The Caucasus’s presence in the Polish ethnopolitical myth shapes the entrenchment of treating the region through a prism of Poles’ martyrology, along with its deformation. In the second aspect, four processes are externalized: 1) overestimating the number of Polish exiles in the region, 2) postponing the initiation of deportations to a period earlier than the available source materials allow, 3) extending the period during which Poles were exiled to the Caucasus, and 4) overestimating the number of Poles who perished in the Caucasus.
As for the first point, one group of scholars in Poland popularizes the thesis that about one million Poles were exiled to the Caucasus. This figure was most likely first employed by Andrzej Chodubski (Chodubski 1984: 4; idem 1995: 69; idem 2000: 227; idem 2000c: 46; idem 2003: 89; idem 2006a: 107; idem 2015: 87). Arguably, it was his view that fostered the appearance of this number in the works of subsequent historians (Kiełbasiński 2001: 141; Piwnicki 2001: 11, 203, 233, 236; idem 2011: 252). Regarding specific areas of the Caucasus, Chodubski, for example, advocated the view that some 350,000 Poles were exiled to Azerbaijan in the 19th century (Chodubski 2005a: 37; idem 2005b: 194; idem 2015: 87), with Baku hosting about 10,000 Polish exiles (Chodubski 1993a: 3). The thesis of high percentages of political exiles to this part of the Caucasus was also advocated by Piwnicki. According to this researcher, they accounted for 80% of the several to dozens (depending on the period) of thousands of Poles who ended up in Azerbaijan in the 19th century (Piwnicki 2001: 236; idem 2003: 221; idem 2011: 265). Other researchers also believe that the largest Polish group in the Caucasus were exiles (Filina/Ossowska 2007: 5).
Roughly this same body of scholars promoting the one-million figure of Poles exiled to the Caucasus in the 19th century advocates that the first deportations to the region began as early as the 18th century. For example, Chodubski in his works furthered the view that these took place after the fall of the Kościuszko Uprising in 1794 (Chodubski 1993a: 3; idem 2003: 87; idem 2010: 205). Similar positions are reproduced in the works of other Polish researchers (Chudzińska-Parkosadze 2016: 60; Piwnicki 2000: 237; idem 2002: 89; idem 2012: 75; Zwierz 1996: 135). Sometimes the start of deportations is pushed back even to the early 1770s, thus implying it as the punishment meted out to the Bar Confederation participants (Piwnicki 2001: 183; idem 2002a: 133; idem 2011a: 117), or in the deportation of Poles to the Caucasus after the First Partition of the Commonwealth in 1772 (Kiełbasiński 2001: 140; Ordzowiały-Grzegorczyk 2016: 165; Porada 2015: 268; Siciński 2005: 256). The prevalence of such views in scholarly works has led to their surfacing in journalistic publications as well (Geremek 2008: 80; Jastrzębski 2014: 216; Meller 2018).
As for the third issue, i.e. extending deportation of Poles to the Caucasus in time, here, foremost, Chodubski popularized the position that this took place even after the January Uprising (Chodubski 1993a: 3). In one article, he even cited a figure of 20,000 Poles supposedly exiled to the Caucasus after the tsarist authorities had suppressed the national revolt (Chodubski 2012a: 175). Regarding Azerbaijan, the researcher believed “the largest number of Poles in history” ended up there after the January Uprising. The scale of this phenomenon was said to have been so large that, as Chodubski claimed, they made up 30% of soldiers in the region’s tsarist garrisons (Chodubski 1983: 39). Here, too, it can be assumed that this researcher’s authority led other academics to write about Poles – that is, January Uprising participants – exiled to the Caucasus (Chudzińska-Parkosadze 2016: 60; Olszewski 2018: 212, Piwnicki 2001: 183). This narrative has also made its way into journalistic writing and has found its way into the works of the most widely read Polish authors dealing with Caucasus issues (Górecki/Grochmalski 2000: 198; Jastrzębski 2014: 75; Meller 2018; Sawicki 2015: 58).
The problem with the propositions of researchers advocating that one million Poles were exiled to the Caucasus, and that the deportations began in the late 18th century, is that they are not supported by any documentation or source material. In their absence, it is impossible to verify the method these researchers used in their calculations and on which basis they formed their opinions. To contrast, in the light of the calculations based on many years of archival searches carried out by Wiesław Caban, the million figure, regardless whether we relate it only to exiles or the total of recruits serving in the tsarist army in the Caucasus, is a number overstated several-fold. Indeed, several thousand Poles were exiled to the region, but it is impossible to determine how many precisely. This number included several hundred people sentenced for political reasons to forced service in the tsarist army stationed in the Caucasus, as well as several thousand national uprising participants, sent to the region also as a means of repression. A completely different issue is the sending of recruits of Polish descent to the Caucasus, who completed basic military service there. Such individuals numbered in the tens of thousands.
One of the reasons why it is difficult to calculate exactly how many Poles were in the Caucasus is that in 19th-century Russia, no statistics were kept regarding nationality, only religious affiliation. As a result, the literature must lean on the number of Catholics when determining the number of Poles in the tsarist army. The inadequacy of this system, introduced due to a lack of alternatives, is evidenced, for example, by one fragment from the memoirs of Gralewski, stating that “thousands of people from the Kingdom [i.e., the Kingdom of Poland1 – P.A.], not counting from the taken land,2 who were Uniates recorded as Orthodox” (Gralewski 2015: 559). This state of affairs related to the policy of Russification and the effort to weaken the Catholic Church within the empire. It is nonetheless impossible to calculate how large a group of Uniates considering themselves Polish was affected. In his work, Gralewski stated that they numbered several thousand, but there is no way to verify this figure. It is likely that Gralewski is reliable in giving this several-thousand figure. It should also be borne in mind that in addition to Poles, Catholics in the Russian Empire could include, for example, Lithuanians, Belarusians, Latvians, Estonians, or Armenians. It is also important to note that due to the occurrence of identical surnames among, for example, Poles and Belarusians, there exist no research methods for determining whether a given person living in the 19th century felt Polish or Belarusian.
The first accurate data on the number of Poles residing in the Caucasus is provided in the Russian Empire census conducted in 1897.3 Per its results, 1,439 lived in Baku Governorate, 1630 in Dagestan Oblast, 616 in Elizavetpol Governorate, 3,243 in Kars Oblast (though from a methodological standpoint one could question the inclusion of this governorate in the Caucasus), in Kuban Oblast 2,719, in Kutais Governorate 1,938, in Stavropol Governorate 961, in Terek Oblast 4,173, in Tiflis Governorate 6,282, in the Black Sea Governorate 731, and in Erivan Governorate 1,385 (Pervaya vseobščaya perepisʾ 1897). Thus, at the end of the 19th century, 25,117 Poles resided within the broadly-defined Caucasus.
It is difficult to determine when the tsarist authorities began using the punishment of deportation to the Caucasus against Poles. There are no known documents on the basis of which it would be possible to ground the view that this procedure began as early as the end of the 18th century. Of course, the case is different with Polish volunteers serving in the army of the Russian Empire in the Caucasus during this period. Probably the most famous among them was Bartłomiej Giżycki, a Polish nobleman who was awarded the War Order of Virtuti Militari at the rank of rotamaster for participating in the Battle of Zieleńce that took place during the Polish-Russian War of 1792. Several years later, he joined the Russian ranks. In 1797, he was promoted to colonel and appointed commander of the Bour (Pavlograd) Hussar Regiment stationed in Georgia, in 1798 became a major general, and ended his career as governor of Volhynia (Čulkov 1916: 175–176).
It is likely that supporters of shifting Poles’ exile to the Caucasus to the end of the 18th century rely on only two facts – the partition of the Commonwealth took place at that time, as a result of which its eastern lands became part of the Russian Empire, and that Russian troops were concurrently present in the Caucasus. However, the first known testimonies of Polish exiles from the region are related to Poles’ participation in Napoleon’s expedition to Moscow, the captives from which the Russian authorities exiled precisely to the Caucasus. Ludwik Widerszal noted that in 1812 likely about 10,000 Polish POWs were sent to the region, but almost all returned home in 1815 (Widerszal 2011: 30). In some articles by Russian researchers, a figure of 2,000 also appears (Savelʾev 2013), with others oscillate around a figure of 12,000 Poles, said to have been relieved from stationing in the Caucasus after Alexander I’s victory over Napoleon (Sudavcov 2015: 125). Interesting in this regard is information cited by turn-of-the-century Russian scholar and editor of the newspaper Severnyj Kavkaz, Grigory Prozritelev. In one work he wrote that in 1912, in a village located about 80 kilometres west of Stavropol within Stavropol Governorate, Polish inscriptions were discovered on some rocks. One of them read: “For the Fatherland a pleasant death, wounds and chains. Poles. Year 1813”. Inscribed next to it were 16 Polish surnames (Prozritelev 1914: 11–14).
A portion of exiled Poles from the war against Napoleon participated in the final phase of the Russo-Persian War (1804–1813), as mentioned, for example, by Michał Janik in reference to Polish diaries. Others, in contrast, ended up in auxiliary units engaged in farm labour (Janik 1928: 94–95). Information about Polish participants of the Napoleonic campaign exiled to the Caucasus can be found, among others, in the memoirs of Stanisław Nowacki, a captured non-commissioned officer of the Legion of the Vistula, published in Poznań in 1833 under the title Podróże do Georgii w czasie moiey niewoli w Rossyi odbyte w roku, 1813–1815. On the basis of undertaken archival queries, examples of exiled Poles’ stay in the Caucasus during this period were also cited by Russian researcher Irina Tsifanova. She described the story of one Pole who, in 1812, while serving punitively in the Russian army, deserted from Georgiyevsk and was captured by independent mountaineers. In 1826, they exchanged him for a “jailed Asiatic” held by the Russians. The latter, however, on the grounds that the Pole had not taken an oath of servitude and faithful service to the tsar, sent him back to his homeland. To contrast, another Pole, a former Napoleonic soldier, remained in Dagestan despite the possibility of returning to Poland as he lacked the strength for such a long-distance journey. He then worked for a local businessman, was taken into slavery by mountaineers, and after several years, ransomed back to the Russians (Cifanova 2005: 86).
Other groups of Poles were sent to the Caucasus as a repressive measure for their participation in various organizations (such as the Filarets4 or the Fatherland [Sarmatian Tribe] Friends), posing, in the opinion of the tsarist administration, a threat to the political order in force at the time. Knowledge of this can be obtained by analysing, for example, the diaries of soldiers serving in the Caucasus. Gralewski mentioned the exiled Filarets in his work (Gralewski 2015: 95, 534). In turn, the case of Adam Trzaskowski, exiled to Georgia for being a member of the Fatherland (Sarmatian Tribe) Friends organization, was described by Bohdan Baranowski (Baranowski 1982: 281). In the first 30 years of the 19th century, however, deportation to the Caucasus was not frequently enforced and can be considered a marginal phenomenon. One Russian officer serving in the Caucasus noted in his memoirs that in the 1820s Poles served in the region in small numbers, being mainly officers (Andreev 1876: 21). It may be assumed, then, that the vast majority of Poles in the tsarist army in the Caucasus at the time were those who had entered its ranks voluntarily.
Forced conscription into the tsar’s army in the Caucasus for political convictions, on the other hand, gained prominence after 1831. This was related both to the policy of the Russification and repression of Poles, which became apparent especially in the 1830s and 1840s, as well as to the military operations carried out by tsarist forces in the Caucasus. Caban noted that the most important source for calculating how many Poles were sentenced to forced conscription is the files of the Permanent Commission of Inquiry kept at the Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw. This Commission passed sentences on some 3,700 people. The researcher calculated that between 1833 and 1856, 435 people were forcibly conscripted into the army for patriotic activities (Caban 2001: 95–96). It should be noted that this figure does not apply only to those sentenced to deportation to the Caucasus, but to all regions of the Russian Empire in general.
The largest exile group was conscripted into the Caucasus Corps immediately after the November Uprising. It consisted of insurrectionists taken prisoner in 1831. Of the 9,346 total captured in the fighting, a mere 1,865 were sent to the Caucasus Corps, with their first batch arriving at the dislocation site on 23 October (Old Style) (Caban 2001a: 727). Caban still stressed that these only represent estimates based on allocation, while how many actually reached the Caucasus cannot be determined (Caban 2001: 91). In 1832 this was a group of conscripts – about 8,900 people. The researcher referred to this conscription as “repressive” given it also covered uprising participants. There are thus methodological reasons to include this group in the “exile” category: in light of the law on the books at that time, a crime (participation in the uprising) had been committed, for which a punishment was subsequently imposed (service in the army stationed in the Caucasus). In turn, about 2.6 thousand people were sent to the Caucasus under the draft in 1834 (1833 saw no draft in the Kingdom of Poland), a particularly high ratio as it accounted for 72% of all recruits from the Kingdom called up to the Russian army (Caban 2001: 114–115).
Caban underscored the difficulty of determining the exact number of Poles serving in the Caucasus as a result of conscription, starting from 1835 and ending in 1855. He meanwhile questioned the findings of Ludwik Widerszal, who calculated the number of recruits regarding this period as follows: based on documents from the War Office of the Governor of the Kingdom of Poland concerning the years 1844–1848, he estimated that on average 700 people were sent to the Caucasus each year. He then related this data to the years 1835–1863 and got a result of about 20,000 Poles. Caban noted that Widerszal did not take into account the fact that the final conscription in the Kingdom of Poland took place in 1855, and either way, in his view, these five years could not be extrapolated to the entire period calculated. He therefore proposed a different methodology. Relying on official information from the Ministry of War for the years 1849–1853, he concluded that 1,200 soldiers from the Kingdom of Poland were sent to the Caucasus every year. In 1854, thus during the Crimean War, this number increased. Data pertaining to the Radom Governorate – one of five into which the Kingdom of Poland was divided between 1845 and 1866 – shows that 915 people were sent to the Caucasus Corps in 1854. The historian assumed that a similar quota was also imposed on the other governorates and that an analogous phenomenon took place in 1855. Thus, in his opinion, about 9,000 people from the Kingdom of Poland were sent to the Caucasus between 1854–1855. The researcher noted that determining how many people were sent to the Caucasus in 1835–1843 is complicated. To his mind, it should be assumed that from 1835 the number of Poles sent to the region decreased, thus reaching a level of 700–900 people per year for 1843–1844. Therefore, he assumed an average of 1,200 people sent each year, as was the case in the period 1849–1853. If all the data then is added up, it would come to 41,460 people being sent to the Caucasus in 1831–1855 (Caban 2001a: 730), accounting for 21% of all conscripts drafted into the tsarist army. An approximate 200 conspirators forcibly conscripted into the army (punishment for patriotic activity) should be additionally added to the resulting figure (Caban 2001: 116).
Caban’s assumptions that an average of 1,200 people from the King-dom of Poland were sent to the Caucasus in the 1830s and 1840s are more or less in line with the findings of Russian historians. For example, Oleg Matveyev stated that the surviving documents of Alexander Dondukov-Korsakov5 show that 14,430 Poles were drafted into the Separate Caucasian Corps between 1835 and 1846 (Matveev 2008: 99). In turn, Gralewski wrote in his memoirs that “male Polish Catholics [in the Caucasus – P.A.], almost exclusively serving in the army, numbered about 26,000 in 1848, with women numbering up to 2000” (Gralewski 2015: 562). In contrast, the French consul in Tiflis in 1840 sent information to his superiors that the number of Poles in the Caucasus Corps stood at 25–30,000 men (Widerszal 2011: 32).
Caban noted in his work that the number of Poles in the Caucasus never exceeded 20% of the total number of Russian troops stationed there, thus this top-down rate was adhered to – it was a decision of the tsarist authorities that limited the maximum number of Poles to 20% of the total number of personnel. There could however exist fluctuations within individual units, which was particularly evident with regard to officers. Although there was an official regulation that Polish officers in individual garrisons should not exceed 20% of the cadre, it was not rigidly observed. Consequently, there were units in the Caucasus where the officer cadre of Polish origin reached 40% (Caban 2014: 204).
In light of the above findings, it should be emphasized that Poles in the Caucasus were primarily conscripts serving in the tsarist army, not exiles. There has been no research to date as to when the tsarist authorities began channelling this group to the southern fringes of the empire. It is possible to link this phenomenon to the creation of the Black Sea Cossack Host. Catherine II allotted those Cossacks belonging to it the lands along the right bank of the Kuban in 1792, to protect the borderland from raids by “peoples from beyond the Kuban”, that is, primarily Adyghe. The resettlement of Cossacks to the new territories from areas previously occupied by them between the Bug and Dniester rivers took place between 1792–1794. Moreover, two years prior, i.e. in 1790, Grigory Potemkin-Tauricheski, viceroy of the Novorossiya, Azov, and Astrakhan governorates, signed an order to include “mercenaries from Little Russia and Poland” in the Black Sea Cossack Host, while in 1799 Tsar Paul I added to this “vagabonds from Little Russia, Poland, and former Zaporozhye” (Selickij 2008: 8). Resultingly, the Black Sea Cossack Host would consist in part of individuals from Poland, though it is impossible to determine at present how many there were. Among the most important reasons for this fact, Aleksander Sielicki cited the lack of specific information linking any given person to Poland. Terms of origin such as “of Polish nobility” or “descendant from Poles” applied only to those who had enrolled with the Cossacks. These were absent, meanwhile, in the case of their children. They, in turn, had, for example, “staff-officer children” marked down as their origin. Another problem stems from the fact that a Pole who enrolled with the Cossacks quite often changed his Polish surname to a Cossack moniker. Additionally, Polish Catholics often converted to Orthodoxy when joining the Cossacks, especially if they had married an Orthodox woman. Sielicki managed to identify some 60 people who volunteered to join the Cossacks and had simply “of Polish nobility” or “descendant from Poles” written as their origin in their documentation (Selickij 2008: 20–38).
It should also be borne in mind that a portion of officers treated service on this dangerous front – where, after all, armed clashed occurred regularly – as an opportunity to make one’s name and attain a speedy promotion. For this reason, they gladly volunteered to enlist in units stationed in the Caucasus (Baranowski/Baranowski 1987: 160). Contemporary researchers estimate that the number of Polish volunteers during the period of most intense fighting in the region, i.e. the mid-19th century, numbered several hundred (Cifanova 2005: 99).
Poles were sent to the Caucasus until 1855, that is, till the final conscription before the January Uprising. The last wave of Polish exiles flowed into the Caucasus in the 1850s. (Reychman 1954: 36). In turn, after 1865 (in 1855–1865 conscription was not conducted in the Kingdom of Poland), when conscription was reintroduced in the Polish territories, deportation to the region became sporadic. This was in connection with Russia’s subordination of the entire Caucasus and the end of hostilities in its eastern part after the surrender of Shamil in 1859, and likewise its western part with the Adyghe surrender in 1864. Nevertheless, Poles continued to serve in local garrisons. These were, for example, individuals who ended up in the Caucasus with their units stationed in other parts of Russia, or volunteers (Baranowski/Baranowski 1987: 201). In addition, after Russia’s subjugation of the entire Caucasus, Polish labour emigration to the region intensified, which saw a steadily increasing percentage of soldiers of Polish origin (Woźniak 1991: 154). For this reason, Polish doctors, engineers, teachers – so the intelligentsia in general – began appearing.
Caban noted that after the January Uprising’s fall, the Russian authorities chose not to use forced conscription as a form of punishment. This stemmed from opinions cropping up in the tsar’s entourage from mid-1863 that an excess of exiles would contribute to the growth of revolutionary sentiment and could cause perturbations for the authorities. Where there were fears of revolutionary sentiment among Poles sent for settling or to penal labour, even more so were there fears of conscripting January Uprising participants into the army. Resultingly, only 2,670 people were deported to penal servitude (Caban 2001: 212) (for the entirety of Russia, not only the Caucasus). Caban pointed out that after 1865, when the tsardom re-initiated conscription in the Kingdom of Poland, no information appears in any source suggesting anyone was sent to toil in the Caucasus before 1873 (Caban 2001: 114).
There remains the issue of Poles who were conscripted into the tsarist army and hailed from the so-called taken lands. Caban stressed that it is likely impossible to determine their number, because although several hundred volumes of recruit registers have been preserved in Lithuanian archives, the personal data do not contain information regarding nationality, only religion. It is likewise difficult to make a judgement concerning nationality on the basis of how the surname sounded and religious affiliation. The researcher pointed to examples of popular surnames, such as Mackiewicz, occasionally including an annotation stating the person bearing them was Catholic, at other times that he was Orthodox. Official statistics, meanwhile, counted Poles from the taken territories called up for military service as “Byelorussians” and “Malorussians”, or Lithuanians. This treatment was not only applied to those entering military academies and schooling to become officers (Caban 2001: 10). The historian calculated that at the beginning of the 1820s the tsarist army’s officer corps numbered approximately 30,000, while just before World War I it stood at 49,000. In that period, about 20,000 Poles or persons of Polish origin would pass through it. Among them, 60% came from the taken lands, 30% from the Kingdom of Poland, and 10% from the central governorates (Caban 2014: 204).
Caban also proved that, statistically, 7,900 people were conscripted from the Kingdom of Poland into the army each of the years between the uprisings. This accounted for less than 10% of total Russian forces. By 1855, 201,000 Poles had served (both conscripts and those sentenced to military service), while the period 1865–1873 saw 119,000 serve (Caban 2001 83, 203, 213). The historian calculated that overall, from 1832 to 1913, some 1.3–1.4 million people were conscripted into the Russian army from the Kingdom of Poland (Caban 2014: 201).
Caban’s calculations, demonstrating that 21% of the total population of the Kingdom of Poland conscripted into the tsarist army was sent to this region between the uprisings (when the largest number of Poles served in the Caucasus), are important in that they undermine claims that Polish recruits were primarily sent to this area. The researcher showed that about 20% of them served in the Caucasus, while 10% served in Siberia (Caban 2001: 224). Thus, their vast majority, with 70% of Polish recruits, were stationed in the European part of Russia. Recruits also commonly did not serve in the Kingdom of Poland, though no official ban on this existed. For example, in 1836, of the 6,911 conscripts, 7% (or 487 recruits) were sent to garrisons stationed in the Kingdom of Poland. By contrast, from the 1840s onwards, an average of about 11% served locally. During the Crimean War, no Polish recruits were sent to serve in their homeland, while following the war’s end that figure again oscillated at around 11% each year (Caban 2001: 116). In turn, from 1868 to 1913, between 3% and 36% of Poles served in the Kingdom of Poland (Caban 2014: 202). Thus, claims that Poles could not serve in their homeland are false (Piwnicki 2002a: 133).
It can be accepted that the appearance of the notion that Poles served mainly in Siberia and the Caucasus was largely influenced by publications of political exiles’ memoirs in the 19th century (who were indeed directed mainly to the two aforementioned regions, with about 50% of the penally conscripted landing in the Orenburg and Siberian Corps, and about 20% in the Caucasus Corps between 1833–1856, though they were relatively few considering the total number of Poles serving in the tsarist army). Readers thus became convinced that since so many memoirs were published from these two areas alone, it implied that “all Poles must have served there” (Caban 2001: 96, 223).
When discussing the issue of Polish exiles in the Caucasus, another problem in the Polish literature on the subject must be mentioned. Namely, some scholars apply the term “exiles” to individuals who did not hold this status. Among the most well-known such individuals, first place must be afforded to Józef Chodźko.6
Andrzej Furier, who worked on the geodesist’s biography, established that during his studies Chodźko belonged to initially legal patriotic associations. During a trial of the Filarets in Vilnius, he was summoned before an investigation commission, to which he gave a detailed description of the organization (Furier 2001: 41–42). He consequently avoided being convicted (Furier 1997a: 830), in turn enlisting in the Russian army and travelling to Moldavia and Wallachia to conduct land-surveying work (Furier 2001: 44). To the Caucasus he was deployed in 1840 at the request of Caucasus Corps commander Yevgeny Golovin, who, valuing the Pole, wanted him to work in his Army-Topographical Detachment (Furier 1997a: 831). Chodźko distinguished himself in the Crimean War, especially in operations around Kars, for which he was awarded the Order of Saint Stanislaus, 1st class. A few years later, he became head of the Caucasus Army’s Topographical Detachment (Berezowski 1970: 430), earning the rank of lieutenant general (Furier 2001: 88). For his contributions to topography, he came to be not only a member of the Russian Geographical Society, but also a corresponding member of the French Academy of Sciences (Rehman 1879: 15).
Another example is Albert (Wojciech) Potocki, also portrayed by scholars and publicists as an “exile” (Geremek 2008: 81; Piwnicki 2002: 90; idem 2012: 76; Reychman 1972: 181). Such a description is also found on the Polish version of Wikipedia (Albert Potocki). Some researchers further claim that Potocki was a participant in the November Uprising (Inglot 1957: 543). Based on available sources, it can be concluded that he was indeed penally conscripted in the 1820s, but served in the Kingdom of Poland. When the November Uprising broke out, he decided not to take up arms against his countrymen fighting for independence, but did not join their cause either. He instead leveraged family connections with General Grigory Rozen, one of the tsarist army commanders deployed against the insurrectionists, and transferred to the Caucasus Corps (Filina/Ossowska 2007: 61). This unit soon came to be led by Rozen himself, who made Potocki an officer and personal adjutant. Already holding the rank of lieutenant colonel, the Pole, at his own request, transferred to units stationing in Volhynia, from there landing in the Kingdom of Poland. He deployed to the Caucasus again in 1845 and became an advisor to Viceroy Mikhail Vorontsov (Woźniak 1987: 234–235).
Witold Zglenicki, the most famous geologist among the Poles in the Caucasus, is also at times portrayed as an “exile” (Chodubski 2012a: 179). In reality, however, he came to the region as a labourer (Adamczewski 2013: 187). He would work at the assay office in Baku from 1891 until his life’s end. This Pole is known, among other things, for his contributions to technologies in mining-well drilling and extracting mineral oil from under the seabed.
In addition to questions related to Polish exiles, the martyrology aspect of the Polish ethnopolitical myth with regard to the Caucasus also concerns the issue of the number of Poles who passed away or were killed in the region being overstated.
The largest figure of Poles who perished in the Caucasus was provided by Grzegorz Piwnicki. Per his estimates, more than 500,000 Poles died in the region’s numerous wars (Piwnicki 2001: 11; idem 2011: 250). However, these estimates are so greatly exaggerated that if they were to be accepted as factual, it would mean that considerably more Poles died in the Caucasus than were sent there.
Most likely, this 500,000 figure employed by Piwnicki is the result of a misinterpretation of estimates provided in Gralewski’s memoirs, which, incidentally, the Polish academic cited in one of his articles (Piwnicki 2003: 203). Looking at the writings of the Polish exile, one finds calculations suggesting that, to his mind, 20,000 tsarist soldiers died in the Caucasus per year (from combat and disease) (Gralewski 2015: 581). In a later section, Gralewski wrote that only a fourth of these soldiers were ethnic Russians. In his opinion, half the army was supplemented by “peoples from Little Russian governorates”, like Poltava, Kharkov and Voronezh. The other half:
was filled with people of various rites from the lands of our former Commonwealth – as calculated by me comparatively on several regiments’ forms. It would thus stand that about three hundred thousand Poles together with Lithuanians and Ruthenians were killed since 1831. And if to this horrifying figure we add those who from 1773 to 1831 perished in the mountains and on the peripheral Persian and Turkish battlegrounds, and who fell victim to the epidemics raging at the time, we will arrive at the huge sum of five hundred thousand. (Gralewski 2015: 582)
It is clear from Gralewski’s text that when he wrote about this 500,000 dead, he meant all individuals from the territories of the former Commonwealth who had fallen under Russia’s dominion: Poles, Lithuanians, and Ruthenians (the latter he considered the entire population speaking Eastern Slavic ethnolects and living on the lands of the former Commonwealth). Piwnicki, on the other hand, ascribed this 500,000 exclusively to Poles. It should also be noted that the figure given by Gralewski was already disputed in the 1930s by Ludwik Widerszal, who considered it grossly inflated (Widerszal 2011: 32), later also by Jan Reychman (Reychman 1939: 268).
To illustrate how exaggerated is an estimate of 500,000 Poles perishing in the Caucasus as a result of wars, it is worth quoting statistics on how many of its soldiers, regardless of ethnicity, Tsarist Russia lost warring in the Caucasus. According to these sources, in all the armed conflicts fought by Russia in the North Caucasus between 1801 and 1864, the tsarist army lost 4,050 officers and 92,225 “rank-and-file” soldiers. This brings the total to about 96,000 soldiers – killed, wounded, and taken prisoner. To this should be added about 55,000 soldiers – killed, wounded and taken prisoner – from the following wars: with Persia and Turkey in 1803–1813 (about 8.2 thousand), against Persia in 1826–1828 (about 4 thousand), against Turkey in 1828–1829 (about 4.3 thousand), in the Crimean War in 1853–1856 (about 16.8 thousand – this number referring only to losses from military operations in the Caucasus and Anatolia), against Turkey in 1877–1878 (19.6 thousand), and in the suppression of the 1877 uprising in the Dagestan and Terek oblasts (about 1.1 thousand). Additionally, an approximate 1.2 thousand soldiers died in advances into the South Caucasus in the 19th century (Gizetti 1901: 129–182).
In sum, throughout its wars in the Caucasus and surrounding regions, Russia lost about 150,000 soldiers (that is, killed, wounded, and taken prisoner) to various armed clashes. Thus, the figure of 500,000 Poles perishing in the Caucasus is three times higher than the tsarist army’s personnel losses in all wars and skirmishes in the Caucasus region over the course of the 19th century, regardless of the nationality of the soldiers killed.
It should be taken into account, however, that to comprehensively determine the total number of tsarist soldiers killed or perished in the Caucasus, the difficult-to-estimate number of dead resulting from diseases (particularly dangerous for those stationed on the Black Sea line), failed escapes, suicides, and killings by fellow servicemen should be added to the 150,000 figure. These were losses greater than those the tsarist army suffered from direct confrontation with the enemy. For example, Yevgeny Krinko cited the following numbers of soldiers who died of disease: during the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–1829–110,000, during the Crimean War – 88,800, in various Caucasus campaigns – 102,000, during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878–82,600 (Krinko 2016: 21). Other numbers also surface in this regard. Much larger ones are cited, for example, by Vladimir Lapin. Per his estimates, for each tsarist soldier who died in battle or as a result of wounds during the Caucasus War, ten died of disease. As one extreme case, the historian gave the example of the Tengri Infantry Regiment. Between 1820 and 1824, ten of its soldiers were killed in battle, while 1,159 died in the same period inside their unit (see Lapin 2014). On the other hand, it should be remembered that Poles were sent to the Caucasus primarily from 1832 to 1855, so it seems reasonable to assume that during this period the mortality rate due to disease had decreased compared to earlier decades.
Caban estimates that by 1856, 75% of the 200,000 conscripted Poles died from disease (as the main factor) and combat, regardless of their place of stationing (Caban 2001: 215). The historian calculated that during this period the mortality rate in the Caucasus was higher than in other parts of the empire, in 1842 being, for example, 95.6 deaths per 1,000 soldiers and thus more than twice as high as for the entire tsarist army (Caban 2001a: 734).
In attempting to estimate how many soldiers from Polish lands died as a result of military operations and disease in the Caucasus while citing Caban’s calculations (which show that in the years 1831–1855 about 41 thousand soldiers were sent to the region from the Kingdom of Poland), it can be assumed that it was around 90% of them, or about 37 thousand. We have no data in turn that could be employed in estimating how many Poles among civilians died in the Caucasus, and it seems unlikely that this matter will ever be clarified.
The Kingdom of Poland was formed in 1815 from the area of the Commonwealth’s lands that fell under the Russian partition. It had its own constitution, parliament, army, and currency, with Polish as the official language. It was connected with the Russian Empire by personal union through the monarch. After the fall of the November Uprising, the tsarist authorities limited the Kingdom’s autonomy and joined it to the Russian Empire through a real union.
The term “taken lands” (Western Krai) referred to the eastern provinces of the First Commonwealth that became part of the Russian Empire in 1772–1807, and were not included in the Kingdom of Poland established in 1815.
It should be noted that there was no rubric in the census for specifying nationality, only native language and confessional affiliation.
The Filarets were a Polish secret society of Vilnian youth, active between 1820–1823.
Alexander Dondukov-Korsakov (1820–1893), a Russian state activist and military commander, served as commander-in-chief of Russian troops in the Caucasus between 1882–1890.
He is called an “exile” by, for example, Chodubski 2012a: 179; Jastrzębski 2014: 219. He is also presented as an exile in the Polish version of Wikipedia: Józef Chodźko, [see <https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Józef_Chodźko>, accessed 29.04.2024].