268 REVERIES
It was an odd situation. A handful of clerks, students, and teachers led by one
junior officer were exposed as the ringleaders of a movement which had chal-
lenged the entire Russian Empire. They were presented to the world as a gang
of criminal drop-outs and misguided youth. Those prisoners who showed
repentance and assisted the authorities escaped further trial, and were given
minor punishments by administrative decree. The deserving cases among them
were given financial aid. All but five of the fifteen condemned to death had their
sentences commuted to hard labour or exile. The rest of the two hundred thou-
sand rebels simply melted away.
The final act was performed on 5 August 1864. At 9 a.m., the gates of the
Alexander Citadel opened, and the official hangman walked out at the head of
a procession. A wide common gallows with five nooses waited on the nearby
ramparts. A mounted escort of helmeted gendarmes lined the five horse-drawn
muck-carts which carried the prisoners. Each man was manacled to the arm of
a brown-cowled Capuchin friar. Traugutt, still dressed in the blue trenchcoat in
which he had been arrested, was absorbed in his last confession. The sentence
was read aloud. The prisoners were blindfolded, dressed in the death smock,
and brought to the gallows. A woman's voice called 'Courage, brother!' Then,
one by one, Traugutt, Krajewski, Toczyski, Zulinski, and Jezioranski were
hanged by the neck until they were dead.
As in 1831, Russian retribution was not long delayed. On this occasion, the
Tsarist authorities were determined not merely to eradicate all trace of the late
insurrection but also to suppress all public manifestations of Polish nationality.
At least one guerrilla 'party' was still in the field. Its leader, the Revd Stanislaw
Brzoska (1834-65), had served as the Chaplain-General of the Rising, and had
first joined the movement in 1862 after being imprisoned for preaching patriotic
sermons. Now he was the last surviving Staff Officer. He held his own in the
countryside of Podlasie until December 1864, when he was captured. He was
executed at Sokolow on 23 May 1865. By that time, the main civilian disposi-
tions of the government were painfully clear. In Warsaw, General Berg was in
the process of closing down all the separate institutions of the Congress
Kingdom. In his three years as the last Viceroy of the Kingdom, from 1863 to
1866, he rescinded all Wielopolski's reforms and all concessions made to Polish
language and culture. In 1864, he formed an Administrative Committee whose
first task was to supervise the policy of peasant emancipation, but which soon
took charge of the entire programme of Russification. The Committee's
Director, Nikolai Milyutin, had served as Secretary of State for the Kingdom in
St. Petersburg, and was the author of the plan to use the supposedly loyalist
peasantry against the patriotic nobles and intellectuals. In seven years of cease-
less attention to detail, the Committee transformed the Polish Kingdom into a
Russian province. All branches of the administration were subordinated to the