Category Archives: Baltics

by | 6 November 2025 · 10:03 pm

Escaping Russia to Riga, 1921

From Kosciuszko, We Are Here!: American Pilots of the Kosciuszko Squadron in Defense of Poland, 1919-1921, by Janusz Cisek (McFarland, 2025), Kindle Loc. 2673ff.

The last prison that Cooper was in was Vladykino. Here with two Polish officers he decided to escape. This time he succeeded. In a way he was forced to escape by his Polish counterparts. In his report filed after reaching Warsaw, he wrote that the two Polish prisoners managed to brake into the prison office in order to forge a few documents for the escape. At this point there was no return. Cooper was very well aware that not only the two direct perpetrators might be shot dead on the spot. He, after all, was considered to be a dangerous anti-revolutionary and enemy of the people. The escape must have happened at the beginning of March, 1921.

Since Cooper himself did not know Russian, he pretended to be mute, and on the long march from Moscow to the Latvian border, Lt. Stanisław Sokołowski and Corporal Stanisław Zalewski facilitated everything for him. They marched in the direction of Wielkie Łuki with Latvia as their general destination, which was then, as through the entire inter-war period, the most efficient crossing point between the workers’ paradise and the outside world. It was through this very border that Boris Savinkov, the famous terrorist, returned to Russia, lured by the mirage of the great anti–Bolshevik conspiracy. Food was obtained by exchanging the clothes they had received in the Amcross packages. The escapees brushed with arrest several times. They were, after all, moving across completely unknown territory with neither a compass nor a map. Cooper recalled that he spent one night up to his neck in water. In any case in an expedition covering over 800 kilometers, the sympathy, or at least indifference, of the local population had to play a crucial role. The last five days of the route to the border was on foot through mud and swamps. At the last minute, a smuggler they had engaged tried to betray the escapees by refusing to lead them across the border. Only threatened with death did he decide to fulfill his part of the contract. The border was crossed at 2:00 A.M. on April 23, 1921. “We came to ‘Amcross’ in rags and without shoes, hungry and completely fatigued,” as Cooper wrote in his first dispatch from Riga.

The shoes were payment for the smuggler who had led them across the border. Cooper would not have been himself if he had not immediately expressed his gratitude to Amcross and brought attention to the need for better care of the American prisoners still held by the Bolsheviks. He wrote about this a few weeks later, to Hoover among others, including a few practical hints. He brought attention to the still existing legal avenues of action by Western charitable organizations in Russia, he stressed the attitude of the two Polish officers and the local population. As an eyewitness, he was also a credible source of information about the conditions prevailing under the communist rule in Russia: “Cooper, a prisoner in Russia, states that Russia is full of propaganda against United States, France and Great Britain; people are told that these countries are responsible for all trouble in Russia. German influence is strong and popular.” In another report he confirmed the level of control by the new regime. “Absolute control of Bolsheviks, either they will stay in control or anarchy.” This experience of the nature of the communist system, gained through direct contact with the iron hand of terror, remained with Cooper throughout his life. He became an unrelenting opponent of the system, and he intended to write a book about his experiences. However he never fully realized his intention. The only fragments were included in his book Things Men Die For. It is worth mentioning here the durability of the anti–American propaganda, whose influence is present even in contemporary academic works. Simonenko, already mentioned in these pages, states in an article about the Kościuszko Squadron that after the signing of the Polish-Bolshevik peace in Riga, Cooper was most ordinarily released from prison and arrived to Poland without any problems. He does not say, however, why he had to overcome the boundless Russian territory in rags and on foot, nor why he crossed the border illegally.

…

Meanwhile, the Polish authorities and the squadron airmen awaited the miraculous rescue of their comrade. His journey from Riga to Warsaw began on April 29, his train reached the capital on May 3, the day celebrated by Poles as Constitution Day. As a witness to the event recalled, “he received a great ovation.” It so happened that this was the first time that Constitution Day had been celebrated without a major war being waged, although the borders had not yet been officially recognized by the Conference of Ambassadors. It is true that in Silesia the third uprising had broken out against the Germans, but Poland was not officially involved in that conflict. Help was provided to the insurgents unofficially using paramilitary organizations such as the Polish Military Organization. Thus, the 3rd of May in 1921 was celebrated solemnly and in an atmosphere of peace, as the new constitution was declared in March and a peace treaty was signed with Russia.

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by | 31 July 2025 · 4:46 pm

Wielka Emigracja po 1831

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 454-458:

Not all Poles stayed around to see how matters would develop after 1831. Already during the insurrection, some insurrectionists abandoned the Kingdom of Poland and made their way to the west. After the November Insurrection, a mass exodus of Poles ensued to France, Belgium, and Britain. There were so many Poles in western Europe that this came to be called the Great Emigration (Wielka Emigracja). The term wielka can mean large—which it was. Somewhere in the vicinity of ten thousand Poles became political émigrés in Paris and elsewhere. But wielka also means great. It was a great generation, comprised of the leading Polish intellectual lights as well as dedicated cadres of insurrectionists. Among those former were the great Romantic poets—the so-called Bards: Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, and Zygmunt Krasiński. Mickiewicz, incidentally, had managed to escape from Russia to the west right before the November Insurrection.

Also in emigration was a young composer from Warsaw, Fryderyk (French: Frédéric) Chopin. Son of a Polonized emigrant from France, Fryderyk was in Vienna when the insurrection broke out and made the reverse journey. The young Chopin, whose musical genius would (among other things) popularize Polish dances such as the polonaise, the mazurka, and the krakowiak, channeled his anguished reaction to the loss of the November Insurrection into his famous, and moving, Revolutionary Étude.

Only in emigration did Polish Romanticism—in literature even more than in music—develop to its full potential. Polish literature of this period is interesting not only for its intrinsic value but for what it represented to Polish society in that period. When politics failed (as they clearly did in 1830–1831), poetry took its place. Poland went from being led by generals wielding sabers to generals wielding pens.

These newfangled generals led a cultural campaign. Their task was to produce a vibrant literary culture that would unite all the lands of the former Commonwealth as well as enrich the Polish spirit. Here the Polish Romantics were influenced by thinkers like Herder, famous for his conception of the Volksgeist, which can be translated as the spirit of the people or nation or as national character. In this vision, the people or nation was viewed increasingly as the common man.

This proved to be one of the most important periods of Polish literature, if not the most important (which surely could be argued). And Adam Mickiewicz—the young poet introduced earlier—is the most famous of the Polish Romantic poets. Indeed, he is the most famous literary figure in all of Polish history. Thus it is interesting to consider the opening line of his most famous work, the epic poem Pan Tadeusz. Expressing the longing of the émigré for the country he has left behind, it begins with the invocation, “Lithuania! My fatherland!” Writing in Polish, this poet who hailed from the territory of today’s Belarus, considered Lithuania his homeland. This suggests that this quintessentially Polish poet reflected ideas of Poland and Polishness that were hardly straightforward—ideas more redolent of the former Sarmatian, Commonwealth realm. Polish and provincial culture (brought to life in the Lithuanian landscape) were one in this depiction of a soon-to-be-lost Sarmatian idyll in its encounter with the transformations of the Napoleonic era. Indeed, it is a Polish peculiarity that national self-definitions were often forged at its margins—in the borderland realm increasingly referred to in the nineteenth century as the Kresy.

Paris proved a seedbed for all kinds of ideas about Poland’s past, present, and future. The émigrés were obsessed with “the Polish question,” a question not limited to the regaining of national sovereignty. Lacking independent statehood, Poles had to answer some other crucial questions as well. They increasingly had to choose, consciously, to be Poles, as this was no longer a choice of state identification. But what, then, was Polishness? How was one to define Poland, or who was a Pole? How to justify being—let alone becoming—Polish, in a world of imperial dominance?

Again, the poet spoke. Or, rather, wrote—although it should be added that Mickiewicz also spent the period from 1840 to 1844 lecturing on Slavic literature at the Collège de France, his lectures often electrifying his audience. Consider his Books of the Polish Nation and the Polish Pilgrimage. Mickiewicz believed that the Poles had a mission of universal significance. In his messianic vision, Poland was the Christ of Nations, suffering for the rest of the world. “But on the third day,” he wrote in true biblical style, “the soul shall return to the body, and the Nations shall arise and free all the peoples of Europe from slavery.” Mickiewicz also saw a special role for his nation in the Slavic world. The future of Europe lay with the Slavs—and the Poles, not the Russians, were Slavdom’s natural leaders, who would fight against the perceived evils of civilization.

Despite his liberal use of biblical phrasing, Mickiewicz’s Roman Catholicism was hardly orthodox. The Pole was conflicted in his relationship to the See of Peter. He, like many others, was outraged that the Vicar of Christ should side with the partitioning empires and condemn the Polish insurrection. Furthermore, Mickiewicz fell under the spell of Andrzej Towiański, a leader of a mystical cult; this experience did little to strengthen his connection to the Roman Catholic Church of his day.

Mickiewicz and the Romantics focused their attention, in exile, on the Polish nation, seeking to determine what in the Polish past was significant, and whether the nation had a historical mission. Theirs was an ideal vision of the nation, focusing more on the body politic—the potential masses of Poles—than on any future territorial incarnation. The Poland of the Romantics was one of the mind. They believed that their nation did have a mission, which was to bring universal freedom to Europe. In this mission lay all hope for Poland. Only if Poles fought for universal freedom could they be considered worthy of regaining independent statehood. Their national stance, thus, was an active and engaged one. The purpose of Polish Romantic literature, furthermore, was to embolden and inspire the nation as well as strengthen national consciousness, without which there could be no gains. In an age when generals wielding sabers had failed, the Romantics saw themselves as generals wielding pens.

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by | 27 July 2025 · 6:48 am

Reconstructing Rothenburg

From The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe, by Marek Kohn (Yale U. Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 150-153, 162-163:

By establishing its place on the tourist map of Europe, Rothenburg ob der Tauber connected itself to an international network through which it built up a stock of admiration and affection. Although that was an intangible kind of capital, it turned out to be the saving of the enterprise. If John McCloy’s mother had not been one of the many foreigners who visited Rothenburg before the darkness closed over Europe in the 1930s, and took spell-casting pictures home with them, the whole of the town might have suffered the same fate that the American bombers visited on four-tenths of it.

One of the artists inspired by images of Rothenburg ob der Tauber was Adolf Hitler, who had initially hoped to pursue a career as a painter. On a visit there in 1934, a few weeks after adopting the title of Führer, he recalled how he had seen many pictures of Rothenburg in his youth, and had greatly enjoyed drawing the town himself. A few years later, he made funds available for the preservation of the town walls, stretches of which were in danger of collapse. His affection for Rothenburg was shared by the Nazi movement in general, for whom the ‘Germanest’ (‘deutscheste’) of towns became something of a pilgrimage destination.

The feeling was mutual. Rothenburgers took to Nazism even before the party took power. At the election in July 1932, when the Nazis became the party with the most seats in the Reichstag with 37 per cent of the national vote, they took 60 per cent of the vote in Rothenburg. After Hitler became Chancellor the following year, Rothenburgers flocked to join his National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Two-thirds of the town’s population became members. Unlike Würzburg, whose Catholic traditions and associated political sympathies dampened enthusiasm for the radical new National Socialist movement, Rothenburg was a small Protestant town in a relatively poor part of Germany. In that respect it fitted the profile of Nazi-supporting localities, but it was more than merely typical. Rothenburg had a very special place in the landscape of the Third Reich.

That place was inscribed principally through the activities of the Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) organisation, which strove to instil National Socialist values in the German people through recreation and exercise. Kraft durch Freude – KdF for short – offered ideological tourist excursions to the town it described as ‘an everlasting witness to the glorious German history of the Middle Ages, a shining monument to German community in olden times’. Rothenburg became a theatre in which Nazi illusionists conjured the spectacle of an ideal folk community magically preserved within its walls, where modern Germans would believe they were ‘seeing a fairy tale of a long-gone golden age resurrected’, as the Nazi party newspaper put it. Among the steps that the town took to enhance the magic was the institution of a Christmas market, without which the fairy tale would not have been complete.

As well as providing affordable domestic holidays for Germans of modest means, KdF made a point of reaching out to members of the ‘Volk’ on the edge of the Reich or beyond its borders. The first contingents came from lands in the west. Under the peace settlements that followed the First World War, the Saar region had been placed under the control of the League of Nations. In 1935, voters in the territory opted to be reunified with Germany, by a majority of over 90 per cent. KdF transported Saarlanders to Rothenburg, where the organisation encouraged them to recharge their feelings of national pride and community. It also brought people from the Rhineland region, which was barred to military forces under international treaties. Hitler sent his troops into it the following year, to huge national acclaim.

From the opposite direction, a thousand Austrians came on a ceremonial day trip after their country was incorporated into the Reich in 1938, marching into the town from the railway station to be greeted by ranks of Nazis chanting ‘Sieg Heil’. They departed in the same fashion after seeing the town’s quintessentially Germanic sights, completing an occasion hailed by the local newspaper as the ‘deepest expression of connection between people of the same tribe and same blood’. Germans from the Sudetenland made a similar procession after the Reich seized the region from Czechoslovakia later that year.

The Reich’s revanchist ambitions further east were implicit in the organisation of visits from Danzig and the Memel territory. Danzig had been designated a Free City, kept separate from both Germany and Poland under the protection of the League of Nations, because it found itself in the corridor through Baltic Prussia that gave Poland access to the sea. Memelland was a strip of eastern Prussia that Germany had been obliged to give up under the Versailles Treaty in 1919; Hitler strong-armed the Lithuanian government into returning it in 1939. The symbolism of the trips was clear enough: the Reich had brought its people to the ideal German home town, and soon enough they would be living in the homeland as well, once its borders were extended to embrace them.

Rothenburg also offered the Nazi regime a means to project soft power abroad, in the form of the Shepherd Dancers, a group founded in 1911 to revive a local tradition on the basis of a historical claim dating back to 1517. They danced at the Albert Hall in London, and paraded through Hyde Park bearing the Third Reich’s swastika flag. Back home, they performed in the market square for crowds on excursions from the huge Nazi rallies in Nuremberg, less than two hours away by train. Although there was no question of imposing the standard Nazi urban ensemble – a grand avenue, a vast assembly space, a massive Party building – as Hubert Gross had planned to do in Würzburg, there was no need. Rothenburg was homely, but on a scale that tended to the monumental. Its houses’ proportions spoke of burgher prosperity; its main streets were straight and wide enough for marching columns. And if there was no space for the Nazi cohorts within the walls, they could always camp beneath them. The location was popular with the Hitler Youth, which at one point massed 1,400 of its members, drawn from more than 27 countries, in a tent city along the base of the town’s fortified perimeter.

…

One of  [the town’s former Nazi mayor, Friedrich] Schmidt’s initiatives as a councillor was an attempt to revive the Christmas market, which had lapsed since its inception during his term as mayor in the 1930s. He was assisted in the bid by Ernst Unbehauen, the artist who had made the antisemitic ‘warning’ plaques that had been installed at the town’s gates….

A person would not have to be a fascist or an ultranationalist to agree with Unbehauen that brash modern advertisements should be kept off Rothenburg’s streets. Conservation societies in historic towns all over Europe would sympathise with his view and applaud his efforts. But in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, denying the twentieth century had a subtext that went beyond Unbehauen’s personal record as a Nazi and an antisemitic propagandist. A town that looked as though the twentieth century had not happened offered an enticing illusion to Germans who wanted to pretend that the century’s fourth and fifth decades had not taken place. Joshua Hagen, the American historian who has examined Rothenburg’s career as ‘the most German of towns’, observes that ‘in the 1950s and beyond it came to represent opportunities for relatively untroubled engagement with Germany’s past’. People could follow the town’s history as far as the twentieth century ‘and then fast-forward to 1950, because as the tourist guides will tell you, nothing happened. It was asleep, timeless, and nothing ever changed.’

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by | 21 July 2025 · 5:40 pm

Changing Faces of Lublin’s Old Town

From The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe, by Marek Kohn (Yale U. Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 220-223:

Lublin has a long history as a site for key moments in the formation of Polish states. A congress of nobles welcomed Grand Duke Jogaila of Lithuania there in 1386, as he made his way to his royal wedding in Kraków, and proclaimed him King Władysław II Jagiełło of Poland. Jogaila returned the favour by granting a range of privileges that enabled Lublin to develop as a centre of trade between the two countries he and Jadwiga had united through their marriage. The treaty of union that inaugurated the Polish-Lithuanian Republic was signed at Lublin’s castle in 1569.

By that time, the urban kernel later known as the Old Town was taking shape on the high ground opposite, as a sturdy cluster of churches and townhouses arranged around a market square and an axis running from the Grodzka Gate on the eastern side to the western Kraków Gate. With an area of ten hectares, the walled town was the same size as its Warsaw counterpart. Meanwhile the space between the castle and the town was beginning to fill with buildings, as the Jewish quarter developed on the inferior land known as Podzamcze, meaning ‘under the castle’. Jews had been prohibited from settling within the city walls in 1535, after Christian merchants objected to the competition they introduced.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the district below the castle boasted one of the most important Hebrew printing houses in the country, and provided the base for the principal Jewish authority in Poland. Around the turn of the nineteenth century it became a major centre of Hasidic Judaism, after the legendary spiritual leader Yaakov Yitzhak haLevi Horowitz took up residence on Podzamcze’s main street. He was known as the Seer of Lublin, because of his reputed ability to see into the future and across the world, and he bestowed a magical aura on the Jewish Town that remained as his posthumous legacy after his death there in 1815.

As the century went on, however, many of Lublin’s Jews were drawn to modernity instead of mysticism. Their local horizons were opened up in 1862, when they gained full citizenship and the city abolished restrictions on where they were permitted to live. ‘Through Brama Grodzka, by which they had waited for so many years, they entered Lublin again,’ wrote the historian Meir Balaban, ‘renting and buying properties for shops and homes, first on Grodzka Street and later also on the Market Square.’ The poorer incomers gradually found niches throughout almost the whole of the Old Town, which had fallen into decline after being abandoned by its wealthier residents. Those who could afford it made instead for the up and coming streets around the city’s spacious central avenue. They resembled their Christian neighbours in their dress and lifestyle, while the old Jewish quarter became even more of a world apart.

That world disappeared from the face of the earth during the Second World War. After the German invaders took control of Lublin in 1939, they ejected Jews from the townhouses around the central avenue, forcing them back to the old Jewish quarter. The Jews of the Old Town were sent there in April 1941, after the occupiers turned the former Jewish Town into a ghetto, which they liquidated a year later. Some 26,000 Jews from the Lublin region were killed at the Bełżec extermination camp, almost all of them upon arrival. Others were sent to a secondary ghetto on the outskirts of the city, Majdan Tatarski, and eventually to the nearby Majdanek camp. The Lublin extermination ended with Aktion Erntefest, Operation Harvest Festival, in November 1943. Over two days, SS squads and German police shot 42,000 Jews at Majdanek and two other camps in the region. At the outbreak of the war, some 43,000 Jews had been living in the city, out of a total population of around 120,000. Almost none of them were left alive by the war’s end.

Little was left of the Jewish Town either. The Germans razed much of it to the ground, as they did in Warsaw’s Jewish district. There, the destruction had begun as a tactic used by the occupiers in their efforts to suppress the Ghetto Uprising. In Lublin, the Germans had already emptied the houses, which they condemned on the grounds of the buildings’ poor construction standards and states of repair. Their underlying purpose was to erase the remains of Jewish presence, which in that locality dated back four hundred years.

The main street disappeared altogether, and with it the form that the Jewish settlement had found in Lublin’s topography. It had previously run along the base of the slope below the castle, its buildings jostling for space and concealing the lie of the land. Tumbledown shacks and solid edifices alike were gone, as was the warren of alleys into which Alfred Döblin had ventured. One unintended consequence was to give the Red Army a clear field of fire in front of the castle for its artillery when it fought its way into Lublin in July 1944.

Three days after the Soviet forces captured the city, the new authorities installed the provisional body that became known as the Lublin Committee, and which formed the germ of the regime that eventually became the Polish People’s Republic. This was the third key moment in Lublin’s history as a site of state formation, initiating a drive to build socialism on Soviet lines that was led by a man with local roots. Bolesław Bierut was born near Lublin and went to school in the city. His early work experience there included a job as a bricklayer’s assistant, and his presence was felt in the reconstruction of Lublin when he headed the country during its Stalinist period.

The site with the most obvious potential for symbolically loaded redevelopment was the barren plain, overlooked by the castle and the Old Town, that now lay where the main street of the Jewish district had previously been. A quadrant had been spared on the far side, where the tenement houses were in relatively good condition, and housed ethnic Poles who had been displaced by the creation of the Majdan Tartaski ghetto. Apart from that, the area formerly occupied by the Jewish Town was emptier than it had been since the Middle Ages.

For nearly ten years, the authorities’ efforts were concentrated up above, within the castle, and were devoted not to reconstruction but to the suppression of armed resistance. The castle had itself been rebuilt in the 1820s after a long twilight of ruin, its rectangular mass clad in a stern neo-Gothic facade appropriate to its function as a prison. Having served to incarcerate anti-czarist insurgents in the nineteenth century, communists between the wars and resistance fighters during the German occupation, it now held anti-communist partisans, many of whom had previously been anti-Nazi partisans. More than 30,000 prisoners were confined there during the new regime’s first decade in power. Death sentences were carried out in the cellar of a building that stood by the castle’s arched front entrance.

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by | 20 July 2025 · 6:05 pm

Changing Wilno into Vilnius

From The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe, by Marek Kohn (Yale U. Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 179-183:

The transformation of pre-war Wilno into post-war Vilnius was effected by removing those of its inhabitants who called it Wilno, the Poles who had constituted the majority of its population. Their departure followed the removal by genocide of the second largest ethnic group in the city, the Jews, who called it Vilna or Vilne. The same sequence took place in the other borderland city that Poles had held dear, known today as Lviv, which had also been inhabited largely by ethnic Poles and Jews before the war.

Vilnius’s reconstruction was principally a population project and only secondarily a rebuilding programme, especially in the Old Town. Czesław Miłosz described the pre-war city as an enclave of negative ambiguity, ‘neither Polish nor not-Polish, neither Lithuanian nor not-Lithuanian’. The aim of the reconstruction was to remove that ambiguity, remaking Vilnius as a city that was definitely Lithuanian and very definitely not Polish. It succeeded in establishing the city’s Lithuanian identity, but had to make do with concealing the ambiguities endemic to the Old Town and the surrounding districts.

Until the Nazi occupation, the heart of Vilnius’s character as a multi-ethnic city was a triangular district adjoining the central space over which the town hall presides. The historic Jewish quarter was not beyond the walls – unlike in many European cities, such as Kraków, whose Jewish residents had been sent to live in the separate township of Kazimierz at the end of the fifteenth century – but right in the middle of the city. A larger Jewish neighbourhood spread out from it across the western side of the Old Town. By 1939, according to one estimate, the central district was home to 75,000 people, of whom 35,000 were Jewish.

Many of that fraction were crammed into the overcrowded and insanitary alleys of the original quarter, which was an object of fascination for outsiders and a symbol of identity for Vilna’s Jews. During the First World War, a boy named Moyshe Vorobeychik often happened upon German soldiers painting and sketching scenes in the quarter. Some of them were notable artists in civilian life. Vorobeychik himself became a photographer, under the name Moï Ver, and produced an avant-garde album based on one of the Jewish streets. The project represented a desire shared by other young Jewish artists in the city, to innovate and embrace modernity while retaining their cultural roots. They formed a group called Yung Vilne, whose emblem was a young tree growing above one of the old Jewish quarter’s signature arches.

Max Weinreich, an eminent linguist and scholar of Yiddish, felt similarly about the relationship between learning and place. He considered that modern Jewish research needed an environment like that of Vilna, where ‘the houses and stones retain a memory’ of its Jewish cultural heritage. Weinreich was a leading figure in the YIVO institute of Yiddish studies, which continued a tradition of intellectual enterprise that had made Vilna a centre of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, in the nineteenth century. YIVO’s headquarters opened in 1933 on a broad modern street at a distance from the city centre, but the emotional heart of Jewish Vilna was still embedded in the sclerotic alleys of the old quarter. The enclave retained its allure for outsiders too, despite the warning in a guidebook by a Polish professor about ‘the typically eastern slovenliness of the inhabitants of this anti-hygienic district and its unbearable fug, which makes it impossible for a cultured European to visit these alleys, especially on hot summer days’.

After the Germans took control of Vilnius in 1941, they confined its Jewish population to two ghettos, one in the old quarter and one in the newer neighbourhood. The former was the smaller of the two, holding 11,000 people. It was liquidated after a month, in October 1941, leaving 29,000 people in the larger one, which was maintained until September 1943 and used as a source of labour. The ghetto inmates’ tasks included the construction of a model of Vilnius, which was produced by a team of thirty architects, engineers, draughtsmen and artists. They were forced to create a representation in miniature of the city from which they had been excluded, complete with the tiny zone where they were imprisoned in the middle of it. Four of them are known to have survived the war, but they were rare exceptions. The great majority of Vilnius’s Jews perished in the Holocaust, many of them shot by squads of Lithuanian volunteers at a killing ground in woodland outside the city. Several hundred managed to stay alive until the end of the German occupation, and a few thousand escaped – many of them involuntarily, deported by the previous communist authorities – into the depths of the Soviet Union. Nearly all of the survivors subsequently emigrated to the United States, Israel and other distant lands. Vilna, the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’, became an exile memory.

The dissolution of Wilno began with an attempt by Polish forces to recapture it. In July 1944, as the Red Army pushed westwards, the Polish underground state launched a nationwide operation to liberate cities and territories ahead of the Soviet advance. The battles of July were the overtures to the nine-week tragedy of the Warsaw Uprising, which began on the first day of August. Wilno’s political and emotional importance to the Polish cause was expressed in the codename for the Armia Krajowa (AK) assault against the city’s German occupiers: Ostra Brama, the Polish name for the Gate of Dawn. A grand and reverent window is set above the arch on the inside of the gate; through it an image of the Virgin Mary, clad in gilded silver, presides over the street below. The site is one of the most intense foci of the Marian cult at the heart of Polish Catholicism, and therefore of Polishness as it is orthodoxly conceived, venerating Mary as ‘Queen of Poland’. Thousands of silver votive offerings attest to its devotees’ faith that the image has miraculous powers. It is said that the first of the offerings came from a Polish-Lithuanian commander who led his men through the gate in an assault on the Swedes who occupied the city in 1702.

As a precedent, it was hardly auspicious. Instead of ejecting the occupiers with supernatural support from the Mother of God, the attackers were checked and forced to retreat. The assault in 1944 also lacked the miraculous intervention that would have been needed to achieve its double objective of driving out the Germans and keeping out the Soviets. After failing to overcome the German defences on the first day, and struggling to communicate with their comrades inside the city, Polish units operated alongside the Soviet forces. In the latter stages of the battle, AK troops fought their way through the Old Town to capture the city hall, and raised the Polish flag over the castle tower. It was quickly taken down by their inimical Soviet allies, who replaced it with a red one.

After six days, the Germans were defeated, and on the day after that, the Soviet leadership ordered the disarming of the AK soldiers. The ensuing arrests of Polish officers heralded a programme of repression that saw thousands detained in Vilnius as the year went on. That sent an ominous message to the Poles who comprised most of the city’s surviving population. In September, the Soviet and Polish authorities agreed terms for the removal of ethnic Poles from Lithuania to territory within Poland’s new borders. It was to be a notionally voluntary exodus, not an expulsion. Lithuanian Poles were sent away from their homes and birthplaces in railway goods trucks, but they were not herded onto the trains at gunpoint. The official term was ‘evacuation’, which suggested that the Poles were being given aid – and that they were under threat.

Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog’s (1968) Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change was one of my most memorable textbooks during my early graduate work in linguistics, in a class taught by one of my most memorable professors, Derek Bickerton.

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by | 18 July 2025 · 4:42 pm

Poland’s Last Royal Election, 1764

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 366-367:

[T]he outcome of Polish elections in the eighteenth century had hardly been a matter of domestic choice. The second Wettin himself owed his election to the heavy hand of the foreign coalition that saw fit to back him.

In this regard, the election of 1764 would be similar to the election of 1734. Russian troops would once again facilitate the promotion of the candidate favored by Tsarina Catherine II. The tsarina’s interference in Commonwealth affairs would come at a higher price this time, despite the fact that the other candidates put forward—the aged Hetman Branicki and an underage Wettin—were hardly attractive. Still, Catherine would have to finance the purchase of votes so as to overcome the opposition of the republicans. Taking no chances, August Czartoryski organized an armed confederation that, disallowing the use of the liberum veto, would guide the Convocation Seym to completion and even introduce some reforms. Ultimately these developments caused the leaders of the opposition, including Branicki, to flee the country.

Who was Catherine’s candidate? Like the candidate advanced by the magnate-led republicans, he was a Piast, if one with a rather unusual major qualification. Stanisław Poniatowski was the son and namesake of the recently deceased former leader of the Family. Yet his claim to fame was not solely—or even primarily—because he was related to the rich, powerful, and influential Czartoryski brothers, his uncles, who had allied themselves with Russia to secure the succession. Rather, Poniatowski attained the crown thanks to what turned out to be a happy accident: when he was in Saint Petersburg in the years 1756–1758, he had been the lover of the young wife of Grand Duke Peter—Catherine, herself.

Nearly a decade later, Catherine saw him as the perfect pawn in her game of controlling what happened in her increasingly impotent and unruly neighbor: any reforming to be done was to come at her instigation. She envisaged the Commonwealth of Both Nations [Poland and Lithuania] as a vassal state, a well-run vassal state. The tsarina’s selection of Poniatowski was supported by Friedrich II, who nonetheless preferred to keep the Commonwealth the way it was, weak and ineffectual. It was thought that Poniatowski, who incidentally had no wealth of his own (after his father’s death he was supported by his cousins) and who held only the amusing title of Lithuanian Master of the Pantry, would be a malleable and subservient Piast.

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by | 15 July 2025 · 1:05 pm

Poland-Lithuania Shrinks

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 302-304:

The population of the Grand Duchy [of Lithuania] had demonstrated its commitment to the Commonwealth, of which they considered themselves citizens. Perhaps a creative extension of citizenship was the answer to the Cossack debacle? Not relying on divine intercession, the nobles of the Commonwealth strove to put an end to the civil war with the Cossacks via diplomatic means. They entered into negotiations with the new leader of the Cossacks, Ivan Vyhovsky. Already earlier it had become clear that his predecessor Khmelnytsky was not entirely satisfied with the outcome of Pereiaslav. Centralizing and humiliating Russian rule proved very different from the genuine autonomy the Cossacks had expected. After all, not all Cossacks were uneducated; whether they had studied at the Mohyla Academy, elsewhere in the Commonwealth, or even in the West, they had been exposed to ideas at great odds with the autocracy they now encountered. Even the Orthodox clergy of the Cossack lands, especially Kyiv, were unhappy at being subordinated to Moscow. Among other things, this dissonance and the resulting dissatisfaction led Khmelnytsky to join the other potential partitioners of Poland—Sweden, Transylvania, and Brandenburg—at the end of 1656.

After Khmelnytsky’s death in 1657, Vyhovsky reached agreement with the Commonwealth. The two parties convened in a town of the Kyiv palatinate near the border with Russia. Although lying to the east of Pereiaslav, Hadiach (Polish: Hadziacz) notably marked a move westward. The Treaty of Hadiach established the terms of the Cossacks’ return to the Commonwealth—terms that were far better than the Cossacks had ever been offered before.

Signed in 1658, this treaty has been compared to the Union of Lublin, and for good reason. The Commonwealth of Two (Both) Nations would be transformed into a Commonwealth of Three Nations—the third being a newly established Duchy of Ruthenia. Consisting of the former palatinates of Kyiv, Bratslav, and Chernihiv, the Duchy of Ruthenia would be an autonomous entity, on par with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Under the leadership of the common king, the Duchy would share a common foreign policy and send its own citizens to the Seym. A certain number of Cossacks would be accepted into the Commonwealth nobility.

The new Duchy would also retain its distinctiveness: executive power would be wielded by the hetman of the Ruthenian army, some thirty thousand strong. The Uniate Church would be disallowed on the Duchy’s territory, where the Orthodox Church would be the favored religion, its higher clergy members of the Senate. The Mohyla Academy would be treated on par with other institutions of higher learning in the Commonwealth.

In short, the Cossacks appear to have successfully won the rights and privileges they had long sought. No longer to be looked down upon, they were to be treated as an equal partner. The Cossacks would be the third “nation” of the Commonwealth—a Ruthenian/Cossack/Orthodox one.

The Seym ratified the Treaty of Hadiach the following year, marking a sea change in the mentality of the Commonwealth’s citizenry, the Polish-Lithuanian nobility. For many Cossacks back in the hetmanate, however, it was too little, too late—at least a decade too late. To be sure, power politics within the hetmanate likely helped to determine the rejection of the proposal. Vyhovsky had been acting in the name of the underage son of Khmelnytsky, Yuri, who now displaced Vyhovsky at the top of the hetmanate. Yet, might the deal still go through—be pushed through? For a moment it looked as though the Poles, who now amassed the largest army in their history—a force of some seventy to eighty thousand, and one that had a string of victories over the Russian and Cossack armies in 1660—would be able to expel the Russians from the Grand Duchy and implement the new arrangement with the Cossacks.

Ultimately, this was not to be. As a result of internal political problems, the Commonwealth was not able to profit from this impressive surge. The terms reached between Russia and the Commonwealth in the armistice of 1667 at Andrusovo were by Commonwealth accounts devastating. The armistice confirmed the Commonwealth’s loss of both the Smolensk region in the north and the Cossack lands to the south, albeit in a novel configuration. The Cossack Hetmanate itself was partitioned between the two states—the dividing line being the Dnieper River. Territories on the right bank of the Dnieper (that is, in the west) were awarded to the Poles, while the left (east) bank came under Russian rule. The Russians also reserved to themselves control over Kyiv, on the right bank of the Dnieper, ostensibly for a two-year period …. The city would never again be part of the Commonwealth. As the famous mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz observed at the time (albeit from his comfortable vantage point in the west), the “barbaric East” was on the rise.

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by | 13 July 2025 · 6:40 am

Polish-Lithuanian Noble Mythmaking

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 269-271:

Men like Żółkiewski, who put national interests and faithful service above private gains, were becoming more rare. Nobles—especially the wealthy magnates—had few reasons to put up with what they saw as unreasonableness on the part of the king. Instead, they embraced a new idea that would knit the diverse Commonwealth nobility even closer together.

This represented an adjustment to the myth of Sarmatian origin. Already in the sixteenth century, Kromer and others had concluded that the inhabitants of Poland-Lithuania were descended from this ancient warrior people. Increasingly, this origin myth was limited to the Commonwealth’s nobility, however. The divisions between the estates solidified and became firmer—as the nobles maintained that, while they themselves were descended from the Sarmatians, the country’s commoners were not and thus were inferior in status. Already a brotherhood of privilege, the noble nation (the diversity of religious faiths and ethnic origins notwithstanding) came to be seen as a brotherhood of blood.

Sarmatian descent was seen as a distinction of another kind—a sign that the noble nation was a chosen nation, one destined for greatness. This sense of Sarmatian uniqueness had three components: economic, cultural, and political. First, that the Commonwealth was the Granary of Europe had been made amply clear to the owners of manorial estates, who in the period of peace that ensued in the 1620s promptly settled back into that still lucrative occupation. Their mission was to feed Europe, to help it thrive and, in the process, to help themselves thrive.

Second, their battlefield encounters with the infidel—here, understood as the Muscovites to the east as well as the Tatars and Ottomans to the south—had bolstered their vision of the Commonwealth as being the Bulwark of Christianity (antemurale Christianitatis)—a vision that the Baroque Church was all too happy to reinforce. This aspect of the Sarmatian myth was expanded to depict the nation as being under God’s special protection. Despite this fervent Catholicism, Commonwealth nobles increasingly embraced Eastern elements of dress and adornment. Witness the trend of having shaved heads—or heads with just a wisp of hair, just like the Moslem warriors they repeatedly fought. Thus, while the Commonwealth nobles defended Western values, their encounter with the East also shaped their identity—if only superficially.

Third, the sense that the Commonwealth’s mixed form of government, which provided the nobility with their cherished Golden Freedoms, was seen as infinitely superior to absolutist rule elsewhere. The myth of Sarmatian descent, thus, gave the nobles a sense of superiority, even invincibility, vis-à-vis the rest of Europe.

Sarmatian pride percolated down to even the poorest of nobles. Despite the exponential growth of magnate wealth during this period, the Sarmatian brotherhood was posited on noble equality. As the saying went, “The nobleman on his plot is equal to the palatine.” The thought that a landless noble might fancy himself as the peer of a magnate with his estates, court, and private army (practically a kinglet himself) nonetheless suggested that there was no glass ceiling: the possibility of upward mobility was always present, if not always likely. All it took was a happy accident of luck or patronage—an advantageous marriage, an appointment to a state office—and a clever nobleman could rise in stature. It was possible to become instantly wealthy if one married the heiress to a magnate family fortune that had been established as an indivisible inheritance (ordynacja). After all, even magnate families died out, to be replaced by new beneficiaries of the Commonwealth’s system. And even the magnates had to take care that their less wealthy noble clients—the men who hoped for that comfortable job, an education for their sons, and a decent marriage prospect for their daughters—retained their allegiance.

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by | 11 July 2025 · 5:48 am

Electing a King of Poland, 1573

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 210-212:

The interest in the election of 1573 was palpable. This was not only an opportunity to become king of the largest country in Europe. Freed of all dynastic constraints by the death of the last Jagiellon, the nobles of the federative state could elect any ruler they chose. The playing field, thus, was as level as it might ever be. This moment in Polish history represented an unparalleled opportunity for an ambitious royal foreigner to expand, in exponential fashion, his influence in Central and Eastern Europe. Thus, instead of a military campaign, there was a political campaign to be fought. And what a campaign it was! The curiosity factor itself must have been great, given that this was the first election of its kind. To borrow a metaphor from a Polish nobleman who would participate years later in the election process, the period of interregnum was a courtship dance: the Commonwealth the attractive bride, and the candidates from various countries her suitors. Each strove to make a positive impression on the father.

The Rules of the Game

Yet the matter was not that simple. Making a good impression was not entirely under the control of any given suitor, and the choice of ruler was not a personality contest. The foreign candidates for Polish king were not even to enter the territory of the Commonwealth, let alone campaign. Nor could domestic candidates be present at the election field. This was a move introduced by Jan Zamoyski during this first election—a move that resulted in the elimination of conniving magnates from consideration. Envoys would campaign, as it were, on their behalf.

There nonetheless were various ways to make an impression—some within the control of the individual candidate, some beyond. Some candidates in 1573, such as the Habsburgs, were not above trying to buy votes—nor were some nobles above benefiting from this; “wining and dining, and making promises” would become part and parcel of Commonwealth elections. In contrast to past elections elsewhere in Europe, however, it would not suffice to win over the most influential individuals, the senators—each of whom represented powerful interests within the country as a result of the offices held—or even the parliamentarians/members of the estates. Those could be numbered in the dozens—or at most, hundreds. Here (thanks again to Zamoyski, who pushed for the king to be elected viritim [in person]), one had to make an impact on a much larger, fluid assembly comprised for the most part of rank-and-file nobles. These were nobles who cared to exercise the right bestowed on them and help decide who would rule the country, but who may or may not have had much experience in governance outside of the local seymiks.

In a way, the noble collectivity that convened during the interregnum resembled more a whole front porch’s worth of shotgun-wielding relatives than a genteel father. The prospect of an election drew some forty thousand nobles to the environs of Warsaw in April 1573. Astride their steeds, they assembled on and around an enormous field, resembling nothing more than the site of a medieval chivalric tourney. The central field, where the palatine and regional delegates convened, was marked off by a ditch and a stockade fence. The masses of noble electors gathered along its perimeter; information was relayed back and forth between center and periphery, allowing those gathered to hear the various reports on the candidates. A large wooden building stood at the end of the field. Its purpose was to protect from the elements the collected paper results of the electoral process.

 

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by | 10 July 2025 · 4:58 am

Poland-Lithuania’s Golden Age

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 166-169:

That Poland-Lithuania was able to rein in the natural inclination of monarchs to seek absolute power was partly the result of the country’s unique political heritage and traditions and partly the result of a unique period of efflorescence, one reflected not only in the degree to which Renaissance ideas penetrated the polity but also in the economic well-being that accompanied the Golden Age….

This Golden Age was no misnomer. Not that Polish miners had suddenly discovered a rich vein of gold. The market for gold and silver bullion was dominated by Spain, whose recent penetration of the New World had uncovered vast new supplies of these precious ores. Poland-Lithuania turned out to have ample reserves of a resource that was in great demand elsewhere in the world: grain.

The particular world conjuncture of the late fifteenth century suddenly upped the ante for the grain trade. The Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century (which, incidentally, never made its way to Poland) had a significant effect on the economy of the countries in Western Europe, which upon rebounding shifted from agricultural production to animal husbandry. The population increase in the growing cities of the West, combined with the conscious decision to raise sheep for wool instead of planting seeds for grain meant that food was at a premium—a situation reflected in the so-called price revolution, which suddenly made it exceedingly profitable to engage in the export of staple foods.

It so happened that Poland-Lithuania was perfectly poised to take advantage of this situation. Not only did these lands have ample fields of grain. They now could profit in full from exporting their grain surplus via the Baltic. How? Because Poland-Lithuania now had an outlet to the sea. In earlier centuries, the Teutonic Knights had dominated the Baltic Sea coast and, with it, all sea-bound trade. This changed in the mid-fifteenth century when the population of Royal Prussia—including cities such as Gdańsk and Elbląg—opted for Polish rule. One long (thirteen-year) war and peace treaty later, Royal Prussia became part of Poland-Lithuania. After the mid-fifteenth century, the Teutonic Knights had to content themselves with the less fertile and less developed lands to the east; and even those lands, known after 1525 as Ducal Prussia, became a fief of the Crown of Poland.

In exchange for their allegiance, the inhabitants of Royal Prussia were given several important political and economic privileges. These included the right to their own regional parliament (the Prussian estates), municipal self-government for the cities, the right to trade everywhere in the vast country, and exemption from any additional tolls on the Vistula. The region’s incorporation into Poland-Lithuania, thus, had the potential to bring much benefit to the state. Gdańsk merchants could contract for Polish grain, and those supplying the grain had recourse to the growing world market for their staples, the easiest commodity for a large lowland country to produce. The result was that in the sixteenth century Poland became the main supplier of grain to Europe. Each fall, tons of golden grain—oats and rye, wheat and barley—were shipped to markets far and wide. Whereas in the year 1490, around twenty thousand tons of rye were exported, for example, nearly a century later (in 1587), the figure had risen to around seventy-one thousand tons.

Some of the grain went to destinations within the Baltic region—to places such as Lübeck or Copenhagen, Stockholm or Riga. The other (larger) half sailed through the sound. Some of the grain ended up not only in Amsterdam but also in places such as Setubal or Faro in Portugal, or even all the way to the Mediterranean.

Among the greatest consumers of Polish grain were the Dutch. Those mighty world traders hailing from a tiny waterlogged flatland could no longer feed themselves. Gdańsk itself was responsible for half of Amsterdam’s Baltic trade. But the Dutch were hardly the only foreigners present in the port Gdańsk. Germans, Frenchmen, Flemings, Englishmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, all traveled to this Baltic entrepôt in search of what Poland-Lithuania could supply. They found a sea of warehouses bursting with rye, wheat, and other grains as well as fibers (flax and hemp), forest goods (wax, honey, potash, lumber), even salted beef.

All this earned the Gdańsk merchants and their Polish suppliers a pretty penny. In the early years of this increased Baltic trade, a foreigner noted what he observed during the annual two-week long fair in Gdańsk, which began on Saint Dominic’s feast day (August 4). He saw over 400 ships arrive in the port. Yet their holds, albeit awaiting the harvest of grain, were hardly empty. They had brought to the shores of Poland-Lithuania all manner of luxury items: French wines; Spanish olive oil, lemons, preserves, and fruits; silks and other fine cloths; Portuguese spices; English cloth and tin. Reportedly the first eight days of the fair were spent loading the boats of the foreigners with Polish-Lithuanian wares, the next eight with selling luxury items (some clearly of global provenance) to the Poles. Business was booming. By mid-century, the historian Marcin Kromer was reproaching his compatriots in the Kingdom of Poland for being obsessed with luxury and splendor, and for adorning themselves in foreign fabrics and exotic leathers, in silks and purples, silver, gold, pearls, and gemstones.

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