias’. 101
    In time, as the nineteenth century progressed, a proportion of the wealthier and more influential landowners of the former grand duchy were able to have their nobility confirmed by the Office of Heralds in St Petersburg. Not surprisingly the Radziwiłłs were among those who adjusted well. But the tsarist authorities made political loyalty an iron condition of any such confirmation and refusals were common. So, too, were confiscations. A large number of estates, and all the most important offices, were taken over by incoming Russian officials, adventurers and carpetbaggers. At the head of them were figures like General Alexander Rimsky-Korsakov (1753–1840), who lived in the extravagant Tuskulanai manor near Vilnius, or Count Mikhail Muravyov (1796–1866), later known as Muravyov-Vilensky, who held a series of high government positions, and who was instrumental in suppressing local resistance. ‘What Russian guns can’t accomplish’, Muravyov once said, ‘will be accomplished by Russian schools.’
    In Muravyov’s time, serfdom was the burning social issue. It had been avoided during the Napoleonic Wars, and shelved during the ultra-conservative post-war era, but it arose again under Alexander II, the so-called ‘Tsar Liberator’ (r. 1855–81). Together with those in other parts of the Tsarist Empire, the serfs of the former grand duchy, an absolute majority of the population, were released from their feudal bonds in 1861, but not from the grinding poverty of backward rural life. Yetemancipation brought hope. It meant that the former serfs could move away to seek work, that they could learn new crafts and skills, and open businesses; and that they could educate their children. Reality moved slowly; aspirations rose fast.
    Education, therefore, became a battleground of competing interests. Tsarist officialdom saw an opportunity for far-reaching Russification, which involved not only the teaching of the Great Russian (Muscovite) language but also reverence for the tsar and the promotion of Russian Orthodoxy. For the population at large, the problem was how to give their children a schooling without handing them over unconditionally to the ambitions of the Russian state. Both the Poles and the Jews possessed their own school systems, and, from the 1840s, the Catholic bishops of Wilno (Vilnius) successfully sponsored primary classes for Lithuanian-speaking children. The harshest battles centred on the fate of White Ruthenians, whose language was treated as a Russian dialect and whose conversion to Russian Orthodoxy was taken for granted.
    The overall effectiveness of Russification is hard to measure. The currency of Russian certainly increased, and a proportion of the people became functionally bilingual. One of the few groups to be more thoroughly Russified belonged to a sector of the Jewish community who adopted Russian in place of their native Yiddish. These people were known as Litvaks , literally ‘Jews of the grand duchy’; their linguistic choice marked their desire of escaping from traditional Jewish society. They naturally made up most of the first wave of Jews who decided to emigrate.
    Religion remained a bone of contention. Some groups and individuals were willing to bear the civil penalties which their religious allegiance entailed. Yet there was no