3,891 words
The greatest ongoing tragedy of the 21st century is the Ukraine War. The war was and is utterly unnecessary. Its violence could have been avoided with a vote to divide or not divide Ukraine along ethnolinguistic lines using the Schleswig-Holstein Plebiscite of 1920 as a model. This, however, didn’t happen. Russia’s leader and people embarked upon a war of choice in 2022 to increase their empty Eurasian empire which senile Joe Biden failed to deter.
Part of what is driving the tumult is the geo-political ghost of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This Commonwealth was once a vast empire in its own right and until recently, its history was only understood in America, if its history was understood there at all, through the Hollywood colored lens of the movie Taras Bulba (1962). The history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is important to understand, however. This ghost of an empire has driven intra-European politics for more than a century, and it is the unseen force underpinning the Ukraine War.
The origins of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth go back to when Jogaila, the (pagan) Grand Duke of Lithuania married the very young Hedwig, the daughter of the King of Poland in 1385. The marriage was one of political necessity – both parties were under terrible outside pressure. The Kingdom of Poland and the Dutchy of Lithuania were threatened by the Christian Germans and Swedes who were advancing under the auspices of the Vatican-supported Northern Crusades. A condition set by the Poles for the marriage was for Jogaila to convert to Christianity. After the wedding, the Dutchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland were united in a monarchal personal union.
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at its maximum extent.
Jogaila’s conversion meant that all his pagan followers also converted to Christianity automatically, but the Dutchy already had many Christians, these Christians, however, were Orthodox Christians – the Eastern branch of the faith. Jogaila’s followers became Western Christians – Roman Catholics. The language of the Dutchy was also not Lithuanian. Instead, business was conducted in Chancery Slavonic, a language which is the forerunner to modern Belarusian.
In 1569, the personal union ended. The Dutchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland were unified into a single polity and the Polish part was dominant. The unitary Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a considerable power for a time. Polish and Lithuanian troops held Moscow on-and-off from 1610 until 1612. This was during Russia’s “Time of Troubles.” The men of the Commonwealth also fought valiantly against the Turks. During the Ottoman Empire’s 1683 Siege of Vienna, the Polish cavalry saved Europe from Islamization.
The Commonwealth’s central long-term problem was that much of its territory was in the most undeveloped part of Europe. Additionally, the Commonwealth sat astride the significant religious divide between Western and Eastern Christians. This created an ugly and continuous churn that drained resources and took lives. When Poles, Germans, and Jews (Westerners in this context) moved into the underdeveloped parts of the Dnieper valley into what is now Ukraine, tensions increased to the point of open conflict with the Eastern Orthodox Cossacks. In the mid 17th century, the Cossacks initiated a series of revolts, and the resulting violence played out in a way that is shockingly familiar to modern readers. Geoffrey Parker writes,
[…]the Cossacks claimed that they sought to defend the Orthodox faith as well as the civilian community, and to that end (according to a chronicler) they ‘treated the Poles with contempt, killed the Germans like flies, burned towns, and slaughtered the Jews like chickens. Some burned monks in Roman Catholic churches.’ [1]
The tensions which underpin the modern Clash of Civilizations are clear in the accounts of the conflicts of the early modern period in Eastern Europe. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s slide into irrelevance was further advanced by a fatal flaw in its constitution which had a provision for the so-called Golden Freedoms. Under this scheme of “freedom,” the king’s plans could be thwarted by the “no” vote of a single nobleman. The Russians under Catherine the Great moved against Poland by bribing noblemen to vote against the interests of the King and the Commonwealth. The Russians weren’t the only players, the Swedes occupied part of the Commonwealth for a time, and the Austrians and Germans took territory. The collapse of the Commonwealth was slow and ugly, and many perished by famine or the sword throughout the decline.
By 1795, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been completely absorbed by the Russian Empire, the Austrian Empire, and Prussia, the founding kingdom of the German Empire. Within the old borders of the Commonwealth, Polish culture remained predominant. Roman Catholicism also spread, but in a roundabout way. Many Lithuanians converted to Calvinism, however the converts to this form of Protestantism tended to be Orthodox Christians. The children and grandchildren of some of the Lithuanian Calvinists then converted to Catholicism, so Western Christianity advanced in Lithuania through the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
Lithuania Resurrected
The Lithuanian ethnonationalists whose metapolitical efforts eventually resurrected their nation did so in a way filled with irony. The Dutchy of Lithuania was not within the exact borders of modern Lithuania, contained a good part of modern Belarus, and Vilnius was a Polish and Jewish populated city with few genuine Lithuanians. Additionally, the ethnically Lithuanian social elite mostly spoke Polish. Teodor Narbutt (1784-1864) started the Lithuanian cultural revival in the mid-nineteenth century with his history of Lithuania which was written in Polish. The theme of the history was that Lithuanian culture was damaged by the Duchy’s 1569 union with the Kingdom of Poland. The history created a massive interest in Lithuanian culture and a revival of the Lithuanian language.
The Lithuanian language only survived in the most backwards parts of the region. Any ambitious Lithuanian peasant eventually moved into a Polish linguistic milieu. The language shift went from Lithuanian speaking grandparents to Belarus speaking parents to Polish speaking children. Lithuanian ethnonationalists in the mid-1800s were reviving a language only spoken by those who were elderly and uneducated. Lithuanians also learned Russian, but only as a lingua franca, they never really took to Russian culture.
The Belarusian parts of the old Dutchy of Lithuania attempted a revival also, but it sputtered out. The entire homeland of the Belarus was in the Russian Empire, and the Orthodox Religion and general ethno-metanarrative of the Belarus was similar enough to that of the Russians that a Belarusian revival in the nineteenth century didn’t take off. Additionally, the Belarusian landholding gentry which might have vigorously led a plausible Belarusian revival was Polish and Catholic not Belarus and Orthodox. The Lithuanian revival was greatly aided by the different ethno-metanarratives of the Lithuanians to that of the Russians as well as the country’s proximity to Germany’s East Prussia. Timothy Snyder points out that,
From the 1860s Lithuanian publications illegal in Russia were produced in Germany, and the Lithuanian national movement was led by men as far away as Bulgaria and the United States. Why then did the Lithuanian national movement attain coherence after 1863 when the Belarusian national movement did not? What may seem at first glance to be disadvantages turned out to be advantages. Take, for example, the need of Lithuanians to break with the past. Although the Lithuanian national idea involved extraordinary feats of historical imagination, it is much easier to invent history by writing massive tomes than it is to change tradition by changing elite behavior. Tradition involves what people actually do now, whereas history narrates what people supposedly once did. Where tradition stops and history begins appears to depend a great deal upon the social origins of national activists. Here again the Lithuanians enjoyed an unexpected advantage over the Belarusians. Activists of humble social origins, whose families never played any role in early modern politics, found it easier to treat the entire past as history. Lithuanian activists, often Russian-educated peasant sons, happily skipped over several centuries and spoke of rebirth. Belarusian activists, Polish-speaking Roman Catholic gentry, were bogged down in the received truth of the actual tradition they learned from their parents and grandparents. The idea of creating an ethnic Belarus based on the people and the language came much harder to them than did the idea of an ethnic Lithuania to the Lithuanians. [2]
The Russian Empire fell apart in 1917 due to the pressures of the First World War. The Bolsheviks that ended the Tsar’s rule were aided by the Germans who sent Lenin by train into Russia and by Jewish financiers on Wall Street who lent money to the Communists. This German-Jewish cooperation makes sense when looking at the shared German-Jewish history in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where many of the towns had a German Quarter and a Jewish Quarter and those two groups had both come into conflict with Orthodox Russians at the same time and due to the same political conditions.
Then end of the Russian Empire allowed for Lithuania and Poland to become independent nations again, however the borders of these reborn nations did not correspond to ethnic groups on the ground. Lithuania also felt cheated because interwar Poland’s army took and held Vilnius, which they viewed as their capital. Vilnius at the time was mostly Polish-speaking, with a large contingent of Polish-speaking Jews.
The relationship between revived Lithuania and revived Poland between the Wars was hostile and ugly. Lithuanians feared the Poles not for their vices, but for their virtues. They knew from experience that Poles could easily assimilate Lithuanians. The situation in Eastern Europe was therefore unstable, with different, but otherwise closely related groups locked in conflict. Furthermore, Bolshevik revolutionaries popped up across Europe making trouble, and they were often Jewish. It was only a matter of time before a new power moved in to fill the vacuum.
The blow came with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to jointly conquer the area. The Soviets took the portions of Poland where Belarusians lived, Germany took the rest. Lithuania held out for a time but Timothy Snyder writes,
In June 1940, the Soviet Union extinguished Lithuanian independence. Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov issued an ultimatum calling for a new government on 14 June; the Red Army entered Vilnius the next day. In conditions of general terror, elections were held in July to “legitimize” a new regime. The Communist-led Lithuanian People’s Bloc announced that it had won 95 percent of the vote. Lithuania’s “application” to join the Soviet Union was granted on 3 August. By 6 August 1940 the Red Army had taken up new positions, in greater numbers, in what had become the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. Between June 1940 and June 1941, the Soviet NKVD deported twenty to thirty thousand Lithuanians, Poles, and Jews to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Former Prime Minister Merkys and Foreign Minister Urbsys were deported in July 1940. President Smetona had fled. [3]
Germany captured Lithuania in the summer of 1941. Nazi agents had to redirect the Lithuanians from their anti-Polish sentiments to anti-Jewish ones. Lithuanian security forces removed the Jews of Vilnius, by forcing them to flee or shooting them. After the Soviet Union recaptured Lithuania, Stalin expanded the borders of the Lithuanian SSR to include Vilnius and its surrounding region. The Lithuanians expelled the Poles in that city but kept the Polish-speaking peasants of the surrounding countryside to maintain the SSR’s agribusiness. Lithuanian ethnonationalism was so powerful, that even Stalin decided to uphold it. Timothy Snyder writes,
The old joke “Vilnius is Lithuanian, but Lithuania is Russian” was actually false. Lithuania was Soviet, which proved to be something else than Russian, especially in Vilnius. The dreams of Lithuanian Romantics in the 19th century, as interpreted by Lithuanian nationalists in the 20th, were realized under Soviet rule. [4]
Poland
Poland after 1795 was split between Prussia/Germany, Austria, and Russia – to put it simply, however, Polish culture remained productive and internationally noticeable, and the idea of a Polish nation-state was never forgotten. Napoleon created the Polish Dutchy of Warsaw in 1807, but it was recaptured by its neighboring empires after 1815. In 1863, Poles revolted, but Russian Imperial troops suppressed the uprising. Following that, the Poles settled into a resented submission until conditions changed during World War I. Additionally, Poles in the diaspora were notable in the arts and science. In the United States, Polish communities agitated for an independent Poland and were a solidly anti-communist group during the Cold War.
Changes to Poland’s territories in interwar period.
After World War I, Polish nationalist thinkers had two separate visions. The first idea was expressed by Józef Piłsudski (1867 – 1935) of the Polish Socialist Party. Piłsudski saw himself as a member of an upper class and cultured elite who understood high diplomacy and politics. Piłsudski saw the role of the Poles as a Norman-like leadership caste in a revived and ethnically diverse Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Piłsudski cultivated positive relations with distant powers – like France and the British Empire – while antagonizing nearby neighbors, both great and small.
Roman Dmowski (1864-1939) had a different vision, which was partially driven by the difference in social class between himself and Piłsudski. Dmowski was a genuine man of the working class where Piłsudski was from the old Polish nobility. Dmowski viewed both Germans and Jews as ethic rivals in a Darwinian conflict with the Poles. He openly sought to separate Poland from the legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Dmowski’s views, writes Timothy Snyder, “…were all but hegemonic by 1914.”
What followed is well known. The competing national visions of Piłsudski and Dmowski were simultaneously attempted, and the contradictions were unworkable. The irreconcilable visions applied as policy antagonized the minorities within Poland as well as Poland’s neighbors. This antagonism partially brought about World War II. In the end, Poland lost its traditional eastern territories but gained German territory in the west.
The reformed nations which arose after 1918 contained people of many ethnicities which created continuous political trouble.
Ukraine
Timothy Snyder writes,
Just as the history of medieval Rus’ begins with the Orthodox baptism of Grand Duke Volodymyr in 988, so the history of early modern Ukraine begins with conversions of Ukrainian nobles to Western Christianity after 1569. In sixteenth-century Poland, Protestants first, and Catholics in response, brought to bear the printed word, the vernacular, and techniques of disputation revived by the Renaissance. [5]
The ideas of the Reformation, Renaissance, and Counter Reformation took hold in the parts of what is now Ukraine which were part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. There, the Orthodox Church had a difficult time keeping up with the Polish-speaking Western Christian missionaries because its hierarchy was shackled by its tradition of communication in Old Church Slavonic, which was effectively a dead language. The theological churn propagated through the living Polish language in the parts of modern Ukraine which were part of the Commonwealth ultimately created a Western Christian-leaning population which still carried out the rituals of the Eastern Church, to put it simply. The Hapsburg Empress Maria Theresa of Austria called the religion in what is now western Ukraine the Greek Catholic Church – an example of the Western-dominated merger of the two systems.
Ukrainian nationalism started later than the nationalism of Lithuania, but it still followed a similar path. One of the first Ukrainian nationalists, Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi (1866 – 1934), wrote The History of Ukraine-Rus’ in 1898. This created an interest in the creation of a Ukrainian nation state. Like the situation elsewhere in what had been the Commonwealth, there was an irony to early Ukrainian ethnonationalism. Many of the chief ethnonationalists were not true ethnic Ukrainians, but upper-class Ukrainophiles of different ethnic origins living in the region. One of that type was Ivan Franko (1856 – 1916). He was of German-Polish origin, and his mother was minor nobility. Franko had been educated in the German language, but by Basilians, a Greek Catholic order dedicated to preserving their church’s connection to the Latin West. In the 1890s, Franko founded a political party dedicated to separating Austrian-ruled Galicia into western Polish and eastern Ukrainian districts.
Unlike the post-World War I situation in Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus, “Ukraine” had never been an independent country in its own right. The term “Ukraine” was really an expression of the ethnic group which lived in the area. Before the First World War the Ukrainian people were divided between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire. After the conflict, the area in which the Ukrainians lived was divided between Poland and the Soviet Union. Timothy Snyder writes,
The region of Volhynia was populated by both Poles and Ukrainians and it went to Poland. There the ideas of revival of a multi-ethnic Commonwealth led by Poles as propagated by Józef Piłsudski were tried. Henryk Józewski (1892-1981), a son of Kijów [Kiev] and a sincere federalist, had been Pilsudski’s agent within the Ukrainian government during the Polish-Ukrainian alliance of 1919-20. Jozewski supported Pilsudski’s policy of “state assimilation,” and maintained that the legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth provided a foundation for Polish-Ukrainian cooperation. Jozewski had a geopolitical vision; Volhynia would become an attractive Polish version of Ukraine, and thereby stem the flow of Bolshevism and nationalism. His failure reals the contradictions of Polish statehood…Jozevski lacked support both from Polish society and from Ukrainian activists. The first did not understand why the Polish state was supporting Ukrainian society; the second wanted to support Ukrainian society without the interference of the Polish state. [6]
The interwar Soviet-ruled part of Ukrainian lands was subjected to food shortages in the 1920s as well as ethnic cleansing of many of the German middle-class settlers in the region. In the mid-1930s, the Soviets under Stalin carefully and deliberately enacted policies which created a famine.
During the Second World War, Ukrainian nationalists formed paramilitaries along both National Socialist and Communist ideological lines. Stepan Bandera’s (1909 – 1959) Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) formed along the lines of Hitler’s vision. The OUN went on to fight Jews, Poles, and Soviets. Stephan Bandera’s followers also fielded and fought in a Waffen SS Division, the 14th Galician Division. Other Ukrainians fought Poles under Communist ideological lines, the Poles tended to be upper class landholders so “class warfare” was really ethnic warfare. Throughout the War, the Ukrainian nationalists fought Poles in a bitter struggle filled with mutual atrocities.
After the Soviets conquered Central and Eastern Europe, the ethnic cleansing continued although Stalin only permitted it on the invasion route between Germany and Russia. There was no ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia or Romania. Poles were removed from the expanded Ukrainian SSR and Ukrainians removed from the adjusted Poland. Ukrainians who wished to leave the Soviet Union were not allowed to travel. Stalin was helped by local political activists in Poland and Ukraine. The entire Polish political spectrum was sympathetic to removing the remaining Jews, large number of Germans in the new territories given to them by Stalin, and the Ukrainians. The Poles lost, however Lviv and Vilnius, which had been significant Polish cities.
The tragedy in the area that was once the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was probably unavoidable given the circumstances. What caused it? Peter Brimelow best described the mechanics of Europe’s nationalist upheaval, writing,
What are now regarded as archetypal nation-states, like Germany and Italy, were actually united only in the nineteenth century. Most human historical experience has been in multiethnic states (…polities). But they have also been primitive – and tyrannies. Multinational and multilingual states (…polities) organized on other principles, like the Hapsburg Empire, did not survive into the modern, democratic age. And for good reason. The essential point is this:
Modern society is organized around the free flow of information. So modernization inevitably puts a premium on linguistic unity. It doesn’t matter what language the people in the next village speak if you have no truck or trade with them. But if you do, it does.
SPECIAL NOTE FOR ECONOMISTS: When you think about it, the emergence of the nation-state on the world scene is very much like the simultaneous emergence of the firm in developing capitalist economies. Both can be traced to lower transaction costs, efficiencies in the transmission of information and the superior economies of specialization. [7]
Poland During the Cold War & the End of History
In Nazi Occupied Poland the Poles and Ukrainians waged an ethnic civil war underneath the larger global struggle. As the Soviets advanced, the Polish Government-in-Exile in London attempted to have the Polish Home Army liberate Poland before the Red Army’s arrival. Should the Home Army pull that off, Poland would be free to take its place in the post-war settlement, but the ethnic civil war meant that the Polish Home Army lost combat power during the operations against the ethnic Ukrainians in Volhynia. Therefore, Poland’s forlorn army was short manpower and easily defeated in Warsaw by German forces in 1944 while the Soviets deliberately stood by. This made Poland helpless before Stalin.
Poland was therefore effectively occupied by the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, but the nationalist effort did not truly end – it was merely hidden behind the T-55 equipped Soviet occupation brigades. Abroad, Poland’s Government-in-Exile still agitated for the return of Lviv and Vilnius. The most prominent Polish activist émigré was Juliusz Mieroszewski (1906 – 1976). He articulated a rational ethnonationalist vision through Kultura magazine. Mieroszewski felt that the wartime changes which made Poland an ethnostate should not be reversed, and Poland should therefore cultivate positive relations with the neighboring countries and Soviet Socialist Republics as they were. Mieroszewski’s ideas should be called The Peace of Poland.
He believed this was necessary because he realized the Soviet Union would collapse and the resulting change in the balance of power could lead to a new war. Mieroszewski probably also recognized that interwar Poland was not a helpless victim, but an aggressive expansionist state with irredentist aims as ambitious of that of Nazi Germany’s.
In 1989, the ugly ethnic conflict between the Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, and Lithuanians was still in living memory, but Polish ethnonationalists set the tone for Central and Eastern Europe when they “turned the other cheek,” to put it simply. After the Berlin Wall fell and the situation in Europe changed, any hostile attitudes in Poland were suppressed as best they could be. This included appeals to Pope John Paul II, who was Polish and familiar with the complex theological issues and the history of bitter ethnic strife in the region.
Under Mieroszewski’s metapolitical vision, the Polish government encouraged the Poles in Lithuania who live along that nation’s eastern border to continue to identify as Poles but otherwise be good citizens of Lithuania. This policy was, in turn, adopted by Germany where ethnic Germans in Poland who escaped deportation were encouraged to do the same. This is what the United States does with its Spanish-speaking population in the Southwest – there is a longstanding policy of toleration and many there work for the Border Patrol.
The vision of Mieroszewski was carried out by Poland’s foreign minister Krzysztof Skubiszewski (1926 – 2010). He shored up relations with the Soviet Union and the soon-to-be independent Soviet Socialist Republics who had activists which remembered the earlier ethnic conflicts. Additionally, the Poles needed to deal with the Soviet Occupation troops in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, but the Soviet Union lasted until the end of 1991. During this time the Poles negotiated the removal of Soviet troops, which was accomplished in 1992. Shortly thereafter, the Russians ceased being cooperative.
Notes
[1] Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, (New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 2013) p. 347
[2] Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1769 – 1999, (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2003) p. 46
[3] ibid. p. 83
[5] ibid. p. 106
[6] ibid. pp. 148/9
[7] Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation, Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, (New York: Random House, 1995) Location 5277
7 comments
…and slaughtered the Jews like chickens.
That image warms the cockles of my heart. I had to pluck chickens when I was a child. I wonder if they jumped around when their heads were chopped off. I wonder what the jews did to draw this reaction–they are such nice people (that was sarcasm). 🙃
Traditionally, Jews monopolized the usury, small trade as well as vodka production. Pogroms were particularly brutal in those parts of the PLC. Most Haydamak uprisings involved them and the 1768 rebellion was notorious for the high number of Jewish victims.
“Russia’s leader and people embarked upon a war of choice in 2022 to increase their empty Eurasian empire which senile Joe Biden failed to deter.”
“The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s slide into irrelevance was further advanced by a fatal flaw in its constitution which had a provision for the so-called Golden Freedoms”
For historical accuracy, the freedoms and privileges were included in multiple constitutions like the Nihil novi (1505) and the Henrician Articles (1587) that regulated the relations between the monarch and the nobility.
One thing to keep in mind is that PLC didn’t go through the decline in manoralism like the West did through the XIVth century as the Black Death didn’t cause similarly massive death toll among Polish peasantry, allowing the “folwark economy” to continue unimpeded.
As a result the system of aristocracy evolved differently, creating a relatively (internally) egalitarian estate which wasn’t too difficult to get into, leading to the oligarchic tendencies.
Eastern (Lithuanian and Ruthenian) magnates significantly affected the political system as they were often large landowners more akin to traditional boyars rather than the szlachta. Ruthenian nobles were even nicknamed “królewięta” (little kings) due to their vast land holdings in Ukraine. Their introduction to the political system enabled political clientelism as they could easily buy votes from the more numerical, but less affluent or impoverished nobles. The catastrophes of the XVIIth century which decimated and impoverished the middle aristocracy, further accelerated those trends.
The Union of Brest (1595–1596) should be mentioned to help understand the religious issue. It established the Ruthenian Uniate Church (the predecessor of the Greek Catholic Church), causing a rift with the Orthodox nobles who refused the Union. It greatly contributed to the Cossack/Haydamak uprisings and really benefited nobody politically except Rome (and Muscovy that gained the Patriarchate in 1589). Unfortunately the Sarmathian culture of the nobility was too tied to Catholicism to allow it any flexibility in the East which sank the fledgling Polish empire.
On a side note, the Union is important when studying the history of Ukrainian nationalism (alongside the Haydamaks immortalized in the poetry of Taras Schevchenko).
“During the Second World War, Ukrainian nationalists formed paramilitaries along both National Socialist and Communist ideological lines. Stepan Bandera’s (1909 – 1959) Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) formed along the lines of Hitler’s vision.”
Those paramilitaries existed already during the interwar period. OUN (before Bandera’s split in 1940) which originated from UWO (Ukrainian Military Organization), committed acts of terrorism against Polish authorities assassinating mostly conciliatory political figures like Bronisław Pieracki, Tadeusz Hołówko or Ivan Babii. Communists mostly worked through the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, which acted as a sabotage/intelligence unit for the USSR.
“In Nazi Occupied Poland the Poles and Ukrainians waged an ethnic civil war underneath the larger global struggle. As the Soviets advanced, the Polish Government-in-Exile in London attempted to have the Polish Home Army liberate Poland before the Red Army’s arrival. Should the Home Army pull that off, Poland would be free to take its place in the post-war settlement, but the ethnic civil war meant that the Polish Home Army lost combat power during the operations against the ethnic Ukrainians in Volhynia. Therefore, Poland’s forlorn army was short manpower and easily defeated in Warsaw by German forces in 1944 while the Soviets deliberately stood by. This made Poland helpless before Stalin.”
That is incorrect in terms of cause-and-effect. Home Army units in the East were weak from the get-go as they had a worse support base especially in the regions with the smallest percentages of Polish population. Before any “ethnic civil war” could thin them out, they were severely routed by the NKVD which cooperated with Gestapo on eliminating the partisan/underground activities. As a result, most Polish villages had to form self-defense units and sometimes relied on Soviet partisan help when fighting against the Banderists. Operation Storm (Burza) which aimed to liberate the territories and welcome the Soviets failed, because the Gov-in-Exile was diplomatically on bad terms with the Soviets, the Warsaw Uprising was a criminal madness and simply because the Soviet main fronts led through Poland which required the absolute security of then-future rear-lines. Even if partisans were successful they were simply arrested and handed over to Smersh or NKGB.
“In 1989, the ugly ethnic conflict between the Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, and Lithuanians was still in living memory, but Polish ethnonationalists set the tone for Central and Eastern Europe when they “turned the other cheek,” to put it simply.”
There were no Polish “ethnonationalists” in 1989. The tone was set by the politicians and intellectuals of Solidarity, who were often extremely hostile towards Polish nationalism and the legacy of Roman Dmowski. What was left of Polish nationalists after 1945 was either exterminated, driven to silence, ejected abroad or co-opted like the PAX association and eventually neutered. Unlike Yugoslavia, Slovakia or some of the Baltic countries we had no benefit of ex-communists turning into nationalists, all became pro-western shades of liberalism. Nationalism had to rebuild itself beyond the (new) hostile mainstream, on whatever means it could scrape. It has been written accurately that “any hostile attitudes in Poland were suppressed as best they could be”. We were marching towards the enlightened, tolerant, anti-racist West and nobody was going to allow any nationalist grumblings from unreconstructed cavemen to disrupt that.
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