TWO

ALEKSANDRÓW

A Border Station at the Center of Imperial Power and Polish Nationalism

The inhabitants of the town of Alexandrovo and its vicinity are not in favor of the government. . . . It is believed that the main reason for this hatred of the government is the foreign press directed against Russia and, in particular, journals from Galicia and Poznań . . . that the public reads avidly. Ardent Polish patriots deliver the aforementioned newspapers to Aleksandrów; among those patriots are Kachanovskii, postmaster, Charnetskii, post office scribe, and Kurzhiiamskii, tobacco inspector; the latter is aware of all political news, which he immediately passes on to his friends, for which local residents especially respect him. Kurzhiiamskii receives the Poznań journals from a Prussian railway conductor . . . he transfers them to a Warsaw jeweler and brother of Charnetskii, through Iarzhinskii, conductor of the Warsaw-Bromberg railway.¹

Report for the Kingdom of Poland’s head of police (1868)

Everybody knows that our vicinity was incredibly famous for smugglers, mainly horse thieves because horses in Russia, that is in our country, were cheap. In Germany, that is beyond Otłoczyn, they were so expensive that for one Prussian horse, you could buy two Russian ones, which was an enormous profit. With smuggling and horse robbery, people came by some land, tenements, department stores, and the most prominent prewar grain merchant, Kamiński, made a fortune with fencing.²

Novel protagonist Czesław Rupnik citing his grandfather’s experiences in the border region

THIRTY KILOMETERS TO THE SOUTHEAST of Toruń, a gigantic railroad building stands out in the center of the small town of Aleksandrów Kujawski (Aleksandrów Pograniczny, Alexandrovo) in the Kuyavian-Pomeranian Province.³ It forms a rectangle of two hundred meters by twenty meters, which is comparable in size to the 1867 station building of the Ostbahn in Berlin. Today, the town’s economic and political importance is negligible compared to that of the German capital or the province’s urban centers of Bydgoszcz, Toruń, and Włocławek. However, before 1920, this place was one of the gateways of the Kingdom of Poland, located just two kilometers south of the border with Prussia; as a result, it figured prominently on the international railroad and telegraph schedules. The place gained importance in the early 1860s, when Prussia and the Russian Empire accomplished the Warsaw–Bromberg Railroad line (Warschau-Bromberger Eisenbahn, Kolej Warszawsko-Bydgoska), linking the Ostbahn to Warsaw—a line that connected the Prussian, Imperial Russian, and Habsburg partitions of Poland-Lithuania with one another and with western Europe.

Figure 2.1. Aleksandrów railroad station, ca. 1910 Postcard, author’s collection.

This chapter looks at two simultaneous and conflicting developments in Aleksandrów and along the cross-border railroad. The line was a tool for economic development and geostrategic control in the hands of the Prussian and imperial Russian governments. Both governments used it to control its often-rebellious border regions more effectively, drawing them closer to their centers. However, when we look at it through the lens of the actor-network theory, we will perceive the railroad as an independent, nonhuman actor in its own right that helped the Polish national movement fight imperial control. Along these lines, this Ostbahn branch influenced the region in ways that were unintended by its initiators. The railroad can be positioned as a decisive actor at the intersection of conflicting interests between various human actors in the border region, such as the line’s shareholders, Prussian and imperial Russian administrations, the military, merchants, smugglers, and Polish nationalists. The latter smuggled both political ideas and pamphlets across the partition borders. All of these actors utilized the space of mobilities created by the railroad. Aleksandrów was the microcosm where all these different mobilities intersected and manifested themselves.

In this chapter, the focus is first on the development of a new borderscape bisected by the railroad crossing. I focus on the importance of the line for the local population and the emerging Polish national movement. This movement relied on long-standing economic and personal ties that even the new borders of 1815 could not disrupt. While this network had no significant political relevance initially, it would gain importance with the gradual rise of nineteenth-century ethnolinguistic nationalism.⁴ In the second part, I focus on the role of the Warsaw–Bromberg line in the Polish January Uprising of 1863–1864, when both the imperial Russian military and the Prussian and Russian state administrations used the railroad to quell the rebellion. However, at the same time, the insurgents also kept a grip on the line, smuggled weapons across the border, or disrupted regular services. The third part of the chapter focuses on the aftermath of the insurrection, when the railroad continued to serve as a geostrategic tool of the neighboring empires while simultaneously acting as an intermediary of the Polish national movement. As a result, by linking Polish cultural and political centers in Prussia/Germany, the Russian and Habsburg Empires, and France, this same line simultaneously challenged the two states’ attempts to quell irredentist movements among its ethnic Polish subjects.

SHAPING A NEW BORDERSCAPE: THE WARSAW–BROMBERG RAILROAD LINE IN ALEKSANDRÓW

Political borders are particular spaces in modern nation-states and seem to clearly divide the “apparently secure interior” from “an anarchic exterior.”⁵ From a historical point of view, though, this definition is anachronistic. Until the early nineteenth century, state borders were not necessarily divisive in either a geopolitical or a mental sense, with “the only difference between one side of the line and the other [being] the line itself and the regimes that sketch it on the map and enforce it on the ground.”⁶ This was certainly true for the ethnically diverse border region in question here. Historically, it was part of Cuyavia and Chełmno Land (Ziemia Chełmińska or Culmer Land), and politically, it belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Poland-Lithuania or Rzeczpospolita). Prussia and the Habsburg and Russian Empires dismantled Poland-Lithuania during the three partitions of 1772, 1793, and 1795. As a result, the whole region became part of Prussia, only to be incorporated into Napoleon’s Duchy of Warsaw in 1807. In 1815, the Congress of Vienna marked new European borders in this region, cutting lines through territories that historically and economically belonged together but that would now remain politically divided between Prussia and the Russian Empire for over one hundred years.

Following the stipulations of Vienna, in economic terms, Poland was supposed to remain united.⁷ However, three conventions between the partition powers (1817–1818) created customs borders, which soon developed into complex obstacles for economic exchange and travelers.⁸ The latter could legally cross only at particular border control stations, located mainly near busy roads, rivers, or railroad stations. States built up a new bureaucratic system to get hold of their subjects’ identities.⁹ Increasingly, the idea that clearly marked borders served to protect the construct of “the homeland” against the imagined “Other” gained ground.¹⁰ Charles Meier has called this development “territorial intensification” linked to an “obsession with drawing lines.”¹¹ Historians of east central Europe coined the term territorialization (Territorialisierung) for this transnational development, wherein states of the nineteenth century homogenized their territory both politically and economically while at the same time delimiting their territory from neighboring states by erecting a modern border. Henceforth, controls shifted from river crossings and city gates inside the state to its political borders. Here, the modern state generated revenue from customs duties on imported and, sometimes, exported goods (see chaps. 4 and 5). Clearly, infrastructure networks such as the railroad, paved roads, and the telegraph helped states attain this goal of control.¹² At the same time, these networks also fostered economic globalization, overcoming state borders.

As a global phenomenon, this development led to a new kind of entangled borderscape. Here, it entailed “transition zones” rather than “cut-off lines,” where people felt “a sense of belonging to each of the two sides,” a sentiment that sometimes led to the development of “hybrid spaces.”¹³ People living near the border often had more of an affinity to those living directly on the other side of the border than to those living closer to their respective political centers.¹⁴ At this point, “the territorial boundary, the simplest line of all, the shadowless stroke of a pencil, is utterly insubstantial in the face of reality,” as Karl Schlögel has put it, deconstructing the misleading clear borderlines drawn by cartographers.¹⁵

In the example of the East Prussian–Lithuanian border region, Ruth Leiserowitz’s observation of the emergence of a “compact border space” with a distinguished “border culture” goes much further than the positivistic perception of the border as a “contact zone.”¹⁶ In the border region in question here, both sides shared not only a common history within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth but also common languages. Here, Polish speakers dominated, with those speaking German or Yiddish intermingling. However, the two partition powers started to intervene in cultural and educational affairs, with their Polish-speaking subjects increasingly perceived as “internal others.”¹⁷

After 1815, Thorn, the closest Prussian city to the north of Aleksandrów, belonged to the province of West Prussia, where Oberpräsident Theodor von Schön implemented assimilationist policies (Einschmelzungspolitiken) that limited the use of the Polish language in public affairs, such as in administration and education.¹⁸ In contrast, until the 1830s, Polish subjects both in the Kingdom of Poland (administered by the Russian Empire) and in the nearby Prussian Grand Duchy of Poznań (Posen, part of Prussia) enjoyed relatively high levels of autonomy in local governance, education, and cultural affairs.¹⁹

However, the Polish November Uprising of 1830–1831 brought a gradual decline in Polish autonomy for both the Prussian and the Russian partitions. In 1825, having put down the Decembrist revolt of liberal-minded army officers, new tsar Nicholas I introduced an absolutist-reactionary course in government. He started diminishing Polish self-governance and increased censorship. With the example of the Paris July Revolution and the Belgian Revolution in mind, on November 29, 1830, Polish army officers, Warsaw students, and members of noble societies launched an uprising in the Russian partition of Poland and formed a new government. It took the tsar nine months to quell the rebellion. The Prussian army actively supported the imperial Russian army in their efforts to put the uprising down. In the aftermath, the Russian Empire abolished most of the Kingdom of Poland’s autonomous institutions that operated in Polish, among them the army and the university. The Polish Catholic Church and Polish schools had to submit to imperial supervision. At the same time, several thousand Poles fled the empire, fearing prosecution.²⁰

Since active support for the uprising was widespread among the Polish nobility in Prussia, and many more inhabitants were considered sympathetic, Prussia also feared Polish separatism within its borders. It restricted the level of autonomy in the Grand Duchy of Poznań. A new Oberpräsident was installed who gradually adopted the Germanizing policies from the neighboring province of West Prussia. Concerning administration, the king diminished the provincial autonomy and installed Prussian civil servants from other, German-speaking parts of the monarchy. Also, the role of the German language was strengthened.²¹ In this atmosphere, exclusively ethnic Polish institutions arose, and the steady alienation of Polish-speaking Prussian subjects took place—an estrangement that Wojciech Wrzesiński appropriately called the “emergence of the Prussian syndrome.”²² Since railroads were not a black box but were embedded in political and cultural context, these developments left their mark on the planning, construction, and operation of the lines in the region.

Developing Peripheries: Population Policies and the Ostbahn

As we have seen, during this time of growing Polish-German and Polish-Russian antagonism, discussions concerning the construction of railroad networks in Prussia and the Russian Empire started in earnest. In Prussia, by the 1830s, railroad enthusiasts like David Hansemann, Friedrich List, and others had identified the railway as a tool to develop the economy and to defend the state militarily.²³ The military soon followed with a positive evaluation of railroads’ practicality in warfare. Consequently, the Ostbahn, as the first Prussian state-owned railroad line, was supposed to come not only with economic benefits for internal and external trade but also with geostrategic benefits on two levels. First, by connecting several fortresses, the line was intended to facilitate a better defense of Prussia in the event of an attack from the Russian Empire. Second, an increasingly important argument was the integration of Prussia’s peripheral territories through the Ostbahn. Prussia had taken over these territories from Poland only in 1815, and in the eyes of the Prussian administration, they showed strong separatist tendencies.

Half of the Ostbahn’s 592-kilometer main line passed through Prussian provinces with an ethnically mixed population. Initially, during the discussions concerning the trajectory of the line in the early 1840s, population policies did not play a significant role. German and Polish representatives alike even sent joint petitions to the Berlin ministries to influence the decision-making process. In 1843, both German and Polish inhabitants of the Grand Duchy of Poznań lobbied to bring the Ostbahn through the center of their province. A delegation consisting of municipal representatives and members from the duchy’s knighthood traveled to Berlin to submit a petition composed in both German and Polish. District president (Generallandschaftsdirektor) Josef Graf von Götzendorf-Grabowski and Chamberlain (Kammerherr) Erasmus von Stablewski were among the delegates.²⁴ Regional political and economic leaders even established a pressure group, the “Association for the Advancement of Railroad Construction between Frankfurt, Poznań and the Vistula.” While they succeeded in bundling the interests of both Polish and German landowners and politicians, they ultimately failed to change the direction of the line.²⁵ However, one can still observe a sense of regional community at this time rather than a feeling of divisive nationalism.

While these discussions are evidence of considerations that ignored questions of ethnicity, let alone population policies, the situation gradually changed in the second half of the 1840s. With political measures coming from Berlin to strengthen direct control over the Polish-speaking parts of the monarchy, the gulf between the different population groups widened. This is especially true for the Polish szlachta, the sizable class of nobility that had been politically influential in the old Rzeczpospolita and the Grand Duchy of Poznań. However, after the 1830 November Uprising, they were gradually deprived of opportunities for political participation. As a result of this divide, population policies would become an increasingly important part of the debates on the Ostbahn.

Given the geographic makeup of Prussia—a territory resembling a stretched-out rag rug—the representatives of the Prussian United Diet of 1847 regarded railroads as necessary to “concentrate the provinces and to bring them closer together” to “weaken the force of attraction of neighboring countries.”²⁶ This “attraction” alluded to the 1830 November Uprising in the imperial Russian partition of Poland-Lithuania and a failed Polish insurgency in 1846, one that Prussian police managed to contain after arresting its leaders.²⁷ The situation was exacerbated during and after the 1848 March Revolution and the related uprising in the province of Poznań.²⁸ As a result, the Grand Duchy of Poznań lost the remainder of its unique status and was transformed into a Prussian province like any other.²⁹ Politically, this resulted in a growing alienation between the German- and the Polish-speaking groups, with parallel economic and political structures emerging side by side.³⁰ These simultaneous developments of both modern German and modern Polish national movements were part of a transnational process of nation building that historians have observed in Europe and globally.³¹

These developments left their mark on the discussions concerning the course and financing of the Ostbahn, thus revealing an ethnonational turn. In 1849, during the decisive debate on the state-sponsored construction of the line in the newly elected Prussian parliament, a critical argument was its potential benefit in connection with population policies. The representatives stressed the importance of the Ostbahn and other railroads for “connecting and merging the populations” of the eastern provinces with the rest of the country.³² Here, the internal threat of Polish separatism prevailed over economic arguments. Openly anti-Polish statements made in the context of the Ostbahn support these findings. In 1853, four years before the completion of the line between Berlin and Königsberg, Eduard Knoblauch, a famous architect and the editor of the first German architectural journal, justified the cost-intensive construction of the Ostbahn as a necessary tool to tighten German control over the ethnically mixed regions. He referred to the alleged oppression of the German language in West Prussia as follows: “In the land of the Kashubians and Pomerelia, Polish is spoken consistently. Under Polish rule, the German language was exterminated by force, and they succeeded. Today, our civilization does not allow similar acts of violence—even if it would be convenient.”³³ With the railroad, Knoblauch hoped to recover and strengthen the Germanness of the region. Homogenizing the population in the different provinces can be seen as an essential part of the argument.

Cross-Border Trade: Predicting a Return to Normalcy

While population policies only gradually developed into a central factor, economic considerations were decisive from the very beginning. While the internal benefits for exchange between Prussia’s industrializing West and its agrarian East were obvious, external trade also took center stage early on. In 1842, the first memorandum concerning the Ostbahn asserted that a future extension to the imperial Russian border would be necessary to cope with the rising demands of east–west transportation.³⁴ This visionary argument was quite surprising since the reality at Prussia’s eastern border did not look very promising at the time, with occasional Prusso-Russian trade wars and an internal customs border between the Kingdom of Poland and the more eastern parts of the Russian Empire that was abolished only in 1851.³⁵ Because of crop failures, in 1848, the imperial Russian administration banned grain exports from the Kingdom of Poland altogether.³⁶ This took place during the Ostbahn discussions in the Prussian National Assembly of 1848.

Within the context of the newly erected trade barriers, the perspective of the railroad as a means to facilitate trade with the Russian Empire seemed bleak. One representative of the assembly even compared the border between Prussia and the Kingdom of Poland to the “Great Wall of China.”³⁷ However, in 1847 and 1848, the minister of trade highlighted the importance of future cross-border trade with the Kingdom of Poland, anticipating a lifting or easing of the trade blockade on the Prussian-Polish border.³⁸

As for the then Prussian cities of Danzig and Thorn, which had been part of the Rzeczpospolita just fifty years earlier, they hoped to mediate once again Poland’s grain trade with other parts of Europe. Despite the customs barriers, grain from the Kingdom of Poland remained an important trade good in Prussian cities. It was traditionally transported on the river and canal systems that froze in the wintertime. With this method of transportation, it took four to six weeks to get the grain from local merchants to the Danzig harbor; with a cross-border railroad, grain merchants would be able to quickly respond to rising grain prices in England by arranging rail transports from Poland, “the continent’s breadbasket.”³⁹

A Railroad Crossing Emerges

After completing the Ostbahn main line Berlin–Königsberg, the construction of its cross-border branch lines became an urgent matter. In 1857, Prussia and the Russian Empire agreed on two such links: first, a prolongation of the Ostbahn from Königsberg in the eastern direction to Eydtkuhnen on East Prussia’s border with the Russian Empire (see chap. 4) and, second, a prolongation of the line from Bromberg and Thorn in the southwestern direction to the Prussian border at Otłoczyn (Ottloczyn, Ottlotschin) and Aleksandrów. While the state-owned Ostbahn committed to building the link from Bromberg via Thorn to the border, private companies in the Russian Empire were supposed to build the branch lines from the border to the existing lines of the imperial railroad network.⁴⁰

In 1862, the Warsaw–Bromberg Railroad Company linked the Ostbahn to the Warsaw–Vienna Railway. As a result, this line would become of “immeasurable importance” for the European network, just as Herman Epstein, first chair of the Warsaw–Bromberg Railroad Company’s governing board, predicted at the third general assembly in 1861.⁴¹ The “European importance” of the link was engrained in the company’s formation. The joint-stock company was closely connected to the Warsaw–Vienna company, which Epstein also led. Epstein was a Warsaw banker of Jewish descent who advised the Polish government on economic questions and secured loans for both railroad companies from the Rothschild bank.⁴² However, because of the Panic of 1857, the first global economic crisis, the Warsaw–Bromberg Railroad Company encountered difficulties drawing enough capital to start construction. Attracted by a government-backed guaranteed dividend on the shares, the Belgian trading firm of the Riche Brothers took on construction. At the same time, investors joined from Prussia, Poland, Belgium, and elsewhere in Europe. The Borsig Works in Berlin delivered the first eighteen locomotives.⁴³

Aleksandrów emerged as the crucial railroad border station between Prussia and the Kingdom of Poland, with a rather insignificant counterpart on the Prussian side in Otłoczyn. Aleksandrów developed near an estate by the same name and in the vicinity of a small village owned by the noble family of Trojanowski.⁴⁴ In three stages between the early 1860s and the turn of the century, the privately owned Warsaw–Bromberg line built the tracks, an impressive station building, an engine shed, repair facilities, and lodging for its employees; opposite the station, the government erected several administrative buildings and storage facilities that served as customs control and a post office.⁴⁵ An analysis of the makeup of the station building proper shows the same social class divisions as in the Berlin case. While first- and second-class passengers and third- and fourth-class passengers shared one waiting room each, the building’s second floor provided four fully furnished luxurious rooms for “noble guests” (dostojni goście).⁴⁶ Robert Stodolny highlighted the absurdity of this expenditure. He counted just twelve visits of Russian tsars from 1862 to 1914, with merely one official state visit, when, in 1879, the Russian emperor met his German counterpart there.⁴⁷

Ever since, this developing complex of buildings has dominated the landscape in an otherwise rural region hitherto untouched by innovations in communication and transportation. In the previous chapter, we compared the development of Berlin’s Southeast to an urban frontier; along these lines, Aleksandrów and the border zone were part of a rural frontier. As in the case of Berlin-Stralau, railroad, mail, and government employees moved to this newly developing town, and so did merchants and workers needed for services related to the station. Several major shipping companies and seventeen currency exchange offices, owned mainly by Jewish inhabitants, moved there (1905).⁴⁸ In 1889, the town had 5,275 inhabitants with diverse backgrounds. According to the local administration, 4,000 Catholics (primarily Poles) lived alongside 900 Jews, 275 Orthodox Russians, and 100 Lutherans/Germans.⁴⁹ Consequently, the population of Aleksandrów is an excellent example of the complex ethnic situation in this border region. Here, before the late nineteenth century, ethnic identities were often blurred, and—to a certain extent—it was rather a regional identity and national indifference that defined people.⁵⁰ This situation is best described in Johannes Bobrowski’s Levin’s Mill, set on the Prussian side of the region. In the novel, the author depicts everyday life and conflicts between Polish and German speakers, both Christians and Jews, against the backdrop of the actions of Prussian and Russian state representatives.⁵¹

Cross-Border Economic Exchange—Formal and Informal⁵²

Despite the global economic crisis, there was some ground for optimism since the situation for cross-border trade was much better in the late 1850s than in the late 1840s, for several reasons. Not only had the tsar lifted the internal customs barrier between the Kingdom of Poland and the rest of the empire in 1851, but he also lifted the ban on the export of grain from the Kingdom of Poland. With the British market open for grain imports and the Sound Dues abolished in 1857, trade in the ports of Thorn, Bromberg, and Danzig flourished and even surpassed the importance it had during the eighteenth century in independent Poland-Lithuania. As a result, official trade across the border station in Aleksandrów prospered and would take off after the Russian-German trade treaty of 1894 (on trade in greater detail, see chap. 5).

While regular cross-border trade was an essential argument for the construction of the rail link in the first place, it soon turned out that informal trade was also fostered by this new means of transportation. The Bromberg-Thorn-Aleksandrów-Włocławek border region was especially prone to informal economic exchange. Here, the new border deliberately cut through the historical Polish region of Cuyavia and its traditional trade routes. Also, it divided numerous rural estates. To avoid hindering traditional local traffic and to better control it at the same time, the administrations in Prussia and the Kingdom of Poland agreed to introduce particular government documents for those living in the border region, a strip defined as two Prussian miles wide on either side of the border (approximately fourteen versts/kilometers). In the 1840s, local police and administrators began issuing unique legitimation cards valid for eight to fourteen days, facilitating local populations’ small border traffic; landowners with property on both sides of the border were granted cards good for one year.⁵³ Later, the zone was enlarged to three Prussian miles on either side.

Figure 2.2. Fragment of a confiscated legitimation card for small border traffic between Prussia and the Russian Empire, 1908. Courtesy of Central Archives of Historical Records Warsaw, AGAD, zespół 247, sygn. 857, 13.

As a result, traditional networks persisted despite the dismantlement of the Polish-Lithuanian state. Many inhabitants of the borderscape regularly crossed the border to stockpile goods that were less expensive on the other side. In Prussia, manufactured goods were far more affordable than in the Kingdom of Poland, where foodstuffs, for their part, were less expensive. One of the highly valued goods was meat. In the 1870s in the Kingdom of Poland, its price amounted to less than half of the cost in Prussia. Small-scale trade was vibrant and happened in a legal gray area where borderlanders crossed multiple times to sell goods to intermediaries across the border. When Prussia planned to limit this low-scale trade at the Aleksandrów border, inhabitants of the nearby Prussian border village of Otłoczyn successfully intervened with the authorities against this intrusion into their livelihood.⁵⁴

To avoid trouble with authorities, most inhabitants of the border region stuck to the customs-free amount when crossing the border, which in the case of meat was two kilograms.⁵⁵ However, others made illicit trade their primary source of income—a long-standing phenomenon at all borders. Decades after the First World War, eyewitness Maria Danilewicz Zielińska from Aleksandrów recalled that “one of the profitable income sources for the inhabitants of the Piaski suburb of Aleksandrów . . . was smuggling, being the house specialty (specialite[sic] de la maison).”⁵⁶

Traditionally, smugglers crossed the porous border on foot and were seldom captured since both the Prussian and the Russian border control lacked the technical means and the workforce to check every movement effectively. Also, the dismally underfinanced Russian border control was itself part of the trade networks. Prussian and western European goods could be found on a massive scale as far away as Warsaw. In 1860, one year before the completion of the cross-border rail, Warsaw’s French general consul reported on the smugglers’ success in getting Prussian goods into the Kingdom of Poland. Even when crossing the regular border, few people paid more than half the lawful tariffs, “with the help of the customs’ connivance”; it was sufficient to “bribe some poor Cossack officers” to get the goods in.⁵⁷

Railroads facilitated this contraband further. In September 1864, the French legation in Warsaw prepared a report for the French foreign minister concerning external trade in the Kingdom of Poland. According to this report, “the contraband in this country is flourishing so much, the officers’ venality is so strong, and the administration’s neglect is so big” that statistics concerning import and export were almost useless. The report referred to Warsaw’s most prominent trading firm, stating that more than one-quarter of all foreign goods entered the country illegally.⁵⁸

We can fully grasp this development by considering the railroad station’s border traffic. In 1867, the number of passengers at the station of Aleksandrów (at the time, there were fewer than 1,000 inhabitants but 73,873 passengers) almost equaled the number at the line’s Warsaw Station (250,000 inhabitants and 76,733 passengers).⁵⁹ These numbers reveal the scale of the vibrant low-level trade across the border. People primarily smuggled luxury goods such as tea, tobacco, garments, and fabrics into the Russian Empire on foot, boarded a train at the first railroad station, and traveled to Warsaw and other destinations.⁶⁰ For example, in 1910, the imperial Russian customs control in Aleksandrów detained an employee of the Warsaw–Bromberg line who had tried to traffic silk into the Russian Empire. As a result, he had to pay a fine and lost his employment.⁶¹ While most of these detainments were nonviolent, border patrol sometimes engaged in deadly fights with smuggler gangs.⁶² This repeatedly happened after 1898 when Russian border patrols were permitted to use their weapon when chasing smugglers.⁶³ As we have seen in the quotation from the chapter’s beginning, smuggling horses into Prussia was another lucrative business. This was especially true for the time of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, when the Russian Empire banned the hitherto flourishing (legal) export of horses. However, many people did not want to lose their income from the lucrative business. In 1905, smugglers paid the Russian border guards three rubles for every horse that successfully crossed the border into Prussia.⁶⁴

LIFELINE FOR POLISH INSURGENTS AND THE IMPERIAL MILITARY: THE WARSAW–BROMBERG LINE DURING THE JANUARY UPRISING⁶⁵

Strategic Railroads in the Russian Empire

In the mid-1830s, Habsburg engineer Franz Anton von Gerstner tried to convince the imperial Russian administration of the importance of railroads. He not only utilized economic arguments but also incorporated geostrategic ones. Pointing at the positive results the British had achieved when quelling a rebellion in Ireland through troops transported by rail, he stated that “if Petersburg, Moscow, and Grodno or Warsaw had been connected by rail, it would have been possible to subdue the Polish insurgents [of 1830–1831] in four weeks.”⁶⁶ However, the empire’s first significant railroad line between Warsaw and the Habsburg capital of Vienna (accomplished in 1848) initially saw little state influence beyond tacit government approval. It was by no means based on geostrategic or military considerations. Since a Warsaw banker raised the original capital across Europe in the late 1830s, the economic factor was most important.⁶⁷

While the subsequent construction of the railroad between St. Petersburg and Moscow (completed in 1851) was still based primarily on economic considerations, the Russian defeat in the Crimean War of 1856 made the administration fully grasp the strategic importance of railroads. Henceforth, the empire embarked on a more ambitious program of strategic railroad construction.⁶⁸ Initiated before the war but completed only in 1862, the railroad connection between the imperial capital of St. Petersburg and Warsaw was the first line with a geostrategic underpinning that would soon play out during the Polish January Uprising of 1863–1864.⁶⁹

The Entangled Borderscape during the Rising

Small-scale border trade and large-scale contraband unfolded in a time of growing antagonism between the Polish-speaking population and the respective state administrations. While significant violent uprisings did not materialize in the Prussian partition until after the First World War, they repeatedly occurred in the imperial Russian partition. Upon accessing the throne in 1855, the new tsar Alexander II initially introduced more conciliatory policies toward the Polish population.⁷⁰ However, by the early 1860s, it became clear that he was unwilling to grant further concessions or broader autonomy. Consequently, the number of Polish-nationalist underground organizations grew. The trigger for a widespread armed insurrection was the forced conscription of Polish men in the fall of 1862, eventually contributing to the outbreak of the Polish January Uprising on January 22, 1863.⁷¹ The border region and the bisecting railroad line had crucial significance during the insurgency.⁷²

The role of the Warsaw–Bromberg Railroad becomes clear when we describe it as a “large technological system” with many interrelated actors—human and nonhuman alike.⁷³ Even during the uprising, the management of the privately owned cross-border railroad represented the interests of shareholders from all over Europe; the company’s board had a Polish head and a Prussian deputy. Its stake was in the smooth operation of the whole system, which would thus maximize profits. Other actors were the company’s clients—or rather the travelers on the line. These could be long-distance travelers for business and tourism in first and second class; they could also be travelers in third and fourth class who were visiting relatives across the border, engaging in informal trade, or looking for professional opportunities; another group was made up of Prussian and imperial Russian military. Employees of the railroad company on different levels and of many ethnic backgrounds, most of whom were Polish speaking, arranged for the smooth operation of the railroad. State administration directly related to the cross-border railroad, such as border guards, customs officers, and railroad police, implemented customs and border regulations for their respective governments. Finally, there were activists of the Polish national movement, who operated in Prussia, the Russian and Habsburg Empires, and abroad. They traveled on the railroad network and could simultaneously be part of any other groups mentioned above. Looking at their interactions within this system and applying some considerations of the actor-network theory can help us perceive the railroad as an additional actor in its own right. Consequentially, the Warsaw–Bromberg Railroad line as an actor possessed a specific, if nonhuman, agency and interacted with the human actors on the system. It contributed thus both to the spreading of the January Uprising and to its ultimate defeat.

From the early stages of the uprising, the rail played an integral part in the adversaries’ strategies. Insurgents tried to get hold of the railroad; they partially managed to destroy vital sections and successfully robbed rail cash transports.⁷⁴ The destruction of communication networks, notably the telegraph posts at railroad stations, was part of the insurgent National Committee’s instructions. As a result, the international telegraph line at Aleksandrów frequently had to be repaired during the rising.⁷⁵ In a decree from June 21, 1863, the Provisional National Government ordered the closure of the St. Petersburg–Warsaw Railroad along with its branch line to the Prussian border. Railroad employees could not go to work, and insurgents interrupted telegraph lines and tracks. This was achieved with little difficulty as, for the most part, the railroad personnel consisted of ethnic Poles, who usually actively or passively supported the uprising.⁷⁶ In this way, the insurgents tried to hinder the imperial government from dispatching troops to the Kingdom of Poland. Tellingly, the insurgents’ decree did not call for the closure of the Warsaw–Bromberg Railroad. This line was needed to arrange for provisions, and railroad employees proved to be crucial in smuggling weapons into the country. This was due to the legitimation cards that enabled them to cross the border easily. Also, the long-standing low- and high-scale informal trade networks helped the insurgents’ cause. As a result, the checkpoint at Aleksandrów became the main route for smuggling weapons into the Kingdom of Poland.⁷⁷

Figure 2.3. Fights along the railroad lines in the Kingdom of Poland during the January Uprising of 1863–1864. Stanisław Łaniec, Partyzanci żelaznych dróg roku 1863. Kolejarze i drogi żelazne w powstaniu styczniowym (Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza, 1974), 216.

Courtesy of Wydawnictwo Książka i Wiedza.

In West Prussia and the province of Poznań, the secret Polish National Committee successfully raised a covert “national tax” in the months before the uprising, thereby enabling the insurgents to buy weapons abroad.⁷⁸ Polish railroad employees and Prussian-Polish customs officers at stations and on the rail supported these actions. They condoned the transportation of firearms and ammunition from France, Belgium, and several German states. Subsequently, Prussian-Polish and Prussian-Jewish trading houses in Danzig, Königsberg, and Thorn arranged for the import of weapons into the Kingdom of Poland. Despite Prussia’s official anti-Polish policies, the city of Thorn did not actively hinder the smuggling since both Polish- and German-speaking inhabitants alike made significant financial gains. Railroad employees organized weapons caches next to the border in Bromberg and Thorn. They organized delivery across the border by railroad and on foot, exploiting Polish-owned estates as secret hideouts. In Aleksandrów, most railroad and customs employees were loyal to the insurgents’ government, and they sealed up boxes containing arms and declared them as regular imported goods. Subsequently, they organized their transport to the insurgent units.⁷⁹ At the beginning, even parts of the (primarily ethnic Polish) railroad police were involved in the uprising, thus further facilitating the smuggling of weapons by rail.

However, the Prussian government banned the export of weapons early on in the insurgency, and Prussian officials began collaborating with Russian agencies to hunt down insurgents in their territory. In February 1863, Prussian police arrested several volunteers trying to cross into the imperial Russian partition to fight.⁸⁰ In March, Thorn railroad inspector Fabricius informed on Polish efforts to smuggle weapons across the border. As a result, the Prussian customs was increasingly successful in confiscating military supplies. Still, the insurgents’ secret service uncovered Fabricius, preventing further damage to their cause.⁸¹ Fearing that the Russian government might be ready to arrange some autonomy agreement with the insurgents, thus endangering Prussia’s hold over its own Polish subjects, Prussian minister-president and foreign minister Otto von Bismarck arranged the Alvensleben Convention in February 1863. Its stipulations allowed imperial Russian and Prussian troops to chase insurgents across their respective borders, as a transnational force working to quell the Polish irredentist movement.⁸² While the convention was supposed to be secret, the insurgents got hold of the plans when searching the diplomatic dispatches transported on the Warsaw–Bromberg line.⁸³

In May 1863, Russian authorities began to successfully spy on the Polish conspiracy on both sides of the border. At the same time, the Prussian police again uncovered important deliveries bound for the insurgency.⁸⁴ For example, two weapon smugglers were arrested on June 2 (14), 1863, during supervision at the railroad station of Włocławek, some forty kilometers southwest of the Prussian border.⁸⁵

In the following weeks, the railroad police chief for the Warsaw–Bromberg line repeatedly urged the Russian governor in Warsaw to reinforce the border station to effectively control the movement of people and goods.⁸⁶ In June and July 1863, the military uncovered a whole network of railroad employees on the line collaborating in transporting “war contraband” across the border, among them Aleksandrów senior engineer Hektor Mac Donald, repairman Ksawery Lontski, conductor Paweł Zbroiński, painter Adalbert Gostitski, Włocławek station cashier Julian Mechkovski, and Kowal stationmaster and cashier Rumkovski.⁸⁷ Despite imperial Russian spies and military actions, the network still remained partly intact and enabled Zbroiński to flee to Warsaw and Mac Donald to escape to Danzig.⁸⁸

At the same time, the tsar’s secret service uncovered the network’s connections across the border into West Prussia and the province of Poznań.⁸⁹ Owing to widespread support for the uprising in the Prussian partition, which manifested primarily in organizational support and volunteering for the insurgency, the Prussian police could hardly count on denunciations. As a result, while Prussian police arrested only a small number of the estimated six thousand Prussian-Polish participants and supporters, an even fewer number were ultimately convicted.⁹⁰ By the end of 1863, Prussian and Russian agencies successfully shut down the clandestine deliveries of supplies across the border. An important step toward achieving this goal was the replacement of ethnic Polish railroad employees with ethnic German and ethnic Russian ones.⁹¹

However, the cross-border rail link served for more than just the smuggling of supplies. Both parties in the conflict were especially interested in the railroad as a vital means of communication (telegraph) and troop transportation. For its part, the imperial Russian army focused on protecting the St. Petersburg–Warsaw and the Warsaw–Bromberg lines. Between January and February 1863, Russian authorities allocated 8,800 soldiers and 1,100 Cossacks to protect the railroads within the Kingdom of Poland. Since the Warsaw–Bromberg Railroad was especially prone to attacks and was the backbone for smuggling across the border, nearly two regular soldiers or Cossacks were stationed per kilometer.⁹² These soldiers were tasked with preventing the frequent acts of rail sabotage. During these acts, insurgents tried to hinder troops and reinforcement transports from eastern parts of the empire into the Kingdom of Poland. Consequently, soldiers accompanied regular trains while special locomotives were sent fifteen minutes in advance to check the track. Because of a lack of steam engines, the railroad line headquarters had to temporarily eliminate local trains and rely solely on express trains to ensure the connections between Poland and western Europe. In the first months of the conflict, all trains crossing the border left forty-five minutes early to enable passengers to catch connecting trains despite the time-consuming border control. Still, passengers frequently missed trains and had to stay overnight at the stations.⁹³

In February 1863, Russian army units embarked in Włocławek to reach the border town of Aleksandrów. Here, they fought against units of Ludwik Mierosławski, leader (dyktator) of the uprising, who later escaped to Paris. There were many cases of insurgents attacking and firing on the trains transporting imperial Russian troops, and sometimes they captured, looted, and disarmed whole trains. Defeated troops often made their way across the border to Prussia.⁹⁴ Since numerous insurgents were hiding in the woods next to the tracks, the army proceeded to cut down the trees on both sides. These clearings remained for decades, since even twenty years later, the German Baedeker guidebook to Russia mentioned them as a peculiarity observed by travelers along the route to Warsaw.⁹⁵

The Warsaw–Bromberg Railroad Company’s annual reports provide evidence of the line’s importance for imperial Russian troops. Almost half of all passengers during the first year of the January Uprising (143,847 out of 297,369) consisted of military personnel. In contrast, in 1865, the first year after the rising, only 32,397 of 218,751 passengers were soldiers.⁹⁶ The private owners of the Warsaw–Bromberg Railroad Company had quite an ambivalent stance toward the uprising. On the one hand, for economic reasons, they were generally interested in the smooth operation of the railroad—even if it was soldiers they were transporting. This was especially true for many Belgian and Prussian shareholders, such as Herrmann Muschwitz, a Prussian citizen and deputy head of the governing board.

On the other hand, a large group of Polish shareholders, including Herman Epstein, the head of the governing board, were sympathetic to the insurgents’ goals. Epstein’s son Mikołaj Stanisław participated in the rising and was later exiled to Siberia.⁹⁷ No wonder both Russian and Prussian government officials collaborated to diminish Polish influence in the company. Consequentially, taking advantage of Epstein’s business trip to Paris in the fall of 1863, Muschwitz and the government representatives on the board changed the company’s charter, thus enabling Muschwitz to take over. At the same time, ethnic Germans replaced numerous ethnic Polish railroad employees.⁹⁸ This measure ensured tighter control of the border link. Consequently, the insurgency gradually lost its grip on the railroad, and its administration finally lifted the state of emergency in the fall of 1863.⁹⁹ Subsequently, the Russian Empire and Prussia continued to focus on de-Polonizing the border zone, replacing Polish employees not only on the railroad but also in the railroad police, border control, and customs.

This conflict is the first example of a railroad being used as a tool to exercise imperial Russian power in newly acquired territories.¹⁰⁰ The outcome led to the emergence of a powerful camp of politicians advocating for building strategic railways in the Russian Empire.¹⁰¹ The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Chinese Eastern Railway are later examples of Russian railroad imperialism, or “Railpolitik,” as Keith Neilson and T. G. Otte have put it.¹⁰²

AFTER 1864: THE RAILROAD AS AN IMPERIAL TOOL AND INTERMEDIARY FOR THE POLISH-NATIONALIST CAUSE

Germanization Policies and the Ostbahn

After the uprising, Prussian policies toward its Polish-speaking inhabitants took on increasingly aggressive Germanizing forms, particularly after the founding of the German Reich in 1871. As a result, the government gradually abolished the remaining elements of cultural autonomy in the province of Poznań. It diminished the role of Polish as the language of administration and education. German policies toward the Polish inhabitants radicalized and gave way to radical German-nationalist anti-Polish policies by the turn of the century.¹⁰³ These policies went far beyond a “campaign of linguistic centralization,” linguistical subjugation, and cultural incorporation, as Eugen Weber and James C. Scott observed for France and its non-French-speaking “foreign provinces.”¹⁰⁴

Consequently, the German employees of the Ostbahn became a critical element in the government’s campaign to impose the so-called German character on the region. While Polish and German inhabitants alike had fought for the railroad to benefit both groups thirty years earlier, an ethnic divide had developed in the meantime. In 1872, the large number of ethnic German railroad officers at the railroad’s headquarters in Bromberg served as an essential argument for the municipality to keep the headquarters there.¹⁰⁵ As a result, when the German government’s plan to merge some of the railroad administrations was published, the Bromberg municipality sent a petition to the German emperor. It kindly requested that he instruct the minister of trade, commerce, and public works not to remove the headquarters from their town. Referring to almost one hundred years of Prussian rule over this former Polish town, the Bromberg citizens stressed the economic boom that their city had since experienced. According to the petition, investments in road, canal, and, most notably, rail infrastructure led to an increase in the number of inhabitants from a mere eight hundred in 1772 to twenty-eight thousand in 1872, with trade and industry flourishing. With the Ostbahn, a “great number of intelligent, able public officials” had settled down with their families, contributing to the city’s wealth by significantly strengthening the economy and “the German element.”¹⁰⁶ The municipal representatives feared the displacement of the direction because the numerous, active, and primarily German officials had been an “essential support for the German element.”¹⁰⁷ Ultimately, the petitioners at least partly prevailed. After the merger of the various Prussian railroad companies into the Royal Prussian State Railways in 1880, a regional headquarters was established in Bromberg.

While Bromberg was perceived as a German stronghold, for the Prussian Poles, nearby Thorn rose to the status of a Polish stronghold: from there, travelers had convenient railroad connections to European centers and the Kingdom of Poland. In addition, in 1866, after the influential Polish-language newspaper Nadwiślanin from Culm (Chełmno), some forty kilometers north of Thorn, ceased to appear, Polish activists established the Gazeta Toruńska (Thorn Gazette). Its journalists followed a nationalist stance equal to that of the Nadwiślanin and often got into costly trouble with Prussian censors. Other Polish institutions that capitalized on Thorn’s convenient location at a vital railroad junction were the Commercial Bank of Donimirski, Kalkstein, Łyskowski & Company (founded in 1866); and the first Polish Economic Parliament (Sejmik Gospodarski).¹⁰⁸

Russian Empire: De-Polonizing the Line

Although after 1871 most of the policies targeting Prussia’s Polish citizens openly intended to Germanize the ethnically mixed territories, the term Russification for the Kingdom of Poland is not without controversy. Imperial Russian political strategies to quell Polish dissent and irredentism in the Russian Empire differed from those in Prussia and the German Empire. After 1864, Russian gradually replaced Polish as the official language in administration and as the language of instruction in secondary (1869) and elementary schools (1885)—in line with the policies in the Prussian partition. Also, after 1874, the Kingdom of Poland was renamed the Warsaw Governorate-General or “Vistula Land” to eliminate all references to a Polish state. However, as Tomasz Kamusella has pointed out, these policies had little impact on the Polish-speaking peasant masses since most had very little or no formal education.¹⁰⁹ As a matter of fact, while imperial Russian policies after 1864 were directed against the Polish national movement, they oscillated between open Russification and more tolerant policies toward Polish culture.¹¹⁰ In his study of the Kingdom of Poland between 1864 and 1915, Malte Rolf argues that “Depolonization” is a more accurate term for the Russian imperial policies in its westernmost province. To support this stance, he points out that while Poles were increasingly rare in higher-level positions in the Kingdom of Poland’s imperial administration, non-Russians remained numerous.¹¹¹ One example is the Warsaw–Bromberg Railroad, where German-speaking subjects (and not ethnic Russians) often replaced Polish-speaking ones. This is part of a broader picture in which the Kingdom of Poland remained at the forefront of geostrategic considerations because of Russian fear of a recurring uprising. The kingdom had the highest density of military personnel in the empire, and railroads played an essential role in the military penetration of the country.¹¹² As Benjamin Schenk has demonstrated, after the January Uprising, high-level debates in the Russian Empire stressed strategic interests in connection with internal upheaval in its western borderlands.¹¹³

The Aleksandrów railroad station played an important part in the de-Polonizing actions of the imperial government. The repeated addition of buildings to the impressive complex did not come without a visual impact on travelers from abroad who entered the Russian Empire here. The representatives of the Russian government in the Warsaw–Bromberg Railroad Company had a say in the enlargement of the station building itself. They made sure that the adaptations to rising traffic in 1874 and 1905–1906 turned the station building into an increasingly representative complex in the French Renaissance Revival style, reminding travelers of a French sixteenth-century castle and of the power and splendor of the Russian Empire they had just entered.¹¹⁴

Tsar Alexander II elevated the importance of this western border outpost of the Russian Empire further when he traveled to Aleksandrów in August 1879 to meet with German emperor William I.¹¹⁵ The station building created a worthy background for the high-ranking meeting. As we have seen, it offered exclusive lodging for noble guests. During his stay, Alexander made sure to visit yet another symbol of Russian domination in the region: the Orthodox Alexander Nevski Church next to the station, inaugurated in 1877.¹¹⁶ Since the Orthodox population numbered only a few dozen, primarily Russian state employees of customs and border control, it is evident that the representative building served more than just religious purposes.

As Benjamin Schenk has pointed out, the numerous government-commissioned Nevski churches that emerged in the empire’s western territories at the time were strong “anti-Catholic and anti-Western symbol[s].”¹¹⁷ Alexander Nevski, the patron saint, remains a meaningful symbol of Russian military strength in the face of outside intruders since he was at the head of the Novgorod Republic’s army in the mythical Battle of the Ice of 1243, defeating the invading armies of the Livonian Order. Not without reason, in the 1870s and 1880s, the Russian government made sure to establish impressive Alexander Nevski churches not only in Aleksandrów but also in other crucial western border crossings, such as Verzhbolovo (1870), Grajewo (1878), Mława (1879), Słupca (1880), and Granica (1884).¹¹⁸ Since these buildings served only a small number of Russian government employees, they were rather “testimonials of the Russification policies, carved in stone.”¹¹⁹ In Aleksandrów, the number of Catholic and Jewish believers was significantly higher than that of the Orthodox ones. However, it was only at the turn of the century that these religious groups could set up their own houses of worship.¹²⁰

In the early twentieth century, the importance of railroad companies in implementing de-Polonizing policies in both the German and Russian Empires increased even further. Since the Ostbahn was state owned, Prussian authorities could easily replace noncomplying ethnically Polish employees with ethnic Germans. However, since the Warsaw–Bromberg Railroad line was privately owned and had shareholders in Belgium and other countries, the Russian Empire initially had fewer possibilities to influence the makeup of the employees. As a result, most employees on the lower and medium levels were Poles and, to a minor degree, Germans when the Russian government finally took control of the line in 1912.¹²¹ An important argument used by Russian-nationalist Duma representatives for this takeover was the ethnic makeup of the employees and workers, which presumably jeopardized the strategic value of the rail.

The imperial Russian government also pursued plans to adapt the track gauge to the standard Russian one; with this measure, it planned to slow down a potential military attack. Polish representatives took this measure to signify imperial Russian suspicion vis-à-vis their Polish subjects. Accordingly, the employees consistently fought against the substitution of ethnic Polish employees; they also complained when a new rule was introduced that made Russian the only language spoken among employees and with customers.¹²² These discussions took place not only in the imperial Duma but also in the flourishing Polish press. This came as a result of the 1905 Revolution when broader freedoms related to press and associations took some pressure off the confrontation between the imperial state and its Polish subjects.¹²³ Consequently, in 1912, unlike in the 1840s and 1850s, the strategic value of this cross-border railroad in both internal and external conflicts prevailed over its economic benefits.

The Warsaw–Bromberg Line: Crucial Intermediary of the Polish National Cause

As we have seen, the region around the towns of Bromberg, Thorn, Aleksandrów, and Włocławek developed into a borderscape with both formal and informal cross-border trade existing because of the border and the related railroad line. However, it was not only trade that flourished in this region. Local newspaper reports from both sides of the border are evidence of the vivid interaction between Polish speakers in Prussia/the German Empire and in the Russian Empire in many spheres. These interactions continued throughout the fifty years from the 1860s to the 1910s and were interrupted only by temporary restrictions such as tightened control of travelers and their luggage.¹²⁴ As a result, many borderlanders learned to live with the border as an integral part of their daily lives and managed to overcome its restrictions. It was pretty common for people to look for work on the other side of the border; job postings in Prussia often asked for language skills in both German and Polish and sometimes included Russian. In 1898, four daily local trains crossed the border in each direction, with about 250 passengers traveling into Prussia. For passport and legitimation cardholders, the only obstacle at that time was a twenty-minute inspection conducted by the border police at the Thorn Station.¹²⁵

With simplified local frontier traffic and appropriate railroad connections, inhabitants of Thorn often visited the famous nearby spa in Ciechocinek, within the Russian partition.¹²⁶ It had been a state-owned bath since the 1830s, and with the railroad connection of 1867, an increasing number of guests went to drink the waters there. In 1867, the only obstacle for travelers from Thorn to the spa was not the border but poor train connections; later, one-day visits on special Sunday excursion trains were popular among legitimation cardholders.¹²⁷ Similarly, inhabitants of the border region on the imperial Russian side traveled to Thorn, the closest city just across the border. In addition to convenient rail connections, there was also a steamboat link from Włocławek.¹²⁸ Polish institutions and Polish hotels, doctors, dentists, watchmakers, and jewelers from Thorn regularly advertised in the newspaper Dziennik Kujawski, published in Włocławek in the Kingdom of Poland, thus attesting to a permeable border.¹²⁹ In addition, these advertisements are evidence of the Polish “organic work” movement, which created structures to support the Polish-speaking population through ethnically exclusive economic support and private education. On the one hand, this led to stronger ties among the Poles across partition lines; on the other, though, it led to an ever-increasing cultural alienation from the respective states, their administrations, and their non-Polish populations.

As a result, while the imperial Russian army was able to crush the uprising through railroads, this very technology continued to play an essential role for the Polish national movement. The Warsaw–Bromberg link developed into an important, if nonhuman, actor in the nation-building process that would contribute to the refoundation of the Polish state. The rail significantly diminished travel times between the partitions of Poland-Lithuania and European capitals, thus knitting together Polish centers in the country with those abroad.

Travelers transported not only goods but also Polish newspapers, books, and illegal pamphlets—evidence of growing dissatisfaction in the Russian and Prussian partitions. This printed matter was often confiscated by railroad and border police and hidden in places such as false bottoms in suitcases.¹³⁰ A Prussian report from two months after the end of the uprising in June 1864, most probably written by the Prussian legation in Warsaw and then translated into Russian for the secret department of the Kingdom of Poland’s Head of Police (General-Politsmeister), mentioned the Polish media from abroad as the main reason for the continuous “evil mood” in Warsaw and the whole country. Shipping agents at the border in Aleksandrów would pass on newspapers, banned books, and other goods such as cigars, foreign lottery tickets, and playing cards to smugglers, who then crossed the border clandestinely. The report stressed the importance of post office and railroad agents during transport. At the contraband’s destination, bookstores, “young and old vagabonds,” “Jewish carriers,” and peddlers distributed the goods.”¹³¹ Further police documents refer to the secret supervision of some of Warsaw’s forty-two bookstores and the Polish journalists in the Warsaw underground, working for Polish newspapers abroad.¹³² As we have seen in the quotation at the beginning of the chapter, in 1868, a secret report to the Head of Police explicitly identified Polish media from abroad as the principal reason for the antigovernment atmosphere in Aleksandrów.¹³³

Since Habsburg Galicia enjoyed cultural autonomy, this territory was a “refuge for Polish border-crossers.”¹³⁴ Here, Polish political publications thrived and subsequently found their way across the border. In this sense, the railroad was crucial for developing a Polish counterpublic in Poland’s imperial Russian and Prussian partitions. Numerous Polish national organizations thrived, and publications circulated despite censorship and recurring crackdowns.¹³⁵

Modern communication technology like the railroad was the backbone for the continuity of the Rzeczpospolita “as a realm of communication,” overcoming political borders and outwitting the imperial Russian and Prussian censors.¹³⁶ In 1898, the Prussian Ministry of the Interior sent Police Director Eckard on an extended mission to check on the situation at the Prussian-Russian border. He complained about a lack of control by the Prussian border police. As a matter of fact, once people passed Prussian border control with their legitimation cards, nobody checked their whereabouts. Also, Eckard stressed the lack of suitable personnel to control “Polish agitation,” alluding to the contraband of Polish journals and books across the border.¹³⁷ This contraband existed even though imperial Russian police collaborated with customs officers and railroad police at the borders and frequently confiscated books with politically undesirable content.¹³⁸ However, as the establishment of the modern Polish state in 1918 has proved, these measures were unsuccessful in curtailing the Polish national movement.

CONCLUSION

The entangled borderscape at Aleksandrów created spaces of opportunities for illicit trade and Polish nationalism alike. Illicit trade involved both smugglers and state representatives; they all earned their livelihood by navigating border and customs regimes across the border, regardless of their ethnicity. However, in reaction to discriminating state policies and outright oppression, Polish nationalists created boundaries between themselves and rival German and Russian nationalists.

Looking at the line from the perspective of the actor-network theory, we can determine which actors would prevail: After taking over the line as a state-owned enterprise, the management and higher-level employees of the railroad joined forces with the imperial Russian state administration and its military with the common goal of de-Polonizing the region and quelling any irredentist movements. Equally, the Prussian authorities believed in the civilizing force of German-speaking railroad employees. However, these anti-Polish policies backfired. As Karl Deutsch has pointed out for the Irish as well as the Polish case, “more and more highly mobilized and disgruntled people [were] held at arm’s length from the politics and culture of their state, and they easily [became] alienated from the government, the state, and even the country to which they thus far had belonged.”¹³⁹ As a result, the Warsaw–Bromberg Railroad line was much more than just a tool of Russian and Prussian imperial policies. As an actor in its own right, it created a space of opportunities for the Polish national movement—a space neither the Prussian and Russian governments nor the railroad company initially intended. It is difficult to measure what part of the Polish-speaking population wholeheartedly supported the Polish national movement. Still, the evidence suggests that the Warsaw–Bromberg Railroad employees played an essential role in making indifferent borderlanders into Poles and Germans—in a manner similar to what Jeremy King has elaborated for the Czech-German case in Budweis (České Budějovice).¹⁴⁰

In the end, lower-level Polish employees, travelers, and activists of this movement successfully joined forces and, through the railroad, disseminated ideas in oral and written form back and forth across the partition border at Aleksandrów. Together, they countered the partition powers’ actions and served as a constructive force for the growing unity of the emerging modern, if increasingly ethnically defined, Polish nation.

NOTES

1.AGAD, zespół 238, sygn. 62, 145–147.

2.Morawski, Nie słuchajcie Alojzego Kotwy, 9.

3.I am grateful to the participants of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies’ 2021 panel “Smuggling in the East European Borderlands” for their valuable comments. Special thanks go to Lidia Zessin-Jurek and Andrew Demshuk.

4.For an overview, refer to Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation.

5.Paasi, “Border Theory,” 13.

6.Bartov and Weitz, “Introduction,” 7.

7.General Treaty, art. 22, 24–26, 28–29.

8.Jezierski, Handel zagraniczny Królestwa Polskiego, 17.

9.On the history of the modern passport system, refer to Fahrmeir, “Governments and Forgers.”

10.Paasi, “Border Theory,” 14.

11.Maier, “Transformations of Territoriality,” 46. For a comprehensive study of territorialization in east central Europe from the mid-nineteenth century to the First World War, refer to Marung, Middell, and Müller, “Multiple Territorialisierungsprozesse in Ostmitteleuropa”; Marung, Middell, and Müller, “Territorialisierung in Ostmitteleuropa bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg.”

12.Marung, Middell, and Müller, “Territorialisierung in Ostmitteleuropa bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg,” 92–94.

13.Newman, “Contemporary Research Agendas in Border Studies,” 37.

14.Bartov and Weitz, “Introduction,” 7.

15.Schlögel, In Space We Read Time, 108.

16.Leiserowitz, Sabbatleuchter und Kriegerverein, 136–137, 171. On border regions and “culturally hybrid landscapes” in east central Europe, refer to Hock, “Kulturelle Dimensionen der Transnationalen Verflechtungen,” 237–240.

17.McCook, Borders of Integration, 164.

18.Böhning, Die nationalpolnische Bewegung in Westpreußen, 47.

19.For a concise overview of imperial Russian policies in the Kingdom of Poland during this time, refer to Rolf, Imperial Russian Rule, 19–23. On the Prussian partition, refer to Wandycz, Germans, Poles, and Jews, 76–85. On the Grand Duchy of Poznań, refer to Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre deutsche Polenpolitik, 84–92.

20.On imperial Russian policies during and after the November Uprising until 1855, refer to Rolf, Imperial Russian Rule, 23–25.

21.Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre deutsche Polenpolitik, 99–103.

22.Wrzesiński, Sąsiad, czy wróg, 76–121.

23.List, “Deutschlands Eisenbahn in militärischer Beziehung,” 61; Mitchell, Great Train Race. On Friedrich List’s ideas on railroads as a unifying force for Europe, refer to Musekamp, “Friedrich List.”

24.Born, Die Entwicklung der Königlich Preußischen Ostbahn, 18.

25.Born, 17–18.

26.Bleich, Der Erste Vereinigte Landtag, 1439.

27.Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre deutsche Polenpolitik, 107–109; Wandycz, Lands of Partitioned Poland, 132–134.

28.Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre deutsche Polenpolitik, 110–112.

29.Broszat, 115.

30.Böhning, Die nationalpolnische Bewegung in Westpreußen, 115.

31.Hadler and Middell, “Transnationalisierung in Ostmitteleuropa,” 31.

32.“Stenographische Berichte . . . 20. Dezember 1849,” 1664.

33.Knoblauch, “Die Ostbahn und das Eisenbahnnetz in Deutschland,” 197.

34.N. N., “Die Verhandlungen der Vereinigten ständischen Ausschüsse,” 10.

35.Jezierski, Handel zagraniczny Królestwa Polskiego, 72.

36.Jezierski, 24.

37.“Stenographische Berichte . . . 11. Oktober 1848,” 805.

38.“Stenographische Berichte . . . 11. Oktober 1848,” 799, 801–803.

39.“Stenographische Berichte . . . 11. Oktober 1848,” 802, 805–806.

40.N. N., “No. 95: Die mit der Kaiserlich Russischen Regierung.”

41.Warschau-Bromberger Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft, Dritte ordentliche General-Versammlung, 4.

42.Guesnet, “Epstein Family.” For the context of the Epstein family’s economic rise, refer to Aust, Jewish Economic Elite, 180–181.

43.Koziarski, Sieć kolejowa Polski w latach 1842–1918, 109, 111; Salomon, Die Warschau-Wiener Eisenbahn, 39–40.

44.On the somewhat disputed genesis of the station’s and town’s name, refer to Stodolny, Od Aleksandrowa do Aleksandrowa Kujawskiego, 7–35.

45.Miernik, “Rozwój przestrzenny przygranicznej stacji i osady Aleksandrów,” 87–88. For greater detail on the development of the railroad buildings, refer to Stodolny, Od Aleksandrowa do Aleksandrowa Kujawskiego, 68–114. For general plans of the site in 1864 and 1874, refer to Erwiński, Krzemiński, and Trescher, Dawny Aleksandrów, inside covers, front and back.

46.For greater detail on its rooms and its noble visitors, refer to Stodolny, Od Aleksandrowa do Aleksandrowa Kujawskiego, 84–101.

47.Stodolny, 89–90.

48.Stodolny, 118–119.

49.Lech, “Motywy zakładania drukarń i księgarń w latach 1867–1905,” 208.

50.Zahra, “Imagined Noncommunities.”

51.Bobrowski, Levin’s Mill, 5–6.

52.For a detailed account of cross-border cooperation in this region on different levels, refer to Musekamp, “Schmuggler, Aufständische und Händler.”

53.Zglińska, “Od kordonu sanitarnego do granicy niemiecko-rosyjskiej,” 40.

54.Krzemiński, “W cieniu kordonu,” 179.

55.Molik, “Granica prusko-rosyjska w okresie zaborów w Wielkopolsce,” 28.

56.Danilewicz-Zielińska, Fado o moim życiu, 9.

57.CADMAE, cote 355CCC, vol. 3, 208–209.

58.CADMAE, cote 355CCC, vol. 3, 333–334.

59.Towarzystwo Drogi Żelaznej Warszawsko-Bydgoskiej, Dziesiąte zgromadzenie, annex III.

60.Refer to the reports of 1906–1909 in AGAD, zespół 247, sygn. 663.

61.Krzemiński, “W cieniu kordonu,” 177.

62.Krzemiński, 178.

63.Zglińska, “Od kordonu sanitarnego do granicy niemiecko-rosyjskiej,” 47.

64.AGAD, zespół 247, sygn. 369, 47.

65.For greater detail on this railroad line’s role in the uprising, refer to Stodolny, Od Aleksandrowa do Aleksandrowa Kujawskiego, 36–67; Łaniec, Partyzanci żelaznych dróg.

66.English translation in Pinter, Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas I, 137; quoted in Schenk, “Travel, Railroads, and Identity,” 138.

67.Salomon, Die Warschau-Wiener Eisenbahn, 23.

68.Heywood, “‘Most Catastrophic Question,’” 47.

69.Schenk, Russlands Fahrt in die Moderne, 48–50. On the importance of strategic arguments in the railroad’s construction, refer to Haywood, Russia Enters the Railway Age, 536–544.

70.Kieniewicz, Historia Polski, 237.

71.Kieniewicz, 241–242; Rolf, Imperial Russian Rule, 25–28.

72.Kieniewicz, Powstanie Styczniowe, 305, 392, 398.

73.On large technological systems, refer to Hughes, “Evolution of Large Technological Systems.”

74.AGAD, zespół 186, sygn. 30952, 104.

75.Stodolny, Od Aleksandrowa do Aleksandrowa Kujawskiego, 82.

76.Łaniec, Partyzanci żelaznych dróg, 55, 222–223, 226–229.

77.Another important crossing for weapon transports was at Eydtkuhnen/Verzhbolovo in East Prussia. Refer to Łaniec, 128–133.

78.Böhning, Die nationalpolnische Bewegung in Westpreußen, 167.

79.Łaniec, Partyzanci żelaznych dróg, 117–119, 122; Böhning, Die nationalpolnische Bewegung in Westpreußen, 168–169; “Kronika.” Nadwiślanin, June 30, 1865, 4. I would like to thank Anna Tissier for her support in researching this newspaper.

80.“Kronika.” Nadwiślanin, February 13, 1863, 4.

81.Stodolny, Od Aleksandrowa do Aleksandrowa Kujawskiego, 45–46.

82.Kieniewicz, Powstanie Styczniowe, 396–399; Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre deutsche Polenpolitik, 122–124.

83.Stodolny, Od Aleksandrowa do Aleksandrowa Kujawskiego, 56–58.

84.Böhning, Die nationalpolnische Bewegung in Westpreußen, 168–169; Łaniec, Partyzanci żelaznych dróg, 122–123.

85.AGAD, zespół. 239, sygn. 24, 1–4.

86.AGAD, zespół 239, sygn. 25, 1–2, 25.

87.AGAD, zespół 239, sygn. 25, 4–6. I usually transliterate the family names from the original Russian documents. In some cases, documents contain first names or the Polish version of the last names, which I then use in first order. Łaniec indicates names in Polish style and adds first names, missing in the Russian document mentioned above (Ksawery Łącki, Adalbert Gostycki, Julian Mieczkowski). See Łaniec, Partyzanci żelaznych dróg, 119.

88.AGAD, zespół 239, sygn. 25, 45; AGAD, zespół 239, sygn. 27, 7–10, 41.

89.Łaniec, Partyzanci żelaznych dróg, 123.

90.Serrier, Eine Grenzregion zwischen Deutschen und Polen, 49; Böhning, Die nationalpolnische Bewegung in Westpreußen, 170–174.

91.Stodolny, Od Aleksandrowa do Aleksandrowa Kujawskiego, 52–53.

92.AGAD, zespół 188, sygn. 29841, 39–40; Łaniec, Partyzanci żelaznych dróg, 168–169.

93.Łaniec, Partyzanci żelaznych dróg, 59.

94.Łaniec, Partyzanci żelaznych dróg, 180, 181. On Russian military action against units of Mierosławski in the region, refer also to Stodolny, Od Aleksandrowa do Aleksandrowa Kujawskiego, 58–59.

95.Baedeker, West- und Mittelrussland, 2.

96.Towarzystwo Drogi Żelaznej Warszawsko-Bydgoskiej, Dziesiąte zgromadzenie, 6.

97.Guesnet, “Epstein Family.”

98.Koziarski, Sieć kolejowa Polski w latach 1842–1918, 101. In 1869, under strong pressure from the imperial Russian government, the German-dominated board resigned, and a Russian-dominated board took control. See Łaniec, Partyzanci żelaznych dróg, 254–258.

99.Łaniec, Partyzanci żelaznych dróg, 60.

100.For examples of railroad imperialism in different parts of the world, refer to Davis and Wilburn, Railway Imperialism.

101.Schenk, “Travel, Railroads, and Identity Formation in the Russian Empire,” 140–141.

102.Marks, Road to Power; Urbansky, Kolonialer Wettstreit; Otte and Neilson, “‘Railpolitik.’”

103.Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre deutsche Polenpolitik, 129. On the “Polish question” in Germany after 1894, refer to Spät, Die “polnische Frage.”

104.Scott, Seeing Like a State, 72; Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen.

105.For a detailed analysis of the development of Polish and German identities and memory cultures in the Bromberg region, refer to Dyroff, Erinnerungskultur im deutsch-polnischen Kontaktbereich.

106.GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 93 E, Nr. 780, Bl. 79.

107.GStA PK, Bl. 82.

108.Böhning, Die nationalpolnische Bewegung in Westpreußen, 110, 139.

109.On language policies in the Kingdom of Poland, refer to Kamusella, “Germanization, Polonization, and Russification,” 825–830.

110.Rolf, “Russifizierung, Depolonisierung oder innerer Staatsaufbau?”

111.Rolf, Imperial Russian Rule, 43–46, 79–80.

112.Rolf, 273.

113.Schenk, Russlands Fahrt in die Moderne, 63–64.

114.Miernik, “Rozwój przestrzenny przygranicznej stacji i osady Aleksandrów,” 89. For views of the railroad station during different historical eras, refer to Erwiński, Krzemiński, and Trescher, Dawny Aleksandrów.

115.On the meeting of the two emperors in detail, refer to Stodolny, Zjazd cesarzy.

116.Sokoł and Sosna, Cerkwie w centralnej Polsce, 30.

117.Schenk, Aleksandr Nevskij, 212.

118.The latter four churches are described in Sokoł and Sosna, Cerkwie w centralnej Polsce.

119.Schenk, Aleksandr Nevskij, 212.

120.Erwiński, Krzemiński, and Trescher, Dawny Aleksandrów, 24.

121.On the imperial administration’s difficulties replacing ethnic Poles with ethnic Russians, refer to Rolf, Imperial Russian Rule, 31–36.

122.Salomon, Die Warschau-Wiener Eisenbahn, 95; “Polacy na kolejach skarbowych.” Dziennik Kujawski, 7 (January 10, 1912), 1; “Po skupie kolei Warsz.-Wied.” 24 (January 30, 1912): 3–4; “Brak ludzi.” 83 (April 13, 1912): 1.

123.Rolf, “Continuum of Crisis?”

124.The most infamous measure was the expulsion of more than twenty-five thousand Prussian residents between 1885 and 1887; they were citizens of the Russian and Habsburg Empires and were mostly Polish speakers (rugi pruskie). Refer to Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre deutsche Polenpolitik, 146–148; Zglińska, “Od kordonu sanitarnego do granicy niemiecko-rosyjskiej,” 43–44.

125.GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 1145, Nr. 122, Bl. 12–13.

126.Przegiętka, “Historia kolei Aleksandrów Kujawski—Ciechocinek.”

127.Zglińska, “Od kordonu sanitarnego do granicy niemiecko-rosyjskiej,” 64–65; “Kronika.” Dziennik Kujawski 114 (May 22, 1912): 3.

128.“Kronika,” 3.

129.Among others, refer to “Ogłoszenia.” Dziennik Kujawski 131 (June 12, 1912): 4.

130.For 1902–1903, refer to AGAD, zespół 248, sygn. 664, 10–13, 16–30, 31–33, 42–51 (with a complete list of books confiscated).

131.AGAD, zespół 238, sygn. 61, 1–7.

132.AGAD, 23–27, 118–121.

133.AGAD, zespół 238, sygn. 62, 144–147.

134.Rolf, Imperial Russian Rule, 93.

135.Rolf, 93–94.

136.Rolf, 94.

137.GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 1145, Nr. 122, Bl. 18–19, 32.

138.AGAD, zespół 248, sygn. 664, 59–64, 96–102.

139.Deutsch, Nationalism and Its Alternatives, 27.

140.King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans.