In the 19st century the “Polish Question” – the attempts made by the people of Poland to recover their country's political independence and restore its statehood, and above all the effect of the Polish independence movement on international relations – was one of the fundamental problems destabilising the political order in East-Central Europe, especially on the western peripheries of the Russian Empire. However, seldom have these issues been examined from the point of view of 19st-century Russians. This book sets out to present the Polish-Russian conflict the way the elite of Russian society saw it, in the “Russia that started at the bottom rung of the ladder for social climbers,” as Alexander Herzen put it sarcastically.

One of the chief research topics in this book is the interaction between Russian public opinion, or rather the germs of Russian public opinion, and the policy the Empire pursued on its uncompliant subjects, and the impact the Polish conflict had on the evolution of Russian political ideas and movements.

In 19st-century Russia there were no legal political organisations, alongside a dearth of social institutions, for the expression of citizens’ opinions, so the only way public opinion could be voiced was through the influential newspapers and magazines. This often resulted in the treatment of “what the papers said” as the equivalent of public opinion. But it also stimulated the rise of propaganda disseminated through periodicals which enjoyed a large circulation (large for those times), addressed to readers at home and for reception abroad, with the intention of shaping opinion the way the Russian authorities wanted it shaped. This state of affairs has obliged me to take at least the basics of the official propaganda into consideration, for the composition of this book, which addresses political ideas. In Chapter III I look at the way the propaganda worked, its extent and its results.

There is still no comprehensive analysis of the position of the Polish question in Russian thought and policy on Poland in the post-partitional period. The bibliography in this book presents a list of the principal publications on this issue.