Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  GEORGE ENTEEN

  POLAND

  Relations between Poles and Russians have never been easy. Despite their close linguistic and ethnic ties, differences rather than similarities characterize the relationship between them. In religious denomination, political tradition, worldview, even the alphabets in which they write their related languages, Poles and Russians are clearly distinct. Russia took its form of Christianity during the late ninth century from Byzantium while Poland was christened by emissaries from the pope almost a century later. Russia came to be the very essence of autocratic rule under Ivan IV and the Romanovs, while Poland developed in an opposite direction, toward a highly decentralized polity linked with Lithuania and dominated by the nobility. Throughout history, Poland has tended to see itself as the easternmost outpost of Western values and traditions: unlike Russia, Poland participated in the Renaissance and Reformation. Defining themselves as Europeans, Poles have often depicted their Eastern neighbors as barbarians and schismatics. Russians returned the favor, describing Poles as flighty, hysterical, and treacherous.

  MUSCOVY AND POLAND-LITHUANIA

  The first significant clashes between the Polish state and Muscovy occurred after the Union of Lublin (1569). During the 1550s and 1560s Muscovy had pursued an aggressive westward policy, seizing some Lithuanian lands. When Muscovite political authority dissolved into anarchy during the Time of Troubles during the early seventeenth century, Poland was ready to fish in troubled Russian waters. Polish nobles and Jesuits supported the first

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  “False Dmitry,” who claimed to be Ivan IV’s son and triumphantly entered Moscow in 1605. In great part because of the large Polish retinue and openly Catholic sympathies of “Dmitry,” he was soon deposed and murdered. But Polish interference in confused Muscovite politics continued. Most spectacularly, King Sigismund III of Poland succeeded in having his son Wladyslaw proclaimed tsar in 1610. The Polish presence in Moscow was not to last; by 1613 the Poles had been slaughtered or forced to flee, and Mikhail Romanov was elected tsar.

  As Russia recovered and expanded under the Romanovs, Poland grew weaker. Poland’s highly decentralized government and elected king meant that the central government could not impose its will on the provinces. 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.

  PARTITIONS AND RUSSIAN RULE

  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 t
wo 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.

  The discontent of 1980 also spawned something quite new: the Polish trade union Solidarity. This first independent trade union in a communist bloc country appeared in late 1980, was banned just more than one year later, and was resurrected- more properly, relegalized-during the late 1980s. Solidarity represented a novel phenomenon for a People’s Democracy: a popular and independent trade union that brought together intellectuals and workers. The outlawing of Solidarity by General Wojciech Jaruzelski in December 1981 was a desperate measure taken, according to Jaruzelski himself, to forestall an actual Soviet invasion of the country. One may doubt Jaruzelski’s account, but

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  POLAR EXPLORERS

  tensions between the USSR and Poland certainly ran high, and the threat of invasion cannot be entirely discounted. Ultimately, however, Jaruzelski’s attempt to save People’s Poland failed. Early in 1989 Solidarity was relegalized and in summer of that year the communists handed over power to Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first noncommunist prime minister since the 1940s. The refusal of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to intervene in Polish affairs made possible this peaceful transfer of power.

  Relations between Poland and Russia during the 1990s have been remarkably positive, considering the amazing changes brought by that decade. Despite grumbling and even saber rattling from Moscow over Poland’s plans to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), in the end NATO expansion took place in 1999 without a hitch. At the same time, economic and cultural links between Moscow and Warsaw have weakened considerably as Poland has turned toward the West both institutionally (NATO, European Union) and culturally (learning English instead of Russian). Still, the correct if not always cordial relations between the two countries during the 1990s give reason for hope that the two largest Slavic nations will finally be able to both live together and prosper. See also: CATHOLICISM; LITHUANIA AND LITHUANIANS; NATIONALISM IN THE SOVIET UNION; NATIONALISM IN TSARIST EMPIRE; ORGANIC STATUTE OF 1832; POLES; POLISH REBELLION OF 1863; POLISH-SOVIET WAR; SAR-MATIANS; TIME OF TROUBLES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Davies, Norman. Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland. (1984). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Gross, Jan. (1988). Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Be-lorussia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jedlicki, Jerzy. (1999). A Suburb of Europe: Nineteenth-Century Polish Approaches to Western Civilization. Budapest: Central European University Press. Polonsky, Antony. (1972). Politics in Independent Poland 1921-1939: The Crisis of Constitutional Government. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Snyder, Timothy. (2003). The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Walicki, Andrzej. (1991). Russia, Poland, and Universal Regeneration: Studies on Russian and Polish Thought of the Romantic Epoch. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Wandycz, Piotr. (1974). The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795-1918. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

  THEODORE R. WEEKS

  POLAR EXPLORERS

  From its earliest days, Russia was concerned with Arctic settlement and development. Actual exploration began during the eighteenth century and continued, although Russia took little part in the classic race for the North and South poles. Interest heightened after 1920, as the USSR transformed itself into a key player in North polar exploration. After 1956, the USSR became an important force in Antarctic research.

  Russian migration to the Arctic coast began during the eleventh century. Further settlement was tied to the foundation of religious communities (such as the Solovetsky Monastery, built in 1435); demand for furs and precious metals; the search for the Northeast Passage (in Russian, the Northern Sea Route); the establishment of ports such as Arkhangelsk (1584); and Russia’s eastward expansion into Siberia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  Scientific and exploratory work got underway during the 1700s and 1800s. On behalf of the Russian government, Danish captain Vitus Bering, with Alexei Chirikov as his second-in-command, launched his Kamchatka (1728-1730) and Great Northern (1733-1749) expeditions. Afterward, the Admiralty and Academy of Sciences sponsored many voyages and expeditions, surveying or exploring Spitsbergen, Novaya Zemlya, the New Siberian Islands, Wrangel Island, and Franz Josef Land. The colonization of Alaska and incorporation of the Russian-American Company (1799) necessitated greater familiarity with the Arctic. Key figures from this period include Fyodor Rozmyslov (d. 1771), Vasily Chichagov (1726-1809), Matvei Gedenshtrom (1780-1843), Academy of Sciences president Fyodor Litke (1797-1882), and Alexander Sibiryakov (1844-1893). The latter sponsored the first successful crossing of the Northeast Passage: Adolf Erik Nordenskjold’s 1878-1879 voyage in the Vega.

  During the late 1800s and early 1900s, as international audiences thrilled to the daring exploits

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  of explorers like Peary and Scott, Russian polar work focused on scientific, commercial, and military concerns. Admiral Stepan Makarov formed a Russian icebreaker fleet, while naval officer Alexander Kolchak, later famous
as a White commander during the Russian civil war, explored the Arctic. Early twentieth-century expeditions under Ernst Toll, Vladimir Rusanov, Georgy Brusilov, and Georgy Sedov ended in tragedy. By contrast, in 1914, Yan Nagursky became the first pilot successfully to fly an airplane above the Arctic Circle. In 1914-1915, Boris Vilkitsky completed the second traversal of the Northeast Passage.

  Under the Soviet regime, polar exploration and development fell to agencies such as the All-Union Arctic Institute (VAI) and, after 1932, the Main Administration of the Northern Sea Route (GUSMP). Prominent Arctic scientists included Vladimir Vize, Georgy Ushakov, and Rudolf Samoilovich of the VAI, as well as Otto Shmidt, head of GUSMP. The USSR made impressive headway during the 1920s and 1930s in building an economic and trans-portational infrastructure in the polar regions. This was also an era of spectacular public triumphs, including the rescue of Umberto Nobile and the crew of the dirigible Italia (1928); participation in the Arctic flight of the airship Graf Zeppelin (1931); the Sibiryakov’s first single-season crossing of the Northeast Passage (1932); the airlift of the Chelyuskin’s crew and passengers, who survived two months on the Arctic ice after their ship sank (1933-1934); the flights of Valery Chkalov and Mikhail Gromov over the North Pole on their way to the United States (1937); the first airplane landing at the North Pole (1937); and the establishment of the first research outpost at the North Pole, the SP-1, under the leadership of Ivan Papanin (1937-1938). In 1941 the Soviets also accomplished the first airplane landing at the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility. There was, of course, an ugly underside to Soviet achievement in the Arctic: Not only was much Soviet polar work characterized by inefficiency and periodic mishaps, both major and minor, but it was closely linked to the steady expansion of forced labor in the GULAG system.