68 ROSSIYAinvariably miss the point. The Poles under Russian rule learned the hard way.
Whenever the Tsar was obliged to make constitutional concessions - as in 1815,
1861, and 1906 - the Poles were led to expect a genuine improvement in their
condition. Instead, they found that the Tsarist bureaucracy, disturbed by the
resultant restrictions on its freedom of action, would treat the concessions as a
temporary withdrawal, and would then work assiduously to reassert its posi-
tion, if necessary by ignoring the constitutional reforms, and to reimpose tradi-
tional methods of control. In the nineteenth, as in the eighteenth century,
Reform was the harbinger not of calm, but of conflict; and for the Poles, of
defeat. It was a situation, in which the constitutionalist or the democrat could
never win. Either he submitted voluntarily, and surrendered his ideals from
the start; or else he rebelled, and after a brief moment of liberty, was forced to
submit involuntarily.
The point was well known in Russia, of course, and was expounded for the
benefit of the Poles by those few Russian dissidents with Polish sympathies. One
such 'westerner', eventually declared insane by the authorities, was the writer
Pyotr Chaadayev, who came to Poland as a young officer in the Napoleonic
wars, and actually joined a Polish Masonic Lodge in Cracow. 'Speaking about
Russia,' wrote Chaadayev, 'it is always imagined that one is just speaking about
a particular form of government... This is not so. Russia is whole worlds
apart—submissive to the will, the arbitrariness, the despotism of one man.
Contrary to the laws of co-existence, Russia only moves in the direction of her
own enslavement, and the enslavement of all neighbouring peoples.'^5
The clearest example of the spiritual gulf separating the leaders of educated
opinion on Poland from their Russian counterparts is to be found in the Polish
connections of Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. Despite his Polish surname,
Dostoevsky's upbringing in Moscow and his outlook were entirely Russian.
Some critics have suggested that secret doubts about his Russian-ness may well
have prompted the extreme, chauvinist attitudes which he cultivated. At all
events, he felt compelled to combine an unstinting defence of everything
Russian with a pathological hatred of everything Polish. Throughout the nov-
els, his Polyachishki or 'Polish scoundrels' form a fantastic rogues' gallery of
cheats, whores, liars, impostors, and monsters. The episode in The Brothers
Karamazov where two silly Polish noblemen reluctantly drink a toast to 'Russia
within the frontiers of 1772' and are then shown to be card-sharpers, is typical
of many others. For the historian, however, it is interesting to learn that
Dostoevsky's indisputable bias, unlike that of his readers, was not based on sim-
ple ignorance. Dostoevsky had a fluent command of Polish, and a detailed
knowledge of Polish literature, especially of Mickiewicz. What is more, he spent
several years under arrest in Siberia in the company of Polish prisoners, with
whom he engaged in prolonged and heated conversations, and from whom, at a
later date, he drew a number of his most vivid portraits. One of his fellow pris-
oners, Stanislaw Tokarzewski (1821-91), recorded their encounters in some
detail, and, it is a memorable picture which he paints. Dostoevsky, the Russian