Epoka reakcji i "pieriedyszki" : wileńscy generałowie-gubernatorzy wobec problemu polskiej własności ziemskiej w latach 1864-1884

ENIn the course of twenty years spanning from the fall of the January Uprising to the rule of General Eduard Todtleben (1884) the Russification of the Lithuanian gubernias underwent assorted stages and intensification. The current of growing repression and national restrictions, inaugurated in the mid-1860s by Mikhail Muraviov and Konstantin Kaufman, became considerably modified in the 1870s by Alexandr Potapov and Petr Al'bedinski. The reduced rate of the Russianisation process in the gubernias in question initiated an epoch of a pause ("pieriedishka"), which lasted to the early 1880s. The retirement of Al'bedinski denoted a return to reactionary policies. The purpose of the political line devised in St. Petersburg and by the governor general of Wilno, as well as the conducted administrative, economic and systemic changes, was predominantly to undermine the historical continuum of Lithuania and its cultural and political ties with Poland. The Russian authorities maintained that such bonds adversely affected the total incorporation of the Lithuanian gubernias into the Empire. Russian ethnic nationalism roused among the authorities proposed that Lithuania should return to Russian roots. In two decades, growing Russification and de-Polonisation produced tangible effects. Polish landowners were decimated and economically weakened. The progress of Polish culture and schooling encountered grave legal obstacles. The Catholic Church, discriminated by the Russian authorities, lost its position as the mainstay of the Polish population and the rank it had enjoyed in the Kingdom of Poland.