THE THAW AND THE JANUARY RISING 269relevant ministries in St. Petersburg, and were staffed by Russians. In 1864, both
the Kingdom and the name of Poland were formally abolished. The Tsar relin-
quished his duties as King of Poland, and Warsaw became the capital of the
Privislinskiy kray (Vistulaland). In 1866, the 10 Polish gubernias were divided
into 85 powiats or 'districts'; and most of the district towns lost their separate
municipal rights. In 1867, the Polish Education Commission was closed down
for the second time. In 1869, the Main School was replaced by a new Russian
University. By 1871, when the Administrative Committee concluded its busi-
ness, the only item which distinguished the conduct of affairs in Vistulaland
from that pertaining in other parts of the Russian Empire was the continuing use
of the Napoleonic Code in the civil courts.
In Lithuania, where there were no official Polish institutions to be disbanded,
repression of the Polish element took cruder forms. In the summer of 1863,
General Muravyev, the 'Hangman', returned to his stamping-grounds of thirty
years before, and as Governor-General of Vilna harried the Poles with merciless
determination. In the preceding period, as Minister for State Lands in St.
Petersburg, he had opposed the policy of Emancipation, and had suffered polit-
ically as a result. He now vented his spleen on the participants, real or imagined,
of the January Rising. Not content with the prosecution of offenders by legal
means, he launched a reign of terror, where people were killed, tortured, and
exiled, villages were razed, and estates confiscated, with no thought of, or
recourse to, the law.^12
In both Poland and Lithuania, the repression of the January Rising left per-
manent scars. A whole generation of Poles were deprived of their careers, and
of their normal expectations of advancement. Thousands of Poles took once
more to the cruel road to Siberia, packed into cattle trucks or shackled together
in long lines, slowly trudging across the tundra to camps and prisons in the most
distant fastnesses of the Empire. These were the cream of the Polish nation — the
most active, the most courageous, the most idealistic men and women in soci-
ety. Most of them never returned. This time there was no general amnesty, not
even after twenty-five years. At the end of the century, when the revolutionar-
ies, socialists, and convicts of the next generation were sent to Siberia, in much
better conditions and in lesser numbers, they found that their places of exile
were still inhabited by deported Polish families. Lenin himself, who spent three
years in southern Siberia in 1897-1900, recalled the warm welcome which he
found in the house of a former Polish partisan. But in due course, Lenin was
released; the Poles of 1864—5, were not.^13
The dissolution of the Congress Kingdom prompts an interesting comparative
question of Russian policy. The Congress Kingdom had not been unique within
the realms of the Tsar in its enjoyment of self-government, but had shared the
privilege with the Grand Duchy of Finland. Annexed in 1809 from Sweden,