Russian Donations in the Territories of the Congress Kingdom of Poland Considerations Based on the Polish Struggles for Independence in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Abstract

The paper deals with the confiscation of estates, conducted by the tsar authorities, following the November and January Uprisings in the Polish territories. The confiscated goods were then given to Russian officials and officers or was owned by State Treasury. The main line of reasoning in the paper seeks to prove that such actions were illegal. In the beginning of the 20^th century there were Polish thinkers who wrote about their illegality. A particular intensive campaign to recover the confiscated estates was launched during the First World War. The paper focuses above all on the activity of Henryk Wierciński who spared no effort to make the Austrian occupation authorities (the Austro-Hungarian occupation started in the Lublin region in 1915) change the legal relations with regard to the ownership of donations illegally granted to the Russians.