1849-1858 – Sex, Lies and Political Parties
The 1849 elections provided some temporary respite for the embattled premier. The opposition Zapadniks made some moderate gains, taking seats from all other parties but ultimately failed to place a serious dent in the government majority. Unfortunately for Prime Minister Gaidar, his administration would not last until the next poll, as the empire was afflicted by pestilence, famine and unrest.
The problems were already brewing before the election as a flue pandemic carried away tens of thousands of lives over the course of 1849 and 1850. Worse was to come as the harvests of 1850 and 1851 proved to be particularly poor – creating localised food shortages through the Volga valley, an area that was overpopulation yet had comparatively unproductive agriculture. The very high levels tariffs that had been implements over the course of the past decade made importing food prohibitively expensive, while there was little to spare within Poland’s internal market. The result was famine among the Tatars of Kazan and Samara.
Anger at the failure of the Polish state to aid them, and longer-term tensions over systemic anti-Tatar abuses, provoked a large anti-government demonstration in the city of Orsk in Samara province. After clashing with police, this demonstration devolved into a fierce riot that was only put down through the heavy-handed use of military force. With dozens killed and many others beaten or arrested, riots spread throughout the towns and cities of Samara, which had been swollen with desperate peasants who had fled the famine in the countryside. For several bloody months public order in Samara collapsed, with the imperial army being forced to go from town to town restoring order. For a time, the government in Kiev was gripped by the fear that the unrest would spread throughout the empire’s Tatar population, presenting a genuinely revolutionary threat to the empire, but fortunately saw little violence remain largely limited to Samara.
Vivid descriptions of the violence in Samara spread were spread across the world by foreign correspondents reporting from the region. These had their greatest impact in the Islamic world – and stimulated a growing angst over the oppression being suffered by the tens of millions of Muslims suffering under the rule of violent Christian and Jewish empires in the Papal and Polish empires. In New Andalucia, a slightly later in Australia, Muslim governments responded to this by calling upon the umma to take refugee in the safety of the Islamic states of the New World – where the tired, poor, huddled masses of the Muslim world could find a land of liberty and opportunity. Over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, millions of Tatars, Arabs and others would seize upon this chance of a better life and make the journey to the Australia and America.
The Samara Crisis proved to be the end of the Gaidar premiership, as Tsar Nikolai finally lost patience with him and dismissed him from his post. In his stead, he reappointed the wise old head of Mikhail Brusilov, with the instruction to stabilise the situation. Brusilov immediately looked to drop tariffs to a more manageable level, thereby reducing the cost of food. He called for a larger government relief effort for areas affected by food shortages, taking the pointed step of appointed a Tatar, the Beylik of Astrakhan, to manage the government response. With this act of goodwill, a stronger harvest and the passing of the flu pandemic, tensions in the east were diffused.
Despite the dramatic events of the previous four years, the 1853 elections resulted in almost complete stasis with just six seats changing hands and vote shares remaining almost identical to their 1849 level. While it appeared that Polish politics had remained almost completely frozen in time in the decade and a half since the restoration of the Duma, this election marked the end of an era. It would be the last of the stale contests that typified the early constitutional era in Poland, with future contests witnessing fiery and full-throated political competition across the country.
Through the mid-1850s, Polish foreign policy was consumed by crisis in the Far East. The poor harvests that had hit the Polish empire in 1849 and 1850 were not limited to her borders, destabilising much of Eurasia. One of the hardest hit areas was the Jin – a Han Chinese state ruling over a large Mongol and Manchu population from the old Ming imperial capital in Beijing. When a large rebellion broke out among the nomadic peoples of the area, the Poles – making use of their own large Mongol population – offered financial and material support, hoping to gain influence in the region and take control of the situation. The Mongol revolt proved far more successful than anyone had expected, and in 1854 a Mongol-Manchu army stormed Beijing like the Great Khans of old, sacking the city and installing themselves as its new masters.
This set off a political crisis. The Xi, horrified at the loss of a proud Chinese city to these barbarians, threatened war and solicited the European powers for support, while the Poles lined up behind their Mongol allies. While the Chinese found sympathy in the West, not least among Poland’s rival who eyed an opportunity to limit their power, the European powers were far more fearful of giving the Poles an opportunity to march deep into the heart of China than they were by the Mongol insurrection in the north. With no one willing to fight alongside them, the Xi were forced to back down and consent to creation of a Polish-aligned Mongol Khanate stretching from Ulaanbaatar to Beijing and Manchuria.
Having cooled the Samara Crisis, won an election and secured a strong new Asiatic ally without spilling a drop of Polish blood, Brusilov enjoyed a commanding political position by 1856, even as the elder statesman pushed into his mid-70s. Sadly for the Prime Minister, everything would unravel in the course of a single April evening. Despite his advancing years, Mikhail Brusilov remained a man of clear vigour, and regularly frequented a number of brothels in the wealthy districts of Kiev. During one police raid on one of these houses of ill repute, the premier was discovered in a compromising position. Naturally, this was hushed away by the powers that be, yet word of the incident still escaped – and was widely published in one of the capital’s leading newspapers, who disregarded national censorship laws in the name of the scoop of the decade – horrifying and delighting the burgeoning chattering classes in equal measure. For the leader of a government with a strong moral and religious edge, the reputational damage was fatal. Under heavy pressure from his ministerial colleagues, Brusilov stepped down in disgrace in favour of his safe but stuffy deputy Illiya Egorov.
Economically, the 1850s saw the sprouts of industry begin to take hold in Poland in earnest. The scale of these enterprises shouldn’t be exaggerated. In the 1861 census less than 100,000 industrial workers were recorded, less than half the number of aristocratic landholders eligible to vote in imperial elections. But their economic impact was already being felt. This was most obvious in textiles, a product especially well suited to low skill mass production. In the late 1850s, Polish textile output surged, surpassing the level it had maintained prior to a crash at the end of the previous decade. However, while in the 1840s and before garments had largely been manufactured in small independent workshops – the bulk of clothing being produced in 1860 came from the factories of Kiev, Minsk, Lvov, Moscow and Warsaw, using new machinery and organisational methods. The difference between the textiles sector and an area that had failed to embrace the techniques of mass production – the brewers, distillers and wine growers of the alcohol industry – was marked, with the former experiencing a transformation while the later struggled to compete with cheaper foreign imports, even with the benefit of a national tariff. This period also saw the first emergence of small steel mills around the Central Ukraine and Donbass coal fields, an industry that in future decades would turn much of the country into an industrial hell scape of fire, smog and molten metal.
Just as its economy began to change, Polish politics were revolutionised. Since the creation of the Duma in 1840, politics had been carried out by loosely organised factions of individuals and elections had been contested without any real focus or energy. This situation was brought to an end in the resplendent halls of an influential liberal gentleman’s club in Kiev in 1856. There, a group of ambitious young Zapadnik deputies, led by the charismatic Boris Zhakov, came together to form the Constitutional Party – the first political party in Polish history. As was inevitably the case among a group of Europhiles, their inspiration came from abroad – where the well-drilled and cohesive political parties of the Holy Roman Empire and the Netherlands fought elections and parliamentary campaigns in a manner unrecognisable to the sleepy political life of Kiev. The new party had a central organisation that would direct funds, strategies and select candidates, a single prime ministerial candidate and leader – Zhakov himself – and a clear set of principles all of its members would have to sign up to: the abolition of Gypsy slavery, the abolition of serfdom, a commitment to free speech and an end to censorship, support for free trade and free markets, and the secularisation of Polish society.
Political regroupment was not limited to the left, as change came to the right as well. With Slavophile morality under question, and the Constitutionalists presenting a dangerous secularising threat, a group of Rabbis and Israelite politicians came together to form a political organisation of their own – the Agudat Yisrael, or Union of Israel. Agudat acted as an umbrella for a variety of religious organisations across Polish Jewry, encompassing all denominations. Yet, it was broadly based upon three groups. At its core, forming its foot soldiers and largest component, were the Hasidim, but it also included a large hardline Kohenist wing – which enjoyed a significant degree of influence over the High Priesthood in Jerusalem and an Olegite faction that fed off intercommunal hostility between Jewish, and Tatar and Mongols in Muscovy. In this, it was a remarkable achievement of religious unity among the Jewish faithful that had so long squabbled among one another – pointing to that, alone, each group was no longer capable of shaping the nation’s destiny. The Agudat Yisrael committed itself to defending Polish Judaism at all costs.
The formation of these political groupings, and the weakness of the Slavophiles in the aftermath of Brusilov’s resignation and the limp leadership of his successor, formed the backdrop to what would be Poland’s first genuinely competitive election. In contrast to previous contests, candidates would campaign vigorously, organising rallies and waging wars of letters in the local press – speaking beyond the very narrow electorate to the wider educated population, in the belief that electors did not only represent their own interest with their votes but those of their wider communities. The outcome would undoubtedly shape the direction of Polish history.
