Vistula Land
Vistula Land, also known as Vistula Krai, was the name applied to the lands of Congress Poland from 1867, following the defeats of the November Uprising and January Uprising as it was increasingly stripped of autonomy and incorporated into Imperial Russia. It also continued to be formally known as the Kingdom of Poland until the fall of the Russian Empire.
Russia lost control of the region in 1915, during the course of the First World War. Following the 1917 October Revolution, it was officially ceded to the Central Powers under the terms of the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
History
In 1831, in the aftermath of the November Uprising, the Polish Army, the parliament and local self-administration were disbanded. The Constitution of the Kingdom of Poland was repealed and replaced by the much less liberal and never fully implemented Organic Statute of the Kingdom of Poland. Universities were closed and later replaced by Russian-language high schools.For a short time, the territory maintained a certain degree of autonomy. The former Kingdom of Poland continued to use the Polish currency and the Administrative Council retained some of its privileges. However, the territory's separate status was gradually eroded. The Russian ruble became the legal tender in 1841 and the customs border was abolished in 1851. The metric system and the Polish penal code were also abolished. The Catholic Church was persecuted and most monasteries were closed and nationalized. In 1875, following the rules of the Synod of Polotsk of 1839, the Eparchy of Chełm-Belz of the Catholic Ruthenian Uniate Church disbanded itself and united with the Russian Orthodox Church.
After 1837, all voivodeships that constituted the Kingdom of Poland were turned into governorates and became an integral part of the Russian administrative division, ruled directly by the Russian tsars.
After the January Uprising in 1863, the former coat of arms of the Congress Kingdom was abolished. The Polish language was banned from office and education, and the process of incorporating the Polish gubernias and the Russification of its administration was completed.
The 1867 reform, initiated after the failure of the January Uprising, was designed to tie the Kingdom of Poland more tightly to the administration structure of the Russian Empire. It divided larger governorates into smaller ones and introduced a new lower-level entity, gminas. There were 10 governorates: five on the right bank of the Vistula River—Suwałki, Łomża, Płock, Siedlce, and Lublin—and the remaining five on the left bank: Kalisz, Warsaw, Piotrków, Radom, and Kielce.
Despite the abolition of the Kingdom of Poland, the tsars of Russia retained the title "Tsar of Poland".
The territory was a namestnichestvo until 1875 and later a Governorate-General, ruled by the Namestniks and Governors-General of Poland.
In the 1880s, the official language was changed to Russian, and Polish was banned both from official use and education.
The name Vistula Land first appeared in official documents in 1888 although more recent scholarship traced it back to 1883.
A minor reform of 1893 transferred some territory from the Płock and Łomża Governorates to Warsaw Governorate. A more extensive 1912 reform created a new governorate—Chełm Governorate —from parts of the Siedlce and Lublin Governorates. However this was split off from the Privislinsky Krai and made part of the Southwestern Krai of the Russian Empire, in order to facilitate its russification.
World War I
The First World War initially expanded Russian control of Poland after the Imperial Russian Army scored a series of early victories against Austria-Hungary on the Eastern Front and occupied Eastern Galicia. Within a year the Austro-Hungarian Army and the Imperial German Army reoccupied the territory and counterattacked into Russian Poland in the Gorlice–Tarnów offensive. During the Imperial Russian Army's subsequent Great Retreat, it looted and abandoned the Kingdom of Poland, trying to emulate the scorched-earth policy adopted during the 1812 invasion. The Russians also evicted and deported hundreds of thousands of the area's inhabitants whom they suspected of collaborating with the enemy.As the Russians retreated, the Central Powers occupied the area ; subsequently, they proposed the establishment of the Kingdom of Poland. In the March 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Russia, effectively ceded all Polish territories it had formerly possessed to the German Empire and Austria-Hungary.