The Polish uprising of 1863 was a traumatic event for Russian society. It was an early warning that the reform era in Russia - which had touched the Kingdom of Poland as well - would not immediately solve all the problems of Russian society. The events of the revolt itself, and the proPolish diplomatic effort it produced, provoked a wave of patriotism and heightened national feeling in Russia. A central feature of this new mood was a determination to deal with the Polish Question once and for all. Proposals to this end, made by prominent Russian journalists such as M. N. Katkov and I. S. Aksakov, came to be known collectively as 'Russification'. A standard assumption in the secondary literature is that policies of Russification had dire consequences for national minonties in the Russian Empire. This claim has been made particularly strongly in the case of the Jews. Writing in a general sense, the great Russian-Jewish historian S. M. Dubnow declared: ‘The insurrection was not only followed by a general wave of political reaction, but it also gave a strong impetus to the policy of Russification which was now applied with particular vigour to the western provinces, and was damaging to the Jews both from the civil and the cultural point of view.’ Louis Greenberg is more specific still: