The Past in Poland’s Present Norman Davies is a Fellow of the British Academy, Professor Emeritus of London University, and Super- numerary Fellow of Wolfson College. His publications include Europe: a History (), and The Isles: a History (). HEART OF EUROPE The Past in Poland’s Present 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw with associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Norman Davies, 1984, 1986, 2001 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 1984 First issued, with corrections, as an Oxford University Press paperback 1986 New edition 2001 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0–19–280126–0 13579108642 Typeset in Janson by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd. Reading, Berkshire For who roared Martwe znasz prawdy, nieznane dla ludu; Widzisz s´wiat w proszku, w kaz˙dej gwiazd iskierce; Nie znasz prawd z˙ywych, nie obaczysz cudu! Miej serce i patrzaj w serce! You understand dead truths beyond the wit of common folk; You can see the world in a grain of powder, in every spark of the heavens. But living truths escape you; you do not see the miracle. So take courage, and look into people’s hearts! No history book which sets out to relate the Past to the Present is ever written at the right moment. By the time that the author’s observations are published, the Present will always have moved on; and the reader’s perspective will have changed. In this respect, the work of the con- temporary historian is more akin to the shifting assignments of the leader writer than to that of the dispassionate analyst of completed histories. Yet March may not be the worst moment to review the roots of the present Polish crisis, since events in Poland seem to have reached stalemate. It might not be quite so untimely as, say, November , when various observers were forecasting an imminent resolution of the crisis, either by the victory of the movement or by some sort of Soviet démarche. Now at least there seems to be a lull in storm, a truce of exhaustion in the war between the Government and the people. But none of the basic issues have been resolved. One can be sure that , , and will bring new surprises, and new twists of fortune, before Poland emerges from the conflict either crushed for a season, or confidently launched on a new course. Yet some attempt to put current developments into their historical context is long overdue. As always happens in a major international event, the Polish Crisis has produced its crop of instant experts who previously paid no attention to Poland’s affairs, and whose awareness of events before (or at the most or ) leaves much to be desired. Political scientists who analyse ‘Soviet-style systems’ without reference to the fourth dimension are strong on the defects of official policy, but weak on the specific characteristics of Polish society. Economists, who correctly recognized the portents of Poland’s distress, have frequently attributed the political explosion of the s to the mistaken economic policies of the s, not realizing that economic failure was itself but the outward manifestation of political conflicts of vii much greater duration. Many sympathetic reporters who witnessed the stirring scenes in the Lenin Shipyards in , or who watched the triumph of the ZOMO in –, could vaguely perceive the Poles’ own acute sense of History in action, without being able to recognize the echoes and the symbols. After a two-year barrage of media cover- age, Western opinion was indeed made aware that there was more at stake in Poland than the price of meat or the mistakes of a corrupt, totalitarian regime. But few people in the outside world had the means to look beneath the surface, and to glimpse the depth and antiquity of the issues involved. At which point, in December , Oxford University Press had the good luck and good judgement to publish God’s Playground: A History of Poland, a work conceived in obscurity years before with no great hope of topicality. Not surprisingly, since two volumes to span a millennium were judged by some to be excessive, demands were made for a shorter, more condensed version. Not surprisingly, since an academic work has to assume the proportions required by its scope and contents, the author declined. God’s Playground is still available, unbowed and unabridged, for those who dare to read. By way of compromise, however, the present volume was designed to treat the same subject but with different aims in mind. Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland makes no pretence of present- ing a full and balanced survey of Polish affairs over the last thousand years. Although each chapter contains a brief chronological narrative, the emphasis has been firmly placed on those elements of Poland’s Past which have had the greatest impact on present attitudes. For this reason, many topics which feature prominently in God’s Playground—the Polish Reformation, the Baltic Trade, Polish Jewry, the Emancipation of the Serfs, the politics of the Prussians or the Ottomans, or whatever—here receive only the barest of mentions. Other elements—notably the purely Polish, national, element, the Church, Polish Literature, the Intelligentsia, Russian relations, and the last two centuries in general— have been given special attention. For similar reasons, the main chapters have been written in reverse chronological order. Chapter I deals with the contemporary period; Chapter II with the Second World War: Chapter III with the pre-war era, . and so on. Eventually, after bouncing back off the bedrock of the Middle Ages and Prehistory, the text comes full circle and Chapter VI deals with ‘The Past in the Polish Present’. In this way, the narrative leads from the more familiar to the less familiar. Having first examined viii the outlines of today’s Poland, and having then descended into the past layer by layer, it attempts to relate each of the main themes of earlier Polish History to later developments. The approach may perhaps be compared to that of the archaeologist who delves into his subject from the most modern level on the surface, through a descending order of the more ancient levels underneath. For most readers it will be a journey from the known into the unknown and back again. Its weaknesses, from the viewpoint of the historical purist, are that by implication it might confuse precedent and ‘post-cedent’ with cause and effect, and that it distorts the relevant weight of particular factors, important today, which may have been less important in the past. Its strength, hopefully, is that it highlights the topics of special relevance for understanding the foun- dations of the Present. Like the geographer who knows that every pro- jection of the three-dimensional earth on to a two-dimensional map involves some sort of distortion, so the historian is unable to reconstruct the Past in any perfect or exact manner. One can only trust to one’s judgement that this particular projection is properly suited to the particular purpose in mind. A series of small tabular appendices encompass a body of factual and ancillary material which would otherwise have clogged the text with superfluous debris. Inevitably, although Heart of Europe is quite different from God’s Play- ground, a fair amount of textual piracy, both deliberate and accidental, has been committed. For once, the plagiarist need not apologize. Indeed, readers are heartily encouraged to seek out the source of such plagiar- isms and thereby to extend their reading on points of special interest. In the intervening period, the opinions which took shape during the writing of God’s Playground have not radically changed. The notion that People’s Poland was heading for disaster was not terribly original; but it proved to be correct, and so did the prediction that the opposition would be ruthlessly crushed, ‘attacked by a wave of police and military repres- sion’. In general, an attachment to the Romantic view of Polish History has been strengthened, together with an awareness of the persistence of long-standing Polish political divisions. On balance, recent events have confirmed the conviction that the Polish Romantics had a more pro- found understanding than their Positivist rivals of their own and their country’s nature, and that, in the last analysis, they are more realistic than the self-professed ‘realists’.