Eugeniusz Niebelski
His name was Wiktor Mikulicz, in old age he looked like a typical Siberian exile – with an ample, black-gray beard and the face of a local. Years ago, during my stay in Irkutsk, his photograph was shown to me by a friendly Siberian exile of Buryat origin, who was an employee of the Regional Museum –she had known which materials I was looking for. There, on the back of the photo, written in Russian was the note: a member of the Polish 1863 Uprising and Baikal Insurrection. It came as a total surprise to me at that moment.
The photograph was – as I subsequently discovered – a black-and-white print of the original, which was most likely in sepia (like all photographs of that era), placed on the official cardboard backing of a photographic studio in Nerchinsk, outside Lake Baikal. The imprint under the photo stated that the original had been taken by master photographer A. Kuzniecow in Nerchinsk in the 1890s; whereas handwritten notes on the other side revealed that the copy had been produced in Leningrad in 1974. What was written on the photograph, what I found out for myself, along with what was extracted from the old parish books (civil registry) by the excellent “researcher” and genealogy expert, Professor Cezary Domański from UMCS Lublin, came together to form the following story:
Wiktor Jan Mikulicz hailed from the Polish Kingdom; he was born on December the 19th, 1842, in Branszczyk, as the illegitimate son to Kazimierz Mikulicz, the mayor of Brok, a town in Masovia, a retired second lieutenant of the Russian army, and Katarzyna Olbryszewska. The couple lived in an informal relationship, but in 1845, after Kazimierz’s had fallen ill, they were married in Tarnogóra in the Lublin Voivodeship; on this occasion the father officially acknowledged his three, including Wiktor. At that time Kazimierz Mikulicz served as the mayor of Tarnogóra.
Before the 1863 outbreak, Wiktor worked as a clerk in the office of the district governor of Radom county. During the Uprising he served as a lieutenant, later attempting to defect abroad with the use of a false passport. Captured, he was sentenced by the commander of the Siedlce Military Division to 8 years of hard labour in Siberian fortresses. On November the 26th, 1864, he set off from Warsaw, on January the 20th, 1865 he was sent from Tobolsk to Tomsk, and on February the 21st – from Tomsk further into Eastern Siberia. On April the 12th, he reached Irkutsk, where he was sent to Listvyanka on the western shore of Lake Baikal, where he was most likely assigned to roadwork beyond the lake, near to Posolsk. In June 1866, he found himself on roadwork duty again (between Kultuk and Posolsk) in a labour camp placed on the 4th versta from the postal station in Murino, among 103 other prisoners, in the so called ‘noble party’. Among them were Ksawery Wojno (later established to have returned to the country and died in Warsaw in the interwar period), as well as Gustaw Szaramowicz and Leopold Iljaszewicz (Elijaszewicz). In that same month, the prisoners (723 in total) provoked an armed uprising on the shores of Lake Baikal, led by the above-mentioned Szaramowicz. The rebellion was unfortunately totally crushed, and ended with the sentencing of its four leaders to execution by firing squad in Irkutsk in November of that year. No reliable data exists on whether Mikulicz took part in the armed resistance; such data was not collected by investigative authorities either. From the context of the whole event, it can be presumed that Mikulicz did not actively fight in the uprising, as he did not attempt to escape to China with fellow “rebels” and was more likely a witness to the events, perhaps also a sympathiser of the movement. However, the field military court in Irkutsk sentenced him along with a group of 260 other exiles, labelled as “highly suspicious”, to an additional year of hard labour, being shackled and classed as “experienced” exiles, meaning they were subjected to special surveillance and punishments.
On November the 16th, 1866, the day after the execution of the leaders of the “rebellion”, Mikulicz was sent from Irkutsk to a nearby distillery in Aleksandrovsk. On January the 20th of the following year, he was moved to Usolye on the Angara River, to a saltworks, where a few hundred Polish exiles were being held, such as Józef Kalinowski, a former officer of the Russian army and later member of the Lithuanian uprising, and subsequently – a Discalced Carmelite, Father Rafał, now a Catholic saint. In July of 1869, Mikulicz was released from hard labour and settled in the Badaysky municipality in the Irkutsk governorate. In 1877, he was granted permission by the Tsar to return European Russia, an opportunity he likely did not take advantage of. It is known that he ended up somewhere beyond Lake Baikal, where he was able to establish a prosperous life for himself.
At the start, he lived in Nerchinsk, then in Stretensk. He entered into commerce and started his own family. A small Siberian encyclopaedia of trade history from 1898 mentions a merchant by the name of Wiktor Kazimirowicz (hence the son of Kazimierz) Mikulicz in Nerchinsk.
One of Mikulicz’s companions from the group of 260 sentenced to an additional year of hard labour, upon returning to the country in 1903, already wealthy and with a large Siberian family, (having worked in government offices around the Baikal area and also as a tsarist policeman) wrote of Mikulicz in his memoirs:
“On the way back from Siberia in 1903, I stopped off to rest at a hotel in Stretensk on the Amur River. That hotel was run by an old acquaintance of mine, Mikulicz, a man already showing his age, but who was surrounded by a rather big family. His son, having graduated from middle school in Chita, now served up the butterbrots and shots at the hotel buffet, in general managing the whole hotel. Mikulicz, aside from this well-functioning and thriving venture, had 40 thousand roubles saved up in the bank. When asked why he was not keen on returning to the country, he replied: “And what did I have there? At least here I can live comfortably and peacefully”.
From various fragments of imprecise data, one might deduce that with time a Mikulicz descendant wandered onwards as far as Leningrad, from where was sent to the museum in Irkutsk the photographic print of his grandfather, with the laconic caption describing its subject. It’s entirely possible that the Mikulicz family still lives in Russia.
This would not be an exceptional or surprising story – A January uprising exile who consciously chose to stay in Russia, having found a better life than in his home country. In 2021, a university lecturer from Strasburg contacted me seeking information about his great-grandfather, Józef Klimkiewicz, a January Uprising participant and later Siberian exile. It turned out to be Klimkiewicz, who hailed from the Świętokrzyskie region, January Uprising member who had been the Bernardine monk, Father Roch. On exile in Tunka (where the authorities gathered a total of 156 clerical deportees) Roch Klimkiewicz was a controversial figure in deportee circles, as during a previous hard-labour deportation at Akatuy on the other side of Baikal, he had publicly renounced his faith and the Church, later working in Russia as a feldsher (medical assistant) where he started a family, and was still living at the beginning of the 20th century.
Eugeniusz Niebelski is a professor at The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin
Translated by Hanna Nawrocka