Increasingly, power devolved to the local magnates, further weakening the center. The anti-Polish rebellion of Bohdan Khmelnit-sky in 1648 allowed Muscovy to extend its power into the Ukraine with the Treaty of Pereiaslavl (1654). Additional Polish territory, including the cities of Smolensk and Kiev, was lost to the Russians during the following decade.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The eighteenth century witnessed further Polish descent into anarchy. Already during the 1690s Polish king Jan Sobieski had complained of his inability to force the Polish magnates to obey him. Worse was to come. The fact that Polish kings were elected allowed Poland’s neighbors to put up their own candidates in the hope of influencing future policy. Poland also had the misfortune to be placed geographically between three rising absolutist states- Prussia, Russia, and Habsburg Austria. In 1764, St. Petersburg succeeded in placing its candidate on the Polish throne. Stanis-law-August Poniatowski, a former lover of Catherine the Great, was to be the last Polish king.
The impetus toward partition came not from Russia, but from Poland’s western neighbor, Prussia. That state’s ambitious ruler, Frederick II (“the Great”) suggested a dividing up of Polish territory to prevent destabilizing “anarchy.” In the first Partition of Poland (1772), Russia absorbed some thirteen percent of the commonwealth’s territory. The shock of the partition fueled a push for serious political reforms, including a strengthening of the central government and the king. The partitioning powers, including Russia, feared a strong Poland.
A 1772 drawing shows Polish King Stanislav trying to hold onto his crown while Poland is split between Catherine II and Frederick II. © BETTMANN/CORBIS They were particularly disturbed by the fruitful efforts of the Four-Years-Sejm, including the Polish constitution of May 3, 1791. Once again using the excuse of Polish anarchy, Prussia and Russia seized more Polish territory in the Second Partition of 1793, calling forth a Polish national uprising. However, the heroic efforts of insurrectionist Tadeusz Kosciuszko could not prevent the Third Partition of 1795, after which Poland disappeared from the European map for more than a century.
After the Napoleonic wars, borders between the partitioning powers were altered significantly, bringing a large portion of ethnic Poland under Russian rule. The majority of Poles thus became subjects of the Russian tsar. Tsar Alexander I afforded the Kingdom of Poland considerable rights and autonomy. The Poles enjoyed their own coinage, legal system, army, legislature, and constitution. Disagreements between Warsaw and St. Petersburg over the limits of Polish autonomy exploded into the open during the November Upris1193
POLAND
Russian troops in Warsaw after the January insurrection of 1863-1864. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS ing of 1830, which lasted well into the following year. After Nicholas I put down this insurrection, he abolished the Kingdom of Poland’s legislature, constitution, and army. Still, legal and administrative differences existed between Russian and Polish provinces-though these differences would be considerably narrowed after the crushing of the subsequent January 1863 uprising.
The final half century of Romanov rule over much of historic Poland has generally been characterized as a period of Russification. Certainly, St. Petersburg viewed Poles en masse as at least potentially disloyal subjects, and Polish culture was kept on a very tight leash. Poles in the Russian Empire could not use their native tongue in education at any level except the most elementary-and even here Russian was often introduced. In the so-called Western Provinces (present-day western Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus) even speaking Polish in public could lead to fines or worse. Still, there was no systematic attempt to Russify the Polish nation in the sense of total cultural (or religious) assimilation. Rather, Russification amounted to a severe limiting of Polish civil and cultural rights in this period.
WORLD WAR I AND INDEPENDENCE
The outbreak of World War I transformed relations between the partitioning powers and Poles. Now securing the loyalty of Poles became a paramount consideration for both Russia and the Central Powers. The Russian commander-in-chief, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich, issued a manifesto in mid-August 1914, holding out the postwar promise of a unified Polish state under the Romanov scepter. In the end, force of arms decided the issue: By autumn 1915 Russian armies had for the most part been pushed out of ethnic Poland. With the Bolsheviks’ coming to power in October 1917 and the subsequent Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918), all hopes of continued Russian-or Soviet-domination over Poland came to an end. In late 1918 Poland regained its independence.
Relations between Poland and the fledgling Soviet state got off to a very bad start. Moscow was
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vitally interested in exporting revolution to Western Europe, most likely by way of Poland. Further, the unclear borders between Poland and its neighbors to the east presented a serious potential for conflict. Historically, Poles had been very prominent as landowners and townspeople in these border regions between ethnic Poland and ethnic Russia. Thus Poles figure in early Soviet propaganda as portly mustachioed noblemen bent on enslaving Ukrainian or Belarusian peasants. Between 1919 and 1921 Soviet Russia and newly independent Poland clashed on the battlefield, the Poles occupying Kiev and, at the opposite extreme, the Red Army getting all the way to the Vistula River in central Poland. In March 1921, both sides, exhausted for the moment, signed the Peace of Riga.
The USSR was not satisfied with the treaty’s terms. In particular, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Belarusians and Ukrainians ended up on the Polish side of the frontier, providing the USSR with a would-be constituency for extending the border westward. Nor did relations between Poland and the USSR improve in the interwar period. The two primary politicians of interwar Poland, J?zef Pil-sudski and Roman Dmowski, both despised and feared the Soviet state. The Communist Party was outlawed in Poland, and many Polish communists fled to the USSR, often straight into the Gulag. Even Adolf Hitler’s coming to power in 1933 did not bring the USSR and Poland closer. Rather, the later 1930s witnessed the Great Purges in the USSR and a downward spiral in Polish politics toward an increasingly vicious form of Polish chauvinism and official anti-Semitism.
Poland was stunned by the Molotov-Ribben-tropp Pact of August 1939. This agreement between Josef Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany demonstrated that their mutual enmity toward the Polish state outweighed ideological differences. The pact allowed Hitler to invade on September 1, 1939, and the Red Army, following a secret protocol, occupied eastern Poland later that month. Once again Poland disappeared from the map. When the Polish state was resurrected in 1945, it was devastated. The large and vibrant Polish Jewish community had been all but wiped out during the Holocaust, some three million non-Jewish Poles had lost their lives, and the capital city Warsaw was a wasteland, systematically destroyed by the Germans in retaliation for the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944. Polish nationalists and some Western writers contend that the Red Army, by that time near-ing the eastern outskirts of the city, could have prevented the Nazi devastation of the city. Others argue that the Red Army had been successfully repulsed by the Germans. In any case, the failure of the Soviets to move into Warsaw allowed the Nazis to massacre Polish fighters who might very well have opposed the imposition of communist rule.
PEOPLE’S POLAND
Having liberated Poland from the Nazis, Stalin was determined to see a pro-Soviet government installed there. Despite the tiny number of native Polish communists and little support for communist or pro-Soviet candidates, intimidation and rigged voting placed a Stalinist Polish government, led by
– Boleslaw Bierut, in power in 1948. Bierut launched a crash industrialization drive, attempted to collectivize Polish agriculture, and jailed many Catholic clergymen. After Bierut’s death in 1956, leadership passed to the more flexible Wladyslaw Gomulka who allowed Poles a considerable amount of cultural and economic leeway while reassuring Moscow of People’s Poland’s stability.
Unfortunately for Gomulka, Poles compared their economic and cultural situation not with that in the USSR, but with conditions in the West. As the 1960s progressed, the relative backwardness of Poland compared with Germany or the United States only increased. Domestically, internal party tensions led to an ugly state-sponsored anti-Semitic episode in 1968, during which Poland’s few remaining Jews-most highly assimilated-were hounded out of the country. Thus, Gomulka’s position was already weak before the notorious price hikes on basic foodstuffs of December 1970 that led to rioting and his replacement by Edward Gierek. Gierek promised prosperity, but was never able to deliver. In 1980, price increases caused civil disturbances and his resignation.
