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Wilno to Poland and revive hope for a renewed Grand Duchy of Lithuania. He

entrusted the mission to General Lucjan Z

eligowski (–), another Pol-

ish Lithuanian. Z

eligowski was a former ofﬁcer in the Russian army, husband

to a Russian wife, speaker of a form of Polish we would hear as Belarusian: a

child, in other words, of the Grand Duchy. In Pilsudski’s address to the other

ofﬁcers of the “Lithuanian-Belarusian” division on their way to Wilno we can

hear the appeal to a very local patriotism: “You’re from these parts, you’ve been

armed, so go on home.”

On  October  Z

eligowski marched about

, troops into Wilno. The Lithuanian army offered no resistance, and the

city’s Polish population welcomed the troops. On  October Z

eligowski pro-

claimed “Central Lithuania,” which was to be one canton of a Lithuania joined

to Poland in a federation.

The other two cantons were to be an ethnic Lithuania with a capital in Kau-

nas, and a Belarusian Lithuania with a capital in Minsk. The idea of a Lithua-

nia of cantons attached to Poland in a federation did not arise from the mo-

ment. It had been proposed during the uprising of , and was discussed for

decades by socialists. In the context of , however, it was impossible to im-

plement. A revived and federated Grand Duchy of Lithuania required at the

very least all three cantons, and Z

eligowski and Pilsudski could create only one.

The Lithuanian government in Kaunas, of course, had no wish to be can-

tonized; and an invasion of Kaunas would not only have violated the spirit of

federalism, it would have provoked the European powers. The Polish National

Democrats made sure that no Belaruso-Lithuanian canton ever arose. The very

day Z

eligowski proclaimed “Central Lithuania,” the Polish delegation at Riga

declined the Bolshevik offer of Minsk and other lands then occupied by the

Polish army. Everyone understood that this doomed the federalist program.

This Polish delegation was dominated by the National Democrat Stanislaw

Grabski (–), who wished to create a Poland in which Poles could pre-

dominate. He overcame the federalist line represented by Pilsudski’s ally Leon

Wasilewski.

The delegation represented the democratic Polish government

and constituent assembly, and not Pilsudski, the head of the Polish state. Be-

hind Pilsudski stood the army and its ofﬁcer corps, but behind Grabski stood

the assembly, dominated by National Democrats.

The idea of a federation was doomed by the reinforcing refusals of Polish

National Democrats in Warsaw and the Lithuanian government in Kaunas,

who prevented the Belarusian and ethnic Lithuanian cantons from arising.

This was a silent alliance of modern nationalists to create new national states,

and to bury the early modern traditions of the Polish-Lithuanian Common-

The Contested Lithuanian-Belarusian Fatherland

wealth. Lithuania, to avoid any ambiguity, had formally renounced the 

Lublin Union.

NATIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF

RIGA, 1921–1939

Belarus. Belarusian activists regarded the Riga settlement as treason and trag-

edy. Although other blows would follow, after Riga it was hard to see Warsaw as

an ally of Belarusian aspirations. Although the Polish state kept Wilno and

some west Belarusian territories, this was not enough to make the idea of a fed-

eration credible. The Riga borders left the Belarusian-speaking minority in

Poland small and rural, as the National Democrats intended. Without Minsk,

the Belarusian intelligentsia was too small to serve as an ally for any Polish po-

litical formation; once Minsk became Soviet, Belarusian national aspirations

within Poland were seen as crypto-Bolshevism.

The Soviet Union did indeed

exert a powerful attraction on Polish Belarusians. After the Riga settlement of

, the Soviet Union was established as a nominal federation of republics in

. One of these was a Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) with a cap-

ital in Minsk. Soviet policy, enforced on the Communist International, was

that the Belorussian SSR should be extended westward to include ethnically

Belorussian lands within Poland.

In the s, the communism exported to Poland exploited antistate nation-

alism as well as peasant land hunger. In these early years of the Soviet Union,

two of Lenin’s tactical innovations—the alliance with the peasantry and the ex-

ploitation of national self-determination—were used to foment revolution in

Poland. Agitation abroad was supported by action at home. The ethnic princi-

ple, the basis for the revanchism of the Belarussian SSR and the Communist

Party of Western Belorussia established in Poland, was actually implemented

within the Soviet Union. In , , and  the territory of the Belorus-

sian SSR was extended to the east at the expense of the Russian republic. In the

s Moscow supported Belarusian culture. While there had been no schools

teaching in Belarusian in tsarist times, Soviet Belorussia in the s boasted an

Academy of Sciences, a State University, an Institute of Belarusian Culture, a

Belarusian State Library, and four thousand Belarusian schools. It was in Soviet

Belorussia that the ﬁrst serious textbook of Belarusian history was written: but

it was not published, and its author was exiled to Moscow.

Polish policy remained repressive throughout the s and s, closing all

remaining Belarusian schools and jailing opponents. The Belarusian move-

First World War and Wilno Question

ment stagnated in Vil’nia. Belarusian activists had little opportunity to speed

modern national ideas beyond Vil’nia to proverbially backward regions such as

Polesie. Polish policy never allowed for the creation of a Belorussian national

society. Stalin’s Soviet Union, on the other hand, destroyed during the s the

Soviet Belarusian society that had arisen in the s. The contrast is well seen

in the fate of the Belarusian politician and writer Branislau Tarashkevich (–

). Tarashkevich, who was born near Vil’nia and educated in the city, in his

youth took part in both Polish and Belarusian organizations in the Russian em-

pire. In interwar Poland, he was a prominent advocate of the Belarusian cause,

as a deputy in Parliament, as a director of Belarusian schools, and as founder

and head of the peasant organization Hromada. He joined the Communist

Party of Western Belorussia in , and was imprisoned in Poland. In his

prison cells, over the course of four years, Tarashkevich translated the entirety

of Pan Tadeusz. He took the manuscript with him to the Soviet Union after a

prisoner exchange of . He could not publish it there. Indeed, he was not al-

lowed to reside in Soviet Belorussia. He was arrested in Moscow in , and

The Contested Lithuanian-Belarusian Fatherland

Fig. . The Prypiet Marshes, near Pin´sk, Polesie region, Poland, . Today in Belarus.

These are the territories where people proverbially had difﬁculty ascertaining the

nationality of the locals.

First World War and Wilno Question

Fig. . Two old men of Chodynicze,

Polesie, Poland, .

Fig. . A wanderer between Ratno and

Kobryn´, Poland, . The former is

today in Ukraine, the latter in

Belarus. At the time, the

photographer was in the middle of

marshy Polesie, Poland.

executed in . Thanks to his widow, the manuscript of his translation sur-

vived.

Poland. The Treaty of Riga, the partition of Belarus, and the violent seizure

of Wilno marked a defeat of Mickiewicz’s idea of the Grand Duchy in Polish

political life. Pilsudski, representative of this federalist tradition, was ultimately

defeated by Dmowski, advocate of integral nationalism. The National Demo-

crats triumphed in foreign relations, as in domestic politics, because their ap-

proach was simple. They also enjoyed a basic advantage of political geography.

The constituent assembly elected in February  represented central Poland,

since what became eastern Poland was at the time occupied by the Red Army. It

was therefore disproportionately National Democratic, and thus disinclined to

absorb enough eastern lands to create a federation. Its support of the Riga set-

tlement created a Poland which was too westerly to be a federation, but not

westerly enough to remain a national state. The National Democrats’ gift of

Minsk, Kamieniec Podolski, Berdyczów and surrounding lands to the Bolshe-

viks at Riga in  left hundreds of thousands of Poles, many of them friendly

to the idea of a federal Polish-Lithuanian-Belarusian state, in the tender care of

Moscow. Most Soviet Poles would be deported to Siberia or Kazakhstan in the

s. The National Democrats’ renunciation also reduced Poland’s potential

East Slavic populations by perhaps two million and potential Jewish popula-

tions by hundreds of thousands.

The National Democrats knew what they

were doing. Had Poland’s borders stretched any further to the east, the party

would never have won an election. As the  parliamentary elections demon-

strated, Poland in its Riga frontiers was evenly split between the National Dem-

ocrats and the Right, on the one side, and socialists and national minorities on

the other. On  December  the votes of the Left, the Center, and the na-

tional minorities elected Poland’s ﬁrst president, Gabriel Narutowicz. He was

assassinated one week later by a right-wing fanatic. Like Pilsudski, Narutowicz

was a Pole of Lithuanian descent who favored equal rights for the national mi-

norities. The assassination of Narutowicz was a heavy blow to Pilsudski, who

soon withdrew (for the time being) from politics.

Pilsudski’s incomplete success in Wilno collapsed ineluctably into the Na-

tional Democratic vision of Poland. With Pilsudski’s idea of a reborn Grand

Duchy of Lithuania buried by Polish and Lithuanian nationalists, Wilno was

absorbed by a Polish national state. The civilian authority installed in Wilno by

eligowski held elections to a local parliament on  January . These were

carried out under military rule by Poles, boycotted by the Jewish, Belarusian,

and Lithuanian populations, and marred by various irregularities. Neverthe-

The Contested Lithuanian-Belarusian Fatherland

less, the . percent participation in Wilno city was a powerful political mes-

sage, and the boycotts by non-Poles meant that Polish annexationists domi-

nated the local assembly. In retrospect, it may appear that Poland annexed

Wilno because Wilno was an “ethnically” Polish city. It was rather the other

way around: the annexation of Wilno was the ﬁrst step toward the elimination

of traditional patriotism and the sharpening of Polish and Lithuanian ethnic

nationalism. After the referendum, Poland annexed Wilno and surrounding

territories, and the Entente powers recognized these frontiers.

Lithuania. How might Lithuanian nationalism have developed if Poland

had granted Vilnius/Wilno to Lithuania? Pilsudski and Z

eligowski, like many

of the Polish-speaking residents of Wilno who voted for annexation, called

themselves Lithuanians. The difference between Pilsudski’s faith in a historical

vision of Lithuania and Dmowski’s desire to annex a “Polish” city is real and im-

portant, reﬂecting Pilsudski’s traditional patriotism and Dmowski’s ethnic na-

tionalism. Nevertheless, by occupying Wilno, Pilsudski solidiﬁed a territorial

order in which Polish and Lithuanian nationalists could ﬂourish—a point

made by his former comrade-in-arms, the Polish Lithuanian Michal Römer.

Regardless of Pilsudski’s motives, the seizure of the city could not be seen by

Lithuanians as consistent with the traditions of the Grand Duchy. As we have

seen, the link between Lithuania and Vilnius was historical. Whatever Pilsud-

ski thought he was doing, taking the city by force of arms was bound to drive

Lithuanian nationalists away from a political and toward an ethnic under-

standing of the nation. Moreover, and as Römer also pointed out, the annexa-

tion of Vilnius deprived the new Lithuanian state of the very people, Polish

Lithuanians and Jews, who might have rendered its society more prosperous

and its polity more practical. As Römer knew, Jews had been generally sympa-

thetic to the Lithuanian claim, believing that a large multinational Lithuania

with Vilne as its capital would be more likely to respect their rights. Their re-

ward in  had been the ﬁrst pogroms in modern Vilne.

Whatever their borders, any national states on the territory of the Grand

Duchy would have forced choices on individuals. After , secular Jews drew

the conclusion that only a distinct Jewish political life could serve their interests

in a Polish Wilno. Having declared their loyalty to a national state, Christian

elites were conﬁrmed in the corresponding national identity by the problems of

a given national society, the milieux in which they functioned, and the avail-

ability of state power. Most Polish Lithuanians went one way or the other.

Römer himself, once Pilsudski’s comrade, then his envoy, and ﬁnally his critic,

chose Lithuania for good in , Lithuanizing his name to Römer’is. He

First World War and Wilno Question

served the state and the society well as a judge, professor of law, and rector of

the University of Kaunas; and consistently opposed radical nationalism and

worked for reconciliation with Poland. Other choices were equally dramatic.

Gabriel Narutowicz, the assassinated ﬁrst president of Poland, was the brother

of Stanislavas Narutavicˇius, a member of the presidium of the Lithuanian

Taryba and of the ﬁrst Lithuanian government.

“Lithuania! My fatherland!”

Unlike other Polish Lithuanians, Pilsudski never quite chose between Po-

land and Lithuania after the First World War, never quite accepted that the

world was composed of national states populated by citizens of the appropriate

ethnicity. Having seized Wilno and ensured poor relations with the Lithuani-

ans for at least a generation, Pilsudski said that he “could not help but regard

them as brothers.” Having realized the impracticality of federalism, he could

not accept nationalism. His republican beliefs were not shared by most of his

fellow Poles, and in the end he relied upon military force and personal charisma

to keep majority views at bay. Having achieved power by military coup in ,

Pilsudski neither trusted Polish citizens to replace him nor imagined absolute

rule for himself. For nine years Pilsudski governed a Poland which he found

disappointing and alien. When he died in , he was buried in Wawel Castle

in Cracow, in the company of Poland’s kings, including the Lithuanian Jo-

gailas. His heart was cut from his chest and buried in the Rossa cemetery in

Wilno, in the family plot, next to his mother’s grave.

“You are like health. Only he who has lost you may know your true worth.”

Pilsudski had lost Lithuania, as he well knew, in the sense conveyed by Mick-

iewicz. If anything is more suggestive of the rupture between historical Lithua-

nia and modern Poland than the separation of Pilsudski’s heart from his body,

it is the lack of a monument to Mickiewicz in Wilno in Pilsudski’s Poland.

Mickiewicz was present in monumental form in Polish cities where he had

never set foot, such as Warsaw and Cracow, but the city where the poet was ed-

ucated and whence he was exiled failed to honor him in any permanent way.

Under the tsars it had not been permitted, since the signiﬁcance of Mickiewicz

was then all too clear: an enduring Polish civilization in East Slavic lands, a Ro-

man Catholic culture that continued to draw converts, a rival conception of the

nation that Russian force and Russian education had not eradicated. In inde-

pendent Poland, however, Wilno Poles found that they could not agree about

The Contested Lithuanian-Belarusian Fatherland

what Mickiewicz meant and how he should be represented. Wilno was won by

bullets and ballots: what place then for the poems and the prophecies?

“As butterﬂies drown in golden amber...”

In Wilno as throughout interwar Poland, the appealing obduracy of modern

nationalism fossilized Romantic images, but could not grant them life. Noth-

ing illustrates this better than Polish attempts to build a monument to Mick-

iewicz after the seizure of Wilno. General Z

eligowski convened a committee to

build a monument, but failed to gain support for any project. The local garri-

son of the Polish army then took the initiative to build a statue on its barracks,

across the River Wilia and beyond the jurisdiction of municipal authorities.

The soldiers accepted a hulking formalist design by the avant garde artist Zbig-

niew Pronaszko. Its wooden substructure, once unveiled, was mocked by the

city’s residents. The leading newspaper complained that the greatest Pole of all

time was presented as a “gray wraith.”

The model, four stories tall, was never

set in concrete. Struck by lightening in summer , its pieces rolled down the

hill, beyond the grounds of the army base, and into the river. Pronaszko’s design

had been inspired by a verse of Mickiewicz’s great rival, Juliusz Slowacki, com-

First World War and Wilno Question

Fig. . Burial of the heart of Józef Pilsudski (–), Polish revolutionary and

statesman of Lithuanian heritage, in Wilno (today Vilnius) on  May .

paring Mickiewicz to a Lithuanian god. The monument shared the fate of the

idols of pagan Lithuania after the conversion to Christianity.

By , another monument to Mickiewicz in Wilno was under construc-

tion. After the army unveiled its project, the city continued its search for more

graceful alternatives. Henryk Kuna, the Polish-Jewish sculptor chosen for the

municipal monument, was completing the granite bas-reliefs that summer. His

unﬁnished work was hit by a German bomb that September. If there could be a

more suggestive destruction of monument than by lightning in July , it was

by blitzkrieg in September . Poland was invaded and divided by Nazi Ger-

many and the Soviet Union that month. Stalin granted Wilno to Lithuania in

, then incorporated Lithuania into the Soviet Union in . Then Nazi

Germany invaded the Soviet Union in , and exterminated Wilno’s Jews in

–. Under Nazi occupation, the granite slabs remaining from Kuna’s

monument were used to widen the main pathway of a cemetery.

The Red

Army returned in , and Soviet rule was reestablished in Lithuania. Between

 and , Wilno Poles were deported.

“Let us remain, dear, as we once were.”

In Soviet Lithuania, these granite slabs were (it seems) raised from the ceme-

tery and given to the local art academy. Surely the country was Russiﬁed, the art

catalogued, and the poet forgotten? Far from becoming a Russian Vil’na, the

city became a Lithuanian Vilnius. Far from disappearing from view, Mick-

iewicz became a Lithuanian national poet. In , in Soviet Lithuania, Lith-

uanians succeeded where Poles had failed: a statue of Mickiewicz (or rather

Mickevicˇius) by Gediminas Jokubonis was unveiled in Vilnius. In , in in-

dependent Lithuania, some of the original granite slabs were incorporated into

the setting of this new monument. From Polish monument, to rubble, to ceme-

tery pathway, to artistic fragments, to Lithuanian monument: this is chaos or-

dered by a Romantic cast of mind, indeed the Romantic idea of national resur-

rection improbably enacted in public art and political life. Lithuanians gained

Vilnius during the Second World War, Lithuanized its public life under Soviet

rule, reclaimed the great poet from the Poles, and in the end won national in-

dependence. How this came to pass is the subject of the next two chapters.

The Contested Lithuanian-Belarusian Fatherland

Chapter 4 The Second World

War and the Vilnius Question

(1939–1945)

Kuszelowo, S

witez´, Ponary, Bialowiez˙ a!

Forest friends to grand dukes of Lithuania!

Your shade once cooled the fearsome crowns

Of the dread Vytenis, of the great Mindaug.

And of Gediminas, who on Ponary’s crest,

Warm in hunter’s bearskin, lay down to rest.

Soothed by the songs of the wise Lizdejko,

Lulled by the rush of the sweet Vilejko,

He saw a wolf of iron in his dreams.

At the gods’ clear command it seems

He built the city of Wilno in the forest

A brooding Wolf midst bisons, bears and boars.

From Wilno, as from the she-wolf of Rome,

Came Ke˛stutis, Algirdas, and Algirdas’s sons.

Great hunters were they, and famous knights,

Whether chasing a foe, or a beast in ﬂight.

The hunter’s dream must be understood:

Lithuania needs her iron, and her woods.

—Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz (Paris, 1834)