About the book: 2020 / In 1815, the Congress of Vienna decided the fate of the lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for the next century. A significant part of them became part of Russia - first as the Kingdom of Poland, endowed with a constitution and self-government, then as the Vistula region, deprived of any autonomy. Twice these lands were shaken by great uprisings, and then by the revolution of 1905. From a testing ground for liberal reforms, they turned into a source of constant concern for St. Petersburg, an object of subordination and Russification. The author shows how the Russian bureaucracy and the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Poland simultaneously conflicted and found areas of peaceful interaction, which was especially clearly manifested in the modernization of the urban environment; how the confrontation with the “Polish question” changed the attitude of the imperial core to the rest of the peripheral regions and how the image of the “rebellious Poles” affected the formation of the Russian national identity; how the Polish provinces, even after an attempt at Russification, remained a “foreign land” for St. Petersburg, not subject to complete cultural transformation. Malte Rolf – professor at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg (Germany), specialist in the history of Central and Eastern Europe.