Nicholas II's order on Poland

On 25 December 1916 (12 December according to the Julian calendar) Tsar Nicholas II, as commander-in-chief, issued an order to the army and navy. It was his response to the German peace offer of 12 December. The Tsar recalled that Germany had attacked Russia and France in time of peace, and argued that now, sensing their strength waning, the Germans were suddenly proposing negotiations. The hour of peace had not yet struck: the enemy had not been driven out of the lands he had occupied, and Russia had not achieved the aims that the war had set before it. Among them the Tsar named the acquisition of Constantinople and the Straits and the creation of a free Poland from all three of her now separated parts. Translations of this sentence differ slightly. The French ambassador Maurice Paléologue, who had known about the order in preparation from the foreign minister, Nikolai Pokrovsky, since 16 December, recorded it as “the restoration of a free Poland composed of her three parts”.

The order was another Russian response to the Act of 5 November, in which Germany and Austria-Hungary had announced the creation of a Kingdom of Poland from the part of the Russian partition they occupied. The Russian government had then protested in a note, and on 2 December the new prime minister, Alexander Trepov, declared in the Duma that Russia’s aim was the re-creation of a free Poland within its ethnographic borders, “in indissoluble union with Russia”. Now the same words about a free Poland, united from all the partitions, came from the Tsar himself. Since the start of the war Russia had avoided unequivocal commitments. When in the summer of 1916 the minister Sergei Sazonov argued for proclaiming autonomy for the Kingdom, he lost his post.

Polish politicians linked with Russia, grouped in the Polish National Committee, had been seeking such a gesture for months. As early as August 1916 Count Zygmunt Wielopolski (PL) had handed the Tsar a memorandum asking for a manifesto confirming the unification of the Polish lands and the restoration of the Kingdom of Poland in union with Russia. The order, however, was laconic. It said nothing about independence, nor about the system of government of the future Poland, nor about what its relationship with Russia was to be, although after the government’s earlier statements there could be little doubt that what was meant was a Poland under the Tsar’s sceptre. Wielopolski later tried to obtain from the Tsar an explanation of how this passage should be understood. Meanwhile, in occupied Warsaw, the occupiers were already setting up the Provisional Council of State, and both sides in the war were outbidding each other with promises to the Poles. Paléologue praised the noble tone of the conclusion, but doubted the wisdom of mentioning Constantinople, since Romania’s defeat had deprived Russia of any chance of taking it.

Tsarist Russia had no time to go further. Less than three months later the February Revolution overthrew Nicholas II. On 30 March 1917 (17 March according to the Julian calendar) the Provisional Government of Prince Georgy Lvov issued an appeal to the Poles, in which it undertook to help create an independent Polish state from all the lands in which Poles formed a majority, linked to Russia by a free military alliance. Only then did Russia recognise Poland’s right to independence.