Polish Exiles in Kurgan. The Case of the Society for Mutual Assistance

Abstract

After the defeat of the January Uprising, a hundred dozen of young Poles, mainly from the area of Lithuania, were exiled to Kurgan. The city authorities were not able to provide support for so many people. Most of the exiles did not receive government benefits. Only those who received money from their families were in a good position. In this situation, the Poles founded a “society against hunger and cold”, which later assumed the name of the Society for Mutual Assistance. The main purpose was to collect cash to help those who did not receive any financial help from home. The Society for Mutual Assistance had its own regulations, which forbade, among others, drinking alcohol, playing cards, indulging in any gambling, maintaining relationships with promiscuous women and most importantly marrying Russian women. The activities of the Society for Mutual Assistance were treated with indulgence by Mikhail Avenirovich Karpinski, the Mayor of Kurgan, who came to conclusion that the deportees engaged in their own organization would abide by the adopted regulations and thus there would be no misunderstandings between the Poles and the residents of Kurgan. It seems that the 27-year-old Michał Żaba, a graduate of the Medical Department of the Moscow State University, could have influenced M. Avenirovich Karpinski’s opinion. Inhabitants of Kurgan began to submit denunciations, at first of M. Avenirovich Karpinski’s indulgent treatment of Poles, and then levelling similar accusations at the governor of Tobol, Aleksandr Ivanovich Despot-Zenovich. In the end, the case was handed over to the general-governor of West Siberia Aleksandr Petrovich Khrushchev, and so an investigation began in 1867. Among the exiles, Michał Żaba suffered the most as he was not only found guilty of establishing the Society for Mutual Assistance, but also accused of making attempts to establish such organizations in Ishim, or Yalutorovsk. In other words, Żaba was accused of conspiring against the existing order in Russia. In the 1960s, Soviet historians treated the issue of the Kurgan investigation as an example of Polish-Russian revolutionary cooperation in Siberia. It seems, however, that the establishment of the Society for Mutual Assistance Society should be regarded as an attempt to revive the societies that were created by Polish exiles in Siberia in the period between the November and January Uprisings.