Bronislaw Antoni Szwarce

Born Oct. 7, 1834, on the estate of Lôchrist, near Dinan, France; died Feb. 18, 1904, in L’vov. Figure in the Polish and Russian revolutionary movements; journalist.

Szwarce, the son of an émigré who fought in the Polish Uprising of 1830–31, graduated from the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris in 1855; in 1860 he began working on the construction of the St. Petersburg-Warsaw railroad. In the summer of 1862 he embarked on a course of illegal activity. He became a member of the Central National Committee, the organization of the Reds, in which he sided with the left revolutionary-democratic wing as an advocate of radical agrarian reform and the establishment of an alliance with Russian revolutionaries.

On Dec. 11 (23), 1862, in Warsaw, Szwarce was placed under arrest, after having offered armed resistance. On May 19, 1863, he was condemned to death, a sentence that was commuted to life at hard labor. He spent about 30 years in prisons and in exile; until 1870 he was incarcerated at the Shlissel’burg Fortress. In 1881 he took part in the work of the Red Cross of the People’s Will in Tomsk. In 1892, Szwarce went to Galicia, where he contributed to the democratic press and carried on a polemic with proponents of a conservative historical interpretation of the Polish Uprising of 1863–64.