Poland: A history. Adam Zamoyski
are now emerging as the major players of the future has radically altered attitudes in the hitherto dominant nations of the West. Put simply, the historian has less to explain and fewer prejudices to break down. But the real significance of the events of 1989 only began to make itself felt later.
When I was writing my book, Europe was divided by the Iron Curtain. Crossing it was an awesome and bizarre experience for anyone brought up in the West—the coils of barbed wire, the watchtowers, the machine guns aimed at the traveller and the ubiquitous guards with their Alsatian dogs were richly redolent of Nazi concentration camp and Soviet gulag. Not surprisingly, since this absurd barrier was one of the last surviving vestiges of a long historical process that had reached its apogee in the twin abominations of Soviet communism and German fascism.
Only two hundred years before, the whole area between the Rhine and the Dnieper had been inhabited by a variety of peoples with wildly differing cultural, religious and political affiliations, organised into an equally variegated miscellany of empires, commonwealths, kingdoms, duchies, principalities, republics, bishoprics, city states, baronies and lesser sovereignties. In a process that began with the eighteenth-century partitions of Poland, these polities had been subjugated and then reorganised into a small number of highly competitive states and the peoples inhabiting them into largely fictitious nations which saw their survival in Darwinian terms. This initiated a struggle that culminated in the two world wars and the Cold War.
If the Iron Curtain disfigured Europe physically, the process which had led up to it had distorted history even more fundamentally. No history more so than that of Poland, which was the first and greatest casualty of the process. Two years after Russia, Prussia and Austria had divided the country up among themselves, on 26 January 1797 they signed a convention containing a secret article which stressed the absolute ‘necessity of abolishing everything which might recall the existence of a Polish kingdom in face of the performed annihilation of this political body’. In this spirit, the Prussians melted down the Polish crown jewels, the Austrians turned royal palaces into barracks, and the Russians grabbed everything they could lay their hands on and shipped it out, particularly documents. All three rewrote history to give the impression that Poland had never been a fully sovereign state, only a backwater which needed civilising.
Throughout the nineteenth century the Poles who struggled to reverse this process and recover their independence were generally viewed in the West as troublemakers impeding the orderly march of progress. In the twentieth century, by contrast, when they once again fell victim, to the Soviet Union, they came to be seen as reactionary and backward because of their resilience to supposedly progressive doctrines such as communism.
Looking back on the way history was written in the twentieth century, particularly in its middle decades, one cannot avoid being struck by how deeply politicised it was. Not only did nationalism or dominant state orthodoxy select and distort facts; various interpretations of Marxist theory reinvented them to suit visions of the future.
Not surprisingly, considering the country’s position at the geographical and ideological interface of such disputes, Poland’s past received the full treatment. And given that it was a battleground for political and nationalist passions of great intensity, it was impossible, even for supposedly uncommitted historians in faraway universities, to write about it entirely dispassionately. That did not change until the disintegration of the Soviet experiment robbed the most vociferous combatants of their arguments.
What was not immediately apparent even at that point was that the disintegration of the Soviet Union held a deeper significance: it marked the end of the era of state-based Darwinism that had begun with the rise of Prussia in the early eighteenth century (arguably even earlier). This model had been discredited by the Great War and was abandoned by most of Europe after 1945, as one country after another divested itself of its national pretensions and imperial attributes to pool its sovereignty in the interests of a united Europe. But the Soviet Union remained wedded to the old mindset of paranoid nationalist/ideological struggle for dominance. Its implosion released the nations of East Central Europe from this, and although large sections of society within those nations, particularly in the Balkans, are still affected by it (for understandable historical reasons), most of the inhabitants of the area have been able to, or even been obliged to, take an entirely fresh view of the past.
This mirrors an analogous process that has been taking place in Western societies. While most young Britons would probably still enjoy watching a 1940s war film glorifying British pluck and derring-do, the overwhelming majority might as well, for all their empathy, be watching an Arthurian romance or a piece of science fiction, and the concept of laying down their lives for their country is largely alien to them. The same is even more true of the French and Germans, while to young Italians the very myths of the Risorgimento, the founding faith of their country, now appear laughable. The majority of the population of the European Union now thinks in terms of societies rather than nations.
Histories written a few decades ago now appear strangely obsessed with political achievements, dominions established, battles won—in essence, with national success. They can seem embarrassingly patronising on the subject of all those who did not win out according to the rules of the day. Those rules have changed, and this is particularly welcome to the historian of Poland.
In the early modern period, the Poles failed spectacularly to build an efficient centralised state structure and they paid the price, being swallowed up by their more successful neighbours. The history of Poland has therefore, up until now, been written as that of a failed state. Like some distorting lens or filter, that failure coloured and deformed the historian’s view of the whole of Polish history.
He is now no longer, as he was only a couple of decades ago, writing the history of an enslaved and to all intents and purposes non-existent country. There is a great difference between writing up a bankrupt business and writing up one that has been through hard times and turned the corner. He is no longer writing the history of a state that failed, but of a society that created a social and political civilisation of its own, one which was occluded by the success of a rival model (now utterly discredited) but whose ideals are close to those the world values today.
All this convinced me that I could not just brush up and update The Polish Way. But since I still stand by that book, as far as it goes, and indeed its basic structure, I did not see any point in beginning a new history of Poland from scratch, and used that earlier book as the basis for this one. At the same time, I have so thoroughly reworked the text, removed so much of the old and added so much that is new, that I had no qualms about submitting it under a new title.
Some readers may be surprised to find no references to sources in the text. This is an essay rather than a textbook. It is based on wellknown and undisputed facts, and is not in any sense meant to break new ground. I therefore saw no reason to clutter the text with numbers, which many readers find off-putting.
I owe a debt to Miłosz Zieliński, who helped me research the recent past, and to Jakub Borawski, who helped me place it in perspective. I should like to thank my editors Richard Johnson, who gave me invaluable support when I began to entertain doubts about the venture, Arabella Pike, who took the project over with enthusiasm, and Robert Lacey, whose editorial skills are nonpareil. I must also thank Shervie Price for reading the text and making useful suggestions, and my wife Emma for her sensible comments and her love.
Adam Zamoyski London, 2009
In the Middle Ages, when people favoured simple explanations, Polish folklore had it that the German nation had been deposited on this earth through the rectum of Pontius Pilate. Sadly, the Polish nation boasts no such convenient and satisfying founding myth, and its origins were something of a mystery even to its neighbours.
While most of Europe evolved from the Dark Ages in mutual interaction, with Celtic monks from Ireland carrying the religion of Rome to Germany, and Vikings from Scandinavia linking England and France with Sicily and the Arab world or sailing down the rivers of Russia to Kiev and Constantinople,