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After the change in Russian penal law in 1847, exile and penal labor (katorga) became common penalties to the participants of national uprisings within the Russian Empire. This led to an increasing number of Poles being sent to Siberia for katorga, they were known as Sybiraks. Some of them remained there, forming a Polish minority in Siberia. Most of them came from the participants and supporters of the 19th century November Uprising and January Uprising, the participants of the 1905-1907 unrest to the hundreds of thousands of people deported in the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. Originally, 148 Polish exiles were stationed in the Orenburg province, but by the beginning of June 1864, 278 people had been sent to the Orenburg governorate to take up residence under the supervision of the police, and by mid-1865, 506 people. In addition, 831 people were identified for establishment on the state lands of the Orenburg and Chelyabinsk districts, of which 754 people were allocated to Ufa. There were about 20,000 Poles living in Siberia around the 1860s. An unsuccessful uprising of Polish political exiles in Siberia broke out in 1866. In 1917 the imperial government of Russia was overthrown by socialist revolutionaries called Bolsheviks, and all the lands of the Empire were convulsed by four years of civil war. As the Russian Empire died and the communist Soviet Union came into being, tens of millions of people were caught up in anarchy, bloodshed, and widespread property destruction, and more than 2 million fled the country. More than 30,000 made their way to the United States.
In the late 19th century there was also a limited number of Polish voluntary settlers, attracted by the economic development of the region. Polish migrants and exiles, many of whom were forbidden to move away from the region even after finishing serving their sentence, formed a vibrant Polish minority there. Hundreds of Poles took part in the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Notable Polish scholars studied in Siberia, among them Aleksander Czekanowski, Jan Czerski, Benedykt Dybowski, Wiktor Godlewski, Sergiusz Jastrzębski, Edward Piekarski, Bronisław Piłsudski, Wacław Sieroszewski, Mikołaj Witkowski and others.
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