The Tsar in Tears

Letters

Vol. 35 No. 6 · 21 March 2013

From Krystyna Weinstein

Greg Afinogenov makes several references to Tsar Alexander’s actions in relation to ‘Poland’ (LRB, 7 February). This use of the word is somewhat misleading, although the tsar himself used it. Afinogenov mentions that Alexander ‘gave constitutions to Finland, Poland and France’. I don’t know about Finland or France, but Poland didn’t exist as a country when Alexander was tsar. By 1797, Prussia, Russia and Austria had dismembered Poland and signed a protocol to excise its name from all future documents. What Alexander did agree to at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the granting of a constitution to what became known as the Congress Kingdom, a rump of what had been Poland. This rump was the one portion of land that Prussia had annexed and that Napoleon, after defeating Prussia at Jena, named the Duchy of Warsaw. To this duchy were added some other small portions of Polish lands removed at the time of the Partitions. This was not ‘Poland’. The constitution named the tsar ‘king of Poland’, and this tiny liberal Congress Kingdom did indeed have a sejm (a parliament) and a senate and did run some of its own affairs, with Alexander’s brother Constantine as commander in chief. But this honeymoon didn’t last, and by 1820 the sejm and senate had been dissolved. In 1831, under the new tsar, Nicholas I, the Poles began an insurrection and with a new government in place announced they were seceding from Russia.

Krystyna Weinstein
Lewes, East Sussex