There is something very Polish about this book; not merely in the fact that the last third of it is a generous, and somewhat indulgent account of Polish foreign policy since 1989. There is a tendency within Polish culture towards very black humor; one thinks of Gombrowicz, Kosinski, and Polanski. What we have here is a story of nationalist obtuseness and narrow-mindedness. Then, during the Second World War, this nationalism degenerates into murder and mass slaughter. But after 1989, there is a happy ending, at least for Poland. It is as unconvincing as a Hollywood film but no less real than that. Basically Timothy Snyder's book about nationalism in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus deals with a conflict between two rival nationalist conceptions. 1569 saw the formation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which covered most of what are now those four countries. In offered religious tolerance to all and civil rights to the political nation. The catch was that the "political nation" was the nobility, and the vast majority of people in the Commonwealth were peasants. Over the next two centuries the Commonwealth declined and was partitioned out of existence in the 1790s. As Polish nobles thought about trying to win back their independence, many of them wanted to win back the tolerant, federalist ideas of the old Commonwealth. However in the 19th century a new, more modern idea of nationalism began to take shape. In a more democratic age the nation consisted of the people. Instead of a compromise between various elites, the people, usually defined by language, would form their own nations. First in Poland, then in Lithuania, then slowly in Ukraine and only very partially now in Belarus, would the second idea triumph.
Snyder amusingly shows the many ironies as the nationalists sought to get their way. One is that Poles had the habit of referring to their former country as "Lithuania," a coinage immortalized in the most famous lines of the national poet, Adam Mickiewicz. Mickiewicz himself never imagined a Lithuania separate from Poland, and never set foot in the Polish heartlands of Warsaw or Cracow, yet his poetry was used by both Lithuanian nationalists and Polish chauvinists to justify partition. Another irony is that Lithuanian nationalists wished to retake their "national city" Vilnius and make it their capital, a desire not hampered in the slightest by the fact that less than 2% of Vilnius' residents in 1920 could speak Lithuanian. There are a whole host of prominent politicians from all four countries who, notwithstanding their patriotic protests, are actually from somewhere else or have relatives and wives from one of the other groups. Snyder goes on to discuss the Vilnius question in the twenties and thirties. In the early twenties Poland easily occupied the city, much to the impotent anger of the Lithuanians. However, as a result of the Nazi-Soviet pact the Soviet Union gave Vilnius to Lithuania. One would think that the Lithuanians would spend their last days of independence before the Soviet annexation in 1940 trying to find a way of defending themselves. Instead they spent much of their time quarrelling over Polish theatres and the possible threat from a defeated and dismembered Poland. Nor were they entirely wrong to do so. For decades Lithuanian nationalists had feared Polish culture more than Russian. Oddly enough, Soviet occupation vindicated that judgement. Notwithstanding the fact that the Soviets deported 5% of the Lithuanian population in the forties, the proportion of Vilnius that was Lithuanian increased from 2% to 50% by 1990.
If Polish-Lithuanian relations were strange, relations with Ukraine were kind of sick. By the late thirties a small, quasi-fascist group, known as the OUN had formed. At the time it was much less popular in Polish Ukraine than socialism, moderate agrarianism, or Soviet communism. Not even the Great Famine in Soviet Ukraine had dimmed Russophilia. But then the Germans conquered all of what is now the Ukraine and the OUN saw its chance. After working with the Nazis to slaughter Jews, in 1943 it saw its chance with German weakness to strike out on its own. As part of its anti-German and anti-Soviet/Russian strategy it sought, not to attack the Germans, or the Soviet partisans, so much as to slaughter the Poles living in Volhynia region, a process both evil and insane. The pages describing this are truly stunning, backed up with archival evidence, as the OUN butchered 70,000 Poles. The Poles responded, often with substantial brutality (they killed perhaps 20,000 Ukrainians), with both the Home Army and Polish Communists involved. After the war there was a "transfer" of Polish and Ukrainian populations.
However, once 1989 came along Poland followed a policy of supporting the independence of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine and keeping their present borders. Any concerns over national minorities would not get in the way of basic civil relations. The other three countries were not wild about this, but they accepted it as a way of getting close to Europe. Snyder is very informative but I have some cavils. First, the struggle is largely between different ideas of nationality; other conflicts, whether between classes, over political mobilization, and over religion, are not as well treated. Second, Snyder does not really explain why Russian and later Soviet culture had so little impact on the Lithuanians and Ukrainians. One would not know, as Stephen Kotkin reported in 2002, that perhaps a majority of Ukrainians regret independence and certainly show much less enthusiasm for it now. Third, there is something disconcertingly apologetic about the treatment of the Greek Catholic/Ukrainian metropolitan Sheptyts'kyi. He may have sheltered Jews, but he supported using the more "moderate" OUN faction as a potential Ukrainian army by becoming an SS division. His denunciation of slaughter in 1942 came after 17 months of the systematic slaughter of Ukrainian Jewry.
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