The Innocents Are Guilty Too: Investigating and Remembering the 'Vilna Drama' of 1840-41

• In Event: Polonophobia and the Russian State (1837-1867): Conspiracy, Misrepresentation, and Memory

Abstract

In May 1840, the local police apprehended a group of students from the Vilna/Vilnius Medical and Surgical Academy who attempted to illegally cross the Russo-Prussian border. After a special commission was established to investigate the incident, this minor violation escalated into a part of the vast master conspiracy allegedly unfolding throughout the Russian Empire’s “western borderlands.” However, an internal discord within the commission, coupled with dissatisfaction in St. Petersburg, led to a complex intra-bureaucratic conflict wherein the interests of the governor-general, the gendarmes, and the tsar’s plenipotentiaries clashed. This presentation will examine the competing interpretations of the Vilna affair in both government documents and the later memoirs of tsarist officials, revealing how security decision-making in the imperial peripheries was shaped by the widespread Polonophobic sentiment, conspiratorial meta-narratives, and institutional affiliations.

Author

• Yasyn Abdullaev, UC Berkeley