U źródeł drugiego Komitetu Zachodniego. Sprawa polska na Ziemiach Zabranych w latach 1860–1862
At the Roots of the Second Western Committee. The Polish Case in the Taken Lands in 1860–62

Summary/Abstract: The sources of the so-called second Western Committee should be sought in the reaction of the Russian authorities to the growing and unprecedented wave of social and political unrest in the early 1860s and national aspirations expressed by the Polish society. One of them was the desire to incorporate the Western Guberniyas into the Kingdom of Poland. For the first time this demand was officially put forward by the nobility of the Rahachow District (Mogilev Guberniya) in October 1861. The reaction of the Russian authorities to this event was the cancellation of the nobility elections in the Mogilev Guberniya and the arrest of the marshal of the Rahachow District Jan Bohusz.Much greater political repercussions were brought by the congress of the nobility at Kamianets-Podilskyi (in September 1862). The gathered nobility of the Podolia Guberniya prepared an address to Tsar Alexander II, demanding the administrative integration of the Stolen Lands with the Kingdom of Poland as a condition and “the basis for the further development of both the Polish and Ukrainian people”. These demands of the Podolia nobility were received in St Petersburg as a threat to the state and an expression of Polish separatism which should be fought at all costs. Almost immediately a decision was made to set up a Western Committee to prepare decisions regarding the solution of the so-called Polish case, consisting primarily in the definitive ousting of Polish influence from the Western Guberniyas of the Russian Empire.

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