At only eighteen years of age, while still a student, Kazimierz Zieleniewski was exiled to Siberia during the January Uprising. Though he was supposed to spend the rest of his life there, he refused to be broken. On the contrary: he achieved great financial success, and his house in Tomsk became a focal point of Polish patriotic and cultural life.

The story begins in the first half of the nineteenth century at Tracewicze in Nowogródczyzna, where in 1845 Zieleniewski was born. Not far away, just over the small Serwecz river lies the Tuhanowicze estate—where in the 1820s, Mickiewicz would meet his beloved Maryla Wereszczakówna.  Zieleniewski was sent by his parents, members of the lesser nobility, to study at the renowned ‘Lithuanian’ Institute of Agrotechnics in Hory-Horki (Mohylev region), which was a hotbed of Polish patriotic youth. Not long after however, the uprising of 1863 broke out. Founded in 1840, the institute had become a proverbial ‘breeding ground’ for young Poles with a patriotic leaning. Among its alumni was Józef Kalinowski, Kazimierz’s senior by ten years and one of the leaders of the uprising in Lithuania, deported to Siberia and later saint of the Catholic Church (Saint Raphael Kalinowski, patron of the Siberian deportees).

It quickly become apparent that the 1863 insurrection had garnered only limited local support. Aside from a group of Institute students under the leadership of Ludwik Zwierzdowski “Topór” who captured the town of Hory-Horki, there was a lack of people willing to take up arms.  After a week long march, with the Russians in pursuit, the young insurrectionists surrendered and stood before the court. Kazimierz found himself among those who were sentenced to an indefinite period of settlement in Siberia.

In the summer of 1864, he arrived in Tobolsk, the capital of Western Siberia. By order of the local governor, he was to spend the rest of his life in the village of Karganovka in the Omsk district, which numbered around only 106 inhabitants. Evidently, he was not at all suited to life in such a remote place as a few months later he successfully obtained official permission to relocate — in the first instance to Omsk, and some three years later to Kainsk in the Governorate of Tomsk. Until 1867, he remained under police supervision. In his early days there, he was employed in a distillery. In his tenth year of his exile, he was married to a local midwife, Adela Juszkiewicz, and the couple moved to Tomsk.

The marriage evidently flourished, for 1874 was the year in which they bought a house together and saw the birth of their daughter. However, the longing for his homeland proved to be irresistible. The following year, after the tsar’s declaration of an amnesty, Zieleniewski applied for permission to return to his birth country — a request that was denied. By 1880, he had achieved the status of a merchant of the second guild and the owner of a sizeable property, where he was to open his first business: a yeast factory, which he later converted into a distillery. Two years later, he came into the possession of a brewery, and by 1903 he was owner of a network of several beer halls located throughout the Tomsk district. Not long after, he even purchased a printing house and for a short time published a newspaper titled Siberian Echoes (Syberyjskie echa). His wife, Adela, bore him eleven children, although several were to die prematurely. The Zieleniewski home rapidly evolved into a center of Polish social life. It housed a library, where local Poles would gather following Sunday Mass. They sang patriotic songs, reminisced about the years of insurrection, and occasionally the tsarist police would show up and conduct searches of the house, having been alerted by reports from their neighbors.

One of Kazimierz’s daughters, Małgorzata, was a graduate of the Faculty of Medicine in St. Petersburg, while his son Edward became an officer in the tsarist army, serving in four wars, eventually attaining the rank of colonel. The youngest son however, born in 1888 and bearing the same name as his father, discovered his artistic talent. He studied first in Tomsk, going on to Tashkent. At the age of seventeen, like his father before him, he took up rebellion against the tsarist authorities. Here he had drawn inspiration from his older sister Małgorzata, who brought news of the 1905 Revolution from St. Petersburg. So deeply moved was she by the events that she was soon sentenced to one year of exile. Soon after Kazimierz Junior followed her, having been arrested for the possession of revolutionary literature, for which he served a year in prison in Yekaterinoslav. He was sentenced to a further three years of exile in the Tobolsk Governorate, but in 1908 — most likely thanks to his father’s financial influence — he managed to escape to the West. He was sought by The tsarist authorities a “communist anarchist.”

In a short time, his father paid him a visit in Switzerland. In 1917, following the outbreak of the February Revolution, they both returned to Russia — with his father perhaps hoping to rescue the family business. Unfortunately, on October 17, 1917, Kazimierz Zieleniewski Sr. passed away and was buried in the local Catholic cemetery.

Apart from the aforementioned Kazimierz Jr., a talented painter who, after a good few years of “flirting” with Bolshevism, was forced to flee to the West (he died in 1931 in Italy), the other children of Kazimierz and Adela Zieleniewski also left a lasting mark on future generations.

Edward rose to the rank of colonel in the Tsarist army and was killed in 1919 while fighting alongside the forces of General Kolchak. Their daughter Ernestyna was married to Mieczysław Wierciński, himself the son of a January Uprising exile and a railway engineer. Their son, Edmund Wierciński, came to prominence in the interwar period as a Polish actor and avant-garde theatre director and, after World War II, a teacher and lecturer at the State Higher School of Theatre in Warsaw (PWST). Kazimierz’s other daughter, Halina (married name Brodzikowska), studied at conservatories in Moscow and Geneva. Following the Treaty of Riga, she came to Poland and, together with her nephew Edmund, performed at Juliusz Osterwa’s famous Reduta Theatre. Zofia Zieleniewska, meanwhile, was married to Jan Popławski, a railway engineer. In 1940, the two were to be deported by the Soviets from their family estate in Janopol, in the Vitebsk region. However, at the moment of deportation, Zofia died suddenly of a heart attack. The rest of her family was deported nevertheless, settling after the war in New Zealand.

We also invite you to listen to the radio feature Syberian Fate, touching on the dramatic story of the Zieleniewski family, prepared by Aleksandra Sadokierska from the Feature and Documentary Studio of Polish Radio Białystok: https://swiatsybiru.pl/pl/syberyjskie-fatum-reportaz/