An Age of Reform 363
KCN would pay for. Although Land and Liberty did not provoke the Poles into
premature action, as one Polish historian later asserted, misunderstandings were
bound to arise: the two parties were unequally matched and there was a latent
dichotomy between military and civilians; in the background loomed the vexing
problem of the destiny of the ethnically mixed borderlands.
In the event the officers were able to give more help to their civilian friends
than vice versa, since they arranged to eva.;:uate a clandestine printing-press
which was threatened with exposure from St. Petersburg to an estate in Vitebsk
province.^61 When insurrection broke out in Warsaw on 22 January 1863 and
the KCN transformed itself into a provisional national government, Land and
Liberty could do little more than issue a leaflet which bore the sensational title
'Polish Blood is Flowing, Russian Blood is Flowing'; a student at the General
Staff Academy obtained a military map which was passed to the insurgents,
and some officers (notably Dabrowski) were assisted in escaping from captivity.
Between 40 and 50 volunteer's were despatched from the interior provinces to
join the insurgents, but this was done by Poles in the capital rather than by
Land and Liberty.^62 Sleptsov toured the Volga region in the hope of stirring up
a peasant revolt, but achieved nothing. In Kazan· two Polish officers
distributed a bogus Imperial manifesto 'abolishing' military service and
instructing peasant soldiers to leave their units; but the instigators of this
affair, which has received far more attention than it warrants, were soon
arrested after being betrayed by a student.^63
In Poland itself and the western provinces several hundred officers and
soldiers deserted, as they had done in 1831, and some subalterns brought their
entire detachments over to the insurgents; but the rebellion was doomed to
failure from the start and the government forces never lost the initiative.
Although local resistance by small bands of partisans continued into 1864, the
authorities were able to bring in reinforcements (there were over 360,000
soldiers in Poland by the end of 1863) and to mount the campaign of repres-
sion indelibly linked with the names of Generals F. F. Berg and M. N.
Murav'yev. Sierakowski and Padlewski were among those taken captive and
executed. According to official figures, in 1863-5 67 officers and 422 men were
charged with anti-state offences; 30 officers and 161 men were executed, and
107 officers and 1,918 men were exiled to Siberia (for crimes of all categories).^64
Military courts heard 26,200 cases in 1864, almost double as many as in 1862.
The opposition movement in the armed forces between 1856 and 1864 was
broader in extent and more determined than that of Alexander I's last decade,
61 It was run by I. G. Zhukov, an ex-captain discharged for spreading revolutionary propa-
ganda among the troops: Venturi, Roots of Revolution, p. 274; D'yakov, op. cit., p. 318; Smir-
nov, Revol. svyazi narodov, p. 218.
62 Leykina-Svirskaya and Shidlovskaya, 'Pol' ska ya revol. organizatsiya', pp. 45-7.
63 Venturi, Roots of Revolution, pp. 303-15; B. P. Koz'min, Kazanskiy zagovor, Moscow,
1929; Leykina-Svirskaya, in RSR i (1960), 423-49.
64 Bogdanovich, /st. ocherk, iv. 518. app. 57, 75, 77-8; Milyutin, in his annual report, gave dif-
ferent figures: VOVM 1864, app. vi, pp. 7, 12; 3,193 civilians were sent to the army as a penalty:
Bogdanovich, iii. app. 47. ·