What was the Warsaw Insurrection of 1794?
The Warsaw Insurrection was the rising of 17 and 18 April 1794, in Holy Week, in which the Polish garrison of Warsaw and armed townspeople attacked the Russian troops of the ambassador and commander Otto Heinrich Igelström. The shoemaker and city councilor Jan Kiliński led the townspeople. After two days of street fighting Igelström escaped with part of his troops, and the capital joined Tadeusz Kościuszko's uprising.5
Two weeks after the scythemen took the Russian guns at Racławice, the capital rose too. The rising was won by soldiers of a shrunken Polish garrison fighting beside craftsmen, apprentices, servants and shop boys. The wider story is told in the Battle of Racławice and in our life of Tadeusz Kościuszko.6
A capital under Russian control
After the lost war of 1792 in defense of the Constitution of 3 May, Russia and Prussia took a large part of the Commonwealth in the Second Partition of 1793. In Warsaw real power lay with the Russian envoy, General Otto Heinrich Igelström, known to the Poles as Osip, who was at the same time ambassador and commander in chief of the Russian troops in what was left of the country.7
The historian Vadzim Anipiarkou, who studied Igelström's letters, shows that he had been governor-general in Pskov before Catherine II sent him to the Commonwealth, that he arrived in Warsaw on 20 January 1793, and that his main task was military: to bring as much of the Polish-Lithuanian army as possible under Russian command.8
The Grodno Sejm, the last of the Commonwealth, approved the partition in 1793 under open Russian pressure. Russian troops were quartered in the city, and the economy was in collapse. Warsaw banks went bankrupt, the house of the banker Piotr Tepper among the first, and work and money grew scarce in the capital.9
The spark was the reduction of the Polish army: on 21 February 1794 the Permanent Council approved the cuts under pressure from Igelström. On 12 March General Antoni Madaliński refused to disband his cavalry brigade and marched toward Kraków. On 24 March Kościuszko swore the oath of the uprising on Kraków's Main Square, and on 4 April he beat the Russians at Racławice.10
King Stanisław August, who had joined the pro-Russian Targowica Confederation in 1792, gave way to Igelström once more. In early April he issued a proclamation condemning the rising in Kraków and branding Kościuszko a rebel.11
The plot and the rumor
A conspiracy had grown in Warsaw since the end of 1793. It drew in officers and soldiers of the garrison as well as townspeople, with a strong group of craftsmen led by guild masters. One of them was Jan Kiliński, born in 1760 in Greater Poland, a master shoemaker and city councilor. His house stood on Szeroki Dunaj Street, near the Old Town Market Square.12
Kiliński won over the guild elders, master craftsmen and journeymen to the idea that the townspeople could free the city themselves, without waiting for Kościuszko's army.13
When news of Racławice reached the city, the Russians knew a rising was being prepared. Igelström planned to strike first in Holy Week: troops would surround the churches during the Holy Saturday services, take the Arsenal and disarm what was left of the Polish garrison. Word of the plan leaked, and the conspirators decided to move before him.14
The historian Vadzim Anipiarkou, working from Igelström's correspondence, notes that Catherine II's last rescript to him, dated 16 April, was a veiled order to take his troops out of the capital. It came too late.15
The forces in the city
On paper the Russians were far stronger. A detailed list of the Russian garrison published in Warsaw in 1794 gave 7,948 men, 1,041 horses and 34 guns. The Museum of Polish History and Polskie Radio give about 7,500. Zofia Strzyżewska gives 5,000, and Monica Gardner 9,000.16
The Polish garrison counted about 3,000 to 3,500 men, and many of them were in the plot. How many townspeople fought is unknown. Kazimierz Bartoszewicz, writing in 1909, thought 3,000 the highest possible figure, against witnesses who spoke of 1,500 to 2,000.17
17 April: the city rises
17 April, Maundy Thursday. In the small hours Polish troops in the barracks got ready to march. Before dawn the first shots rang out at the Iron Gate (Żelazna Brama), where a Russian post was overrun, and a cannon shot from the Arsenal gave the signal to the whole city.18
The Arsenal was opened and its muskets handed out to the people. Armed crowds made for Miodowa Street, where Igelström's headquarters stood. The fighting around his residence went on all day.19
The sources name the building differently. The Museum of Polish History calls it the Morsztyn palace, while Bartoszewicz describes it as the former Załuski palace, its front on Miodowa Street and its back on Podwale.20
Kiliński led the townspeople fighting in the Old Town and the attack on Igelström's residence.21
On the Royal Route the Działyński Regiment, one of the Polish garrison's regiments, marched from its barracks toward the castle and broke a Russian force near the Church of the Holy Cross. The Russian commander there, General Miłaszewicz, was wounded and taken prisoner.22
Fighting also went on around the Arsenal and in the streets of the Old Town.23
The Saxon Square and the night
The Russians tried to send help to Igelström from the south of the city. A strong column formed at the Jerusalem tollgate and came up toward the Saxon Palace, and its way was barred at first only by armed townspeople with a single gun. They fired from the gate and the courtyard, then from the neighboring Brühl palace, while part of the Russian column broke off to loot. The column never reached Igelström and turned back.24
By evening General Stanisław Mokronowski, a veteran of Zieleńce, had been made commandant of the city and Ignacy Zakrzewski president of Warsaw. Monica Gardner quotes a later manifesto in which Kościuszko singled out the two for the nation's gratitude.25
The fighting did not stop at night. Johann Gottfried Seume, a German poet serving as Igelström's secretary, saw the street battle and was taken prisoner. He left an account of the noise of guns, bells and drums through the night, later published as Einige Nachrichten über die Vorfälle in Polen.26
18 April: Igelström escapes
18 April, Good Friday. Surrounded, Igelström gave up the fight for the city and got out with part of his men, through the streets toward Żoliborz. Bartoszewicz writes that he had asked for talks, slipped away during the pause in the firing and went to a Prussian detachment camped at Powązki.27
By Bartoszewicz's account the Russians left in the embassy held out until about 5 p.m., when it was stormed. He counts about 38 hours of fighting from the first shots to the fall of the embassy, and he records that the secret papers of the Russian envoys were found there.28
In Anipiarkou's judgment Igelström escaped captivity but lost real influence over events.29
Losses and consequences
The list published in 1794 counted 2,265 Russians killed, and the head of the Polish Kosciuszko Foundation, Leszek Krześniak, speaks of more than 2,000. The number of prisoners differs from count to count: Kościuszko's report spoke of 1,400, and the 1794 list of 161 officers, 1,445 men and 320 servants and other civilians. Bartoszewicz puts the Polish losses at 800 to 900 killed and wounded, and Tadeusz Korzon, as he quotes him, at 900 to 1,000.30
19 April. Warsaw formally joined Kościuszko's uprising, and a Provisional Deputation Council (Rada Zastępcza Tymczasowa) took over the city. Kiliński sat on it. On Easter Sunday a Te Deum was sung in the cathedral, with the king present. Within days the city authorities called on the inhabitants to help fortify the city.31
A few days later Wilno rose too and drove out its Russian garrison, taking General Arseniev prisoner. Teaching materials of the Polish state teacher-training center describe the Warsaw rising as the largest Russian defeat of the uprising.32
Leszek Krześniak stresses how rarely civilians have played so large a part in a war: craftsmen under a shoemaker, together with the troops left in the city, beat a Russian garrison and forced it out of the capital.33
The success did not last. In the summer Warsaw held out through a two-month siege by the Prussians and Russians. On 10 October Kościuszko was beaten and captured at Maciejowice, and after the storming of Praga on 4 November the capital capitulated. The fighting on the approaches is told in the Battle of Kobyłka.34
Jan Kiliński in memory
Kiliński became a colonel and raised a regiment of townspeople, and he fought in the defense of Warsaw in the summer. After the uprising he was imprisoned twice by the Russians. He died in Warsaw in 1819.35
He became the symbol of the townspeople's part in the uprising, and the history portal dzieje.pl counts him among the first Polish national heroes from outside the nobility.36
His own memoirs need care. Bartoszewicz, who used them, warned that Kiliński inflated numbers, writing for example of 24,000 Russian soldiers in the city, and that his second memoir could hardly be trusted.37
In 1936 a statue of Kiliński with a raised saber was put up on Krasiński Square, near the Arsenal. In 1942 the German occupiers took it down, in reprisal, the IPN notes, for the removal of a German plaque from the Copernicus monument, and it survived the war in the National Museum. After the war it was set up on Podwale, near the site of his house in the Old Town.38
