Polish Uprising Participants (1863-1864) in the Russian Officers and Officials' Perception

The subject of this study is the analysis of the perception and assessment by Russian officers and government officials of cases of Polish soldiers serving in the imperial army going over to the side of the insurgents during the Polish Uprising of 1863–1864. This problem is considered through the prism of an internal, psychological and ethical dilemma, which was recorded in the memoirs of contemporaries: this is a conflict between professional military duty and a deep national-patriotic feeling, the so-called "sense of a good Pole", among Polish soldiers and officers. Thus, the work is intended to reveal how the Russian officer corps, which itself was a direct participant in this military conflict, interpreted the motives, circumstances and consequences of this difficult moral choice, which called into question the bonds of military solidarity and loyalty to the state. The methodology is based on the historical and anthropological approach and critical analysis of personal documents – memoirs and diaries of Russian officers and officials who participated in the suppression of the uprising or served in the Kingdom of Poland. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the view of the problem of loyalty of the Polish military through the prism of the subjective, personal perception of their defection to the side of the rebels by their Russian comrades-in-arms. This allows us to identify a complex range of feelings among Russian officers: from condemnation of betrayal to understanding and sympathy for the prisoners. The main conclusion of the study is that their attitude to the defectors was contradictory and ambiguous. They condemned the fact of treason, but often understood its reasons. At the same time, Russian officers also write about those Poles in the Russian army who continued to serve and participated in the suppression of the uprising, and at the same time note the particular cruelty in their actions against their fellow tribesmen. Based on the sources studied, the authors of the study conclude that, in the perception of contemporaries, the conflict had the clearly pronounced character of an interethnic war, where professional solidarity gave way to national identity.