Where Is Poland? | Poles in Syberia

Chapter 4

Research in Exile

Much of Siberia was terra incognita, waiting to be discovered. Check out which Polish deportees managed to become explorers of the vast Siberian territories and scholars of unknown languages and peoples.

Aleksander Czekanowski, xylograph by A. Regulski & F. Tegazzo, 1877. Source: Polona

Aleksander Czekanowski, Irkutsk region

Aleksander Czekanowski was born in 1833 in Kremenets (present-day Ukraine). He studied in Kiev (medicine) and Dorpat (geology), before returning to Kiev to work as paleontologist at the university’s museum. In 1863, arrested for his underground activity, he was exiled to 6 years in Siberia, in the Transbaikalia region. Already on his way to he collected specimens of insects, for which he used a magnifying glass made from a carafe.

After forced resettlement to the vicinity of Bratsk on the Angara River, he lived in poverty for several years. In spite of the harsh climate and hard labour, he did not give up his scientific activity. He studied the geology of region known as 'Angaraland', making meteorological observations with devices of his own design.

He took part in and later led several expeditions, surveying and mapping the geology of Eastern Siberia. In 1873-1875, he led three such expeditions through the valleys of the Lower Tunguska, Olenyok and Lena Rivers – in total they travelled over 25,000 kilometres. The maps he made filled in many of the ‘blank spots’ in Siberia and for a long time remained the only cartographic material on Central Siberia.

He was released from exile in 1875, and in 1876 took up the post of custodian at the Mineralogical Museum of the Academy of Sciences in Petersburg. In 1876 he was allowed to make a short trip to his family home in Kremenets. Shortly upon his return to Petersburg he died in unexplained circumstances.

Portrait of Benedykt Dybowski, ca 1910. Source: Polona.pl

Benedykt Dybowski, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky

Born in the Minsk region and educated in Minsk, Tartu, Breslau, and Berlin, Dybowski found himself in Siberia in 1865 following the January Uprising, when his initial death sentence was instead commuted to 12 years of katorga (hard labour) in Siberia. Dybowski, by then an accomplished and respected scholarly expert on ichthyology, took the opportunity to engage in pioneering research of the fauna and flora of Lake Baikal, which at the time had been studied only very sparsely. Together with another exile, Wiktor Godlewski, he built instruments and started exploring the underwater life in temperatures that often reached -40 degrees Celsius. Dybowski discovered over 100 new species of crustacean. From Lake Baikal he then moved eastward, exploring Eastern Siberia (where he discovered a new species of sika deer) and ultimately Kamchatka, where he set up hospitals for lepers and helped fight epidemic diseases. In 1883 he returned to his homeland and started teaching at the University of Lwów. Dybowski died in in 1930. Shortly after his death, a glacial formation in Greenland was named after him.

Bronisław Piłsudski with Ainu children, 1892 - 1896. Source: Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences

Bronisław Piłsudski, Kirovskoye, Sakhalin Island

The elder brother of Józef Piłsudski, one of the fathers of Polish independence. While studying law at university, he fell in with Russian revolutionaries (Lenin's elder brother among them) and with them began organising an assassination attempt against the Tsar. When the conspiracy was exposed, Piłsudski was initially sentenced to death, but then exiled to Sakhalin island for 15 years. Thanks to his education, he eventually managed to avoid backbreaking labour in a logging camp. Among other things, he ran a meteorological station and wrote a paper on climate observations. Thanks to Lev Sternberg, a Russian researcher and also an exile, he became interested in ethnography. He was the first to study the Ainu people.

Piłsudski was one of the pioneers of ethnographic field recording – he recorded songs and rituals of the Ainu on Edison's wax cylinders (the precursor to the vinyl record). He also left behind substantial photographic documentation. He drew up dictionaries of the languages of the Sakhalin natives. The Ainu people had no writing system, so it is thanks to these records that knowledge about their folklore was preserved. The Japanese writer Shimei Futabatei called Piłsudski 'an oddball who was so kind-hearted and innocent like a child that he would always insist in a very excited tone that he needed to do something to help the Ainu, that it was his destiny to do so, despite the fact that he was always a complete broke'.

Jan Czerski, explorer of Baikal and the Sayan Mountains

Jan Czerski was born in 1845 in the Vitebsk region. He went to school in Vilnius but was arrested and conscripted into the Russian Army before he could finish school. He was sentenced to exile in Blagoveshchensk near the Amur River, but never made it there – ending up stationed in Omsk instead.

In 1871 he received permission to move to Irkutsk, where he met other Polish exiles-turned-scholars, Aleksander Czekanowski and Benedykt Dybowski. With their help he was able to join the Russian Geographical Society and started exploring the region.

Czerski explored the Sayan Mountains – one of the largest mountain ranges in Asian Russia – as well as the Baikal region, and the valley of the lower Selenga (later he also explored the New Siberian Islands). He published a study on Lake Baikal, explaining the origins of the lake and describing the geological structure of East Siberia. He is the author of the first geological map of the eastern coast, for which he was awarded a gold medal by the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In 1883 he was pardoned by the Russian government, and later regained his noble status, but continued to live in Irkutsk until 1886, when he moved to St. Petersburg. He spent the next 5 years working at the Academy of Sciences where he pursued his interest in palaeontology. He collected and catalogued over 2,500 ancient bones, publishing a large work on Quaternary Period mammals, followed by an even larger work on Siberian mammal fossils in 1891.

In his honour, the name Czerski (Chersky) was given to numerous Siberian landmarks, including two mountain ranges ‒ which interestingly are thousands of kilometres away from one another. One Chersky Range is in Zabaikalsky Krai, a southern Siberian region bordering on China and Mongolia. The other Chersky Range is situated in the remote Northern Sakha Republic between the Yana and Digirka rivers – the region where Czerski also died on an expedition in 1892.

Jan Stróżecki in Kolymsk, 1896 - 1904. Source: Masovian Digital Library

Jan Stróżecki, Srednekolymsk, Yakutia

Rebellion was simply in Stróżecki's blood. He was born into a family with a three-generation history of fighting for independence. He was one of the founders of the Polish Socialist Party, an editor of socialist magazines, and an expert on printing illegal publications, but photography was his greatest passion. Paradoxically, he achieved his most in this field during his banishment to Siberia. In nine years of exile, he created a rich photographic archive, documenting the everyday life of the exiles, the fauna and flora of Siberia, and the ethnography of the natives. He took part in scientific expeditions and used a phonograph sent from Moscow to record the sounds, songs, and rituals of the local population for ethnographic purposes.

After returning to the Polish lands he took part in the ill-fated Russian Revolution of 1905. Fearing further repression he emigrated to France, where he ran a photographic studio and continued his social activity, which included setting up the People's University for Polish emigrant workers.

Wacław Sieroszewski, mug shot made by the Okhrana security police, before 1910. Source: National Digital Archives

Wacław Sieroszewski, Namtsy, Yakutia

As a 20-year-old he became involved with the socialist movement and ended up in the Warsaw Citadel. However, he did not stay there for long – he was exiled to Siberia for issuing an illegal prison newspaper and participating in a riot, during which he attacked a tsarist general. In 1880, he was sent to Verkhoyansk, where he married a Yakut, Arina Chelba-Kysa, who then helped him and his fellow prisoners in two escape attempts. Caught and judged as the leader of the fugitives, he was sentenced to perpetual settlement 'one hundred versts from any trade route, river, or city'. Living among autochthonous peoples resulted in his fundamental work, Dwanaście lat w kraju Jakutów [Twelve Years in the Land of the Yakuts]. Friendship with a Yakutian shaman enabled Sieroszewski to describe their belief system in close detail. He received a gold medal from the Imperial Geographical Society for his work. Thanks to the efforts of influential scientists he managed to get permission to return to his country, but due to his political involvement the rhythm of his life was determined by prison sentences and deportations. In 1903-1904, he led a research expedition to the Japanese island of Hokkaido. He published many scientific and popular works dealing with the culture of Far Eastern countries.

Employees of the Museum of Ethnography and Anthropology in St. Petersburg, 1914. First on the right Edward Piekarski Source: Wikicommons

Edward Piekarski

Born in 1858 into a Polish family near Minsk, Piekarski was 23 years old (1881) when he was exiled to Yakutia for revolutionary and nationalist activities. He spent the next 24 years there. To kill the time – and to avoid going crazy – he began to learn the Yakutian language. He noted his observations, terms, phrases, sayings, proverbs '...with ink made from willow-bark brew... on scraps of newspapers and packaging'. In 1894-1896, he participated in the expedition of the Russian Geographical Society (called 'Sibiryakov's expedition') which collected materials on the demography, anthropology, language, folklore, and beliefs of the Yakuts. In 1905, he was allowed to move to St. Petersburg – but still did not give up his research.

'Even if I get permission to return to the homeland, I cannot leave my work, to which I have devoted thirteen years of the best period of my life' – he wrote from Russia to his father.

Piekarski's greatest achievement was his Dictionary of the Yakut Language (in 1907-1930 he published a total of 13 volumes). This dictionary was at the same time a unique encyclopaedia of Yakutian folk culture, and it still remains an invaluable source of knowledge. He died in 1934 in Leningrad.