Before dawn on 17 April 1794, Polish troops and armed townspeople rose against the Russian garrison of Warsaw. The rising came three weeks into the Kościuszko Uprising and less than two weeks after the victory at Racławice. After fighting through the streets for two days, the insurgents drove the Russians out, and the Russian commander, Ambassador Iosif Igelström, fled the city. Among the leaders was Jan Kiliński, a master shoemaker and city councillor. Nobody knows exactly how many died.
A capital under occupation
After the war with Russia in 1792 and the Second Partition of Poland in 1793, Russian and Prussian troops were stationed on Polish soil. On 24 March 1794 Tadeusz Kościuszko swore an act of national uprising in Kraków, directed chiefly against Russia and Prussia, and on 4 April his army, including peasants armed with war scythes, won at Racławice. The news raised tension in Warsaw, where a conspiracy of soldiers and craftsmen was already at work.1
The Russian commander in Poland was Iosif Igelström, who was also the ambassador in Warsaw. The Institute of National Remembrance names his decision to cut the Polish army by half as the direct cause of the rising. According to the Polish Press Agency account published by dzieje.pl, he also planned to use the Holy Saturday services to surround the main churches, arrest suspected conspirators, seize the Arsenal and disarm the Polish garrison. Leszek Marek Krześniak of the Polish Kościuszko Foundation describes the same fear: word spread that the Russians meant to take the weapons stored in the Arsenal and to trap people in the churches. The conspirators decided to strike first.2
Two days of street fighting
Krześniak says the first clash came early on 17 April near the Iron Gate, where Polish horsemen overran a Russian post and took its two guns. A cannon shot from the Arsenal, which the Russians had failed to take, and the ringing of church bells then spread the rising across the city.3
Kiliński led the craftsmen in the Old Town, ambushing Russian soldiers as they came out of their quarters, and the Institute of National Remembrance says he led the townspeople's assault on Igelström's residence. The heaviest fighting was around Miodowa Street, where the Russian embassy stood, and on Krakowskie Przedmieście. The fighting went on through the night and into 18 April. According to Krześniak, Igelström then asked for a truce and slipped away to Powązki, where Prussian troops were camped, and the Russian units left behind on Miodowa Street were overrun. By the end of 18 April the capital was free.4
The cost
No exact count of the dead exists. Krześniak, speaking to the Polish Press Agency, put the toll at about 2,000 Russians killed and about 2,000 taken prisoner, and about 1,000 Poles killed and 1,000 wounded. Other historians give different totals, and the figures should be read as estimates.5
The shoemaker who became a hero
Jan Kiliński was born in 1760 in Wielkopolska and moved to Warsaw in 1780, where he became a master shoemaker and, in 1792, a city councillor. Once the fighting was over he was the only representative of the Warsaw craftsmen on the Provisional Temporary Council that took over the city. dzieje.pl describes him as one of the first Polish national heroes who did not come from the nobility, and the Institute of National Remembrance calls him a symbol of the townspeople's part in the uprising. His monument stands on Krasiński Square near the Arsenal, where some of the fighting took place.6
What followed
Warsaw became the uprising's stronghold. Britannica calls Kościuszko's defense of the city against Prussian and Russian armies, which besieged it for about two months that summer, his greatest military success. The uprising still failed: Kościuszko was wounded and captured at Maciejowice in October, and the Third Partition ended the Polish state. His life and campaigns are told in our biography of Tadeusz Kościuszko, and the battle that set Warsaw alight in our article on Racławice.7
The dates here are in the Gregorian calendar, which Poland used. Russia still kept the Julian calendar, which in the eighteenth century ran eleven days behind, so Russian documents of the time give earlier dates.
Also on this day
- 1975: Fall of Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, the Khmer Republic's capital, effectively ending the Cambodian Civil War.
