The Surveillance of Congress Poland’s secret police over the Polish emigrants in 1831–1839 (on the basis of the reports of the military governors of Warsaw to the Third Section)

Abstract

The article deals with the activities of the secret police of the Congress Poland in the 1830s aimed at monitoring the Polish political emigration, which was formed after the defeat of the November Uprising of 1830–1831. The paper introduces previously unknown documents from The State Archive of The Russian Federation (GA RF) – the reports of the military governors of Warsaw to the Third Section of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery from 1831–1839. Among these reports, we managed to locate a few dispatches by Werner-Kubersky and Shostakovsky, prominent agents already known from other sources and scholarly works. The new source expands on the history of the Polish emigration in the 19th century by adding the viewpoint of the Russian secret police, which was rarely taken into consideration in previous historiography. The secret police under the rule of Ivan Paskevich, Congress Poland’s viceroy in 1831–1856, remained semi-independent from the Third Section by maintaining a stand-alone spy ring among the Polish emigration. An important part of the reports was devoted to monitoring Austria’s policy towards the Polish émigrés and the activities of the Polish refuges in the Republic of Krakow. The analysis of the reports shows that the Russian spies focused on the threats to state security, which were regicide projects and plans for sending emissaries to the former Polish lands. Ideological differences among the emigrant factions were of minor importance to them.