Poland too was a battleground, particularly after the Polish uprising of 1863, when Alexander II intensified the Russification of the empire’s western provinces, areas where the Polish landowners remained strongly nationalist. Russian was made compulsory in schools and public offices. Polish students at Warsaw University had to suffer the indignity of studying their national literature in Russian translation. There were even signs forbidding the use of Polish in railway stations, restaurants and shops.
The assassination of the tsar led to more repressive policies. Now, more than ever, certain nationalities (Poles, Armenians, Jews) were branded as disloyal, identified with the revolutionary movement and subjected to further language bans and prohibitions that became ever more absurd. In Stalin’s church school in Gori, which he began attending at the age of nine, in 1888, the boys were forced to speak in Russian at all times and were beaten by their masters when they lapsed into Georgian. During the 1907 cholera epidemic in the Kiev area, doctors were forbidden to publish warnings not to drink the water in Ukrainian. But the peasants could not read the Russian signs, and many died as a result.
Of all the empire’s national minorities, the Jews suffered most. They were at the bottom of the empire’s racial hierarchy. Since their incorporation into Russia during the partitions of Poland, the Jews had been subjected to a comprehensive range of legal disabilities and discriminations which by the end of the nineteenth century embraced some 1,400 different statutes and regulations. They were forbidden to own land, to hold civil service posts or to serve as officers in the army; there were strict quotas on Jewish admissions into higher schools and universities; and they were forced by law to live within the empire’s fifteen western provinces, which made up the Pale of Settlement.