page_title: Polish minority in Russia
section_title: Tsarist Russia until 1917
hierarchical_section_title: Polish minority in Russia / History / Tsarist Russia until 1917
context_page_description: There are currently 73,000 Polish nationals living in the Russian Federation. This includes autochthonous Poles as well as those forcibly deported during and after World War II; the total number of Poles in what was the former Soviet Union is estimated at up to 3 million.
context_section_description: After the change in Russian penal law in 1847, exile and penal labor (katorga) became common penalties to the participants of national uprisings within the Russian Empire. This led to increasing number of Poles being sent to Siberia for katorga, they were known as Sybiraks. Some of them remained there, forming a Polish minority in Siberia. Most of them came from the participants and supporters of the 19th century November Uprising and January Uprising, the participants of the 1905-1907 unrest to the hundreds of thousands of people deported in the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939.
  Originally, 148 Polish exiles were stationed in the Orenburg province, but by the beginning of June 1864, 278 people had been sent to the Orenburg governate to take up residence under the supervision of the police, and by mid-1865, 506 people. In addition, 831 people were identified for establishment on the state lands of the Orenburg and Chelyabinsk districts, of which 754 people were allocated to Ufa.
  There were about 20,000 Poles living in Siberia around the 1860s. An unsuccessful uprising of Polish political exiles in Siberia broke out in 1866.
  In the late 19th century there was also a limited number of Polish voluntary settlers, attracted by the economic development of the region. Polish migrants and exiles, many of whom were forbidden to move away from the region even after finishing serving their sentence, formed a vibrant Polish minority there. Hundreds of Poles took part in the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Notable Polish scholars studied in Siberia, among them Aleksander Czekanowski, Jan Czerski, Benedykt Dybowski, Wiktor Godlewski, Sergiusz Jastrzebski, Edward Piekarski, Bronisław Piłsudski, Wacław Sieroszewski, Mikołaj Witkowski and others.
caption: Christmas Eve in Siberia by Jacek Malczewski (1892)
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