„A Bullet Is Better than Such a Life!” A Polish Uprising on Lake Baikal in 1866

Książka sfinansowana w ramach zadania: Upowszechnienie w języku angielskim monografii Eugeniusza Niebelskiego „Lepsza nam kula niźli takie życie!” Polskie powstanie nad Bajkałem w 1866 roku – zadanie finansowane w ramach umowy nr 781/P-DUN/2019 ze środków Ministra Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego przeznaczonych na działalność upowszechniającą naukę.

I believed that I would be able to supplement the new edition of this book with some important materials that I found a while ago at the Irkutsk archive. Unfortunately, I was denied access to them but I decided to publish the book nonetheless, driven by both the need to introduce content-related changes and additions, and to disseminate this tragic 19th-century tale about Polish exiles.

Two previous editions have already been distributed (the first one was handed out as support material for a scholarly session on the Baikal uprising, held at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin in 2016). The current edition, with a modified layout, contains all the texts from the first edition but with some amendments added to the main descriptive text. It has a foreword written by Professor Wiktoria Śliwowska on the 150th anniversary of the events but my ending remains unchanged.

The presented edition is the first one in English. We have created it in the hope that this tragic yet vivid history of the Polish uprising near Lake Baikal in 1866—initiated by the Poles deported into the depths of the Russian Empire for their earlier involvement in the January Uprising of 1863—will attract the attention of historians and readers living outside Poland.

Eugeniusz Niebelski