Ooh! Polish history. cracks knuckles

Sources first. Neal Ascherson's The Struggles For Poland, while primarily a work on mid-20th-century Poland (as the Second Republic and the Polish SSR), offers surprisingly comprehensive context for Poland's rather lackluster existence before the Second Republic came to be in 1918. There’s also, as always, Norman Davies’ God’s Playground, which has been the definitive work on more or less all of Polish history since its publication. This is partially because of an utter void in the realm of English-language histories of Poland, but it’s also a damn good book in its own right. Anyway, let's answer your question in the order you listed the occupying powers, just so I don't have to think about what order to put them in.

Russian Poland / Congress Poland / Kingdom of Poland

The Polish Russian existence was bleak, but in this bleakness there was unity. Russian Poland was known from 1815 simply as the Kingdom of Poland, but it's often referred to as Congress Poland in an effort to more easily distinguish it from the medieval Kingdom of Poland, and that same Kingdom which later makes up half of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Kingdom of Poland was technically a country, with its own king and laws, and its status as a subject of the Russian Empire gave it a little bit of autonomy, but it was 'in personal union' with Russia, which is shorthand to say that the King of Poland was also the Tsar of Russia; their rulers and heirs were the same, which in the context of an autocratic monarchy means that the two were unified in all but name. The Polish heartlands of Lesser Poland and Mazovia lay in the Kingdom of Poland; there were a lot of Poles for the Russians to oppress, so resistance was common here relative to the Polish communities in Germany and Austria. The Russian Empire had one single census in its history, dated 1897; in it, Warsaw was Russia's third-largest city, behind only Moscow and St. Petersburg. The nobility of Warsaw and its fellow Polish cities were outraged at Russian disdain for long-held Polish liberties, specifically that ‘Golden Liberty’ which was a cornerstone of the bygone Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s political landscape (and conveniently gave the nobility a ton of power over the king, which they sorely missed). So, with each passing generation there was a rebellion of Poles in Russia who hoped to achieve goals which varied from greater Polish autonomy to a Polish nation-state to the revival of the multiethnic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. There’s no better duo than Polish events and naming them solely by the date they occurred, so these rebellions are known chronologically as the November Uprising, the January Uprising, and the June Days. The most relevant of these insurrections was in November 1830 when a secret meeting of a Polish Sejm (which just means Parliament) did what the Sejm has always done best - giving the King the middle finger. The Polish nobility overthrew the king, established a Polish National Government and peace talks with ‘King of Poland’ Nicholas I of Russia quickly disintegrated. The Poles went to war, sufficiently trained and supported by plenty of veteran leaders who had served France across the continent during the Napoleonic Wars. They fielded a large, modern army, but the Russian army was, as you might expect, larger, and they had Napoleonic experience and weaponry as well. The war was bravely fought over the course of a very long eleven months, sufficiently so that the more nationalist among Polish historians wonder if the Poles could have held their own and even established an independent Polish nation. However, if the conflict went south for Russia, intervention from Prussia and Austria was a real possibility - none of the three powers wanted Polish nationalism to see success - so the upstart Polish National Government probably saw doom in its future. Unfortunately, this ‘November Uprising’ saw the end of any limited autonomy Russian Poland had. The Kingdom of Poland ceased to exist and became directly administered by Russia, and no further rebellion would return these rights to the Poles. In an effort not to ramble and to answer your question more directly, I will spare you the details on the January Uprising and the June Days. Congress Poland was a land of dogged resistance: a heavily repressed people regardless rose up against their overlords time and time again, and a culture which seemed to have been losing its national unity during the later Commonwealth period regardless coalesced against a powerful foe. Tsarist Poland in 1900 was violent, it was turbulent, and it was not a very nice place to live..

German Poland / Greater Poland / Province of Posen

The Russian Empire oppressed the Polish because they oppressed everyone. Even Russian serfs chafed at the imperial yoke. Poles were sufficiently similar to Russians that they were given at least a shred of dignity and autonomy. On the other hand, Imperial Germany gave them no quarter. Although Ascherson claims that the Russians were the most oppressive toward Poles, the relative prosperity of German commoners under Bismarck meant that the Province of Posen, on the outskirts of a truly modern nation, was left with a desire for the fruits of modernity. The Province of Posen represented what we haven’t covered of the Polish heartland; a region known as ‘Greater Poland’ in contrast with the ‘Lesser Poland’ which was under Russian hegemony, both chock full of Poles. You probably know who Otto von Bismarck is - the Chancellor of the German Empire, a man second in power only to the Kaiser himself, and perhaps even more ambitious. He did many, many things, but his relevance to our story is his execution of a plan called the Kulturkampf, a wave of controversial legislation which was generally aimed at reducing the influence of the Pope and Catholicism on Germany, and specifically on counteracting any influence the Polish population might have on the country. Ascherson points out that after the Partitions “the Catholic Church became the main institution which preserved and defended Polish culture, language and identity against foreign oppression”, and now that very same institution was under threat. Some of these laws, such as the “School Inspection Law” or “School Supervision Act” proclaiming that public education is to be overseen by the government rather than by religious officials and organizations, are actually quite progressive for their time (albeit the less secular among Christians were still miffed at such decrees). Others, such as the “Pulpit Law” which decrees that a religious official talking politics while on the job is an arrestable offense, seem a lot easier to view as xenophobic or otherwise authoritarian in nature. Although the Kulturkampf had settled down by 1880, the power of the Catholic Church appropriately reined in, anti-Polish sentiment only continued to brew. The popular concept among Germans that the Poles were Slavs under the corrupting influence of international Jewry, and therefore represented every last drop of degeneracy that Europe had to offer, took root and would hold firm until at least 1945. The Germans were colonizing the Province of Posen, largely through extraordinary real-estate deals and employment opportunities to which only ethnic Germans were privy. German settlements and markets sprang up among the Polish-majority province. In 1885, tens of thousands of Poles were expelled from the province; every Pole with dual citizenship in the neighboring Austrian or Russian regimes was forcibly sent there to make room for German communities in Posen. By 1900, the ideological segregation of German and Pole which would later fuel the vitriol of the Third Reich was already coming down on Poland with surprising zeal.

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