Poland полностью

The Jews were the one orphan people of the Commonwealth who had no national pretensions. Russia, which had not previously admitted Jews, designated the old Polish frontier of 1772 as an easternmost pale beyond which those she had acquired by the partition could not settle or even travel. Although they transferred their loyalty promptly, and showed it by remaining faithful to the Tsar throughout the French invasion of 1812, the Jews were heavily discriminated against. Nicholas I brought in further restrictions and subjected them to military service, often with forced conversion to Orthodox Christianity. His successor Alexander II (1855-81) relaxed many of their disabilities, and allowed them to move around the whole of Russia freely. But following his assassination the Jews were blamed for everything from Russia’s failures to carrying out ritual murders of Christian children, and became victims of officially sanctioned pogroms. In 1882 they were confined to the pale of settlement once more and were subjected to further restrictions. Hundreds of thousands of the poorest Jews, who could not fit into the area of the pale, moved westwards into Poland. Most of these ‘Litwaks’, as they were known, were destitute. They were as unwelcome to their brethren in Poland as they were to the Poles, and they nourished a new anti-Semitism.

This, and the rise of a modern Darwinian strain of nationalism among the other peoples of the former Commonwealth, placed Polish patriots on the horns of a dilemma, suggesting as they did that not only the model of the Commonwealth but even an updated state-based multiculturalism were unworkable. The best way forward appeared to be to follow other European states in taking the ethnic core and the language as the bases of the nation. But this meant rejecting the inclusiveness and toleration of the Commonwealth in favour of an exclusive ethnocentric conformism that would lead inevitably to intolerance and the need to somehow remove the foreign bodies within such a nation. It was this dilemma that would shape the political countenance of the new Polish nation.

The first political parties of modern Poland sprang from the peasant cooperatives and self-help groups which burgeoned in Galicia in the 1870s. The earliest were the Peasant Party (1893), the People’s Party (1895) and the Polish People’s Party (1903). The workers of the cities had also organised themselves into unions and in 1882 a socialist workers’ party, Proletariat, was founded by Ludwik Waryński. This suffered a setback in 1884, when the Russian police arrested the leadership. Waryński was sentenced to sixteen years’ hard labour, four of his colleagues were hanged, others were imprisoned or exiled. The remnants of the party were brought together by Stanisław Mendelson and transformed in 1892 into the Polish Socialist Party (PPS).

In the following year another group of socialists led by Róża Luksemburg and Julian Marchlewski founded the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP), which rejected nationalism. This soon began to disintegrate, but was revived in 1900 by Feliks Dzierźyński, who added Lithuania to the name (SDKPiL). Although it grew to an impressive size, this party would play a greater part on the Russian than the Polish political scene (‘Bloody Feliks’ became the first head of the Cheka, forebear of the NKVD and KGB). The PPS on the other hand quickly gained in influence in all three partitions.

In 1894 it started publishing a clandestine organ, The Worker. Its editor, Józef Piłsudski (1867-1935), was a gifted conspirator whose early life reads like a novel. He had spent five years in Siberia for helping to supply Lenin’s brother Alexander Ulyanov with explosives for a bomb which was thrown at the Tsar in 1887. He was twice sprung from Russian jails by colleagues. After escaping in 1900 from a prison hospital in St Petersburg, where he had got himself transferred by faking madness, he dodged from Tallin to Riga, thence to Kiev (where he managed to compile and publish an edition of The Worker) and Lwów, then to London, from where he entered Russia again on forged papers. He was deft at moving the presses of The Worker from one hiding place to another, and he also made it interesting reading, with the result that by 1899 the illegal paper had a circulation of 100,000. Since he used it as a platform for his own views, it helped him to win the leadership of the PPS.

Polish socialism was heavily marked by the national issue. The first manifesto of the PPS proclaimed the goal of an independent Poland within its 1772 frontiers, as a homeland to all the nations living within them. It was in effect a call for the restoration of the Commonwealth, and therefore of Polish hegemony, which was to ignore the nationalist aspirations of many Lithuanians, Belarusians and Ukrainians.