From Revolution to Nation: Popular Unrest in Russian Poland 1907-1918

Russian Poland was among the most militant tsarist borderlands during the 1905-1907 Revolution. Harboring long-lasting strikes and breeding bellicose street fighters, Poland witnessed an unprecedented political upheaval manifest in the emergence of mass parties, labor unions and a new public culture. However, only a decade later, when revolutionary movements again loomed large and shook the whole region, Poland remained relatively calm. What were the processes responsible for the withering-away of social-revolutionary tendencies, or asking the question other way around, how did the process of popular nationalization go on during the inter-revolutionary decade? In order to address this question Wiktor Marzec analyzed an extensive database documenting contentious events in Russian Poland between 1907 and 1917 so as to offer a broader outlook of dispersed and variegated popular unrest, where both class and nation as communities of reference were forged out of the general grievances such as the lack of dignity and economic deprivation.

Wiktor Marzec is an assistant professor and project leader at the Robert Zajonc Institute for Social Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland. He holds a Ph.D in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Central European University, Budapest (2017). Marzec is the author of Rising Subjects. The 1905 Revolution and the Origins of Modern Polish Politics (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) and co-author of From Cotton and Smoke. Łódź – Industrial City and Discourses of Asynchronous Modernity, 1897–1994 (Lodz University Press, Jagiellonian University Press 2018), as well as several articles on the labor history and history of concepts of Russian Poland. His current research focuses on the process of state building in the borderlands of late imperial Russia.