WHICH POLAND ?
Sne,—Mr. A. J. P. Taylor's comments on the Cambridge History of Poland in your issue of October toth, 1941, show his unfavourable opinion of Poland, and his statements are, unfortunately, not free from distortion of historical facts.
In his opinion my country became " the Poland of the Poles " no earlier than in the twentieth century. Before that Poland was " wherever the Polish aristocracy owned land." In plain words this signifies that it was but the twentieth century which saw the awaken- ing of the national consciousness of the Polish masses, a consciousness which hitherto was confined to the relatively small class of selfish country squires.
This view is incongruent with historical facts. Towards the close of the eighteenth century, when the independence of Poland was threatened, numerous hosts of Polish peasants, armed with scythes, took part in the insurrection led by Kosciuszko. Their leader, Bartosz Glowacki, is one of Poland's national heroes. The Polish townspeople, likewise., not only took a lively part in the general re- vival of the national spirit in the second half of the eighteenth cen- tury (the names of Stanislas Staszic and Hugo Kollontaj among others should be mentioned in this connexion), but actively opposed the Rutsian and 'Prussian invasion. The figure of the simple shoemaker Jan Kilinski entered for ever the nation's pantheon.
The Polish armed risings against the Russian and Prussian oppres- sors in the following century (I most emphatically challenge Mr. Taylor's assertion that the " revolts " of 1830-3! and 186,3 were actuated by a spirit of conquest on the part of the Poles) were far more than a movement of a dissatisfied nobility. They represented operations on a major scale, as is evident from their long duration and the mobilisation of large armed forces of 'the powerful Russian Empire needed to subdue them.
Nationalism in the present-day meaning of the word is a product of the nineteenth century with its roots in the French Revolution. Poland did not exist as a State in the nineteenth century. If she could have outlasted in her pre-partition frontiers she would—according to my firm belief—form an entity as solid and uniform as England or France. One has to keep in mind that these States too were com- posed of divers heterogeneous elements which in the course of historical evolution were absorbed and unified, although some regional peculiarities continue to exist in the form of distinct languages, customs, traditions, &c.
Poland in 1919-21 did not recover her former frontiers. For her - fall in the eighteenth century she had to pay a heavy price—the loss of nearly one half of her area. There is no doubt that Poland could have extorted greater territorial concessions from Russia. The Treaty of Riga was the result of a compromise when we consider the favour- able moral and military position of Poland at that time. Beyond Poland's eastern boundaries were left more than a million, Poles. Mr. Taylor implies that this territorial arrangement was unfair to Russia, although practically no real Russians were living in the Polish eastern provinces. Ukrainians and White Russians lived on both sides of the frontier and their lot in Poland was by no means worse than in the U.S.S.R.
But if the author of the review is so eager to apply to Poland the strictly ethnographical principle, why does he not acknowledge that Poland had a right to incorporate the district of Vilna? The Polish population formed a clear majority in this district, whereas the Lithu- anians did not represent more than 5 to 6 per cent. of the whole population. Poland in the fourteenth century did not annex by force her astern domains which henceforward formed a part of the Polish state until its collapse four centuries later. Poland was proud that ha acquisitions were due to a voluntary union of the peoples con- tented--confirmed by numerous acts of faithful allegiance to the
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