It’s rare that a direction on a compass can carry such loaded connotations, and yet,
in discussing the history of Europe, “East” is a complicated word.
In the past few centuries, “Eastern Europe” earned an unfair reputation for backwardness,
poverty, and unsophistication, for reasons we will see.
It’s also rare for the simple act of reading history to cause me physical and psychological
pain.
And yet…
Poland … For reasons we will see.
Our notions of Polish hardship tend to focus on the 1900s, what with the Soviets and the
Nazis out and about — but Poland’s status as the volleyball of Europe actually goes
back quite a ways.
Yet despite the best attempts of half a dozen different empires, Poland would not die, and
that is worth investigating.
So, to see how Poland’s story unfolds (and find out what Lithuania has to do with it),
Let’s do some History!
Being well outside of the Roman and Holy Roman empires, we don’t get much on Poland until
the medieval period, when Duke Mieszko I converted to Catholicism in 966 and began expanding
his Duchy out across the northern European plain, reaching up to the Baltic Sea and down
to the Carpathian Mountains.
His son Boleslaw I negotiated with Holy Roman Emperor Otto III to grant Poland an independent
Church governance, adding 3 new bishoprics to their original one, and a shiny archbishopric
in the capital of Gniezno.
To celebrate, Boleslaw promoted himself to King, but made the classic goof of splitting
the kingdom between his sons.
The hope was to keep government local and responsive, but the real result was several
functionally-independent minor dukedoms who occasionally threw hands at each other.
His grandson brought the kingdom back together, but then it got divided again in 1138, and
it stayed that way for 2 centuries.
A consequence of this was a move away from a single rigid hierarchy to a more dynamic
society of tenant-farmers, merchants, and nobles spread out across market towns, church
lands, and noble estates.
Meanwhile, the Crown’s relative weakness was an opening for the Church to educate,
govern, and shape Polish culture.
It’s at this surprisingly early stage that an idea approximating nationalism appears,
as the church at the time was the only major body that transcended local politics, and
some clergy vocally advocated for a reunified state under the polish crown.
Hang on to that theme of indivisibility, it comes up later.
Another big change came in the form of people, as Germans from the HRE and persecuted Jews
came to settle in Poland.
In 1264 King Boleslaw V granted Jews personal freedoms and legal protections, which was
a major rarity elsewhere in Christendom.
And this welcome got a lot warmer during the reign of Kazimierz III, who extended Jewish
freedoms to the entire kingdom in 1334 and encouraged more Jews to come to Poland.
Kazimierz also gets points for codifying laws, issuing a new standard currency, founding
the first Polish university, unifying the political machinery of the Kingdom (that’s
a big one), and recouping some of the land lost a century earlier to the Teutonic knights
in the north and the Mongols in the east.
The man was busy!
And late Medieval Poland didn’t slow down.
After Kazimierz, the crown passed through his sister to her husband Ludwik of Hungary.
That wasn’t the best match, as he confiscated some Polish territory for Hungary and bribed
the nobles with special privileges to let him do what he wanted, but after him, his
daughter Jadwiga became queen of Poland, and she married Grand Duke Jogaila of Lithuania,
which bound the Kingdom of Poland to the Duchy of Lithuania in a personal union.
Lithuania was very large, but also very pagan, so as part of the marriage deal, Jogaila and
his state converted to Christianity.
Despite one of history’s largest overnight conversions, the two states remained very
different, and the Teutonic knights along the coast saw Lithuania as barbarous pagans,
so they tried to invade, but lost at the battle of Grunwald in 1410.
In the century after the union, late-medieval Poland saw its first local assemblies of nobles,
and in the 1490s the Szlachta (as they’re known in polish) formed a statewide parliament,
called the Sejm.
By the 1500s, Renaissance arts and ideas made their way north.
And, when paired with good administration, some nice reforms, and hefty resource exports
to western Europe, Poland was living it up in a golden age.
You know Copernicus?
With the heliocentrism?
Yeah, Poland.
Now, the Personal Union between Poland and Lithuania was a familiar political arrangement,
Europe made these things all the time, but it was rare they lasted two whole centuries.
In that span, Lithuania began to resemble Poland in a few key ways, but it was still
its own country, and opposed to a simple incorporation.
So after some political wrangling, the Union of Lublin in 1569, nice, established a bi-federal
state with a jointly elected King/Grand-Duke and a bicameral parliament of the noble Sejm
[biannual] and a Senate [standing].
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as it was to be known, had independent local laws,
treasuries, and armies for each state — and if this all sounds kind of insane, that’s
because it is, which is the best part.
At a time when the rest of Europe was big on centralized government and royal absolutism,
the Commonwealth was a federal monarchy, which was elected by a parliament of nobles, who
themselves accounted for 10% of the population.
That’s nearly how many people could vote in Democratic Athens.
To make this outlier even more extreme, the Commonwealth in the 1600s was one of the largest
and most populous countries in Europe, with 11 million people spread over 400,000 sq mi.
That included Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Belarusians and Ukrainians, Jews, and Tatars;
and between Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, 3/4 of the world’s Jews & even some Muslims,
it was astoundingly diverse, in part because it stood at the crossroads of several different
cultures.
But this regional centrality would become dangerous in the next two centuries, as basically
every empire in a 500-mile radius was keen to grow larger at Poland’s expense.
Various threats came and went, but sometimes two would rear up at once, such as the later
1650s, when Sweden and Russia both invaded Lithuania in what’s known as The Deluge.
Cities were ransacked and plundered, and the whole commonwealth briefly shrank to very
small.
The Commonwealth survived, but between war and ensuing plague, it was gravely wounded:
a quarter of the population dead, vulnerable to outside threats, and falling into a governing
crisis.
See, the Republic had become a tragic victim of its own lofty ideology.
Wanting to avoid even the slightest whiff of absolutism, the Sejm had a Liberum Veto
which allowed any member of the Szlachta to stop debate.
In the best of times, this gave contrarians an instant handbrake on the entire legislative
process, but it was also laughably easy for foreign powers to abuse.
A single bribe could throw a critical reform right out the window.
So by the 1700s, the Sejm regularly failed to reach any decisions.
This was good news for the empires that encircled Poland, as Russia, Prussia, and Austria all
stood to gain from Poland’s newfound weakness, and wanted to make it their puppet state.
In 1764 Russia installed Stanislaw II as King, and 4 years later a Confederation of nobles
at Bar threw a rebellion against Russian influence and interference, soooo Russia invaded and
then Prussia and Austria just kind of also invaded while Poland was distracted.
By 1772 a third of the Commonwealth was partitioned between the three empires.
From here, King Stanislaw was stuck between doing nothing and letting things get worse,
or going rogue and actually trying to fix Poland’s problems, which would provoke the
empires, and make things get worse.
To his credit, he went for it, calling a four-year Great Sejm in 1788 to write out a new constitution
for the state, and a really good one too, they even dropped the Liberum Veto.
But, of course, this was way out of line, so Russia and Prussia and then later Austria
invaded with the explicit goal of wiping Poland off the map.
By 1795 the three empires had partitioned the entire commonwealth, and Poland-Lithuania
was fully gone.
… Poof.
SO… what does one do when an ancestral homeland gets sliced up like a birthday cake?
That’s a good question.
Well, as the 1800s show, you write poetry, paint, and throw a lot of revolts.
Poland was right along many Europeans in channeling Romantic Era ideals into a struggle for nationhood.
But Poland’s situation was a little unique, as they had a nation, and in the cultural
sense they still did, but they didn’t have a state.
In an interesting return to the 1200s, ideology focused on the church as a cultural anchor
point for Polishness.
And this meant that “Poland” as a concept narrowed significantly, away from the multiethnic
and multifaith society of the commonwealth and towards what we’d call ethnonationalism.
Yikes.
Really running with that Catholicism angle, Polish thinkers conceived of their country
as The Christ of Nations, which died in the partition as a martyr for other nations and
would one day re-emerge.
I mean, in hindsight, not strictly wrong!
Polish life under partition differed between the three empires.
After some short-lived Napoleonic shenanigans, the “Congress Kingdom of Poland” existed
as a vassal state under the supervision and direct governance of the Russian Empire.
Later in the century it was stripped of what autonomy it had and got absorbed fully into
Russia.
The situation was a little better in Austria, as the Polish-majority province of Galicia
was quite poor, but decently autonomous, and Galicia became a center of polish consciousness
as the century progressed.
By contrast, Prussia, later Germany, had no taste whatsoever for Polish culture, and pushed
for Germanization across the whole empire but onto Poland especially.
Germany’s slice of Poland gained from the industrial revolution, but it was a pretty
patchy process overall.
And across the board, post-hoc justifications for partition relied on harsh stereotypes
that have endured to this day.
No no no, guys, you don’t get it, it’s not that we’re greedy, it’s that they’re
bad, and don’t deserve to exist!
Colonization attitudes, in my Europe?
It’s more likely than you think.
Despite several attempts at uprising made over the century, none succeeded, and over
3 million Poles emigrated for the United States.
It seemed as though the only hope for a revived Poland was the complete collapse of the great
European empires — but as it happened, that would not take long.
And as we step into the first World War, I’ve got to work very hard to not fall into the
infinite web of tangents and books-worth of footnotes for 1900s history.
So WWI in the East was not a game of trench warfare, but armies constantly on the move
causing widespread destruction.
The collapse of all three partitioning empires and sympathy among the allied powers cleared
the room for a new Polish state to rise out of the war, but there was constant friction
with the other new postwar states, such as Lithuania.
Meanwhile, Germany and Soviet Russia hated all of this, so Poland’s task of reunifying
and running their state also faced external pressure of German posturing and full-on Soviet
invasion.
In September of 1939 the Nazis invaded Poland and the Soviet Union followed two weeks later,
partitioning Poland just like the olden days.
Russians persecuted class and political enemies, Germans persecuted race enemies.
And so the Holocaust happened.
Death-camps like Auschwitz contributed to the systematic death of 5 million Poles, 3
million of whom were Jewish.
They also killed Polish politicians, priests, and thinkers in a bid to exterminate polish
culture.
In the face of this utter barbarity, the Polish resistance was among the strongest in Europe,
staging two mass uprisings and organizing military operations across the continent.
Poles played a key role in cracking the Enigma mechanism, and were vital pilots in the Battle
of Britain.
This got marginally better but infinitely more uncomfortable when Russia joined the
Allies, and after the war the soviets turned Poland into a communist satellite state.
Once again Poland was materially and demographically devastated by the conflict, and the heavy-handed
policies of Stalinism weren’t the most helpful in the rebuilding process.
Over the decades various reforms were made and undone and then made again and so on,
and once again, the Church acted as a vehicle for Polish unity, this time in opposition
to communism.
The election of Cardinal Wojtyla of Krakow as Pope John Paul II was an indescribably
huge deal for Poland.
After the Trade Union “Solidarity” started in 1980 and gained a huge following among
Polish workers, support from America and the Vatican helped it become the main political
opposition against the communist government, and the church facilitated the negotiations
to allow Solidarity to participate in the elections of 1989, which broke the Communist
monopoly on power.
Poland’s pathway out of Communism in the ‘90s and beyond brought another series of
struggles, but it’s largely a space they’ve been before.
And that’s one of the most confounding aspects of Polish history: there are so many plotlines
that seem to echo across time, and there’s also so much that couldn’t have happened
anywhere else.
Who could wind up with a government system as absolutely bonkers as the Commonwealth?
It’s amazing.
Polish history can read like a tragedy, ‘cause often it is, but the Polish people have more
than demonstrated that’s no reason for fatalism.
Thank you so much for watching!
I’d like to apologize for the quality of my Polish pronunciation, because while I often
like to try, it’s rare that I succeed.
And of course, I’d like to thank our community on Patreon for supporting the work we do — some
of their names can be seen scrolling along right here.
I’ll see you all in the next video.