Nestor Troubetzkoy

Nestor Troubetzkoy (also known under his Polish and Belarusian names of Nestor Trubecki, Nestor Trubiacki, or Nestor Kalinowski by his mother; ca 1840 Kraków – 1907 Warsaw) was a revolutionary, anarchist, Prince. Nestor Troubetzkoy was born in Kraków as the son of Prince Grigory Troubetzkoy (freemason) and a Polish szlachta woman M. Kalinowska. They met in Saint Petersburg; after that M. Kalinowska moved to Kraków and Nestor was born in the Free City of Kraków. The Congress of Vienna (1815) restored the partition of Poland, but gave Kraków its independence, as the Free City of Kraków. The city again became the focus of the struggle for national sovereignty in 1846, during the Kraków Uprising. The uprising failed to spread outside the city to other Polish-inhabited lands, and was put down, resulting in Kraków's annexation by Austrian Empire.

After graduating from school in Kraków in 1857 Troubetzkoy went to Vienna, where he started studying at the University of Vienna and got involved in several Polish students' conspiracies and secret cultural societies. After exmatriculation in 1859 Troubetzkoy returned to the area of Kraków, where he continued to act as a revolutionary. In his literary work, Troubetzkoy underlined the need to liberate all peoples of the former Republic of the Two Nations from Imperial Russia's occupation and to conserve and promote the Ruthenian Catholic Church, the Belarusian Greek Catholic Church and Ruthenian language. He also promoted the idea of activisation of peasants for the cause of national liberation, the idea that was until then dominated by the gentry. He also referred to the good traditions of democracy, tolerance and freedom of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as opposed to national oppression of cultures dominated by Russia. After the outbreak of January Uprising he was involved in the secret Prowincjonalny Litewski Komitet w Wilnie. However, after initial successes against the Russian armies, the Russians moved a 120,000 men strong army to the area and the revolutionaries started to lose most of the skirmishes.

After the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, Austria granted autonomy to Galicia, making Polish the official language and establishing the provincial diet. After the Ausgleich of 1867, Galicia found itself in Cisleithania - the Austrian part of Austria-Hungary. As this form of Austrian rule was more benevolent than that exercised by Russia and Prussia, Kraków became a Polish national symbol and a center of culture and art. Troubetzkoy was a member of the Międzynarodowa Socjalno-Rewolucyjna Partia Proletariat and the Polska Partia Socjalno-Rewolucyjna Proletariat. He also helped publishing Proletariat, one of the first clandestine newspapers in Polish. Troubetzkoy was a correspondent of anarchist press from 1901 on, under the different names, e.g. in Freiheit, Neues Leben, Der Anarchist, Der Freie Arbeiter; a contributor of the Polish anarcho-syndicalist monthly Wolny Swiat in 1904; for a while active in Bohemia where he contributed for Der Generalstreik. In 1905 Troubetzkoy went to revolutionary Warsaw, Congress Poland (Russian Revolution of 1905). He was imprisoned in Warsaw. Troubetzkoy fled arrest in April 1906 and went to Switzerland, Zürich, where he became a contributor of Der Weckruf and a member of Jan Machajski's squad in Geneva; expelled from Switzerland, lived in several European countries and returned to Congress Poland; active in the Polish-Belarusian underground resistance until his death in 1907.