Bartłomiej Garczyk
In the 1660s, during the Polish-Russian wars, groups of Poles defending the cities and fortresses of the Smolensk region and the Severia region (including Polotsk and Vitebsk) were taken prisoner. The captives were taken deep into the Moscow state and incorporated into the crews of the fortresses there. The Polish captives were ‘useful and trained fortifiers in the east’ and performed an important settlement and military function for the tsarist authorities in the vast undeveloped areas of Russia.
23 Polotsk ‘drabs’
The earliest written evidence of the presence of Poles in Kazan and the Volga region are the so-called lustration/revision books (Russian: писцовые книги), which contain information about the so-called estate property (land grants constituting economic security for tsarist officials), among other newly settled persons. A book from 1565–1568 lists among the first residents of the capital of Tataria 100 hired foreigners: Germans, Poles and Lithuanians. Among the foreigners living in Kazan, a separate category were the residents of Polotsk (24 people), among whom were 23 infantrymen (drabs) of Polotsk. These were military infantrymen, cannoneers and riflemen taken prisoner by the Russian army after the surrender of Polotsk in 1563. The document goes on to list individuals with Polish-sounding names and the places where the homes of Polotsk military men were located. Among them were: Paweł Żerawski, Wojciech Łański, Marcin Zabłocki, Stanisław Griszyn, Mikołaj Opratka, Stanisław (last name missing), Jan Nikołajew, Adam Matwiejew, Stanisław Janow, and Filon Bielski (or Bielskow), Stanisław Jan Mazur (? – Mазуров in the original) and Jan Nisław.
Another of the documents, a review register from 1646, no longer mentioned the presence of Polotsk military officers, but it did mention four foreigners from Smolensk. They were: Jan Bobrowski, Nazar Bratoszewski, Adamko Greniewski and Aleksander Lenkowski. Additional information about the earliest Polish settlement in Kazan and its surroundings can be found in the work of Yevgeny Lipakov, an outstanding Kazan researcher. In it, we find testimonies about the resettled ‘for life,’ originating from the Polish-Lithuanian lands, noble families of Boliński, Krasieński and Niewielski. Around 1594, Marcin Boliński arrived in Kazan, where he was granted pomiestie [an estate](41 souls) in the village of Permiaki (Kazan district), and lived there with his son Józef.
‘A handful of Polish prisoners of war’
The Polish settlement on the Volga River was significantly influenced by the Polish-Russian war of 1654–1667, which ended with the truce of Andrusovo. As noted by Aleksander Kraushar (who was the first to study the archival materials he had found), ‘a handful of Polish captives’ driven to the Volga River formed a permanent organisation in Kazan and, in order to keep the national tradition alive, passed lauda (resolutions) at sejmik meetings in 1655 and 1663. The first of the resolutions was dated 20th September 1655 and was signed by 60 people, mostly defenders of Vitebsk. The second document, bearing the date of 23rd July 1663, was signed by more military men taken prisoner presumably from various battlefields.
Let’s take a closer look at the first mentioned document from 1655. It describes the circumstances of the imprisonment of Polish nobles who took part in the defense of Vitebsk besieged by the army of Tsar Alexei:
And after that we ourselves […] to various places in the land of Russia, stripped of everything […] some to Pskov, to Veliky Novgorod, to Toropets, to Luk; others to Yaroslavl, to Kostroma and other towns were sent out […]. And after that by the Volga River, we are sent to Kazan [in bold by B. G.], where we have been living for ten Sundays, some with our wives and children, others separated from their wives and children, looking cum lacrymis for God’s grace and mercy from Your Majesty and the Republic for our speedy liberation from this heavy enemy prison, as long as we, like other prisoners, are not sent further afield as to Astrakhan, to Siberia, to the Terek and other various directions and distant Osudarskie towns, and as long as we are here in Kazan, in a single group, we do so uniformly, having agreed to the Laudum […].
(Kraushar, Sejmiki)
The defenders of Smolensk 1654
A separate category of the population settled on the Kazan land were noblemen – the defenders of Smolensk, who, after the surrender of the city in October 1654, according to the terms of the capitulation, were able to gain their freedom by accepting Moscow service. Those who chose to take an oath of allegiance to the tsar were sent to the ‘eternal life’ to the fortress cities in Kazan province. These resettlements were related to the creation of the so-called Zakam fortification zone (Russian: Закамская засечная черта or укрепленная закамская черта) by Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in 1652–1655. It was a southeastern system of fortifications (fortified cities, ramparts, entanglements, etc.) surrounding Kazan and the Kazan Krai, forming the outer line of defense of the then borderlands of the Grand Duchy of Moscow against the incursions of the neighbouring nomadic tribes – the Nogais, Kalmyks and Bashkirs. It was there, by the Kama River, that the soldiers of the Smolensk garrison were forcibly resettled. However, it is impossible to find out precisely what the ethnic self-identification of the taken prisoners was. Thus, it is difficult to make an unambiguous judgment, but it is probably not wrong to say that among the resettled representatives of the Smolensk nobility there were probably Poles as well. This issue was reflected in tsarist historiography. The Poles resettled on the Volga River were explicitly mentioned by historian Ivan Golikov, who, describing the Kazan province of Peter I’s era, enumerated the towns on the Kama River that were ‘settled with Polish captives’ (these were Menzelinsk, Zainsk, Stary Sheshmensk, Bilyarsk and Tyansk). Another Russian scholar, Georgy Peretiatkovich, estimated that by 1655, a total of 1,271 people, including 464 representatives of the Smolensk nobility*, had been sent to the Kama River.
Polish nobles were directed to the areas of the former Kazan Khanate also after the Truce of Andrusovo. According to a census compiled by Tsarist official Matvei Salov, who directed the resettlement in Zakam, land grants on the left bank of the Volga River in the area of the Utka and Mayna rivers were given to Polotsk noblemen: capitan of cavalry Kazimierz Pogodzki and his sons: Maksym and Jan; capitan of cavalry Siemion Buchałowski; Fiodor Michałowicz Pałczewski; Marcin Sieliński; Marvin Andrejewicz Kułąkowski; Andrzej Michajłowicz Zakrzewski; Stefan Zasiecki; Michał Michajłowicz Zasiecki; Adam Mościcki (? – Мостицкий in the original) and others.
15,000 confederates
The 18th century saw another wave of exile associated with the collapse of the Bar Confederation. It is estimated that a total of nearly 15,000 Polish soldiers were taken into Russian captivity, who, under a 1768 decree by Tsarina Catherine II, were sent deep into Russia and directed to the garrisons of the Kazan and Tolboi governorates, as well as conscripted into the Siberian and Orenburg corps. Many of the exiles arrived in Kazan. The local historian Yakov Griszyn points out that the first batch of confederates sent to the Volga River numbered 460, and with the arrival of subsequent batches the number of confederates in the city increased and reached nearly 2,000. On the other hand, Władysław Konopczyński cites after Alexander Kraushar and Thesby de Belcour the number of 5445 confederates led to Kazan**. A classic testimony to the stay of the Bar confederates in Kazan is the adventurous fate of the legendary fugitive, author of the widely read and repeatedly published Memoirs – Maurycy Beniowski (1746–1786). His memoirs, although undoubtedly rich, deviated significantly from the historical truth and were a kind of peculiar self-legend***. Confirmation of Beniowski’s presence in Kazan can be found in another of the Bar Confederates – Karol Lubicz-Chojecki. Taken prisoner near Cracow, he made a prison journey through Kazan to Siberia in 1769, from where he escaped to Poland and wrote down his memoirs. Chojecki pointed out the interesting fact that there were Poles in Kazan who ended up there as partisans of Stanisław Leszczyński.
‘Europe’s exiled culprits’
The Kazan governorate was also home to the captured Kościuszko insurgents. In December, 1795 there were 67 of them, among them 44 representatives of the nobility and 11 Muslims. A Lithuanian court marshal Stanisław Sołtan was also exiled to Kazan. One of the participants in the insurrection was a Kościuszko brigadier taken prisoner near Maciejowice – General Józef Kopeć (1758–1827), who, exiled to Kamchatka, passed through Kazan twice in 1795 and 1799. In Kopeć’s account, one can find confirmation that colonies were established around Kazan by the government from long ago, inhabited by ‘exiled culprits from Europe,’ and settlers were recruited to complete regiments.
Another group of Poles, who probably appeared in Kazan, were participants in Napoleon’s expedition to Moscow. A Russian researcher Sergei Homchenko, in a work devoted to the captives of Napoleon’s army, noted that successive batches of captives of the multinational army were arriving in the areas of the Volga and Pre-Ural, that is, in the Kazan, Saratov, Orenburg, Astrakhan, Nizhnovgorod, Symbir and Penza governorates. A total of 11 908 people, including six generals and 1231 officers, were sent to live in the aforementioned regions between September 1812 and January 1814. Among the officers taken prisoner were: 172 French and 48 Poles, as well as 24 Prussians, 19 Italians, eight Portuguese, and Westphalians, Saxons, Dutch and others; among the rank-and-file soldiers, on the other hand, French (3704 persons) and Poles (1486 persons) dominated, followed by Italians (389 persons)****.
‘Philomath hub’ in Kazan
An important factor influencing the presence of Poles in Kazan was the erasure of the secret conspiracy organisations of the 1820s and 1830s by the tsarist authorities. The pre-November and inter-November conspiracies resulted in the formation of a number of conspiracies in academic youth circles. One of the centers where they were formed was Vilnius. The founding of the Philomath and Philarete Society in 1817 was of particular importance. The exposure of the organisation in 1822 led to the expulsion from the university and exile to various cities in the depths of Russia of many representatives of Vilnius youth. For five of them, the place of destination turned out to be Kazan, where the Philarets were sent: Józef Kowalewski and Teodor Łoziński, as well as philarets Jan Wiernikowski, Feliks Kułakowski and Hilary Łukaszewski. Following Zbigniew Wójcik’s statement, Kazan, next to Moscow, St. Petersburg or Orenburg, was another peculiar ‘philomathic center,’ where a larger group of Vilnius youth was forcibly settled.
A lot of information about the existence in Kazan of the Vilna resettlers is provided by the surviving correspondence with the remaining fellow philomats scattered around Russia. In the letters, we find interesting information about the activities of the five mentioned above. For the most part, they show that the beginnings of their stay away from their hometowns were difficult, and the exile itself had a bad effect on their mental and spiritual condition. Only letters received from friends, which were ‘an invaluable gift to the heart,’ brought joy. In a letter to Tomasz Zan, Kowalewsk felt sorry for himself:
I can confidently tell you that our life here is filled with suffering and boredom. […] In the summer – the unbearable heat, in the winter – the miserable frost, in the spring and autumn – the impassable mud keeps you trapped in the house […]. A few trees in the garden do not lure one to take a stroll. No beauty delights […].
(Correspondence of the Philomaths)
In the following decades, successive generations of conspirators passed through Kazan. Justynian Ruciński (1810–1892), a participant in Szymon Konarski’s conspiracy who had been sentenced to 20 years of hard labour in Nerchinsk, was twice in the Volga region. In 1843, the leaders of the Warsaw conspiracy (the so-called Union of the Polish Nation) were arrested and sent to exile: Gerwazy Gzowski (1812–1888), Adam Gross (1819–1878) and Aleksander Karpiński (1819–1905). The Kazan archives preserved documentation containing an exchange of letters between the Warsaw governor and the Moscow and Kazan governors about the discovery of a secret organisation in Warsaw. The contents of the materials show that the authorities were to send its leaders to Kazan and then to Perm. Walerian Staniszewski (1822–1906) spent six months of the year 1850 in Kazan, having been arrested and sentenced to serve in the Orenburg Corps for his involvement in the so-called ‘Pharmacist’ Conspiracy’ formed at the Pharmaceutical School in Warsaw in 1848. During his stay, Staniszewski had the opportunity to get to know the representatives of the Kazan Polish community. He described, among other things, his impressions of his meeting with the then Polish Catholic chaplain Fr. Ostian Galimski and professors Kleotyld Tchórzewski and Antoni Stanisławski, as well as the well-known Kazan physician Ludwik Gross.
Footnotes:
* According to Roza Bukanowa’s calculations, in 1655, there were 100 Cossacks, 269 riflemen, 300 peasants, 464 representatives of the Smolensk nobility and 29 prisoners of war and others deployed in the towns of the Zakam line;
** AFrench colonel, a participant in the Bar Confederation, Francois Auguste Thesby de Belcour, stayed in Kazan twice in 1770 and 1773. He compiled a register listing 5445 names of confederates exiled to Kazan;
*** An attempt to confront Beniowski’s memoirs with archival sources was undertaken by Janusz Roszko in order to, as he put it, ‘bring the truth out from under the polish of the lies of his memoirs.’;
**** In turn, Zygmunt Librowicz reported the number of 900 Polish Napoleonic soldiers, including many military trumpeters. How many exactly ended up in Kazan and the Kazan governorate is impossible to estimate. The problem of Polish prisoners of war in Russia in 1812 is hardly present in the Polish literature.
Dr Bartłomiej Garczyk – historian in the Department of Eastern Studies at the Faculty of History of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Research interests: history of Russia and the USSR, Poles in Russia.
Translated by Małgorzata Giełzakowska.