Category Archives: Ukraine

by Joel | 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 Joel | 17 July 2025 · 12:52 pm

Poland’s Silver Age Ends

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 329-330:

The seventeenth century had proven a mixed bag for the Commonwealth. It began on a relatively high note, with the reign of Zygmunt III Vasa that ushered in the so-called Silver Age. Mid-century, however, the Commonwealth nearly imploded, wracked by devastating invasions, civil war, and the loss of left-bank Ukraine. The country’s recovery from the [Swedish] Deluge, although noteworthy, was only partial. The nobility clung ever more tightly to its cherished Golden Freedoms and rejected anything that smacked of political reform, particularly if it might lead to a strengthening of the monarch’s position within the country. Even the triumphant, world-historical victory of Sobieski and his forces at Vienna—the high point of the century—did more for Western Christendom than for the Commonwealth itself.

The final election of the seventeenth century did not lead to the confirmation of a new Piast (or native Sarmatian) dynasty. Despite his efforts, King Jan III Sobieski proved unable to secure for his sons the Polish succession. To the contrary, the election of 1697 would mark a reversal of recent policy, which since the Deluge had given preference to candidates of noble Piast heritage. From the vantage point of hindsight, an interesting pattern emerges. Consider the elections both preceding and following the triplet of Vasa reigns. The first two elections, limited to foreign candidates, put one regrettable (Valois) and one memorable (Batory) candidate on the Polish throne. The anti-foreign backlash following the abdication of Jan Kazimierz Vasa (which marked the end of the Polish Vasa dynasty) put two Piasts (native candidates) on the Polish throne: once again, one regrettable (Wiśniowiecki) and one memorable (Sobieski) candidate.

Despite the fact that Sobieski not only had significant military victories under his belt but also had fathered sons who could contend for the throne, the electoral pendulum swung once again—out of their reach….

This clear rejection of the Sobieski heir—and, by extension, all candidates of Polish/Sarmatian noble descent—opened the doors wide to foreign involvement. This time, the results of the election ended up demonstrating to what extent the Commonwealth elections could be used in the power struggle between the various major European players.

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by Joel | 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 Joel | 12 July 2025 · 5:55 am

Catholic vs. Orthodox Slavs

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 231-235:

The war with Muscovite Russia was hardly over. Despite the accomplishments of the valiant Transylvanian [Stefan Batory], Polish-Russian relations had yet to enter into their most interesting—indeed, most incredible—phase. In the interim, another development took place, one that would have important repercussions for the battle not only for territory but also for the hearts and minds of the borderland inhabitants.

More precisely, this new development represented a war for souls. At the same time that Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy were vying for control of the Rus’ principalities, questions of jurisdiction over the Orthodox population of Eastern Europe generated sparks. This was the world of the Greek Church, adherents of Christianity in its Byzantine (that is, Eastern) rite.

Byzantine Christianity differed from the Church of Rome in a number of ways, not all of them doctrinal. Whereas in Roman Catholicism the high church language was Latin, there was no one single high church language in the Greek world: the Slavic lands had been given their own church language by the earliest missionaries to the Slavs, Cyril and Methodius. This language came to be known as Old Church Slavonic. Distinct from the spoken vernaculars of the region, it was nonetheless for the most part comprehensible to the population.

The relationship of the church and state in the East was also different than in the West. Following the pattern of Byzantium, the Eastern Church pragmatically subordinated itself to the authority of the state in which it functioned. Another seemingly obvious distinction: the Eastern churches did not owe allegiance to the pope in Rome but, rather, acknowledged the patriarch of Constantinople. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the position of the Greek Church was much diminished. This allowed for some jockeying within Eastern Christendom, especially in the East Slavic lands, where the majority of the faithful resided and the religion flourished.

To be sure, even before the Ottomans moved into Byzantium, not all was well in the Eastern Greek world further north. This in part was the result of the fact that, from its inception, the head of the Greek Church in the Rus’ lands had been the metropolitan of Kyiv. The shift of state borders that resulted in the Greek faithful residing in different states complicated the ecclesiastical picture and led various clergymen to vie with each other for influence over the faithful of Eastern Europe. To give one example: the Bulgarian clergyman who was chosen as metropolitan of the Ruthenian lands in 1415 soon found himself excommunicated by the patriarch of Constantinople, whose mind had been poisoned by the metropolitan of Moscow, who wanted this position for himself. Not until 1458 was Poland-Lithuania able to establish an independent Kyivo-Halych metropolitanate for its Orthodox population.

…

Those in the Commonwealth realized that they needed to counteract such moves. Essentially there were two options. They could either establish an autocephalous Orthodox church for the country or bring about church union—here, union with what was still the biggest force in Christianity: the Church in Rome.

The latter option won out, in part because the Church of Rome had made similar efforts in the past. First attempted in Constance, union between the Roman and Greek Churches had been achieved at the Council of Florence (1439), although nothing ultimately came of it (it is this attempt at union, incidentally, that led to the formation of an autocephalous Orthodox church in Moscow). Yet another sign that union was the direction favored by the Vatican was that, as early as 1573, a Greek College was opened in Rome as well as a Congregation for Eastern Churches.

The Commonwealth, thus, was convinced to work toward union and capitalized on a desire among Commonwealth clergymen not to subordinate themselves to Muscovy—in particular, not to send their financial dues there. This became visible in the synods that took place in the town of Brest, along the internal Polish-Lithuanian border, at the end of the sixteenth century. The Greek clergy decided to support the idea of union—with qualifications. While they would recognize the authority of the pope in Rome, they were not ready to make many changes that would affect the look and feel of their religion. They were allowed to retain their distinctive Eastern rite: the liturgy in Church Slavonic, as well as other traditions, including the marriage of the clergy. A selling point for the Orthodox bishops was a further advantage specified in the act of union: they were to be admitted into the Senate of the Commonwealth, on par with the Roman Catholic bishops.

This Union of Brest, as the 1596 agreement was called, produced a new phenomenon in the Commonwealth: so-called Uniates. These were Eastern-rite Catholics, in official parlance members of the Greek-Catholic Confession of the Slavonic Rite. In other words, while they retained their traditional Eastern rite and practices, they were part of the Catholic Church.

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by Joel | 7 July 2025 · 6:10 am

Mazovia (with Warsaw) Joins Poland

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 146-149:

Zygmunt’s reign did bring many positive developments, however. One important accomplishment was the ultimate incorporation of Mazovia (with its ducal capital of Warsaw) into the Crown of Poland. Regardless how odd this may seem to contemporary readers, Warsaw—despite its central location and later claims to fame—was not yet fully a part of the realm. Since the fourteenth century, Mazovia had been a fief of Poland, controlled by a branch of the old Piast princely dynasty. Bit by bit, the Crown of Poland had acquired pieces of that territory; yet it was only after the death of the last Mazovian prince, Janusz III, in 1526 that the process of incorporation was completed.

For a Polish province, Mazovia was in many ways atypical. The duchy had long eschewed battle with the Teutonic Knights to its immediate north and even maintained good trade relations with them. As of the late fourteenth century, Mazovians had played an important role in facilitating the trade of timber and naval stores coming to Baltic ports via the Narew, Bug, and Vistula Rivers. The duchy likewise assisted the transit trade of furs, wax, and honey from Lithuania as well as cattle from Volhynia. After 1500, Mazovians expanded their activities to include the grain trade. As for the social composition of the duchy, it boasted a preponderance of nobles—certainly vis-à-vis Poland-Lithuania as a whole. Some 20 percent of the population claimed a noble patent—quite a large number, though to be sure most of these were impoverished soldier-nobles. Warsaw had a provincial feel, although in the sixteenth century it was beginning its ascent, in part thanks to trade.

[It sounds as if Poland may have acquired its own equivalents of the Prussian Junker class when it incorporated Masovia into the Crown of Poland.–J.]

Although King Zygmunt managed to incorporate the remaining pieces of Mazovia into the Crown, he was less successful in pressing state and dynastic interests in the region of the Baltic Sea, this despite a very real occasion to do so. For a war fought against the Teutonic Order in 1519–1521 brought the Knights to their knees—literally. One of the most famous images in Polish history dates from 1525, the so-called Prussian Homage. A triumphant view of this grand event was painted in 1882 by the nineteenth-century Polish artist Jan Matejko, whose colorful brushstrokes lavishly rendered the scene of the former grand master of the Teutonic Knights, Albrecht von Hohenzollern, kneeling before the Polish king and publicly swearing his fealty.

Yet such a rosy view of the event—although attractive to Matejko’s contemporaries, who took especial pleasure in seeing Prussians bowing down before the Poles, even if only in the deep historical past—was misleading. Much more could have been achieved than simply having Albrecht von Hohenzollern kneel before the Polish king (who was, after all, his uncle) and resign himself to the status of subordinate. What could have marked the end of Prussia as an independent entity—had Zygmunt pursued the fight further—instead gave little Prussia a new lease on life. Recall that part of Prussia had already been incorporated into the Crown by Zygmunt’s father. This was the so-called Royal Prussia, which had sought to break away from the hold of the Teutonic Knights and turned to the Polish king for help.

What went wrong, then? Although it was a Polish fief, in this moment Prussia was permitted to undergo a notable change. No longer to be run by the Teutonic Knights, it was transformed by Albrecht von Hohenzollern-Ansbach (the aforementioned nephew of Zygmunt) into a secular state. Henceforth the last grand master of the Teutonic Order would be known as Duke of Prussia, and his successors would have hereditary rights in the lands formerly held by the Order. Not only that: the Prussia of Albrecht von Hohenzollern simultaneously embraced the views promulgated by Martin Luther, who by nailing his ninety-five theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg in 1517 initiated a movement that would forever change the face of Christian Europe. This was the Protestant Reformation. Close to Martin Luther himself, Albrecht became—with Zygmunt’s permission—the first territorial Lutheran ruler and Prussia became the first Protestant state in Europe.

That this should occur without bloodshed or upheaval was in part due to Zygmunt the Old’s willingness to approve this amazing transformation of the former arch-Catholic polity—in part to keep Ducal Prussia from moving into the orbit of the Holy Roman Empire. To be sure, in the Treaty of Kraków of 1525—the first European treaty between a Catholic and a Protestant state—Zygmunt and Albrecht agreed that Ducal Prussia would come fully under Polish control on the extinction of Albrecht of Hohenzollern’s line. That only a generation later a different king would, in a pinch, exchange his hereditary rights to succession for military assistance is but one of the fateful missteps that would haunt Polish history for centuries to come, even if it could not be foreseen in 1525.

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by Joel | 3 July 2025 · 5:56 am

Poland and Lithuania Unite

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 105-107:

In 1411 a peace between the Polish-Lithuanian state and the Teutonic Order was finally achieved at Toruń. At that time, Jagiełło managed only to secure Žemaitija for Lithuania and Dobrzyń for Poland. Thus, ultimately, Lithuania benefited much more than did the Crown of Poland—somewhat paradoxical in a state that purportedly was dominated by the Polish half. While Lithuania regained all that it sought, the Poles remained unsatisfied. Notably, however, these were the territories that the Order had refused to give Poland-Lithuania to keep the peace only a year earlier. Still, this left many formerly Polish lands along the Baltic coast in the hands of the Teutonic Order, including the important towns of Gdańsk and Toruń. And the Crown of Poland still had no outlet to the sea.

However, in a way, the Battle of Grunwald [= the First Battle of Tannenberg in what is now named Stębark] did have an important outcome for Poland-Lithuania. The joint fight against a common enemy brought the subjects of the two halves of the state closer together, proving to Poles and Lithuanians alike that they had mutual interests. Together, they could accomplish much, even if separately each (especially Lithuania) was weak.

Within a couple of years, Poles and Lithuanians took another step on the road to becoming closer. This was in the so-called Union of Horodło, signed in the Volhynian town of that name in 1413. What had previously been a personal union cemented solely by the person of Jagiełło would now have a solid dynastic connection. To be sure, the position of grand duke in Lithuania would be hereditary (Vytautas agreed to be dux [no modifier], under Jagiełło), while the king of Poland would be elected. But the latter—that is, Jagiełło’s successor—would come from the Lithuanian dynasty, to be elected upon consultation of Vytautas and the Lithuanian boyars.

One of the most interesting provisions of the tripartite document called for a special union of (Catholic) Lithuanian and Polish nobility and clergy. Some fifty years after their conversion to Roman Catholicism, forty-seven Lithuanian noble families were embraced by and included in Polish heraldic clans. In this way, the palatine of Kraków, for example, accepted into his Leliwa clan the palatine of Vilnius. The Polish castellan of Sącz would be united with the Lithuanian castellan of Trakai (Polish: Troki). The numerous Półkozic clan embraced a Lithuanian noble family, while the protoplast [progenitor] of the Lithuanian Radvila family (better known under their Polonized name, Radziwiłł) became part of the Sulima clan. In essence, a joint Polish-Lithuanian noble estate was established. Henceforth, there would be a single nation for the united state.

The Preamble to the Union of Horodło gives evidence of the lofty principles undergirding the union: “Whosoever is unsupported by the mystery of Love, shall not achieve the Grace of salvation. . . . For by Love, laws are made, kingdoms governed, cities ordered, and the state of the commonweal is brought to its proper goal.” The love between the Poles and Lithuanians would truly have a familial (clan) basis now. Yet the union was not complete. It did not include the Orthodox nobility—for the most part, Ruthenes. They were, in a way, second-class citizens—something that would not bode well for the future.

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by Joel | 2 July 2025 · 6:11 am

Dilemmas of Pagan Lithuania

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 88-90:

The pagan Lithuanians had managed to conquer the western Ruthenian territories (roughly today’s Belarus and Ukraine) at the time of these lands’ greatest weakness. In a relatively short space of time, they made huge advances. Lithuania gained control over Polatsk in 1307, over Minsk in 1340, over Smolensk (a mere 230 miles from Moscow) in 1356, and even over the far-distant Kyiv—the former, great capital of Kyivan Rus’—in 1363.

This tremendous expansion was in part facilitated by the protoplast [= progenitor] of the great Lithuanian dynasty, Gediminas (1315–1341). He was ably assisted by his numerous sons, the most important Kestutis and Algirdas. While Kestutis’s presence could be felt in the Polish southeast in 1376, it was Algirdas who earlier defeated the Golden Horde at Syni Vody (Blue Waters; Polish: Sine Wody) and gained control over Kyiv. The two formed a sort of diarchy—a kind of dual rule that would be inherited by their sons, Jogaila (Algirdas’s favorite son) and Vytautas.

In the process of conquering this large swath of Eastern Europe, the Lithuanian Gediminid dynasty inherited a sizable population that was Slavic and Orthodox—a population that outnumbered the Lithuanians themselves eight to one. The Lithuanians figured mainly as rulers and elites. Most of the East Slavic inhabitants—most notably, the boyars (nobles) of Ruthenia to the south—were members of the Orthodox faith. In other words, they were Christians, but not followers of the Church of Rome.

The pagan Lithuanians within this large multiethnic entity were the nobles and villagers of the north—that is, residing in the core Lithuanian territories, before the decline of Rus’ allowed the Lithuanians to gain control of a good chunk of the Ruthenian lands. This was a small but not insignificant population, especially as it included members of the ruling family, such as the future king of Poland. This expanded Lithuanian state was a completely decentralized entity, with descendants of Gediminas ruling over various sections of the state (and often quarreling among themselves).

Although Lithuanians ruled, the rapid expansion of the state left the initial population, which had yet to establish a written language, with real challenges. How could they rule over Christian, and lettered, peoples? In part this imbalance was ameliorated by the Lithuanians availing themselves of a ready-made state language—the language of the conquered Ruthenes. Intermarriage with Ruthenian princes led to the spread of Ruthenian culture within the Grand Duchy. Many Gediminids became converts to Orthodoxy and otherwise found the culture of the conquered Slavs to be attractive. Some went so far as to ally themselves with the Muscovite state to the east. This most certainly was true of the numerous sons of Algirdas and his first wife, Maria, all of whom embraced Orthodoxy and ruled in the eastern section of the Grand Duchy. (Their half-brother Jogaila long remained a pagan, as did the other children of Algirdas and his second wife, Juliana of Tver—this notwithstanding her Orthodox provenance.)

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by Joel | 5 December 2024 · 7:45 am

Romania Between Nazis and Soviets

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 487-490:

In early July, the Romanian army, assisted by local populations, shot the Jewish inhabitants of villages in southern Bukovina and then extended the killing eastward. In the regional metropolis Czernowitz/Cernăuţi/Chernivtsi, until recently a center of Habsburg Jewish cultural life, German regular soldiers as well as SS troops joined with Romanian forces in rounding up and murdering much of the town’s Jewish population. German units claimed to be shocked by their allies’ brutality, and SS mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppe D) received orders to entice Romanians into “a more planned procedure in this direction.” They objected that the Romanians failed to bury victims, took bribes, or engaged in rape and plunder (for example, taking gold from corpses).

Jews who survived were driven toward the river Dniester, where many were shot into the waters while others were kept in unspeakable conditions in newly established “ghettos” on Bessarabian territory. Next, after occupying and then annexing territory of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic on the other side of the Dniester—called “Transnistria”—the Romanians set up camps there, where unknown numbers of Jews were killed. They permitted no regular food distribution, and some inmates attempted to eat grass. In the infamous camp at Bodganovka, the bakery sold bread for gold, but when the gold ran out, the commandant ordered mass shootings. Romanian forces shot some 40,000 Jews over a precipice into the Bug River, and then took a break for the Christmas holiday. They had seized the regional capital Odessa after stiff resistance in October, yet after a bomb exploded killing Romanian officers, Antonescu ordered reprisals; in one of the cruelest mass murders of the Holocaust, 18,000 Jews lost their lives. By the spring of 1942, this human-made hell had consumed the lives of at least 100,000 Jews.

If the Germans were shocked by the brutality of Romanian policies against Jews, they were also impressed by the apparent peace and prosperity of Ukraine under Romanian rule. After the violence against Jews subsided in the fall of 1941, the city of Odessa recovered quickly. The venal Romanian administration took its cut, but then stood back and watched as individual enterprise flourished, with new hairdressers, cafes, shops, taverns, and movie theaters. Rather than terrorize the local population, Romanian authorities allowed each village in Transnistria to vote on the language it wished to be taught to its children and set up a Ukrainian auxiliary police force.

The Antonescu regime’s eagerness to kill Jews in Bessarabia and Transnistria had left the Germans convinced that it would follow through with the complete destruction of Jewry in the Romanian heartlands. Indeed, Antonescu had wanted to deport the Jews there to Bessarabia, but the Germans stopped him in August 1941, afraid of overburdening SS Einsatzgruppe D. Romanian authorities constricted the rights of Jews in the Regat [the Old Kingdom] as well as Transylvania: seizing their property, forcing them into labor brigades, and expelling them from the professions. The process was called “Romaniazation.” If Romania had behaved like Germany, the next step would have been mass murder, and in fact plans surfaced to transport Romanian Jews to killing camps in occupied Poland. The German railways had even set aside cars and drawn up routes. Yet in the summer of 1942, Romania stopped cooperating.

Explanations vary. Radu Lecca, Romanian commissar for Jewish affairs, a man already wealthy from bribes, supposedly took offence at being snubbed during a visit to Berlin in August 1942. He and his colleagues had become tired of being treated as representatives of a second-class power and being told what to do with “their” Jews. But the moment for a shift also seemed apt. The Romanian government had sent more troops to the eastern front than anyone else, and vividly sensed the coming catastrophe of the Third Reich. Two desperately undersupplied Romanian armies were just taking up positions near Stalingrad in the fall of 1942 when Antonescu requested new weapons from Hitler. This and all other requests were rebuffed.

The leadership also grew hypersensitive to warnings coming from the West about its mistreatments of Jews. President Franklin D. Roosevelt told the World Jewish Congress in New York that “punishment of countries which had persecuted Jews represented one of the aims of the war,” and he promised “fearful retribution” for those who perpetrated “barbaric crimes” against civilian populations in Axis-occupied countries. With the legacies of Versailles and Trianon in mind, Romanian elites knew that punishment meant loss of territory.

That same month, Romanian university professors, writers, and schoolteachers signed a memorandum to the Palace linking deportations of Jews to the postwar territorial settlement: “We must bring ourselves in line with international law and guarantee the right to life and legal protection of every Jew of the territories which we claim.” Ringing through this declaration was the ethnic perspective according to which human life, especially of aliens, was of secondary importance to the nation’s territory. But now the fear of losing territory kindled concern for the fate of aliens, as well as some contrition. Deportations of Jews were in fact a “methodical and persistent act of extermination.” The authors acknowledged that “we have been at the forefront of the states which persecute the Jews.” “I have said it once and will go on saying it,” Romanian Peasant Party leader Iuliu Maniu added in September, “we will pay dearly for the maltreatment of the Jews.”

Rumors of planned deportations to Poland had leaked that summer, panicking Jews in Transylvania, and Maniu and others in the Romanian Peasant Party intervened to put a stop to them. In December, Roosevelt and now Churchill reiterated the threats. “Those responsible for these crimes,” they declared, “shall not escape retribution.” Warning voices also came from the Red Cross, the Turkish Government, the Orthodox Metropolitan of Transylvania, the Papal Nuncio, as well as the Romanian Jewish community (led by Alexandru Safran, the youngest chief rabbi in the world, who had worked closely with members of the royal family as well as the dictator’s wife). Thanks to the insistence of several women active in social welfare, the Romanian Jewish community also mobilized to rescue some 2,000 orphans who had survived the punishing camps in Transnistria.

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by Joel | 15 November 2024 · 2:51 pm

For two weeks in September-October this year, the Far Outliers took a Viking cruise down the Danube River from Budapest to Bucharest. Here are some impressions from each of the countries we visited. A photo album from the trip (Danube 2024) is on Flickr.

Our first stop in Bulgaria was at Vidin, one of its oldest riverside towns. Our morning excursion was to the old mountain fortress of Belogradchik (‘Little Belgrade’) and its impressive rock formations, with steep hillsides to climb. In the afternoon we walked along the waterfront, to the old Ottoman post office, a mosque, an orthodox church, and a memorial to the victims of communism. We didn’t make it as far as the synagogue because we fell into a long conversation with a talkative schoolboy fluent in English. The captain of our Viking Ullur cruise ship was Bulgarian.

The next morning we stopped at Ruse, famous for its baroque architecture and the Friendship Bridge to Giurgiu, just across the Danube in Romania. But our daylong excursion took us south to Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria’s old capital, and the nearby Ottoman merchant city of Arbanasi, now a major tourist attraction, where we visited an Ottoman-era merchant’s house and an orthodox church hidden in a barn. We ate lunch at the Hotel Izvora (= Spring), built in traditional Bulgarian style, and with a waterwheel-driven rotisserie. On the way back to the bus, we passed two classic Russian cars, a Lada and a Moskvitch.

We passed many large farms on our bus excursions. The wheat and maize had been harvested before our October visit, but fields of young green rapeseed (canola) plants were also visible. After the fall of communism, large collective farms were broken up and given to the families who worked them, but many new owners who lacked the resources to farm their own land have leased it back to large agribusinesses. Bulgaria also has valuable specialty crops, the most famous of which are from the centuries-old Rose Valley. (We first heard of it, under the name Valea Trandafirilor, during our sojourn in Romania in 1983-84.)

After Russia attacked Ukraine’s Black Sea grain-storage ports, including Ismail in the Danube Delta, much of Ukraine’s huge wheat exports now come by thousands of trucks through Romania, across the Friendship Bridge, and back to the Bulgarian port of Varna on the Black Sea.

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Filed under Bulgaria, economics, language, nationalism, religion, Russia, travel, Turkey, Ukraine, war

by Joel | 24 January 2024 · 2:19 am

Soviet Famine of 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 84-86:

Stalin saw threats everywhere, even from those who were starving. The war left famine in its wake, the worst in the Soviet Union since the 1920s and early 1930s. The 1945 harvest was poor, followed by terrible weather in Ukraine, drought in Moldova and unseasonable rain which destroyed crops in Siberia. The following year’s harvest was one of the worst on record. The grain crop was a third of its 1940 level, the potato yield less than half. Between one and a half and two million people died from starvation. And the famine was exacerbated by ideology: the Soviets were sending large quantities of food to East Germany and other parts of its new empire in an attempt to prop up the popularity of local communist parties. They were also stockpiling food in case growing international tensions led to war.

The Kremlin used the same methods that had been adopted in the 1930s – grain was requisitioned from the collective farms and the peasants were accused of hoarding. Stalin sent his henchmen to demand delivery of the quotas of grain each region had been ordered to hand over to the State. Unsurprisingly, the results were the same; the famine worsened.

Typically, Stalin had little sympathy with the victims and blamed them for their own plight. Khrushchev was sent to Ukraine, as he had been in the 1930s when he was Party Secretary there. He was hardened to suffering in the Soviet countryside and had caused a good deal of it himself, sending thousands of people to their deaths in the camps. Now he reported that famine in Ukraine was ‘dire’ and that people were resorting to cannibalism. Stalin reproved him: ‘This is spinelessness. They’re trying to play tricks on you. They are telling you this on purpose, trying to get you to pity them and get you to use up your grain reserves.’

The State raised prices and halted bread rationing among workers in rural areas, but not the peasants on farms, meaning they had virtually no bread though they were producing the grain to make it. The same day, the little economic freedom that they possessed was taken away. Farmers on collectives were banned from growing produce for themselves on the tiny plots of land they had been allowed before.

Thousands of people who complained about the famine publicly were sent to the Gulag. Predictably, theft of food increased. In the summer and early autumn of 1946, 53,369 people were charged with stealing bread; three-quarters of them were sent to jail. New laws were introduced to raise sentences from three months to three years; at the stroke of a pen Stalin personally increased the sentence to five years – and more for repeat offenders. Starving people were sent to labour camps for years for stealing potatoes lying in a field.

In Ukraine, some people fought back. Partisans from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA (Ukrayins’ka Povstans’ka Armiya), fought a low-level guerrilla campaign against Soviet forces, predominantly in western Ukraine and the eastern part of Poland in the Carpathian mountains, where at one point it numbered more than 30,000 soldiers. The UPA’s dream was an independent Ukraine of ethnic Ukrainians and for much of the war they had been fighting Poles as hard as they had fought Soviets. The sporadic fighting was little more than a minor irritant to the Kremlin, though Stalin took no chances. He sent more than 100,000 troops of his own, and pressed the Polish army to join the Russians in combating them. He used tried and tested methods – between 1945 and the end of 1947 more than 182,000 Ukrainians, mostly peasants or civilians who had nothing to do with the UPA, were despatched to the Gulag. The UPA fought on until the end of 1949, when they were finally crushed by the Soviets, though at the cost of over 1,200 Red Army casualties.

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Filed under economics, food, labor, nationalism, Ukraine, USSR, war