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Russian imperialism, which had always differed in the European provinces, took a new turn in the later nineteenth century, following the Polish insurrection of 1863. Trouble there had been expected for some time before it actually erupted, prompting the government to announce reforms that would have given the population more self-government. Most Poles seem to have been content with this, but extremists - hitherto a comparatively rare breed — were determined to scupper any reconciliation. They organized demonstrations to mark past rebellions, the death of an archbishop, and anniversaries of significant events in Polish history and of martyred Polish revolutionaries. The temperature rose. When the authorities reacted it rose even higher. The Tsar’s brother Constantine, who served as his viceroy in Warsaw, was still inclined to conciliation, but an alliance was emerging between the radical nationalists and the Catholic Church that made a negotiated settlement virtually impossible. Attempts on the lives of the viceroy and his chief adviser, Marquis Bielopolski, were answered with executions. The moderates on both sides had lost out. Conscription was ordered to take young men, regarded as the most susceptible recruits to the nationalist cause, out of circulation, and this sparked an armed insurrection.

It turned out to be a messy business. The revolutionaries were disunited and poorly organized; the suppression was often severe. The attempted revolution degenerated into a sporadic guerrilla war. Most Polish nobles, though sympathetic to the rebels, stayed aloof from the action. Both sides used terror tactics, and the Polish peasants sometimes reacted violently against both sides. Britain, France and Austria demanded that Russia make concessions to the Poles, but the chance of that disappeared with the departure of Grand Duke Constantine. Eighteen months passed before order was fully restored. ¹² St Petersburg then changed its strategy in Poland. It had switched its favour from the Polish nobility to the Polish peasants by going ahead with a land reform even before the rebellion had been fully suppressed. In this way the elite were punished for their lack of loyalty and the peasants were rewarded for their ‘good sense’ in resisting the lures of the rebels and ‘standing fast under all manner of threats and violence’. ¹³ It also began a policy of Russification in its Polish provinces. Russian, not Polish, was to be the language of the courts and the chief language of instruction in schools. Since the vast majority of Polish peasants were illiterate, a race ensued for their hearts and minds between the state-controlled schools, which encouraged loyalty to the Empire, and the informal Church schools, where increasingly nationalist priests taught Polish and preached the idea of Polish independence.

Victory eventually went to the priests and the Church schools, but it was a close-run contest and the outcome was in doubt until the turn of the century. Russia had been slow to appreciate the possibilities of education as a force capable of winning the young and thereby promoting imperial integration. ¹⁴ Partly because of this, but partly also because Russia lacked the resources to implement it sooner, Russification eventually turned out to be counter-productive. On the other hand, in Poland as elsewhere, the disunity of the opposition allowed the occupying power to ‘divide and rule’ in the great imperial tradition.

St Petersburg soon had to cope with a rising tide of nationalism in its other provinces too. In Estonia and in the Latvian-speaking hinterland of Riga, where in the late eighteenth century modern nationalism had been ‘discovered’ by Gottfried von Herder, the German elite had been co-opted by the government and it took some time before the peasants were to become aware of their distinct linguistic and cultural identity. It took even longer for them to realize that it might entitle them to claim political rights and even autonomy In rural Lithuania, where the elite were Polish and the city population largely Jewish, the case was somewhat different. So it was in Finland, where nationalism took root in reaction against the dominant Swedes, not the Russians. A semi-autonomous grand duchy, Finland had its own parliament, which in 1863 decided that Finnish should be used as the language of public business within twenty years. The growth of elementary education in the 1870s ensured the triumph of the Finnish language and, eventually, of Finnish nationalism, but for the moment the Finns were loyal, and, to signal his appreciation, in 1863 the Tsar personally opened the Diet at Helsingfors (Helsinki).