“Today's telegram: in Warsaw there's a sort of St. Bartholomew's night going on. Russians have been treacherously butchered in their beds. The Jesuits are not slumbering.” That was not only the way the Slavophile poet Prince Vladimir Odoevskii reacted to news that an uprising had erupted in Poland. Most of Russia's “enlightened society” responded in that way, too. The outbreak of the rising sent a wave of confusion and alarm through the top echelons of Russian society, mixed with anger at news fanned by the official propaganda of thousands of Russian soldiers alledgedly murdered in their sleep.

The progress of the uprising as it spread out further and further afield despite constant setbacks suffered by the insurgents and desperate efforts by the Russian military and police to stop it, and finally the developments of the spring of 1863, when the fire of rebellion crossed the River Bug, gave the Russian upper classes many moments of panic. Coupled with the threat of diplomatic intervention by foreign powers and the prospect of yet another war, it all led to an atmosphere of hysterical dread that made Russians see that unequal battle – one of Europe's mightiest armies pitted against a general call to arms of youths recruited from the ranks of the Polish intelligentsia, gentry, and craftsmen – in terms of a fight to the death that could determine the fate of the whole Empire.

Tsarina Maria Alexandrovna bade farewell to General Mikhail Murav'ev General Murav'ev as he set off for Lithuania to mercilessly put down the Polish uprising, with a yearnful sigh, “If only we could hold on at least to Lithuania…” Murav'ev, whose deeds earned him the nickname Veshatel’, “Hangman,” had himself observed that “holding the Kingdom [of Poland] was completely out of the question; that's what the mood was even of the regnant persons at the time.