THE RUSSIAN PARTITION 75humiliations the Tsar had discovered was to make the Polish children say their Catholic
prayers every day in Russian...
- Name the Tsars who have reigned over our Holy Russia since Catherine II.
- Catherine II, Paul I, Alexander I, Nicholas I, Alexander II. The inspector was
satisfied. This child had a good memory... - Tell me the names and titles of the members of the Imperial Family.
- Her Majesty the Empress, His Imperial Highness the Tsarevitch Alexander, His
Imperial Highness the Grand Duke ... At the end of the enumeration, which was long,
Hornberg smiled faintly... - What is the title of the Tsar in the scale of dignities?
- Vyelichestvo (Majesty).
- And what is my title?
-Vysokorodye (High-born).
The inspector took pleasure in these hierarchic details, more important to his way of
thinking than arithmetic or spelling. For his own simple pleasure he asked us again: - Who rules over us?
To conceal the fire of their eyes, the directress and the superintendent
stared hard at the registers they held before them. As the answer did
not come quickly enough, Hornberg, annoyed, asked again in louder
tones: - Who rules over us?
- His Majesty Alexander II, Tsar of All the Russias, Manya articulated painfully. Her
face had gone white.
The session was over. The functionary rose from his chair, and, after a brief nod,
moved to the next room, followed by Melle Sikorska.
Then the teacher raised her head. - Come here, my little soul.
Manya left her place and came up to the schoolmistress, who, without saying a word,
kissed her on the forehead. And suddenly, in the classroom that was coming to life again,
the Polish child, her nerves at an end, burst into tears.^9
On the Russian side, anyone who dared to show sympathy for the Polish lan-
guage or for Polish customs was asking for trouble. A certain Col. Krupsky, for
instance, who had served as the commandant of a small Polish town after the
suppression of the January Rising, was cashiered by the Army for exactly that
reason. The charges against him mentioned that he had spoken in Polish in pub-
lic, and that he had danced the Polonaise. The long struggle to clear his good
name embittered the life of his entire family, and helped to turn his daughter,
Nadzezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's consort, into a convinced revolutionary. In this
way, the policy of Russification in Poland can be seen to have heightened the
resolve of the Tsar's most doughty enemies. Relaxations introduced after 1905
had little time to repair the damage of previous decades.
None the less, it is undeniable that Russification did affect the scene in many
important respects. To all outward appearances, Warsaw in the late nineteenth
century became a cosmopolitan metropolis, whose local Polish colouring might
modify but could not efface all those features common to cities throughout the
Tsarist Empire: