EN
The article attempts to determine whether the policies of tsarist Russia towards the Western Provinces after 1863 were characterized by ambiguity. According to the author, the main goal of Imperial Russia’s policy was to absorb the annexed territories and incorporate them into the Russian political system. The empire’s support for the settlement of Russian peasants in the Western Provinces, the attempts to force Catholics to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, the sale of Polish estates to Russians on preferential terms and other extortive measures were merely different manifestations of Imperial Russia’s policy which was not in any sense ambiguous.