The Reconstruction of Nations

Yale University Press

Contents

Chapter One

Lithuania! My fatherland! You are like health. Only he who has lost you may know your true worth. -Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz (1834 Paris)

Once upon a time, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania dominated medieval Eastern Europe. Since 1991, the Republic of Lithuania has been a small country on the Baltic Sea. Vilnius, once the capital of the Grand Duchy, is today the capital of the Republic. The apparent continuity conceals tremendous change. For half a millennium before 1991, Lithuanian was neither the language of power in Vilnius nor the language spoken by most of its inhabitants. Before the Second World War, the language spoken in a third of its homes was Yiddish; the language of its streets, churches, and schools was Polish; and the language of its countryside was Belarusian. In 1939, almost no one spoke Lithuanian in Vilnius. In that year, the city was seized from Poland by the Soviet Union. How, then, did "Lithuania" come to mean what it does today: a small independent nation-state with Vilnius as its capital? How did the past matter, if it mattered at all?

The present may be understood in terms of closed possibilities. From the middle of the sixteenth until the middle of the twentieth century, the city was a center of Polish and Jewish civilization. Before it became a modern Lithuanian city, Vilnius ceased to be Polish and Jewish. Vilnius was once the capital of a great multinational realm. For it to become the capital of a small state, modern proposals to revive the old Grand Duchy as a federation had to be defeated. The city also did not become Russian, despite being ruled from Moscow and St. Petersburg for most of the past two hundred years; nor Belarusian, despite the preponderance of East Slavic peasants in the countryside. A modern Lithuanian idea based upon history and language was victorious in Vilnius, even though we see that history and language themselves had little to offer Lithuanian nationalists who dreamed of the city. How does modern nationalism recover territory in such conditions? Why one modern nationalism rather than another?

Present national ideas arose in intimate contact with past rivals. Assertions of continuity and justice, mainstays of the national histories of established states, were once weapons in fierce and uncertain contests. The next five chapters discuss the fate of Vilnius not only in terms of Lithuanian success, but in light of the aims and plans of the city's Poles, Belarusians, Russians, and Jews. Henceforth, the capital of the old Grand Duchy will be called by the name the aspirant or inhabitant attaches to it: "Vilnius" for Lithuanians, "Wilno" for Poles, "Vil'nia" for Belarusians, "Vilne" for Jews, "Vil'no" (then "Vil'na," then "Vil'nius") for Russians. This nominal pluralism may appear awkward at first, but it allows us to see political disputes, and awakens our skepticism to settled "facts" of geography. In this way, we may see competing ideas, movements, and states for what they were: stages in the reconstruction of the elite early modern nation of the Grand Duchy into new modern nations. To avoid seeing these developments as inevitable, we shall concentrate on twists and turns, on contingencies, on misunderstandings, on unintended consequences. We shall attend to the successes, and to the failures.

Nothing is simple in the relationship between national ideas and political power. Different parts of a society subscribe to different forms of national loyalty, and these differences may prevent consensus on crucial questions. National ideas have a force of their own, and can be put to political use by calculating outsiders. National ideas arise in circumstances other than those when they gain force: when true to tradition they prove unwieldy in practice; when innovative they awkwardly call for change in the name of continuity. The more effective national ideas involve getting the past wrong; to understand their power to bring about the change they conceal, we must get the past right. Our goal is not to correct national myths, but to reveal the political and social conditions under which they gained life and force. This chapter and the next will help us to see the novelty of modern national ideas of Lithuania, Belarus, and Poland by defining the early modern nationality that preceded them. To get a sense of the legacies bequeathed to modern national activists in the twentieth century, we must consider the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The modern competition for Vilnius grew from an earlier idea of nationhood within historical Lithuania.

THE GRAND DUCHY OF LITHUANIA, 1385-1795

Lithuanian grand dukes were the great warlords of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe. They conquered a vast dominion, ranging from native Baltic lands southward through the East Slavic heartland to the Black Sea. Picking up the pieces left by the Mongol invasion of Kyivan Rus', the pagan Lithuanians incorporated most of the territories of this early East Slavic realm. The Orthodox boyars of Rus', accustomed to Mongol overlordship, could regard Lithuania not as conqueror but as ally. As Lithuanian military power flowed south, to Kyiv, so the civilization of Rus'-Orthodox religion, Church Slavonic language, and mature legal tradition-flowed north to Vilnius. As Vilnius replaced Kyiv as the center of Orthodox Slavic civilization, two Catholic powers, the crusading Teutonic Knights and the Polish Kingdom, aspired to Lithuanian territories. Pagan Lithuanian grand dukes astutely bargained for their baptism. In the late fourteenth century, Lithuanian Grand Duke Jogaila traded Catholic conversion for the Polish crown. Polish nobles, keen to avoid a Habsburg on the throne, offered Jogaila eleven-year-old Princess Jadwiga and with her the Polish succession. Jogaila, as grand duke of Lithuania and Lord and Heir of Rus' ("dux magnus Litvanorum Russiaeque dominus et haerus naturalis"), accepted a merger of his domains with Poland at Krewo in 1385. He was baptized as Wladyslaw Jagiello and elected king of Poland the next year. Successive agreements preserved the personal union by restoring Lithuanian autonomy and linking the Polish and Lithuanian nobility. The Jagiello dynasty ruled both Poland and Lithuania for almost two centuries, until 1572.

Even before the Krewo Union of 1385, Lithuania was in religion and in language rather an Orthodox Slavic than a pagan Baltic country. Jogaila's promise of conversion to Catholic Christianity applied to himself and remaining pagans: most of his realm, and many of his relatives, were already Orthodox Christians. The result of Jogaila's conversion was not so much the Christianization of a pagan country as the introduction of Roman Catholicism into a largely Orthodox country. The introduction of Catholicism established a cultural link between Lithuania and Europe, and created the potential for Polish influence. The baptism of the Lithuanian Grand Duke as a Catholic ensured that Lithuania was not an Orthodox state in the sense that Muscovy was being established as one. By the same token, Jogaila's baptism opened the way for Muscovy to pose as the protector of Orthodoxy. By the time Lithuania had incorporated Kyiv, the Orthodox metropolitan had vacated the city for Vladimir-on-the-Kliazma. The metropolitan's subsequence residence in Muscovy complicated Lithuania's claim to be the successor of Rus'. Jogaila did have the opportunity to resolve this tension, since in the 1380s he had a choice between Catholic Poland and Orthodox Muscovy. In 1382 he went so far as to agree to marry the daughter of Dmitrii Donskoi and accept Orthodoxy. This plan had two disadvantages: Orthodoxy would not defend Lithuania from the Teutonic Knights, who treated it as heresy; and Orthodoxy would favor the Slavic boyars in Lithuania, already more numerous and more cultured than Jogaila's Baltic Lithuanian dynasty. The Polish crown and Catholic cross were favorable in both domestic and international policy: they provided a reliable bulwark against the Teutonic Knights, a reliable basis for expansion to the east, and a new source of distinction for Jagiello and his descendants.

Politics aside, medieval Poland and Lithuania had more in common than one might suppose. When we imagine Lithuanians and Poles negotiating the terms of their alliance in 1385, or planning the common assault on the Teutonic Knights at Grunwald in 1410, we must keep in mind that they could communicate not only in Latin but also in Slavic languages. Local recensions of Church Slavonic, introduced by Orthodox churchmen from more southerly lands, provided the basis for Chancery Slavonic, the court language of the Grand Duchy. Having annexed Galicia, a former province of Kyivan Rus' known in Poland as the "Rus' Palatinate" ("Wojewdztwo Ruskie"), Poland also had its share of Orthodox churchmen and Church Slavonic scribes. Having divided the lands of Kyivan Rus', Poland and Lithuania shared its cultural inheritances. Poles and Lithuanians were not divided by language to the same extent as were contemporary Poles and Germans. After 1386, the Polish-Lithuanian courts functioned in Latin and in two distinct Slavic languages: the Polish of the Polish Kingdom, and the Chancery Slavonic of the Grand Duchy. Lithuanian continued to be a spoken language of the Lithuanian Grand Dukes and their entourage for another century, but in the politics of Poland-Lithuania its role was minor.

In the next chapter we shall see that the Baltic Lithuanian language provided the basis for a modern Lithuanian nation; here we must a fortiori record its irrelevance in the early modern Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The last grand duke to know the Lithuanian language was apparently Kazimierz IV, who died in 1492. When Kazimierz IV confirmed the privileges of Lithuania in 1457, he did so in Latin and Chancery Slavonic; when he issued law codes for the realm, he did so in Chancery Slavonic. During Kazimierz's reign the printing press was introduced in Poland: Cracow publishers published books in Polish and Church Slavonic, but not in Lithuanian. Frantsysk Skaryna, the first printer of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, published much of the Bible around 1517, in a Belarusian recension of Church Slavonic. In the early sixteenth century we also find biblical translations into the Slavic vernacular, Ruthenian, though not in the Baltic vernacular, Lithuanian. Unlike Skaryna's, these involved direct translations of the Old Testament from the Hebrew. These Old Testament translations were apparently executed by Lithuanian Jews, who knew Hebrew and spoke Ruthenian. Since Ruthenian was spoken by local Christians and Jews in the early sixteenth century, intended readers may have been Christians, Jews, or both. One confirmation of the privileges of the Jews of Lithuania was issued in the year "semtisiach dvadtsat vtoroho"-the year 7022/1514 reckoned in both Eastern and Western Christian fashion, dating a decree in Chancery Slavonic of the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. The Grand Duchy's Statute of 1529 was composed in Chancery Slavonic. The statute was interpreted by Grand Duke and King Zygmunt August in his replies to the Lithuanian gentry in Vil'nia in the 1540s in a Chancery Slavonic riddled with Polish.

In Muscovy the state language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which we are calling "Chancery Slavonic," was called "Lithuanian" or "Belorussian." Although modern Russian historians sometimes call this language "Russian," at the time Muscovite scribes had to translate the Lithuanian statutes into Moscow dialect for them to be of use to their court. Chancery Slavonic differed significantly from contemporary Polish, but in the context of dynastic union with Poland it provided a Slavic platform for the spread of the Polish language and ideas. As early as 1501 legal texts in Chancery Slavonic are penetrated by Polish terms and even Polish grammar. The introduction to the Grand Duchy's 1566 Statute records that the Lithuanian gentry was already using Polish in practice. The acts of the 1569 Lublin Union, which created the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, were recorded in Polish only. The position of the Polish language in Lithuania was not the result of Polish immigration, but rather of the gradual acceptance of a political order developed in Poland and codified for a new Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569. That this was matter of political culture rather than of personal origin is emphasized by the Grand Duchy's 1588 Statute, which ennobled Jewish converts to Christianity. Poland also served to communicate larger trends in European law: whereas the medieval appropriation of Roman law never reached Muscovy, the Statutes of 1566 and 1588 demonstrate the growing importance of Roman (and Germanic) models in Lithuania. During the Renaissance, much of what was conveyed to Poland from Italy in Latin was conveyed from Poland to Lithuania in Polish.

As the Polish vernacular was elevated to the status of a literary language in Poland, it superseded Chancery Slavonic (and vernacular Ruthenian) in Lithuania. The Polish and Lithuanian nobility came to share a language during the Renaissance, facilitating the creation of a single early modern political nation. That said, there was a pregnant difference between the Latin-to-Polish shift in Poland and the Chancery Slavonic-to-Polish shift in Lithuania. In the Polish Kingdom the vernacular (Polish) dethroned an imported literary language (Latin). The elevation of Polish to equal status with Latin was an example of a general trend within Latin Europe, which began with the Italian "language question." In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania an import (Polish) supplanted the native language of politics and law (Chancery Slavonic), and forestalled the further literary use of the local vernacular (Ruthenian). As we have seen, the Baltic Lithuanian language had lost its political importance long before. The Renaissance "language question" was thus answered in an unusual way in Lithuania. In Italy after Dante, and then throughout Christian Europe, the vernacular was elevated to a language of literature and state. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania became a country in which the language of culture and politics was further from, rather than closer to, the vernacular. Polish as common high language well met the needs of the republican institutions and ideals of early modern Poland-Lithuania; it would not withstand the advent of modern democratic national ideas that bore these same names.

EARLY MODERN AND MODERN NATIONS

In pointing to legacies of early modern politics to modern politics, we must be clear about the differences. The early modern Polish nation which the Lithuanian gentry jointly created was far from the modern concept of the nation with which we are familiar. It was based on citizenship in a great republic where the gentry enjoyed extensive and codified rights. By the early sixteenth century, the Polish gentry had secured for itself protections against arbitrary action by the king, a major role in the conduct of foreign affairs, and the right to reject new legislation. The increasingly constitutional basis of the Polish polity allowed for the lasting inclusion of units with distinct traditions of local rights, such as Royal Prussia. By the same token, the Polish system created a model for neighboring gentry who wished to formalize and extend their own privileges. In deciding upon a constitutional union with Poland, Lithuania's gentry were pursuing such rights, privileges, and protections for themselves. During the period of dynastic union with Poland, Lithuania became an East Slavic realm in which the gentry enjoyed rights relative to the sovereign. By the terms of the 1569 Lublin Union, Lithuanian nobles joined their Polish neighbors in a single parliament, and in the common election of kings. Lithuania preserved its own title, administration, treasury, code of law, and army. The Commonwealth thereby created was a republic of the gentry, whose myth of Sarmatian origin included nobles of various origins and religions, and excluded everyone else.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Reconstruction of Nationsby Timothy Snyder Copyright © 2003 by Yale University . Excerpted by permission.
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