The History of Poland And Russia
I fully believe that to understand the present we must understand the past. That past is not a determinant of the present but tends to act as a constraint upon the present, limiting the available options and tainting current thinking. Many lies are told about history to affect people’s opinions and decisions in the present, and the history of Polish/Russian relations is very much a victim of the current status of Russia as an official Western enemy. It must be vilified in order to gain the support of the Western citizenry to aggressive acts taken against Russia, designed to bring an independent country under the heel of the West.
The Genesis of Poland and Russia
A territory recognizable as a Poland dates back to the 10th century, with the Piast dynasty. In 1385 it became the Polish-Lithuanian Union and was spared domination by the Mongols; a fate that destroyed the Kevian Rus’. The Union was a major power within Europe and grew to claim suzerainty over the Duchy of Prussia as well as including what is now Lithuania and Latvia and two thirds of Estonia, all of Belarus and most of modern Ukraine, in addition to the eastern two-thirds of modern Poland. This was the heyday of the late 16th and early 17th centuries that Polish elites harken back to, a heyday that included the occupation of Moscow (see below) but was then followed by a long decline that led to the liquidation of the country in the late 18th century. The history of Russia tends also to date back to the 10th century, with the Kievan Rus’, which reached its’ peak a century later before a long decline which ended with complete destruction by the Mongols from 1237-1240; this included a massive depopulation of up to 50%. Only the Novgorod Republic in the North retained some degree of autonomy from the Mongols. The Grand Duchy of Moscow slowly gained power under the Mongol Yoke, defeating it at the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380 and subsumed the other surrounding regions, including Novgorod. Ivan the Great (1462-1505) then finally drove out the Mongols, placing all of central and northern Russia under Moscow’s rule. Ivan the Terrible (1547-1575) nearly doubled the size of Russia, expanding down to the Caspian Sea (defeating the Khazan and Astrakhan Khanates).
250 Years of War Ending In The Dismemberment of Poland
Ivan then launched the Livonian War (1558-1583) against Sweden and the Polish-Lithuanian Union (which became the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569) for access to the Baltic, but the war was inconclusive and drained the resources of Russia while other enemies also threatened. Russia was forced to sue for peace and the Truce of Jam Zapolski (1582) to all intents and purposes returned the borders back to the pre-war positions. With Ivan’s death Russia fell into a civil war (he had killed his eldest son in a fit of rage and his other son was unfit to rule); The Time of Troubles that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth took advantage of to invade Russia and occupy Moscow. The Polish were driven out and the Romanov Dynasty established in Russia in 1613. So even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we already have the Polish and the Russians fighting a major war, and then Poland invading Russia.
In 1654, with the Ukrainian peasants rebelling against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the leader of the Ukraine asked for Russian protection. The resulting Russo-Polish War (1654-1667) involved campaigns right across the territories of modern Belarus and the Ukraine, and concluded with Eastern Ukraine (east of the Dnieper River) falling under Russian control and Western Ukraine remaining under Polish control. This is very much the current fault line within the Ukraine with the East tending toward Russia and the West tending toward Europe. Additionally, the Smolensk region was also reclaimed by Russia. In parallel, the Polish had also had to fight the Swedes and the conflicts with both Sweden and Russia (which included the Deluge during which the western part of the Commonwealth was occupied and devastated by the Swedish and the eastern part by the Russians) greatly weakened the Commonwealth. It then went into decline, culminating in the three partitions of the county between 1772 and 1795, by the Habsburg Monarchy, Prussia, and Russia; Austria and Prussia divided up the western areas and Russia took most of modern western Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. For the next 122 years Poland ceased to exist. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 placed the Duchy of Warsaw under Russian control, and this was the status quo until the outbreak of World War 1.
Post-WW1 Polish Rebirth
After World War 1, the western part of Poland regained its independence and invaded the now Soviet Union (weakened by internal strife and other foreign invasions) to reclaim the lands of Belarus and the Ukraine. These forces were driven back to Warsaw, where the Poles claimed a great victory at the Miracle on the Vistula and drove back the Soviet forces far into the USSR. The settlement of the Polish-Soviet War (1918-1921), the Treaty of Riga extended Polish territory all the way to Minsk in the east (taking approximately half of modern Belarus) and included the western part of Ukraine surrounding Lviv (this included Galicia). It must be remembered that there was also an uprising in the Ukraine (especially western Ukraine) in general against the Soviets which was defeated by the Red Army. The Polish failed to fully regain their previous lands, while the Russians had to give up territory to a nation that had once again attacked it whilst it was rent by a civil war (as in The Time of Troubles). The settlement of World War 1 had also forced the USSR to give independence to the Baltic States, and Finland, a bitter pill for a nation that had fought for three hard years against the Germans.
After the Polish coup of 1926, Poland was a quasi-dictatorship with the military leader Pilsudski at its helm, that imprisoned political opponents and sentenced them in show trials and established a concentration camp for political prisoners; although Pilsudski did restrain the widespread Polish antisemitism. In 1931 Poland signed a non-aggression pact with Russia, and in 1934 with Germany (the latter of which was denounced by Hitler in April 1939). After Pilsudski died in 1935, antisemitism increased and increasing limitations were placed on the Jewish population, together with open discussions of how to remove the Jews from Poland. The population remained predominantly agrarian, with a small landowning class. With the accession of Stalin to absolute power, the Soviet Union became a dictatorship which was rammed through the fastest industrialization in history by a mixture of terror, propaganda and national pride. It was this industrialization that allowed the Soviets to defeat the German army in WW2.
WW2 Dismemberment and Soviet Domination
Poland took part in the German partition of Czechoslovakia in 1938, taking the territory of Teschen. This was a nation that the USSR considered an ally, but the Soviets had not even been involved in the Munich Agreement. As Churchill noted in his memoirs (The Gathering Storm), Poland was against any agreement with the Soviet Union to stem German aggression, even after Hitler’s repudiation of its non-aggression pact with Germany. Britain and France also dragged their feet with respect to a Soviet-proposed Triple Alliance to protect Eastern Europe from German aggression; a rejection that Churchill later accepted was a mistake, “The alliance of Britain, France and Russia would have struck deep alarm into the heart of Germany in 1939, and no one can prove that war might not have been averted” (The Gathering Storm, p. 325). On June 7th, Estonia and Latvia signed non-aggression pacts with Germany. In this light the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 between the USSR and Germany can be seen as the natural result of the inability of the USSR to form an alliance with the Western powers to protect Eastern Europe and itself. Instead, the Soviets made a peace with the Germans that regained the lands lost in 1921 to Poland, as well as the Baltic States, and moved the border much farther away from Moscow. Without this latter factor, Moscow may have easily fallen to the Germans in the first months of Barbarossa (the German invasion of the USSR), and the German supply lines would have been significantly shorter; “If their policy was cold-blooded, it was also at the moment realistic in a high degree” (The Gathering Storm, p. 351). The Pact was a natural realist response to the unwillingness of the British and French to ally with the Soviet Union, and it was this unwillingness that facilitated the German invasion of Poland not the response of the Soviets to it. In May 1940 the Soviets also executed 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals at Katyn Forest, many of which were the sons of the Polish elite; an action designed to quash any thought of an independent Polish government. Poland was again extinguished.
Western Ukrainian Collaboration With The Nazis & Resistance To Post-WW2 Soviet Rule
After the German invasion of Russia, the 14th Waffen Grenadier Battalion of the SS (1st Galician) was formed with mostly Ukrainian volunteers from the Galician area, and it fought against the Soviet army, Soviet and Polish partisans, the Slovak national Uprising and Yugoslav partisans. At the end of the war the battalion surrendered to Polish soldiers in Italy and were allowed to emigrate to the UK (8,000), Canada and the US instead of being deported to the Soviet Union. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (the UPA), based in western Ukraine (the population of eastern Ukraine considered them to be collaborators) also fought against both the Soviet and Polish armies during and after WW2. The UPA was involved in ethnic cleansing. It was only fully defeated in Poland in 1947 and the Soviet Union in 1949. Seven million Soviet citizens of the Ukrainian Socialist Republic served in the Soviet army, showing how it was only a relatively small part of the Ukrainian population that fought for the Nazis and against the Soviets. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union four decades later, Ukraine was an integral part of the USSR proper and Poland a part of the Warsaw Pact.
The Present
The above documents a nearly 500-year period of wars, invasions and occupations between Poland and Russia/the Soviet Union. A result is a Ukraine divided between its western provinces that consider the 1st Galician and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army as heroes, and an east that looks to Russia as its ethnic homeland. Another result is an ongoing Polish/Russian enmity, with an ongoing war over historical revisionism and the meaning of that history for the present; this has deepened with the 2014 Ukrainian coup, the recent destruction of Soviet war memorials in Poland, and Polish attempts to block the Nordstream 2 pipeline. And another is the deep enmity of the Baltic states for Russia. Having its historical enemies being members of both the EU and NATO is not something welcomed by Russia, and is in direct contravention to guarantees given to the Soviet leadership prior to the joining of East and West Germany.