Kazan Conspiracy of 1863

an attempt to incite a soldiers’ and peasants’ uprising in the Volga Region in the spring of 1863, undertaken on the basis of an agreement between the leaders of the uprising in Poland and Lithuania and members of the Land and Liberty group. The advocates of immediate revolutionary action—Polish revolutionaries, the Committee of Russian Officers in Poland, and some members of the Moscow Land and Liberty group—expected to attract peasants to the uprising by using the authority of the tsarist regime. In March 1863 a false tsarist manifesto and the proclamation “The Provisional People’s Government” were drawn up, calling for an immediate uprising and for the creation of local organs of revolutionary power that would transfer land to the peasants and implement other revolutionary demands.

In March 1863, M. A. Czerniak discussed with the Kazan members of the Land and Liberty organization a plan for capturing Kazan to make it the center of the uprising, but the majority of the Kazan revolutionaries did not support him. The conspiracy was carried out against the wishes of the Central and Kazan committees of the Land and Liberty organization, which considered the time inopportune for organizing an uprising. The activities of the participants of the Kazan conspiracy were halted by numerous arrests. The engineer H. W. Kieniewicz and the officers N. K. Iwanitcki, A. Mroczek, R. I. Stankiewicz, and Czerniak were executed, and members of the Kazan Land and Liberty group were subjected to repression.