Congress Poland Polish Kongresówka [
k?ngr?'sufka], officially and formally
Kingdom of Poland (
Polish Królestwo Polskie [
kru'l?stf? 'p?lsk??],
Russian ??????? ???????? Tsarstvo Polskoye Russian pronunciation ['tsarst?? 'pol?sk?je]) and informally known as
Russian Poland was a constitutional
personal union of the
Russian Empire created in 1815 by the
Congress of Vienna, replaced by the
Central Powers in 1915 with the
Kingdom of Poland. Though officially Congress Poland was to begin its statehood with considerable official political autonomy the
Tsars generally disregarded any restrictions on their power and severely curtailed autonomous powers following uprisings in
1830-31 and
1863 turning it first into a
puppet state of the Russian Empire and later dividing it into provinces.
[1][2] Thus from the start the Polish autonomy remained nothing more than fiction
[3].
The territory of Congress Poland roughly corresponds to the Lublin, Lódz, Masovia and Swietokrzyskie voivodeships of Poland.
Although the official name of the state was the Kingdom of Poland, in practice this was not used. Instead, in order to distinguish it from other Kingdoms of Poland, it was then and is usually now referred to as Congress Poland. Throughout the 19th century, the term Congress Poland continued to be used in relation to these territories, although the political entity they were connected with no longer existed.
Originally, the kingdom had an area of roughly 128,500 km2 and a population of approximately 3.3 million. The new state would be one of the smallest Polish states ever, smaller than the preceding Duchy of Warsaw and much smaller than the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (which had a population of 10 million and an area of 1 million km2.[6] Its population reached 6.1 million by 1870 and 10 million by 1900. Most of the ethnic Poles in the Russian Empire lived in the Congress Kingdom, although some areas outside it also contained Polish majority.
