Kontrolowanie zagranicznych i zakordonowych czasopism polskich przez cenzurę rosyjską

Abstract

The aim of the article is to reconstruct the possibilities people living in the part of Poland an-nexed by Russia had to access Polish-language periodicals published outside that area. The author draws on two types of sources hitherto barely every used: monthly lists of imported publications dealt with by tsarist censors between the fall of the January Uprising and the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution, lists published by the (Central) Committee of Foreign Censorship in Saint Petersburg, as well as all minutes of meetings — preserved in the Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw — of the Warsaw Censorship Committee from the analysed period, which contain justifi cations of the decisions taken by the officials with regard to various publications. In addition, the author has been able to access nearly all issues of journals censored in any way at the time and currently kept in the 23 largest Polish historical libraries. It turns out that import attempts (possible only in the case of periodicals that had not been previously proscribed) were rare and concerned only 93 titles. In the case of over a half of them censors prevented even a single issue from being circulated. Justifications of the refusals were similar to those formulated with regard to books. Most of them focused on protecting the Orthodox religion, the Imperial House, and Russia’s policy. Particular attention was paid to limiting the infl uence of the Catholic Church and the Poles’ aspirations to freedom. However, sometimes censorship was — perhaps deliberately so — inconsistent. It seems that the limited scale of import was also infl uenced by the limited interest in publications from beyond the cordon on the part of the local readers, who were satisfi ed with Warsaw publications.