Konstanty Kalinowski was born to an impoverished szlachta family. His father, Szymon, was a manager of the Mastaŭliany farm and manor. The Kalinowski family hailed from the region of Mazovia and bore the Kalinowa coat of arms. After graduating from a local school in Świsłocz in 1855 he went to Moscow, where he started studying at private law school. Soon he moved to St. Petersburg, where he continued his studies at the University of St. Petersburg and got involved in several Polish students' conspiracies and secret cultural societies. After graduating in 1860 he returned to the area of Hrodna, where he continued to work as a revolutionary. He also started publishing Mużyckaja prauda, one of the first periodicals in Belarusian and two other Polish language clandestine newspapers. In his literary work, Kalinowski underlined the need to liberate all peoples of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from Russia's occupation and to conserve and promote the Greek-Catholic faith and Belarusian 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 Imperial Russia. After the outbreak of the January Uprising he was involved in the secretProvincial Lithuanian Committee in Vilnius. Soon he was promoted to the commissar of the Polish government for the Grodno Voivodeship. His writings made him popular both among the peasants and the gentry, which enabled the partisan units under his command to grow rapidly. Because of his successes he was promoted to the rank of Plenipotentiary Commissar of the Government for Lithuania, which made him the commander-in-chief of all partisan units fighting in the areas of today's' Eastern Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine.
Last months, execution and interment
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. Finally Kalinowski was betrayed by one of his soldiers and handed over to the Russians. He was imprisoned in Vilnius, where he wrote one of his most notable works - the Letter from Beneath the Gallows, a passionate credo for his compatriots. He was then tried by a court martial for leading the revolt against Russia and sentenced to death. He was publicly executed on Lukiškės Square in Vilnius on 22 March 1864, at age 26. The remains of the executed insurgent, along with others, were clandestinely buried by the Tsarist authorities in the site of a military fortress on top of the Gediminas Hill in Vilnius. The remains were excavated and positively identified in 2019 and were solemnly re-interred in the Rasos Cemetery on 22 November 2019.
Kastuś Kalinoŭski, commentaries by Jan Zaprudnik and Thomas E. Bird: The 1863 Uprising in Byelorussia: "Peasants' Truth" and "Letters from Beneath the Gallows". Byelorussian Institute of Arts and Sciences, The Krecheuski Foundation, New York, 1980.
