Snyder T. The Reconstruction of Nations Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004. 384 p
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commander of the Polish army, ordered the operation. Thirty-four years after
his participation in Operation Vistula, he was again convinced that Poland had
to be saved by self-invasion.
33
Was this an ending or a beginning? Most mod-
ern Polish nationality include hostility to Ukraine? Or could one imagine, with
Solidarity, a free Poland in accord with its eastern neighbors?
The Embattled Ukrainian Borderland
214
Part III The Reconstructed
Polish Homeland
217
Chapter 11 Patriotic
Oppositions and State Interests
(1945–1989)
After the negotiated revolution of , Solidarity formed a noncom-
munist government, which moved quickly to establish an eastern pol-
icy. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in , Poland’s rela-
tions with independent Lithuania and Ukraine quickly improved.
Lithuanian politicians came to see their western neighbor as the key to
European integration, while Ukrainian presidents traveled to Warsaw
to seek historical reconciliation. Disputes with Lithuanians about Vil-
nius, or with Ukrainians about Galicia and Volhynia, were so well
managed as to be nearly invisible. As we have seen, the Second World
War and its aftermath broke some of Poland’s links with the east, and
spread modern nationalism. Perhaps war in the s had created the
preconditions for peace in the s? Perhaps ethnic cleansing set the
stage for national reconciliation?
Such suppositions only make sense in retrospect, from the vantage
point of a northeastern Europe without postcommunist conflict. The
image of a peaceful region arose not from the order Polish policy in-
herited, but from the order it created.
1
The innovation of Polish pol-
icy was to understand nationalism, and channel it toward regional sta-
bility. Between and , when the Soviet Union was still intact, Polish
policy acted as if Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine were becoming nation-states.
Polish diplomats added a proviso: that independence would mean accepting
Soviet-era borders. This was at once a prediction of a future without the Soviet
Union, and an effort to prepare the stable regional order that would then emerge.
It reflected a new Polish grand strategy, prepared in emigration, and debated for
fifteen years before . Its authors were Jerzy Giedroyc and Juliusz Miero-
szewski, who framed it within their understanding of Polish nationality. Since
it arose from consideration of the conflicts discussed in parts and , and since
it brought the peace that is the subject of part , their variant on modern na-
tionality deserves sustained attention.
THE EASTERN INTERESTS OF A POLISH STATE
Jerzy Giedroyc (–) was involved, by birth or by choice, in all of the
eastern questions of interwar Poland. He was born in Minsk, then still the cap-
ital of a Russian imperial province, to an old Polish Lithuanian gentry family.
Giedroyc’s studies in Moscow were interrupted by the Bolshevik Revolution,
and he returned home. As imperial Russia’s Northwestern Territory, the lands
of the old Grand Duchy of Lithuania, was contested by Polish and Bolshevik
armies in , Giedroyc and his family left Minsk for Warsaw. As we have seen,
the federalist Pilsudski’s armies won the war, but the nationalist Grabski deter-
mined the peace. Polish negotiators gave Giedroyc’s native Minsk to Bolshevik
Russia. Like many a Lithuanian Pole before him, Giedroyc found Warsaw poor
and gray. Giedroyc studied Ukrainian history and literature at university, and
made the acquaintance of leading Ukrainian activists.
2
His contacts spanned
the spectrum of Ukrainian political life, from Dmytro Dontsov, the ideologist
of integral Ukrainian nationalism, to Vasyl’ Mudryi, the head of the left-lean-
ing and democratic UNDO. Giedroyc was fascinated by Metropolitan Andrei
Sheptyts’kyi, head of the Greek Catholic Church. As a journalist and civil ser-
vant, Giedroyc urged the Roman Catholic Church to improve relations with
Sheptyts’kyi’s Greek Catholic Church. On state business, and at his own initia-
tive, he visited the Hutsuls, a poor Ukrainian-speaking people in southeastern
Poland.
Giedroyc was repelled by the integral nationalism of the National Demo-
crats, and attracted by Pilsudski and his nostalgic vision of a Poland of many
nationalities. A generation younger than Pilsudski, Giedroyc too was a Lithua-
nian Pole who took an interest in Ukraine. Like Pilsudski, Giedroyc was a
The Reconstructed Polish Homeland
218
pragmatist whose highest value was Polish statehood, and who did not con-
flate the nationalism of Polish society with the interests of the Polish state. For
Giedroyc, the historical attachments of Poles and other nationalities were im-
portant only in their relation to the Polish state. Because Giedroyc believed that
national minorities could destroy Poland, he concluded pragmatically that the
Polish state had to satisfy their aspirations so far as possible. In particular, this
would have involved keeping faith with earlier commitments by extending po-
litical autonomy to Ukrainians in Galicia. In general, it would have required
engagement with all minority populations, in order to determine how the Pol-
ish state could serve them, and how local nationalists could be deprived of
arguments to use against Polish statehood. Interwar Poland lacked a general
policy for its eastern minorities; yet there were Poles, such as Giedroyc and Vol-
hynian governor Henryk Józewski, who devoted themselves to the problem.
As we have seen, the Second World War sharpened national conflicts on the
territory of interwar Poland, allowing massive and bloody Ukrainian-Polish
cleansings. The war’s aftermath brought massive deportations and took from
Poland two of its most important cities, Lwów and Wilno. During the war
Giedroyc maintained his interest in eastern questions, and kept up friendly
contacts with representatives of other nationalities, including Ukrainian na-
Patriotic Oppositions and State Interests
219
Fig. . Jerzy Giedroyc (–),
Polish intellectual and grand
strategist. Giedroyc redirected Polish
political thought. Photograph taken
in Paris in the late s.
tionalists. Having served under General Wladyslaw Anders in the Polish Army,
he made his way to Paris, and founded a Literary Institute and the review Kul-
tura. Between and , Kultura was the most influential Polish émigré
publication. It is quite possible that Giedroyc, over the course of these four
decades, was the single most influential Polish intellectual. He enjoyed influ-
ence at home because he treated emigration in an unusual way. From France,
Giedroyc intended to influence politics within communist Poland, rather than
create a substitute Poland abroad. In this he differed from the main body of
Polish émigrés, who sought to preserve the political institutions of interwar
Poland in London exile. Having chosen nostalgia, many London Poles saw no
reason to criticize the old order, or to resign from territories lost to the Soviet
Union.
3
Giedroyc believed that a newly independent Poland would be some-
thing other than a revival of interwar Poland, and that preparations should be-
gin immediately. Giedroyc understood that the Second World War had re-
posed without resolving Poland’s eastern questions, and worked to create the
platform upon which new solutions could be sought by a future sovereign
Poland. Although Giedroyc rarely wrote, his editorial decisions marked out a
Kultura line on eastern policy.
4
Kultura treated Poland’s postwar eastern border as the eastern frontier of a
future sovereign Poland. This may seem like common sense, but it was very
controversial among Poles, and unusual among East European émigrés in gen-
eral. This border was first drawn by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in and
confirmed by the Yalta accords of , events that Poles regarded as the great
diplomatic betrayals of the twentieth century. Giedroyc’s innovation was to see
these territories not as Polish lands lost to the Soviet Union, but as contested
territories that could now serve nations comparable to the Polish nation. Al-
though Lwów and Wilno had become L’viv/Lvov and Vilnius/Vil’nius as a re-
sult of the triumph of the Red Army and the choices of Stalin, Kultura treated
them as part of Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Lithuania, and in the final analysis as
Ukrainian and Lithuanian.
5
REALISM AND ROMANTICISM
In and Giedroyc’s closest collaborator, Juliusz Mieroszewski ( –
), provided the theoretical justification for the eastern grand strategy of a fu-
ture sovereign Poland. The supreme concern remained the interests of a future
Polish state, and a guiding assumption remained that certain wartime changes
should not be reversed. Giedroyc had long contended that Poland had no in-
The Reconstructed Polish Homeland
220
terest in challenging the territorial status quo; Mieroszewski sought to show
that Poles had a positive interest in maintaining it. He proposed the strength-
ening of the Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian nations within the respec-
tive Soviet Socialist Republics, including on territories taken from Poland in .
He contended that a future sovereign Poland should support the independence
of Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian nation-states. The recommendation
for Polish foreign policy presumed a prediction: that such a sovereign state would
soon arise, and have to deal with independent eastern neighbors. Mieroszewski
was one of the few students of politics who made the correct prediction, writing
of the springtime of nations to come in the twentieth century in both Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union.
6
In the early s, this seemed rather romantic. The Soviet Union was a nu-
clear superpower which appeared to be winning the Cold War. Poland was a
Soviet satellite, its most recent upheavals of and easily quelled by
its communist regime. Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine were constituent re-
publics of the Soviet Union, whose dissidents were a harried few. Hugely for-
midable Soviet conventional military forces were concentrated in precisely the
region in question. Yet, as the eventual fate of the Soviet Union makes clear
enough, the real in international relations includes not only the state of affairs
at a moment in time, but the direction of its change as time proceeds, the ap-
prehension that multiple directions of change are possible, and the realization
that individuals use states to force events onto one course rather than another
on the basis of ideals. Realism as a mode of analysis must be pragmatic, but it
must also (if it is to avoid paradox) include an awareness of the goals which call
for pragmatism, the end toward which pragmatic measures are the means.
These ends are not themselves realistic, they cannot be derived from the world
as it is, but must arise from individuals’ sense of how the world ought to be. In-
terests are incoherent without ideals.
It follows that what appears idealistic may be realistic. Mieroszewski was right
about the fate of the Soviet Union, and about the need for an anticipatory Pol-
ish eastern policy. His own consideration of future Polish interests, precisely be-
cause it was clear about ends and means, escaped the confines of the old Polish
dilemma of realism and idealism. He treated Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine
not by reference to their traditional connection with the Polish nation, but in
the context of the security of a future Polish state. Imagining the geopolitical
position of such a Polish state, Mieroszewski anticipated threats from () an in-
dependent Russia and () imperialist Polish nationalism. Mieroszewski feared
that conflict with Russia over Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania would entrench
Patriotic Oppositions and State Interests
221
harmful versions of both Russian and Polish nationalism. Mieroszewski’s pro-
gram was not an expression of sympathy toward the Lithuanian, Belarusian,
and Ukrainian peoples, but a plan to prevent conflict over territory and deflect
Russian and Polish nationalism. Mieroszewski noticed that the creation of
Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republics within the
Soviet Union had created an intellectual opening for such a strategy. Because
Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine could be seen as political units, he thought it
possible to convince Poles that these Soviet republics were but a step away from
national statehood. The analogy between a satellite Poland and Soviet republics
was strained, but it was made possible by the structure of the Soviet Union. Be-
cause the borders of the Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian SSRs with each
other, the Russian SFSR, and Poland were already visible on maps, it was possi-
ble to advocate the preservation of existing borders in a future order of nation-
states.
7
From his recognition of the centrality of Russia and his understanding of the
organization of the Soviet Union followed the conclusion that the countries
Mieroszewski called “ULB” were key to the security of a future sovereign Po-
land. If independent Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Lithuanian states could sus-
tain themselves, they would moot the old Polish-Russian competition. It was
thus in the Polish interest to make the survival of such states more likely. Hence
Mieroszewski also argued that territorial adjustments by Poland in the east
could not be in the Polish interest; and that advocacy thereof would alienate an-
other generation of Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belarusian national elites. Be-
ginning immediately, he argued in the early s, Poles should not only re-
nounce revanchism in the east, but support the aspirations of the Lithuanian,
Belarusian, and Ukrainian nations to independent statehood. Although this
conclusion flowed from realistic considerations, Mieroszewski understood that
it could provide Polish foreign policy with a moral dimension. As a realist, he
could see that this moral dimension might inspire Poles to act.
POLISH TRADITIONS AND THE KULTURA
PROGRAM
Federalism. Giedroyc was born in Minsk, Mieroszewski spent his youth in Gali-
cia, and it is easy to see the Kultura eastern program as continuing the elite early
modern patriotism of Pilsudski and, more distantly, of Mickiewicz. Giedroyc
was indeed an admirer of Pilsudski from childhood, and Mieroszewski believed
that Mickiewicz understood freedom better than Poles of his day. Yet the unit
The Reconstructed Polish Homeland
222
of analysis in Giedroyc and Mieroszewski’s theory of international relations was
the nation-state, a modern form alien to early modern traditions. Mickiewicz
was nostalgic for a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in which nationality
meant something entirely different than it does now, and Pilsudski wished to
create a federation united by Polish high culture. Giedroyc and Mieroszewski
were preparing Poles for the fully modern world of nation-states. Mieroszewski
assumed that a sovereign Poland would be a nation-state, and that Ukraine,
Lithuania, and Belarus could become nation-states as well. He disdained nos-
talgia for the old Commonwealth, not because he found it unsympathetic per-
sonally, but on the pragmatic grounds that it could only be seen as imperialism
by Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belarusian patriots. As he realized, once one is
committed to seeing Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine as equal nations rather
than as colorful addenda to a Polish state tradition, the legacy of the Common-
wealth becomes treacherous ground.
As we have seen, Lithuanian nationalism was based upon the particular view
of the Commonwealth as poisonous to Lithuanian culture, while Ukrainian
nationalism idealized rebellions against the Commonwealth. Poles themselves
tended to see the early modern Commonwealth in modern nationalist terms,
and therefore tended to regard its eastern territories as part of their own his-
tory.
8
All of these readings are so deeply false that no amount of scholarly com-
promise can reconcile them. They can all, however, be placed within a set of
parallel national readings of history, if one accepts the political principle of
multi-nationalism. This is what Mieroszewski proposed. In Mieroszewski’s vi-
sion, the evident sympathy for Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian peoples
implicit in Mickiewicz’s poetry and Pilsudski’s federalism became normative
respect for Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian nations. While Polish feder-
alists had assumed the superiority of Polish culture in the east, Mieroszewski
welcomed distinct Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian national elites. The
understanding of Poland as an old nation and Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine
as young nations, whatever its merits as history, was rejected in politics. It was
replaced by propositions, asserted in the present tense, that all four peoples
were nations deserving of states. The Kultura program can be seen as updated
federalism: if one accepts the crucial qualifications that cooperation with east-
ern neighbors is a question of relations among friendly states, and that the
recognition of these states requires that Poland abandon the territorial ambi-
tions and civilizational claims of the old federal vision. Federalism assumed
early modern nationality. The Kultura program was an accomodation with
modernity.
Patriotic Oppositions and State Interests
223