Category Archives: Poland

by | 17 July 2026 · 3:02 pm

How Much Polish in Esperanto?

This week’s newsletter from Culture.pl contains several articles on language, one of which, by Mikołaj Gliński, answers How much Polish is there in Esperanto? Here are some excerpts:

The Slavic Esperanto lexicon is generally considered to derive from two Slavic languages, both of which Zamenhof knew very well – Russian and Polish. While Russian, as he later recalled, was his favourite during his early days, as well as the language of the larger part of his linguistic output, Polish was the language spoken in Warsaw, where Zamenhof would eventually spend most of his life. And it’s actually these two languages that make up the 1% of Slavic in Esperanto vocabulary. The problem is that sometimes identifying the original language is very hard if not simply impossible.

While Esperanto words like barakti (to flounder, from барахтаться barahtat’sja), gladi (to iron, from гладить gladit’), krom (except, from кроме krome), or vosto (a tail, from хвост) are easy to identify as of Russian origin (they simply don’t appear in Polish), and others like kolbaso can be considered as coming from Russian based on their phonetic build-up (Rus. kolbasa, compare Pol. kiełbasa), there are also some that can be really problematic. This goes for words like celo (aim), bulko (bun), klopodo (effort), kaĉo (porridge, from kasza / каша kaša), prava (right [in opinion], from prawy / правый pravyj), or svati (to matchmake, from swat / сват svat). Due to their almost identical forms in both languages, it seems hardly possible to tell from which language Zamenhof took the original root.

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And yet the group of Esperanto words which are usually identified as Polish loan words is significant. It includes such words as:

  • barĉo – borscht (from barszcz),
  • ĉu – whether (from czy),
  • krado – a grating (from krata),
  • luti – to solder (from lutować)
  • pilko – a ball (Polish piłka)
  • ŝelko – suspenders (from szelki)
  • [via] moŝto – [your] highness (from Polish mość),

While this is a rather diverse bunch, comprising elements of clothing, sport items, local food, and a grammatical particle, some of these words can be more interesting than others, and actually instructive in telling us something about how Zamenhof saw the component languages of Esperanto, in this case Polish.

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One of these words is moŝto. It certainly isn’t a word of particular prominence or frequency in contemporary Esperanto. In fact, it’s a word you’re not likely to use at all, unless you’re addressing high authority, or… a king. The latter was Zamenhof’s case – he used the word (precisely: Lia reĝa moŝto) when addressing the king of Spain Alfonso XIII speaking at the Esperanto Congress in Barcelona in 1909. Yet it is this word that also happens to offer interesting insights into the role of Polish in the Esperanto system.

The word goes back to the Polish word mość, one of many honorific lexemes used (historically) in Polish. In early modern Poland, the phrase was required as an obligatory form of address between and to members of the Polish nobility (szlachta). Used and abused, this linguistic habit was part of the more widespread social and cultural phenomenon known as szlachtomania (nobility-mania), a real scourge of early-modern Polish society.

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While Zamenhof on the one hand made sure that addressing people in Esperanto would be as democratic as possible (Esperantists address each other by a simple vi (you), much like in contemporary English, and unlike in Polish), he also reserved a mode of speaking when addressing the highest royal authority. In finding the right word he somewhat naturally turned to Polish. A choice well justified, as Polish is perhaps the only Slavic language (along with Czech) to have developed an elaborate honorific system that distinguishes between who you’re talking to, based on your age and social status (historically, class of society).

That Polish is at the core of Esperanto honorific usage is best exemplified in the phrase via reĝa moŝto, which translates as Your Majesty, and can be seen as quite a direct calque from the Polish: wasza królewska mość…

Is Ĉu Polish?

But perhaps the most interesting and telling case of a Polish Slavic influence on Esperanto is the particle ĉu (whether, if). This little but important word goes most likely back to the Polish czy, otherwise it comes up only in Belarusian (ці/tsi) and is not used in other Slavic languages. Interestingly the same particle (צי, tsi) surfaces also in Yiddish, a language Zamenhof was surely familiar with.

Much the same as in Polish, ĉu in Esperanto is used primarily to introduce a question. Like in this example:

Imagine you find yourself somewhere in Eastern Europe. But is it Russia or Belarus, Poland or Croatia, Slovenia or Slovakia? Find out how much you know about Slavic languages and we’ll see if you’re able to make your way through Slavic Europe.

Ĉu li aŭ ŝi amas min? [Does he or she love me?]

Whereas in French or English, asking a question involves inverting the word order and/or inserting an auxiliary particle, which as many struggling language learners surely know, can be quite complicated, Esperanto simply puts ĉu in front of the phrase or subordinate clause, the sentence basically stays the same. This is exactly how ‘czy’ operates in Polish and Yiddish.

But ĉu is also interesting because it opens us on the issues of syntax – as most structuralists would tell you, language is not really about vocabulary. This helps to pinpoint the more thorough impact of Slavic, and Polish in particular, on the fundamental grammatical structures in Esperanto. Like say, the accusative…

Is Esperanto’s accusative Slavic?

Esperanto is somewhat notorious for its rather free word order. This goes for noun + adjective order (adjective noun) but also, and more importantly, the structural order of subject, object and verb in a sentence. The latter in Esperanto is very flexible, even if the word order which is usually recommended is SVO. This flexibility, which allows for great liberty in constructing Esperanto sentence, is actually facilitated through the presence of the accusative. Compare these examples:

The boy bit the dog

La knabo mordis la hundon

La knabo la hundon mordis

La hundon la knabo mordis

La hundon mordis la knabo

Mordis la hundon la knabo

Mordis la knabo la hundon

The presence of the accusative case (marked by the -n ending) was a bone of contention in early discussions among Esperantists (and partially led to a schism in the early Esperanto movement, see Ido). But Zamenhof always remained a strong advocate of the accusative. As Professor Żelazny explains, he thought it was a key tool in allowing bigger flexibility for Esperanto sentences, which was particularly important in poetry, which Zamenhof admired so much. The accusative affix allowed for greater flexibility in the Esperanto word order and thus multiplied the rhyming potential of it, which otherwise would be very limited.

As a result, Esperanto’s word order is very fluid (although naturally some positions are preferred by users) just like it is in Slavic languages. And while it’s obviously impossible to trace back the invention to Polish or Russian (German also has the accusative,) the Esperanto sentence shares a general similarity with the rather free syntax of Slavic sentence.

This is showcased in the early translation of The Pharaoh by Bolesław Prus. As Walter Żelazny notes, it was La Faraono, translated by Kazimierz Bein, that became a kind of model for much of the literature later written in Esperanto.

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Semantic calques

A more subtle influence of Slavic languages on the structure of Esperanto, and more precisely its morphology, can be traced in the semantic build-up of Esperanto word formations, like senanima, senforta, or senfunda. While all these words are built from Esperanto (sen-) and Romance elements, they are actually semantic calques from Slavic languages, but again telling whether it’s Polish or Russian may be next to impossible.

  • senanima – heartless, callous [calque of Rus. бeздyшный or Pol. bezduszny]
  • senfunda– bottomless [calque of Rus. бeздoнный, Pol. bezdenny]
  • senforta – powerless [calque of Rus. бессильный / Pol. bezsilny]

A similar ‘subliminal’ influence of Slavic semantics can be seen in the meaning and functioning of some words. One oft-cited example is the Esperanto word plena ‘full, complete’, which looks Latinate in form (French plein(e), Latin plen- ‘full’), but has the semantic range of Russian полный polnyi ‘full, complete’, as can be seen in the phrase plena vortaro ‘a complete dictionary’, a usage not possible with the French or Latin words. And one could add that it’s also how the word pełny is also used in Polish.

Phonetics

Another area of a possible Slavic influence is phonology. As Walter Żelazny explains: “The Esperanto phonological system is almost entirely Polish.” That’s why, as Żelazny claims, the majority of Poles, as the majority of Slavs, should not have to learn any vowels. In fact, all the sounds which you can find in Esperanto are also in Polish, including diacriticical signs: ĉ (Polish cz), ĝ (dż), Ĵ (ż), Ŝ (sz), ŭ (ł).

Alphabet

A bit surprisingly, Polish influence is also traceable in the Esperanto alphabet and orthography. The Esperanto alphabet consists of 28 letters, with each letter standing for one sound. Apart from diacritical letters, its peculiarities include the letters C and J. Pronounced as ‘ts’ and ‘y’, respectively, they may at first seem a bit counter-intuitive for many Esperanto learners, but they are best explained on the grounds of the Polish alphabet. It is a common experience of many Polish learners that these letters to the English eye are false friends. (As to further Slavic influence in the Esperanto alphabet, compare the letter ŭ in Esperanto and Belarusian).

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Accent

But perhaps the best and most convincing example of the overall influence of Polish – and not Slavic languages – on the shape of Esperanto is its accent. The accent rule was included already in the first edition of Unua Libro, the first Esperanto handbook, published by Zamenhof in Warsaw in 1887. Among the 16 cardinal principles of Esperanto the one No. 10 reads:

The accent falls on the last syllable but one (penultimate).

The penultimate accent just happens to be one of the characteristic features of Polish, differentiating it sharply from other local Slavic languages, like Russian (which has unpredictable stress) or Czech (initial accent) as well as from French, which accents the last syllable pronounced. That’s why some practitioners of Esperanto claim that Polish pronunciation of Esperanto is the most natural and closest to the Esperanto standard. But this is of course rather a matter of individual taste.

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Filed under language, Poland, Russia

by | 12 July 2026 · 5:15 am

Reviving Russian Slavic Eurasianism

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 102-104:

Putin adopted many elements of traditional and revived Eurasianism as parts of his world view. In his official pronouncements he spoke repeatedly of Russia as a unique multiethnic civilization not only different from the West but opposed to it in history, culture, and values. But he also embraced with equal if not greater enthusiasm the ideas of a different group of Russian thinkers who juxtaposed Russia to the West predominantly as a Eurasian Slavic or Russian civilization. That trend of thought, represented by such figures as Aleksei Khomiakov, Ivan Kirievsky, and Konstantin Aksakov, predated Eurasianism, going back to the first decades of the nineteenth century, which produced one of the most consequential schisms in Russian intellectual history, that between Westernizers and Slavophiles. The former insisted that Russia’s destiny lay with the West, while the latter emphasized Russian uniqueness, rooted in history, language, culture, and nationality.

The nationality that the Slavophiles called Russian was in fact East Slavic. In imperial Russian terminology, it consisted of Great Russians, or Russians per se, Little Russians or Ukrainians, and White Russians or Belarusians. The model of a tripartite Russian nation, which the Russian historian Alexei Miller calls a “big Russian nation,” was adopted by the imperial elites in the second half of the nineteenth century and became part of the ideological credo and personal belief, as well as identity, of many of the country’s political, religious, and military leaders. The Russian Revolution put an end to the dominance of the tripartite nation in Russian political and ethnonational thought. In 1922, Lenin resisted Joseph Stalin’s attempts to incorporate non-Russian republics into the Russian Federation and insisted on the creation of a Union state in which those republics would be distinct polities with rights equal to those of Russia.

The idea of a big Russian nation went into the Russian emigration along with the White Guard generals defeated by the Bolshevik Red Army and the intellectuals who supported their vision of Russia, one and indivisible. Among the émigrés was General Anton Denikin, whose memoirs would make a strong impression on Vladimir Putin, and the philosopher Ivan Ilyin, an admirer of fascism, whose article, “What the Dismemberment of Russia Promises the World,” would become a frequently quoted source in the speeches and pronouncements of Putin and other Russian officials. Ilyin argued that one day Russia would gather its lands back under its tutelage.

The key figure who linked the imperial thinking of the past with a plan for dealing with post-Soviet Russian challenges and realities was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In his essay of 1990, Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals, Solzhenitsyn called for the separation of the eastern Slavs from the non-Slavic republics of the Soviet Union and the formation of a “Russian Union” consisting of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and northern Kazakhstan. If one followed Ernest Gellner’s definition of nationalism as the establishment of congruence between political and ethnonational borders, then Solzhenitsyn’s “reconstructed” Russia was to become quadripartite. But his plan never materialized, and several years later Solzhenitsyn went on to question the legitimacy of the Ukrainian borders. In his essay Russia in Collapse (1998), Solzhenitsyn argued for the annexation of eastern and southern Ukraine, denouncing its “inordinate expansion onto territory that was never Ukraine until Lenin: the two Donets provinces, and the whole southern belt of New Russia (Melitopol–Kherson–Odesa) and the Crimea.”

Putin was an admirer of all these writers and shared many of their ideas. In May 2009, less than a year after the invasion of Georgia, he made a public show of his admiration for imperial Russian thinkers. Despite rainy weather, he showed up in the company of numerous reporters at the cemetery of the Donskoi Monastery in Moscow to lay flowers on the graves of General Denikin and his wife, along with the grave of Ivan Ilyin and that of Ivan Shmelev, another Russian émigré writer whose remains had been returned to Russia. Putin also laid flowers on the grave of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who had died in Moscow the previous year.

Referring to General Denikin, whose grave he honored first, Putin encouraged one of the reporters accompanying him at the ceremony to read Denikin’s memoirs. “Denikin discusses Great and Little Russia, Ukraine,” said Putin. “He writes that no one may meddle in relations between us; that has always been the business of Russia itself.” Denikin was in fact following Aleksandr Pushkin, who had attacked the West for criticizing Russia’s assault on Poland after it rebelled against the empire in 1830. If Pushkin referred to Russo-Polish relations, Denikin referred to those between Russia and Ukraine. In Putin’s view, it was up to Russia to decide how to conduct its relations with a weaker neighbor. The Slavic roots of the two peoples became his excuse to condemn any Western support for Ukraine.

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Filed under military, language, migration, Russia, nationalism, philosophy, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus

by | 11 July 2026 · 6:54 am

NATO’s Bucharest Summit, 2008

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 87-89:

As NATO leaders arrived for the Bucharest summit on April 2, 2008, Russia’s vocal protests against membership for Ukraine and Georgia were on their minds. Putin came to the Romanian capital in person to take part in the meeting of the Russia-NATO summit and warn the members of the alliance against extending invitations to the two post-Soviet republics. “The emergence of a powerful military bloc at our borders will be seen as a direct threat to Russian security,” Putin told President Bush. Bush was not particularly impressed. Before going to Bucharest he made a stopover in Kyiv, where he told the Ukrainians: “Your nation has made a bold decision, and the United States strongly supports your request.”

But key European members of NATO, France and Germany in particular, blocked the decision advocated by the United States and supported by the new East European members of the alliance to grant Ukraine and Georgia a Membership Action Plan. “We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO,” read the declaration before making it clear that no accession would take place any time soon. The MAP was promised but not given on the basis that the two potential applicants still had to meet some specific criteria in order to qualify. “[W]e will now begin a period of intensive engagement with both at a high political level to address the questions still outstanding pertaining to their MAP applications.”

The matter was postponed and would not return to the NATO agenda at the next summit or the one after that. Everyone knew that the decision to deny MAP to the two post-Soviet republics was a concession to their former master, Russia. Otherwise it was impossible to explain why the Bucharest summit invited Croatia and Albania to join NATO. For the two countries now perceived as threats by Russia, NATO’s non-decision on their membership was the worst possible outcome of the summit: their applications had been postponed indefinitely, leaving them with no protection from the alliance that they had publicly stated they wanted to join. While Russia would not dare to attack NATO, it could easily attack its aspirants, and it did so.

On August 8, 2008, a few months after the Bucharest summit, Russia launched a war on Georgia, ostensibly in defense of the Georgian enclave of South Ossetia, which had seceded from Georgia in the early 1990s. The Russian attack allegedly came as a response to the actions of the Georgian army, which had been ordered into South Ossetia, but there was no doubt that the war was directly linked to the outcome of the Bucharest summit. Russia had established official relations with South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two Georgian provinces that it was now “defending,” almost immediately after Putin’s return from the Bucharest summit. The Georgians fought back under the leadership of President Mikheil Saakashvili, who had been educated in Ukraine and the United States, but the Russian army, larger and superior to Georgia’s, moved deep into the country and threatened to occupy its capital, Tbilisi.

On August 12, Yushchenko, together with the leaders of Poland and the three Baltic states, flew to Tbilisi to show support for Saakashvili and his country. That day the Russian advance was stopped by means of a ceasefire negotiated by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. Russian troops eventually left a good part of the occupied territory but stayed in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, ostensibly protecting the independence of the two provinces from Georgia and perpetuating its territorial division. That undermined Georgia’s chances of ever joining NATO, as the alliance was reluctant to accept any state with unresolved territorial issues. The Russian war on Georgia became the first instance of its initiating a major war beyond its borders. It sent a clear signal to the West that Russia was prepared to use military force to stop any expansion of the alliance. It also demonstrated to other post-Soviet republics that NATO would not come to their rescue in case of Russian attack.

The decision of the Bucharest NATO summit, coupled with the outcome of the Russo-Georgian War, dealt a devastating blow to Ukrainian aspirations to join the alliance. The changing of the guard in Washington and the inauguration of Barack Obama as president in January 2009 led to a thorough revision of all elements of US foreign policy and an attempted “reset” of US-Russia relations. In January 2010 Viktor Yushchenko, defeated in the first round of that year’s presidential elections, left office to make way for Putin’s old favorite, Viktor Yanukovych. The new president promptly dropped NATO membership from the Ukrainian foreign-policy agenda and signed a deal that was devastating for Ukrainian security because it extended the presence of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol until 2042.

The Bucharest summit put Ukraine in the most vulnerable position that it had experienced since declaring independence. Without nuclear weapons and NATO membership, Ukraine found itself at the mercy of Russia, which saw the ambiguous offer of membership extended to Ukraine by the Bucharest summit as a threat to its own security. Ukraine was a lone warrior on open ground pursued by hostile forces, running to take shelter in a secure fortress, only to find its gates closing because of disagreements among its defenders.

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Filed under Baltics, democracy, France, Germany, military, nationalism, Poland, Russia, U.S., Ukraine, war

by | 10 July 2026 · 3:21 pm

Post-Soviet Nations and NATO

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 82-84:

As far as Russia was concerned, the victory of the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine was a major blow to the Kremlin’s interests at home and abroad. “It was our 9/11,” declared the Russian political adviser Gleb Pavlovsky, who was close to the Kremlin. A native of Ukraine, he went to Kyiv to advise Prime Minister Yanukovych and his campaign. The Orange Revolution was also a personal defeat for Putin because it was supported by Boris Berezovsky, his onetime sponsor, later nemesis, and ultimately refugee from his regime. The Kremlin was concerned that under the Western-leaning President Yushchenko, Ukraine might leave the Russian orbit forever and join the Western camp.

With the fall of communism, democratic rule became a prerequisite for post-communist and post-Soviet states aspiring to join Western institutions, both political, like the European Union, and military, NATO in particular. Ukraine, with its chaotic but viable democracy, could be a candidate for both, while Russia, failing one democracy test after another and eventually setting on the path of authoritarian rule, could not. The success and durability of Ukrainian democracy was a threat to the Putin regime, since it encouraged whatever remained of the pro-democratic forces in Russia and, in geopolitical terms, brought democratic institutions closer to Russia’s borders. In Putin’s eyes, this was not just undesirable but unacceptable.

By 2004, Putin was well on the way to laying the foundations for a future autocratic regime. He took control of the Russian Duma in the December 2003 elections, which saw his party, United Russia, obtain three times as many votes as the communists to become the largest party in parliament. He then exploited a hostage crisis produced by Chechen radicals who attacked a school in Beslan in September 2004. It was mishandled by the Russian security services, whose personnel stormed the school, contributing to the death of 314 hostages, including 186 schoolchildren. This gave Putin an opportunity to intervene and curtail whatever remained of Russian democracy: elections of regional governors were abolished, and new laws were introduced curtailing the activities of political parties and NGOs.

Putin was eager to see a similar political system installed in Ukraine, openly campaigning for Yanukovych and secretly pushing Kuchma toward the use of force. He failed on both counts. In early 2005, mass protests also shook a number of other post-Soviet countries, including Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, where the “Tulip Revolution” unseated the local ruler, Askar Akayev, who had been in power since the late Soviet period. A year before the Orange Revolution, the “Revolution of Roses” in Georgia had brought to power a young, charismatic, pro-Western reformer named Mikheil Saakashvili. In Russia, all these protest movements were labeled “Orange.” Finding itself on the defensive, Moscow began to mimic the tactics used by the opposition during the Orange Revolution, creating and funding numerous pro-government youth organizations, the most notorious of which was “Nashi,” or “Ours.” “Ours” were there to defend the president against revolutionary upheaval, allegedly promoted by foreign powers. Ukraine was singled out in that regard, but behind Ukraine Moscow ideologues saw the threatening shadow of the West.

Indeed, as expected in Moscow, the Orange Revolution produced a major geopolitical shift in Kyiv. President Yushchenko returned to the pro-European policies launched by Kuchma before the Melnychenko tapes scandal of 2001. Those included gradual integration into European structures, from the European Union to NATO. Yushchenko wanted an invitation to join the alliance in the form of a Membership Action Plan, or MAP. His requests did not fall on deaf ears in Brussels, as NATO officials invited Ukraine to begin an Intensified Dialogue on possible membership. The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland, Ukraine’s western neighbors who had not wanted their efforts to join NATO to be compromised by association with Ukraine in the 1990s, now all supported Ukraine’s aspirations to membership. They were only too happy to yield their position on NATO’s eastern flank, vulnerable to possible Russian attack, to Ukraine.

In February 2022, a few weeks after his inauguration, Yushchenko attended a meeting of heads of state of NATO member nations in Brussels, where he publicly declared that he wanted his colleagues to regard Ukraine as a future member of the alliance. He did so in the name of the Orange Revolution that he had led and the people who had elected him to the presidency. “I’m pretty much sure, dear friends,” began Yushchenko, “that the people who went onto Kyiv’s squares and streets were motivated because they wanted to see Ukraine in Europe, not as a neighbor of Europe, because we are a country located in the center of Europe. And we would like to see Ukraine integrated into the European Union and into the North Atlantic Alliance.” Before leaving the podium, Yushchenko went out of his way to reassure Russia that his NATO aspirations and those of his country were not directed against Russia. “Russia is our strategic partner,” declared Yushchenko, “and Ukraine’s policy toward NATO will by no means be against the interests of other countries, including Russia.”

Ukraine was trying to solve its security dilemma as best it could. Since NATO had established a strategic partnership with Russia, the idea of Ukraine’s acceding to NATO without antagonizing Russia was theoretically feasible in the 1990s. But in the wake of the Orange Revolution, Kyiv faced a difficult choice: either to accommodate Moscow, which had long-standing territorial claims on Ukraine and had intervened directly in that country’s presidential elections, or to seek protection in a military alliance that could guarantee its territorial integrity and sovereignty. The threat from Russia was real and immediate, while membership in NATO was hypothetical and removed in time. After long vacillation, Kyiv opted decisively for NATO.

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Filed under Central Asia, Czechia, democracy, Europe, Hungary, military, nationalism, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Ukraine, USSR

by | 1 July 2026 · 12:33 am

Changing USSR Nationality Policy

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 18-21:

The USSR began its life with massive affirmative action for the non-Russian cultures outside the Russian Federation. But cultural Russification of the borderlands returned in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Stalin emerged as Lenin’s sole successor and began preparing the country for war. One reason for the change was industrialization, which, given Russian control of the all-Union party, came with the advance of Russian as the language of administration, science, and technology. Another reason was accommodation of the Russians as the largest nationality in the now Soviet empire, along with concern to integrate the non-Russian nationalities culturally so that they would not switch sides in the coming war.

In Ukraine, the largest non-Russian republic of the USSR, the change of nationality policy was signaled by show trials against the Ukrainian intelligentsia. The first such trial, which took place in 1929, was followed by an attack on the Ukrainian party cadres and the peasantry, which reached its peak during the Holodomor, or the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33. A number of key Ukrainian communists committed suicide, while others were dismissed from their positions and jailed. As many as four million people were starved to death as part of a concerted campaign to crush the peasant resistance to the collectivization and maximize grain delivery for Soviet industrialization. In the month leading up to the start of the famine, Stalin warned his associates that such measures were needed to prevent loss of control over Ukraine. The Holodomor turned Ukraine, previously known as the breadbasket of Europe, into a land devastated by famine.

World War II led to another shift in Moscow’s policy toward the nationalities. Although Russocentrism was not abandoned, more manifestations of Ukrainian and other non-Russian patriotism were allowed. The Soviet takeover of Poland’s eastern provinces following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 was justified as liberation of fellow Ukrainians and Russians from Polish capitalist oppression. It was also celebrated in ethnic terms as the reunion of western Ukraine and western Belarus with the corresponding Soviet republics. The old imperial reunification paradigm was back, dressed this time in Ukrainian and Belarusian clothing. After Hitler attacked the USSR in June 1941, non-Russian nationalism was mobilized once again, especially in Ukraine, to encourage patriotic resistance to the German invasion. Once German forces occupied all of Ukraine with the assistance of their Romanian and Hungarian allies, Moscow did not mind promoting the Ukrainian language, culture, and history to mobilize resistance and inspire the loyalty of more than six million Ukrainians drafted into the Red Army. The Ukrainian card was also played at home and abroad to justify the military takeover and annexation of western Ukrainian lands ruled by Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania during the interwar period.

In 1914 the Russian army had captured the city of Lviv, then under Austrian rule, justifying it as liberation of fellow Russians—that was the tsarist authorities’ official term for the local population. As World War II drew to an end, the Soviets played not the Russian but the Ukrainian national card when they integrated Lviv into the Ukrainian SSR, although the city was largely Polish in ethnic composition, with Jews (largely exterminated during the Holocaust) as the second-largest ethnic group.

While the authorities were eager to exploit Ukrainian ethnicity to justify Soviet westward expansion, they did not welcome or tolerate every expression of Ukrainian patriotism and nationalism. The radical Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), formed in the western Ukrainian lands during the interwar period, was considered particularly dangerous. Its members were known to the Soviets as Banderites: their leader, Stepan Bandera, and some of his followers were imprisoned in German concentration camps after a failed attempt to declare an independent Ukrainian state in alliance with Germany and against the USSR in the summer of 1941. The Nazi occupiers, who regarded Slavs as subhuman, deported more than two million Ukrainians to Germany as slave laborers and persecuted Ukrainian patriots of every description.

The two branches of the OUN, one led by Bandera, the other by his less-known rival Andrii Melnyk, turned against the Germans by the end of 1941. In 1943 the Bandera faction assumed leadership of the 100,000-strong Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a guerrilla force that fought against the Polish Home Army and the Nazis and, later, against the Red Army for control of western Ukraine. The Ukrainian nationalist insurgency was not completely crushed until the early 1950s, the last years of Stalin’s rule, earning the designation of the strongest and longest-lasting movement of resistance to the Soviets anywhere in east-central Europe.

The Soviets did their best to discredit the Ukrainian nationalists by condemning their early collaboration with the Germans and exposing the participation of some OUN members in the Holocaust and the ethnic cleansing of Poles during the German occupation of Ukraine. They also made major concessions to the Ukrainian language, which became dominant in western Ukrainian government institutions, replacing Polish. But the Sovietization of western Ukraine was carried out mainly by repression. Not only the captured fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army but also civilians suspected of helping the insurgents were resettled or deported en masse to gulag camps in the Russian SFSR, making Ukrainians the largest ethnic group of political prisoners in the Soviet Union—a phenomenon documented by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag Archipelago.

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Filed under military, war, migration, labor, nationalism, economics, USSR, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, food

by | 29 June 2026 · 12:05 am

Polish & Ukrainian Anthems

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 213-214:

THE UKRAINIAN NATIONAL anthem begins with the words “Ukraine has not yet perished,” hardly an optimistic beginning for any kind of song. But this is not the only anthem whose words do not inspire optimism. The Polish national anthem starts with the familiar line “Poland has not yet perished.” The words of the Polish anthem were written in 1797 and those of the Ukrainian one were penned in 1862, so it is quite clear who influenced whom. But why such pessimism? In both cases, Polish and Ukrainian, the idea of the death of the nation stemmed from the experience of the late eighteenth century—the partitions of Poland and the liquidation of the Hetmanate.

Like many other anthems, the Polish one was originally a marching song written for the Polish legions fighting under the command of the future emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, in his Italian campaigns. The song was originally known as the “Dąbrowski mazurka,” named for a commander of the Polish troops, Jan Henryk Dąbrowski. Many of the Polish legionnaires, including the commander himself, had taken part in the Kościuszko Uprising, and the lyrics were meant to lift their spirits after the destruction of their state by the partitioning powers. The song’s second line asserts that Poland will not perish “as long as we are alive.” By associating the nation not with the state but with those who considered themselves its members, the Polish anthem gave hope not just to the Poles but also to representatives of other stateless nations. A new generation of patriots in Poland and Ukraine refused to accept the disasters of the previous century as the final verdict on their nations. Both Polish and Ukrainian activists promoted a new understanding of a nation as a democratic polity made up of citizen patriots rather than a territorial state.

IN THE FIRST decade of the nineteenth century, Napoleon and his soldiers brought the ideas of nation and popular sovereignty to the rest of Europe in their songs and at the points of their bayonets. In 1807, the dream of the Polish legionnaires came a step closer to realization when, after defeating Prussia, the French emperor created the Duchy of Warsaw out of territories annexed by that country during the partitions of Poland. To the Poles, this offered the exciting prospect of the restoration of their homeland. In 1812, after Napoleon’s invasion of the Russian Empire, Poles under Russian rule rose in support of the French invader, whom they considered a liberator. Adam Mickiewicz, the foremost Polish poet of the era, reflected the Polish nobility’s excitement at the advance of the French army into today’s Belarus in his epic poem Sir Thaddeus, which is still required reading in today’s Polish (but not Belarusian) schools. “Glory is ours already,” says one of the poem’s Polish characters, “and so we shall soon have our Republic again.”

In 1815, when entering the University of Vilnius, the sixteen-year-old Mickiewicz gave his name as Adam Napoleon Mickiewicz. By that time, Polish hopes of having “our Republic again” had been crushed. Napoleon, Dąbrowski, and their French and Polish troops had retreated from the Russian Empire in defeat.

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by | 28 June 2026 · 12:59 am

Polish Realia: Italian Pizza

Here are some informative paragraphs from the placemats at Tutti Santi, home of “legendary Italian pizza” in Kielce, Poland.

Włosaka pizza to setki lat historii. Na to, jak smakuje, ma wpływ jakość produktów, ale tez wiele lat poszukiwan, odkryc i zaangażowania ludzi, dla których pizza stała się życiową pasją. Zamów swoją ulubioną pizzę i rozsmakuj się w tej wyjątkowej historii.
Italian pizza embodies centuries of history. Its taste is shaped not only by the quality of the ingredients but also by years of exploration, discovery, and the dedication of people for whom pizza has become a lifelong passion. Order your favorite pizza and savor this unique story.

Włoskie Rzemiosło Italian Craftsmanship
Przepis na prawdziwą, włoska pizzę to tajemnica, do której dostęp mają tylko nieliczni. Tutti Santi to jedyna restauracja w Polsce, w której spróbujesz pizzy według receptury Mistrza Włoch i Europy Valerio Valle. Ciasto jego autorstwa jest delikatne, cienkie i lekko chrupiące.
The recipe for authentic Italian pizza is a secret accessible to only a few. Tutti Santi is the only restaurant in Poland where you can taste pizza made according to the recipe of Italian and European Champion Valerio Valle. The dough he created is delicate, thin, and slightly crispy.

Cierpliwość Patience
Ciasto według autorskiej receptury Mistrza Valerio Valle wymaga czasu i cierpliwości. Dojrzewanie ciasta trwa 48 godzin, w tym czasie zachodzą w nim niezbędne procesy, dzięki którym zawsze jest pyszne i lekkostrawne.
The dough, based on Master Valerio Valle’s original recipe, requires time and patience. The dough undergoes a 48-hour maturation process, during which essential changes occur that ensure it is always delicious and easy to digest.

Pomidory Tomatoes
Pomidory nie zostały odkryte we Włoszech, ale to Włosi odkryli ich potencjał i zamienili je w symbol włoskiej kuchni. Nasz sos tworzymy tylko z włoskich pomidorów, które dojrzewają w gorącym słońcu południa, co daje im wyątkową słodycz.
Tomatoes were not discovered in Italy, but it was the Italians who discovered their potential and turned them into a symbol of Italian cuisine. We make our sauce exclusively from Italian tomatoes ripened in the hot southern sun, which gives them exceptional sweetness.

Mąka – Sekret Ciasta Flour – Secret to the Dough
Wyselekcjonowaliśmy specjalny rodzaj włoskiej mąki o odpowiedniej zawartości białka. Mąkę sprowadzamy prosto z włoskich młynów, które od blisko 200 lat należą do jednej rodziny, gdzie przez pokolenia przekazuje się najlepsze tradycje i wielowikowe doświadczenie.
We have selected a special type of Italian flour with the appropriate protein content. We source our flour directly from Italian mills that have belonged to the same family for nearly 200 years—mills where the finest traditions and centuries of experience have been passed down through generations.

Naturalny Ogień Natural Fire
Nasze pizze wypiekamy w specjalnych kopułowych piecach opalanych drewnem. Od czterech pokoleń są one produkowane przez jedną rodzinę Valoriani. Od ponad 100 lat specjalizuje się ona w tradycyjnych piecach chlebowych, wykorzystując moc ognia, właściwości lawy wulkanidznej i widzę na temat rzemieślniczych metod wypieku ciasta.
We bake our pizzas in special wood-fired dome ovens. For four generations, they have been produced by the Valoriani family. For over 100 years, they have specialized in traditional bread ovens, harnessing the power of fire, the properties of volcanic lava, and expertise in artisanal baking methods.

Unikalne Smaki Unique Tastes
Do przygotowania każdej pizzy w Tutti Santi wykorzystujemy selektywnie wybrane produkty, które sprowadzamy bezpośrednio z Włoch od regionalnych, rzemieślniczych producentów. W naszym menu znajdziecie m.in. szlachetną szynkę San Daniele, Mozzarellę di Bufala z mleka bawolego, sery Stracchino, Provolone i wiele innych regionalnych produktów!
To prepare every pizza at Tutti Santi, we use carefully selected products imported directly from Italy from regional, artisanal producers. Our menu features, among other things, premium San Daniele ham, buffalo milk Mozzarella di Bufala, Stracchino and Provolone cheeses, and many other regional products!

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by | 25 June 2026 · 12:27 am

Ukraine’s Magna Carta?

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 161-164:

WHATEVER THE LEGAL and ideological underpinnings of the Pereiaslav agreement, the tsar honored Buturlin’s promise and gave the Cossacks what the Polish king had never agreed to: recognition of Cossack statehood, a Cossack register of 60,000, and privileged status for the Cossack estate. He also recognized the liberties enjoyed by other social strata under the Polish kings.

First and foremost, however, the agreement laid the foundations for a military alliance. It established no western boundary for the Cossacks’ territory—they could go as far as their sabers would take them. The Muscovite and Cossack armies entered the war against the commonwealth on their separate fronts: the Cossacks, assisted by a Muscovite corps, led the offensive in Ukraine, within the boundaries of the Kingdom of Poland; the Muscovite troops launched an offensive near Smolensk and moved west through Belarus and then into Lithuania, north of the Lublin border between the grand duchy and the kingdom. The joint offensive of Muscovite and Cossack troops brought unexpected results. Whereas in 1654 the Polish and Lithuanian troops, assisted by the Crimean khan, had managed to resist the offensive from the east, in the summer and fall of 1655 the Polish-Lithuanian counteroffensive collapsed: the Cossacks once again besieged Lviv, and Muscovite troops entered Vilnius, the capital of the grand duchy.

This was the beginning of the era known in Polish history as the Deluge. Not only did the Muscovite and Cossack armies move deep into the commonwealth, but in July 1655 the Swedes launched an offensive of their own across the Baltic Sea. By October, both Warsaw and the ancient Polish capital of Cracow were in Swedish hands. Alarmed by the prospect of a complete Polish collapse and a dramatic expansion of Sweden, which now claimed the parts of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania conquered by Muscovite troops, in the fall of 1656 Muscovite diplomats concluded an agreement with the commonwealth in Vilnius that put an end to Polish-Muscovite hostilities. Khmelnytsky and the Cossack officials were enraged at being denied access to the negotiations. The separate peace with Poland was leaving the Cossacks one on one with their traditional enemy. As far as they were concerned, the tsar was reneging on his main obligation under the Pereiaslav agreement—the military protection of his subjects.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky ignored the Muscovite-Polish deal and sent his army to help an ally of Sweden, the Protestant ruler of Transylvania, fight the Poles. Now, even the military alliance between the tsar and the Cossacks came into question. Khmelnytsky had been looking for new allies since Sweden’s entry into the war with Poland. The Swedes seemed determined to destroy the commonwealth, which Khmelnytsky also wanted. Negotiations to conclude a Ukrainian-Swedish agreement that would put an end to the commonwealth and guarantee the inclusion not only of Ukraine but also parts of what is now Belarus in the Cossack state gained new impetus from what the hetman regarded as the tsar’s betrayal of Ukraine.

Khmelnytsky, however, did not live to see the conclusion of this new international alliance. He died in August 1657, leaving the state he had created and the Cossacks he had led at a crossroads. Although Khmelnytsky believed that his alliance with the tsar had already run its course, he formally abided by the deal he had made in Pereiaslav. Events there became an important part of the old hetman’s large and contradictory legacy. Cossack chroniclers of the eighteenth century celebrated him very much in the same vein as the professors and students of the Kyivan College had done on his entrance into Kyiv in December 1648. They extolled him as the father of the nation, the liberator of his people from the Polish yoke, and the hetman who had negotiated the best possible arrangement with the tsar: they considered the Articles of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, approved by the tsar after Pereiaslav, a Magna Carta of Ukrainian liberties in the Russian Empire.

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by | 23 June 2026 · 12:10 am

Polish Realia: Dogs & Computers

Psine.pl, a computer repair shop in our Kielce neighborhood, has some interesting word usage.

The first item is the name of the company itself. Google translates psine as ‘doggie’. (It also translates Eng. doggone as Pol. cholera, which it translates back into Eng. ‘damn’.) Polish pies ‘dog’ has a very irregular declension: psy ‘dogs’, do psa ‘to the dog’, do psów ‘to the dogs’, z psem ‘with the dog’, z psami ‘with the dogs’, o psie ‘about the dog’, o psach ‘about the dogs’.

Pol. szczeniak ‘puppy’ is a little bit more regular: szczenięta ‘puppies’, do szczeniaka ‘to the puppy’, do szczeniąt ‘to the puppies’, ze szczeniakiem ‘with the puppy’, ze szczeniakami ‘with the puppies’, o szczeniaku ‘about the puppy’, o szczeniętach ‘about the puppies’.

The recent loanwords listed on Psine’s storefront have very regular nominative plurals: laptopy, smartfony, tablety, komputery. Other recent loans have similar plurals: bestsellery, burgery, filtry, gofry (< gaufre ‘waffles’), pantsy, szorty, (jar for) tipsy, toalety, turysty.

But, in construction with serwis ‘service’ or naprawa ‘repair’, the same tech loans take different plurals: (serwis/naprawa) laptopów, smartfonów, komputerów. 

For ‘game console’, Psine.pl writes singular konsol do gier and plural konsoli do gier. Google translates ‘console’ into singular konsola and plural konsole. The word translated gier is related to a whole etymological rabbit-hole full of nouns and verbs: gra ‘game’, gry ‘games’, gracz ‘gamer’; grać ‘to play (games), graj w gry ‘play (at) games’, graj w piłkę nożną ‘play (at) football, wygrywaj mecze ‘play matches’, graj na skrzypcach ‘play on a violin’ (lit. ‘on horsetails’?), etc.

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by | 22 June 2026 · 12:04 am

Cossacks & Tatars vs. Poles & Jews

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 151-153:

Up to that point, developments resembled those of previous Cossack uprisings, but Khmelnytsky changed the familiar pattern. Before marching northward, capturing towns, and confronting the commonwealth army, he went south in search of allies. In a dramatic reversal of established steppe politics, he offered the Crimean khan his friendship and an opportunity. The cautious khan allowed his vassals, the Noghay Horde north of the Crimea, to join the Cossacks. For Khmelnytsky and the Cossack rebels, this was a major coup. While the popular image of the Cossack nowadays is a man on horseback, in the mid-seventeenth century most Cossacks were in fact infantrymen. They lacked a cavalry of their own because maintaining one was too expensive: only nobles could afford to keep a battle-ready horse, often more than one. Khmelnytsky’s new alliance with the Tatars, who fought on horseback, solved the cavalry problem. From then on, the Cossacks could not only take poorly fortified borderland towns or defend themselves in fortified camps but also confront the Polish army in the field.

It did not take long for the alliance to prove its worth. In May 1648, Cossack and Tatar forces defeated two Polish armies, one near the Zhovti Vody (Yellow Water) River near the northern approaches to the Zaporozhian Sich, the other near the town of Korsun in the middle Dnieper region. A key to Cossack success, apart from the participation of Noghay cavalry (close to 4,000 horsemen) in both battles, was the decision of some 6,000 registered Cossacks to switch sides, abandon their Polish masters and join the Khmelnytsky revolt. The Polish standing army was completely wiped out. Its two chief commanders, the Crown grand hetman and the Crown field hetman, as well as hundreds of officers, ended up in Tatar captivity.

While the Cossacks’ sudden success shocked the commonwealth, Khmelnytsky and his closest supporters could not believe their luck. The hetman did not know what move to make next. In June 1648, with the Polish armies gone and the commonwealth in disarray, Bohdan Khmelnytsky took something of a summer hiatus and retired to his native Chyhyryn to consider what to do. But the rebels refused to take any breaks. With the old registered Cossacks gathered near Bila Tserkva, a town south of Kyiv, the popular uprising began in earnest in the rest of Ukraine. Inspired by the news of Cossack victories, the peasants and the townspeople took matters into their own hands, attacking the estates of large landowners, harassing their retreating private armies, settling scores with nobles, and hunting down Catholic priests. But those who suffered most from the peasant revolt in the summer of 1648 were the Jews of Ukraine.

The first letters that Khmelnytsky sent to the authorities as the revolt began already mentioned Jewish leaseholders. The Cossack hetman complained of the “intolerable injustices” that the Cossacks were suffering at the hands of the royal officials, the colonels—Polish commanders of the registered Cossacks—and “even” the Jews. Khmelnytsky mentioned the Jews in passing, placing them in the third or even fourth echelon of Cossack enemies, but the rebels in Right-Bank Ukraine, where Jews began to suffer attack en masse in June 1648, had their own priorities. They assaulted and often killed Jews (especially men), leading to the destruction of entire communities, which they all but wiped from the map in the course of three summer months of 1648. We do not know the number of victims, as we do not know the number of Jews living in the region before the revolt, but most scholars estimate Jewish losses at 14,000 to 20,000 victims—a very high number, given the time and place. For all its rapid economic development, seventeenth-century Ukraine was relatively sparsely settled.

Twentieth-century Jewish and Ukrainian historians have placed considerable emphasis on the underlying social causes of anti-Jewish antagonism in Dnieper Ukraine of that period. Rivalry between Jewish and Christian merchants and artisans in the cities and towns, as well as the Jewish leaseholders’ role as middlemen between nobles and peasants, did indeed contribute to the violence unleashed by the Cossack revolt. But one should not lose sight of religious motives in the attacks on Ukrainian Jewry. Religion was essential to social identity on both sides of the Christian-Jewish divide. It was not for nothing that the best-known Jewish chronicler of the massacres, Nathan Hannover, called the attackers “Greeks,” referring to their Orthodox religion, not their nationality. Some rebels felt that they were on a religious mission to convert those Jews who had escaped the massacre. Forced conversion to Christianity saved the lives of many Jewish men. Some of them joined the Cossack ranks, while others returned to Judaism once the threat of annihilation was over.

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