Poles between Germany and Russia. Imperial Policy and Inter-Imperial Interaction in the Polish Question in 1898—1905

German policy concerning the Polish national minority has rarely been the subject of research done by Russian historians. This gap is intended to be filled by this article, which is a continuation of the work published in issue No. 3 of the journal New and Contemporary History (2025), where the same issues were examined using materials from an earlier period. The chronological framework was not chosen by chance: in 1897/1898 Germany declared its transition to “world politics”, in 1905—1906, because of the revolution, the course towards the Poles in Russia changed, which also influenced the situation in the Prussian provinces of Poznan and West Prussia. In the last years of the Chancellorship of H. Hohenlohe and under Chancellor B. Bülow, the authorities returned to the harsh Germanization course practiced under O. von Bismarck and softened in 1890—1894. This course had previously affected primarily two areas of significance for the Poles: agriculture, where the fund for supporting the German colonization of the Polish provinces was increased twice during this period; and education, which was related to the switch from the Law of God being taught in schools to German. This measure provoked active resistance from the Poles, the most striking episode of which was the Wresen school boycott of 1901—1902. The indictments of the participants in the riots in Września triggered a broad anti-government campaign, which involved various political forces both in Germany and abroad. After the start of the revolution, the Russian authorities, together with the German authorities, took a number of steps to prevent mass unrest in the lands adjacent to Germany, populated by Poles. The democratization of the Polish course as a result of the revolution in Russia led to an exacerbation of the Polish question in Prussia, whose authorities refused at this stage to correct the Germanization measures, despite their obvious ineffectiveness. The sources for writing the article were mainly diplomatic documents from the collections of the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire, introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, as well as transcripts of meetings of the Reichstag and the Chamber of Deputies of the Prussian Landtag, as well as materials from the German press

Boycott · German · Politics · Central European national history · European Law and Migration · Polish Historical and Cultural Studies