Though officially the Kingdom of Poland was a state with considerable political autonomy guaranteed by a liberal constitution, its rulers, the Russian Emperors, generally disregarded any restrictions on their power. Thus effectively it was little more than a puppet state of the Russian Empire.[3][4] The autonomy was severely curtailed following uprisings in 1830–31 and 1863, as the country became governed by namestniks, and later divided into guberniya (provinces).[3][4] Thus from the start, Polish autonomy remained little more than fiction.[5]

The Kingdom of Poland was created out of the Duchy of Warsaw, a French client state, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 when the great powers reorganized Europe following the Napoleonic wars. The creation of the Kingdom created a partition of Polish lands in which the state was dividedamong Russia, Austria and Prussia.[6] The Congress was important enough in the creation of the state to cause the new country to be named for it.[7][8] The Kingdom lost its status as a sovereign state in 1831 and the administrative divisions were reorganized. It was sufficiently distinct that its name remained in official Russian use, although in the later years of Russian rule it was replaced [9] with the Privislinsky Krai (Russian: Привислинский Край). Following the defeat of the November Uprising its separate institutions and administrative arrangements were abolished as part of increased Russification to be more closely integrated with the Russian Empire. However, even after this formalized annexation, the territory retained some degree of distinctiveness and continued to be referred to informally as Congress Poland until the