1. WAS THE POLISH-LITHUANIAN COMMONWEALTH AN EMPIRE?

What is the proper description and what is the proper analytical approach for the political structure and function of the vast Eastern European realm known as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth? “Imperiological” studies, the number and influence of which have been growing rapidly in the past two decades, might now provide a new answer to this perennial historical question – the Commonwealth was an empire. In fact, the Polish-Lithuanian state has previously been designated as an empire, albeit rather intuitively and not very convincingly, in a few recent studies.
In the words of Harvard historian of Eastern Europe, John P. Le Donne, “it is not customary to speak of a Polish empire, [...] but I do not see why the Swedes, with a Grand Duchy of Finland and other possessions in northern Germany, had an empire while the Poles did not”. This statement serves as a justification for putting a Polish empire on a par not only with the seventeenth century Swedish state, but also with the Russian Empire of Peter the Great and his successors. Another American scholar, the political scientist Ilya Prizel, similarly stresses the similarities between the Russian and Polish empires, as he calls them, due to their multinational structure and their supra-national elites.^[1]
Indeed, territorial greatness expansion beyond one’s ethnic borders, multinationality, and the formation of a supra-national elite characterize the state that evolved from the so-called Polish Crown lands between the late fourteenth century and 1569, the year of the Lublin Union with Lithuania, and the final partition of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century. It is enough to quote the beginning of the list of the Polish king’s title in 1569: “King of Poland, Grand Duke of Lithuania, Lord and Heir of Ruthenia, Prussia, Mazovia, Samogitia, etc” (Król Polski, Wielki Książe Litewski, Ruski, Pruski, Mazowiecki, Żmudzki, itd., Pan i Dziedzic). It is also worth remembering that the new state had a territory covering close to one million square kilometers. Is this enough evidence, however, to categorize the state as an empire?
There was, of course, never a Polish emperor as such. “The Commonwealth was Europe’s largest early modern realm governed by early modern Europe’s largest citizenry, the noble nation” as Tom Snyder, a historian from Yale University, aptly observed.^[2] In the Commonwealth’s political structure, the nobility could be portrayed as a candidate for a collective emperor. However, the ruling, multiethnic elite had no geographical center. It would be very difficult to ascertain the existence of any systematic form of centralizing policy or of unequal economic exchange patterns between some assumed Polish political center (be it Warsaw or Krakow) and its non-Polish peripheries. The power and wealth of a Ruthenian magnate (like Wiśniowiecki) or a Lithuanian one (like Radziwiłł), sitting in their manors beyond the Dnieper or Dvina, were in many cases greater than any power that the king could dispose of in his palace in Warsaw. The political domination of a center over its peripheries, centralizing practices, and a systematic unequal flow of goods between center and peripheries – is it possible to qualify as an empire without these characteristics? According to most contemporary definitions of empire, the answer is clearly no.^[3]
There was however another factor in the Commonwealth’s cultural and political fabric that could be – and is – interpreted as a key argument in the debate of its imperial character. It was the bloodless triumph of the Polish vernacular over its potential rivals: Latin, old Church Slavonic, and vernacular Ruthenian, as the language of politics, law, and culture. This happened in the late sixteen century. Polish became the common “high” language of the multiethnic elites. Captured in the words of the richest Lithuanian magnate, Prince Janusz Radziwiłł, writing to his brother Krzysztof at the beginning of the seventeenth century, “Though I myself was born Lithuanian and a Lithuanian I shall die, in our country [that is as citizens of the Commonwealth – AN] we have to use the Polish language.” In the middle of the same century, even the Cossack elite that led the uprising against the Polish gentry used Polish as their language of command and of negotiations with the Commonwealth. They did not at that time understand – it is worth stressing – the Muscovite dialect, so that Khmelnytskyi had to have letters written in the Muscovite dialect translated into Latin in order to be able to read them.^[4]
If every empire is about power and conquest, then in the Commonwealth’s case, it could only be a cultural “conquest.” This was not a violent, forced conquest, however, but the result of a more spontaneous, natural attraction to the best means of communication with the broader culture of Europe.^[5] Polish however was the language of assimilation not only to the great innovations and petty delights of Western European post-Renaissance thought, but also of the specific republican culture of the Polish gentry, of their liberties and their extensive constitutional safeguards against the arbitrary actions of the king. It became the language of assimilation to their specific laws, customs and institutions.
If, as many definitions assume, a general form of ideology or a shared political belief (with at least potentially universal appeal^[6]) is another precondition necessary to the foundation of an empire, then it could me argued that the Commonwealth acquired one. Through its constant struggles against the incursions of the Ottoman Empire into Europe, the Commonwealth gained its identity as a defender of Christianity. Through the successful assimilation of most of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania’s elites to its republican culture and the Polish language, the Commonwealth acquired its identity as a distinct civilization of free citizens opposed to and contrasted mostly with Muscovite and Ottoman despotism. The “Sarmatian” myth of the common descent of all the Commonwealth’s gentry formed a popular basis for an original ideology of this unique state. It was founded exactly on the belief that this was the promised land of a free people, the brave and independent “Sarmatians.” One of the most original and prolific political writers of the sixteenth century, Stanisław Orzechowski, who coined the dual definition of his identity, “an ethnic Ruthenian and politically a Pole” (gente Ruthenus, natione Polonus), expressed the belief in the following rhetorical question: “Could Poland have conquered the ancient and more numerous people, such as the Ruthenians, except than with these liberties?”^[7] One and a half century later, another ideologist of the Sarmatians’ perfect civilization, the Jesuit Walenty Pęski, wrote even more forcefully, “Poland’s strength lies in freedom... We do not live in a foreign way, neither as Frenchmen, nor as Germans do, but in our own native Polish way. What is more, it is rather not a human but a heavenly way of life. The words Polus [heaven in Latin – AN] and Polonus are very close... and this results in forms of existence... We do not disdain foreign ways of life, they are good for foreigners but not for Poles, because they would harm our freedom, which is the most precious and congenial thing for us”.^[8]
The rudiments of the Commonwealth’s rulers – that is the nobility’s – ideology show two different aspects of its influence on future generations of Polish elites looking for their – and their country’s – identity after the collapse of the state. A recollection of the relative success of the Polish language as the means of communication of the Western (or rather Southern) European culture to the eastern/northern part of the continent in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century would inspire the belief that Poland could be again the gate for European influence among Eastern Slavs, their elder sister in civilizational development. In this case Poland would be the very active periphery of a Western European center. In another variant, relating to a perceived function of the Commonwealth as the bulwark of Christian Europe against Islam or the “schizmatics”, a reborn “Polish empire” could play a passive role on the European periphery as a defensive wall against the barbarians.^[9]
On the other hand, a firm belief that the Commonwealth had constituted the best political order in the world, giving more freedom and rights to their citizens not only than the eastern despots of Muscovy or the Ottoman Empire, but also more than western Europe’s absolute monarchies. The idealized model of the lost world of the Sarmatians could have thus become an inspiring vision of Poland not as anyone’s periphery, but as an original center of its own: a unique civilization of republican liberty and self-government. Its natural realm was coterminous with the Commonwealth’s borders. This was a specific perception of the Polish place in the center or rather in-between alien civilizations – Moscow’s despotism, Turkish Islam and Western European bureaucratic absolutisms.
As can be observed not only in the opinion of an eighteenth century Jesuit quoted above, but also in hundreds of other documents of Sarmatian thought, the self-perception of this specific civilization was concentrated on its own perfection rather than on any idea of expansion. In the opinion of most of its citizens, this represented a kind of Utopia attained. In order to make any Utopia stable, it is best for it to be located on an island. Unfortunately, the Commonwealth was not an island. It was placed in the middle of a geopolitical whirlwind among real empires, making it much more difficult to stay passive and self-satisfied. The temptation to influence, to take an active part in changing the surrounding societies and states became evident. The question was in what direction? And how? With what means? Occupying the borderlands between the Latin West and the Greek East, most of the Commonwealth’s citizens recognized the roots of their political identity in the former – either as part of the Roman Catholic Church or in a vision ancient Roman republicanism. The further transfer of the values of this identity could only take place in the country’s northeast – as had already been the case with the assimilation of Lithuanian nobles into noble Polish political culture.
Could it be expanded farther to the east, to the Muscovy? In the beginning of the seventeenth century, a part of the Commonwealth’s elites tried to answer this question positively. The so-called Polish intervention during Russia’s seventeenth century time of troubles is the only evident example of the imperial expansion of the Polish-Lithuanian state.^[10] Certain Jesuit thinkers, the brains behind the Commonwealth’s highly effective counter-reformation movement, encouraged the expansionist spirit of the Polish nobility. “We do not need the East and West Indies. Lithuania and the North [that is eastern orthodox Muscovy – AN] are a true India,” wrote Father Piotr Skarga. Another ideologue of the Polish intervention in “the North,” Paweł Palczowski, used a similar comparison to describe the true perspectives for the Commonwealth’s colonial expansion. Muscovy was to be to Poland-Lithuania what the West Indies were to Spain and Portugal, the aim of a Christian and civilizational mission as well as the land of huge resources.^[11] The Polish occupation of the Moscow Kremlin as a consequence of this “mission”, however fateful for the future of Polish-Russian relations, was rather an isolated episode in the Commonwealth’s elites attitude towards imperial methods of influencing its eastern Slavic neighbor.
The idea of extending the peaceful experiment of co-opting the boyars of the Grand Duchy of Lithunia by granting them the privileges and freedom reserved for the Polish gentry by repeating the process with Russian elites was an older and more popular attempt to gain influence of the country’s northeastern neighbor. Such an idea was first aired during the first interregnum on the Polish throne following the death of the last Jagiellon in 1572. Ivan the Terrible was presented as a serious candidate, on the condition that the fabric, structures and mores of his Moscovite state would be opened to the Commonwealth’s political culture. The Lithuanian Chancellor Lev Sapieha presented Boris Godunov with an elaborate idea for the union of the Polish-Lithuanian and the Muscovite states in 1600. The subjects of both rulers were to be free to serve the other ruler, travel to his country, contract marriages with the other ruler’s subjects, own land and go to school in the other ruler’s country.^[12]
Without going into the details of this seemingly far-fetched idea, repeated several times in different versions during the seventeen century, it is enough here to stress the belief of its exponents in the attractive power of the Commonwealth’s political model for the whole Eastern Slavic world – “ut in perpetuum respublica Polona cum Domino Moschorum sit una respublica in aevum”.^[13] The most ambitious prospect of the Sarmatian’s idealogical imperialism in the east was limited to transforming Russian tsardom into a republic modeled on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

2. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: MENTAL TRANSITION OF THE COMMONWEALTH TO THE EUROPEAN PERIPHERY

The Polish-Lithuanian state stumbled on the Ukrainian (Cossack) problem and already lost its strategic contest with Russian tsardom in the middle of the seventeenth century. At the beginning of the next century, Russia became not only a great European power under the leadership of Peter the Great, but it was officially declared the Empire, while the massive intervention of Russians and the constant presence of their troops on the Commonwealth’s territory during the Great Northern War transformed the Polish-Lithuanian state into a Russian protectorate. From a geo-political perspective, the Commonwealth, instead of being a core power, at least at a regional level, became just a “limitrophe” that could be used either as a means of introducing Russian influence to the heart of Europe or – in the opposite direction – as a leverage for Western European power against the rising ambitions of Russia. This state of affairs began to influence the self-perception of a part of the Commonwealth’s elites. The reality of political dependence fostered the idea of independence as a pursuable aim. How to attain this new aim? The eighteenth century Enlightenment gave rise to ideas of modernization, measures necessary to compete more effectively with the surrounding, modernizing empires – not only the Russian one, but also the Habsburg monarchy and Prussia. The old Sarmatian ideal could be seen in this new perspective not as the essence of the Polish originality, but as an obstacle the fostering of the state’s independence. It is not by chance that the same harbinger of the Enlightenment reforms, Father Stanisław Konarski, first used Sarmatian pejoratively and first introduced the word “independence” into Polish political literature.^[14] “Emphasizing the ‘infinite difference’ separating Poland from the progressive countries of Western Europe, such as England, Switzerland, or Holland, ...he scored the myth of alleged Polish distinctiveness ‘a peculiar and unheard of pretense of superiority over mankind’ as well as the Sarmatian claim of Poland enjoying special divine protection.”^[15]
The eighteenth century, especially in its Enlightened version, can be described as an age of crisis of the Polish idea as a separate civilization and a distinct cultural-political center with its separate mission and ideological sphere of influence. Father Konarski’s followers, authors of most of the political reforms and cultural innovations introduced so rapidly during the reign of the Commonwealth’s last king, Stanisław August Poniatowski, accepted the place of their state on the periphery of the one and only civilization, Enlightenment Europe, with its center somewhere around Paris and London. This was the time when the semi-orientalizing concept of Eastern Europe was invented, expressed in the writings of intellectuals like Voltaire or Diderot.^[16] However, due to the concentric structure of this imagined community of the enlightened, the late Commonwealth’s elites could aspire to be at least closer to the center than some other Eastern European societies. They could aspire to be less “barbarian” than, for example, the Russians “doomed” by their more eastward geographical position. Deprived of their original identity as Sarmatians, modernizing Polish elites could look for consolation imagining a place for their nation on the right, better side of Europe. A reinvigorated and reformed Commonwealth could perceive itself to be an “eastern march” of the European Enlightenment. The question was, whether it should serve as a bridge or as a bulwark?
With the ascent of the revolutionary era, the tenet of liberty, so deeply ingrained in the Commonwealth’s political culture, regained its privileged place in the imagined structure of modernity, ameliorating the Polish feelings of backwardness so evident in the Enlightenment’s pre-revolutionary civilizational categories. The American experiment was observed with considerable interest by Polish republican ideologues, seeing in Washington and Jefferson the followers of the same ideal that formed the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of noble citizens. The first echoes of the French version of the new political order, launched under the banner of liberté, fraternité, and egalité, were received with enthusiasm in some other circles in Warsaw and Vilnius as a formula quite familiar to the traditional political culture of the noble republic.
The elites of the Commonwealth, or rather the part of them that proclaimed the first European Constitution of May 3, 1791, and then staged a last ditch struggle to defend it and their independence against Russian intervention, found a new identity for the spirit of the dying Commonwealth. This new identity combined some elements of the old Sarmatian myth of Polish freedom as something unique, at least in Eastern Europe, with a new ideology of a revolutionary, post-Enlightenment Europe. The latter extolled not so much the difference between the “perfumed” and the “unwashed,” but rather the fight for freedom against tyrannies and different forms of oppression. And who can better understand political injustice, who can better understand the necessity of freedom than the revolutionary Polish noble, fighting against the armies of three empires that decided to eliminate the Commonwealth and its political nation from the map of Europe? The Commonwealth, just beginning the painful process of its national modernization during the last years of its existence and the first decades after its final dismemberment, was perceived by its most active political elites more and more as a champion of freedom – opposed more and more to Russia, again the champion and mainstay of tyranny. One can call this model of the deceased Commonwealth, as it evolved on the threshold of the nineteenth century, as a regional power of freedom, responsible for maintaining ideas on freedom and tansmitting them eastward.
After the final dismemberment, the political hopes of the leaders of the last struggles for the Commonwealth’s independence turned revolutionary and then identified the interests of the republic with that of Napoleonic France, the anti-status quo superpower. Their strategic program was comprehensively formulated in an anonymous political brochure published in 1800 “Czy Polacy wybić się mogą na niepodległość?” (Can the Poles Attain Independence?) ascribed to Tadeusz Kosciuszko’s secretary, Józef Pawlikowski. This was a vision of Poland operating not only within the former Commonwealth’s borders, but inciting revolutions in all three empires – Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Romanov, – that partitioned the Polish-Lithuanian state. The author urged Polish political elites to launch a war of opinion against tsardom within the Russian nation as well as to arouse non-Russian nations (first and foremost, the Ukrainians) against the empire that was portrayed as the prison of nations. Seven years later, the same author published a plan for the dismemberment of the Russian state along its ethnic borders.^[17] New Polish patriotism began to identify its role as a leader of national awakening movements in Eastern Europe. The final aim of this role would be to crush all three empires dominating the region – Russia, Austria, and Prussia – and make room for new actors in the political arena. Nations would replace dynastic states and bureaucratic empires.
Was the Polish “ideal” at this point essentially anti-imperial? Probably no. There were just “evil” empires and “good” ones. The addressee of Pawlikowski’s project of destroying the Russian empire was the leader of a different empire, the French emperor Napoleon. The “children” of the Enlightenment could not imagine a totally independent role for an Eastern European political and cultural entities. They were not able to conceive a regenerated Commonwealth and its mission in the region without practical support from a Western strategic patron. Nothing illustrates better the limits to the political imagination of the first generation of the Commonwealth’s orphans than the works of such eminent thinkers as Stanisław Staszic and Hugo Kołłątaj. I refer here to their works that were published during the short-lived Duchy of Warsaw, an embryo of the Polish state as an eastern march of western power and the French military outpost on the Russian border. Both philosophers envisaged Europe as a federation of nations under the leadership of France. This was to be a community of civilization and Enlightened order, beyond whose borders chaos would reign. The principal meaning of the Duchy of Warsaw, eventually extended to fill the pre-partition borders of the Commonwealth, would be to serve as the easternmost flank of this community. Once again it would be a wall defending Europe against potential dangers from Asia. In order to strengthen this “eastern march” of Napoleonic Europe, Poland should become the core of a Slavic federation, a regional representative, so to speak, of the Enlightenment and civic liberties. Russia, on the other hand, was to be excluded from this union and relegated to Asia, to the chaos and barbarity beyond Enlightened Europe’s borders – at least as long as it remained an Empire, and an “evil” one at that.^[18] This was not a concept of Poland as a separate realm between East and West, but that of two distinctly different worlds. Poland would serve as the eastern gatekeepers on the side of righteousnous, Enlightenment and order, important as long as a strategic tension continued between her western patron-power and the eastern hostile power just over the border.
This concept was destroyed together with the Napoleon’s Grand Army and the Duchy of Warsaw. For the next hundred years there would be no Western power interested in posting Poland as its plenipotentiary in the east of the continent or in recreating the Commonwealth in any form. A new territorial order established in Vienna in 1815 on the post-Commonwealth realm made room for the possibility of an independent Poland, (now given the rump form of the Congress Kingdom) an outpost of the Eastern Empire aimed at the center of the continent. Tsar Alexander I took most of the former Duchy of Warsaw territories under his rule, changing radically the proportions of the three partitioning empires’ shares in the Commonwealth’s heritage. Now, Russian tsars had 82% of the Commonwealth’s lands, the Austrians had 11%, and the Prussians had 8%. Together with the largest share of territory, the Russian state also absorbed most of the Polish ethnic heartlands and “absorbed more nobles of Polish culture than there were nobles of Russian culture in the entire Russian empire. In the early nineteenth century,” as Timothy Snyder reminds us, “far more subjects of the tsar could read Polish than Russian.”^[19] This was a change of enormous consequences.
The eastern, former Lithuanian provinces of the Commonwealth were again under the same scepter as the Polish cultural-ethnic core. This very fact made to the integration of Lithuanian-Ruthenian parts of Russian acquisitions much more difficult. The Russian Empire’s elites had to either agree to a kind of a cultural condominium over these territories or to start a fight unto the death with the Polish element. Fifteen years after attaching the Kingdom of Poland to the Russian Empire, it was already clear which path had been chosen. The November uprising of 1830 symbolized an official declaration of war between Poland and Russia over the Lithuanian-Ruthenian borderlands. Can this fateful conflict, overshadowing the history of the nations in this region of Europe over the next hundred years or more, be called a clash of two imperialisms?
The answer is by no means easy.

3. NATIONALISM, MESSIANISM AND THE DECONSTRUCTION OF EMPIRES

First, we should take into consideration the role that “the Polish question” objectively played in destroying the Russian Empire. Tsar Alexander I tried to keep the Congress Kingdom of Poland not only as a valuable strategic outpost of Russia’s influences in central Europe, but also as a kind of testing ground, where he tried new techniques and possibilities to reform his state in order to bring it closer to western standards. The fact that the tsar granted Poland a liberal constitution, while Russia still had none (actually she would have to wait for her own liberal constitution for almost 180 years) illustrates this situation. The Russian westernized elite took it as an offence, an affront to the victorious generation of 1812 war heroes, the future “Decembrists”. It was exactly during the reign of Alexander I that the Russian-speaking elite expressed its outrage at the prospect of being once again invaded – this time internally, so to speak – by the late Commonwealth’s elites, with their political ambitions and traditions so alien to the Russians. It is against such figures as Prince Adam Czartoryski, tsar Alexander’s friend and the Empire’s foreign affairs minister from 1804-06 that a new Russian exclusively national consciousness began to form. “The father of Russian historiography”, Nikolai Karamzin, best voiced this new, national idea generated in opposition to Poland. He addressed his warning straight to the Emperor in 1819, “No, Sire, the Poles will never be our true brothers nor our faithful allies. Now they are weak and defenseless. [...] When you strengthen them they will wish to be independent and their first step will be to separate from Russia”. Karamzin expressed for the first time a vision of the mortal combat between the Russian and Polish cultural-political cores over the lands of the former Kievan Rus’ and domination in the whole Eastern Europe. His harsh verdict meant that it was a zero sum game. There could be no place there for two ruling elites. Either the Russians or the Poles would dominate, so to extirpate all Polish influence from Lithuanian-Ruthenian lands and to eliminate Polish statehood in any form whatsoever was to be the obvious duty of any Russian citizen.^[20]
Such logic made Karamzin’s warnings a self-fulfilling prophecy. An important part of the former Commonwealth’s elites had not been satisfied with the situation where the Kingdom of Poland was separated from the so-called western gubernias, the eastern half of the former Commonwealth. They had already been on the path that led – through modernization – to a new, national re-construction of their identity with the idea of state independence as a natural consequence and guarantor of it. Notwithstanding the fact that another and still quite substantial part of the former Commonwealth’s gentry (ethnic Poles included) saw nothing bad or compromising in serving the Empire and pursuing their personal careers in the Tsarist administration and army, they were actually trapped between the independence-minded Polish groups and the Russian national reaction. The spiral of recriminations and aggression on both sides of the conflict confounded the imperial logic of the Tsarist state. Poles (equated in the traditional, still officially pre-national system, with Catholics) began to be excluded from the Empire’s elite just because they were Poles.^[21] This meant the beginning of the “nationalization” of the Empire that finally led to its destruction. Two Polish uprisings of 1830-31 and 1863-64, and corresponding Russian national reactions to them were milestones in this process. As different scholars agree now, unable either to throw off Russian domination or submit meekly to it, Poland became a permanent festering sore on the Russian empire’s body of politic. “It demonstrated vividly the problem of an Asiatic empire trying to dominate a European nation,” writes Geoffrey Hosking, very much in the tradition of Edmund Burke and Lord Acton. The Polish nobility were pioneers of modern nation-building in the Empire, challenging not only the Tsarist administration but Russian elites, as well as Ukrainians, Lithuanians and the region’s other nations to follow suit, as Andreas Kappeler reminds us.^[22]
How did the Polish elites of the former Commonwealth transform themselves into pioneers of modern nation-building and the “awakening” of other East European nations? It is necessary to stress here the importance of the specific ideology coined during the Romantic era, following the first great uprising of 1830. Actually, it was not a modern ethnic nation-state ideology, but, on the contrary, a new faith in the Commonwealth’s binding capacities. Beaten in the field, the old Republic should have its spiritual revenge over Russian – and all other – despotisms. This new idea was presented in the post-insurrection emigration by the most-talented Polish poets, such as Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, and their teacher-historian from Wilno University, Joachim Lelewel. All of them represented the Grand Duchy of Lithuania’s historical traditions. All of them stressed the importance of a voluntary union as a principle of the Commonwealth’s political system. All of them extolled the unique character of the Commonwealth’s republican virtues and the rights and liberties of its citizens as opposed not only to the Russian or the Ottoman political traditions, but to Western European bureaucratic formalism and state absolutism in different guises. They re-interpreted the Sarmatian idea in more democratic terms that should open citizenship of a regenerated Polish republic to all its inhabitants. At the same time, they identified the post-partitioned political body of Poland as a symbol of all oppression. In Mickiewicz’s and Słowacki’s messianic-religious interpretation, Poland became the nation-martyr and even the Christ of nations. All the struggles for Polish independence, consecutive insurrections from the Bar confederation through the Kosciuszko uprising to the 1830-31 war with Russia were interpreted as models of a courageous consistency in striving for freedom. Lelewel coined the tenet used during the uprising of 1830-31, and repeated subsequently by the émigrés as the new motto of the Polish mission, “For your freedom and ours”. And indeed, the Polish émigrés were active and very much visible in all of Europe’s political turmoil between 1831 and 1863. The Revolutions of 1848-49, known as the Spring of Nations, was the climax of this revolutionary Polish activity.
The paradoxical nature of the ideology that led Polish émigrés to this feverish activity can be most succinctly described as international nationalism, a call for the solidarity of nations in their fight against the unity of despotic monarchs as represented by the Holy Alliance lead by Tsar Alexander I, Emperor Francis I of Austria, and the Prussian King, Frederic William IV. The Commonwealth’s would-be regenerators thought themselves the natural leaders in this specific nationalist international. The most extensive consequence of their plans are vividly described by Mickiewicz in his futuristic vision of the year 1899 (written in 1832), when he expected the hetman of the Commonwealth (that is military leader) to come back from the Urals after defeating the last remnants of Tsarist despotism and enabling the establishment of a Free Republic of Siberia. All nations were to be liberated, those of Siberia included, and the center of their liberation was to be in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, regenerated and united anew with Poland.^[23] The whole Eastern and Central European and post-Tsarist realm was to be transformed into a set of democratic, nation-based republics, modeled on and liberated with the help of the restituted Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. And so the latter was to be a kind of anti-imperial empire. This vision inspired revolutionary oriented national movements in many parts of Europe, as well as future Zionist leaders.^[24]
For Lelewel and Mickiewicz, any geopolitical considerations were alien. They sternly believed in the attractive force of an ethic appeal connected to the example of the Polish fight against the Tsarist arch-Empire and extended this belief to the Russian nation as well, which they treated as one of the victims rather than the perpetrator of imperial and despotic designs. In other versions of Polish émigré political thought, however, the Polish “liberation doctrine” was more geopolitically oriented, distinctly opposing Poland and Russia as two opposing poles of political attraction in Eastern Europe and in Slavdom in general, not only in terms of idealistic principles, but also in the harsh reality of state-interests. Poland, reconstituted in its old, pre-partitioned borders, would form a kind of anti-Russian strategic magnet. In order to secure the future place of Poland, its aim should not be so much to create a Polish Empire as to destroy the existing Russian Empire and diversify its geopolitical territory into as many component-states as possible. This idea was similar to the ideas of Cardinal de Richelieu two centuries earlier regarding the reorganization of German lands in order to make France’s strategic position in the east invincible.
As an example of this mode of Polish political thought one can mention General Ludwik Mierosławski’s geopolitical treatise from 1857. He expounded the necessity of balancing a much too powerful and dangerous Russian political realm with a strong Poland and her influence throughout all Slavdom (Russia excluded). Poles (together with Ruthenians) should play a central role in the liberation of the Slavonic race from the despots ruling Eastern Europe and connect the world of Slavs to western civilization.^[25] Even more illustrative in this respect may be the last stage of Prince Adam Czartoryski’s political career and thought. The former Tsarist foreign minister became the prime minister of the Polish insurgent government in 1831 and ended up the most implacable enemy of the Russian Empire’s territorial integrity. For thirty years, he led the propaganda and diplomatic fight against the Tsarist state from his émigré headquarters in Paris. The failure of the idea of a just empire, an idea he had cherished during his service at Alexander I’s court, developed into a highly original concept of nations and their rights to independence, which was to take priority over imperial states in organizing a new political order in Europe. He expressed this new idea in his extensive “Essay on Diplomacy”, written in 1823 and printed in 1830, and then tried to realize it against the Russian Empire. Leading the post-insurrection diplomacy and propaganda of Polish exiles for thirty years, Prince Czartoryski became the main patron of all non-ethnically Russian elements of the Empire with the aim of tearing the empire apart. His battle cry against Tsar Nicholas I’s state was independence for the Don Cossacks, the Tatars, the Circassians (that is Chechens), Finns, Estonians and other ethnic or religious minorities. In his propaganda, he portrayed them all as victims of Russian oppression. Inspired by the Prince’s agents and backed by Western European powers, especially by the British, these new nations were to form an important element of Czartoryski’s plan for the destruction of the Russian empire and formation of a new political order throughout Eastern Europe. It is worth stressing that Czartoryski was consistent enough in extending his principles and efforts to lands of the Ottoman and, to a lesser extent, Habsburg empires, backing the national movements of the Romanians, Serbs, Croatians, Hungarians, and Bulgarians.^[26]
Would he have had enough consistency to apply his ideas to the right of nations within the realm of the former Commonwealth? This is the key question that needs to be addressed during our search for the true meaning of Polish imperialism in the nineteenth century. Actually Czartoryski himself was the main financial and political patron of this group of émigrés that tried to defend the old unity of the Commonwealth as a multiethnic, multi-religious, and even multilingual entity founded on common republican virtues and on the belief in the revival of the old Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian power in its pre-partition frontiers.^[27] They even established a particular organization in Paris at the end of 1831, The Society of the Lithuanian and Ruthenian Territories. It had one of Czartoryski’s associates as its president, Adam Mickiewicz as vice-president, Juliusz Słowacki as treasurer, and Joachim Lelewel as head of the historical section. The Society’s aim was to propagate the unity of the Lithuanian and Ruthenian lands with Poland and the specific historical and political traditions that differed them from Russia proper (usually referred to as Muscovy).
At the same time however, the Society had to defend its principles against a new, internal enemy. The defeat of the insurrection led to heated debates among the émigrés as to why they had lost? The most radical section of opinion agreed that they had failed due to a deficit of democratization and modernization. The main reason for defeat was the fact that the uprising failed to mobilize all strata of the society, especially the peasantry. In order to arouse them it was necessary to address them in their own, vernacular language. Which should that language be? Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, or Belarusian? For the leaders of the largest democratic party in the emigration, the Polish Democratic Society, it was obvious that it should be Polish and that centralization was necessary step to guaranteeing success both in terms of the next uprising and in the later organization of a new Polish state. The early modern conception of a republican nation began to be replaced by the modern concept of the nation as the sum of vernacular speakers, a necessary precondition for modern democracy as it seemed. So they (especially Tadeusz Krępowiecki and Adam Gurowski) criticized the concept of the old supra-ethnic Commonwealth as a destructive and anarchic one. Any “regionalism”, such as the cultivation of a separate Ruthenian (Ukrainian) or Lithuanian cultures and languages, should be strictly forbidden. The eastern half of the former Commonwealth should simple adopt Polishness.^[28]
Another attack on traditional ideas of the Commonwealth originated from the political thinker, Maurycy Mochnacki, who criticized the “international” character of the obligations taken by Mickiewicz or Lelewel in their concept of Romantic nationalism. Poles should spare their blood for the Polish cause only. Any solidarity of nations is just dangerous chimera. Mochnacki and Krępowiecki, in their concurrent critique of Romantic sense of mission, foreshadowed a crisis in the concept of the Commonwealth’s regeneration and of its “liberation mission” in Eastern and Central Europe. They intellectually paved the way for modern nationalists not only in Poland, but in Lithuania and Ukraine as well. “Modern politics after 1863 meant shrugging off the Commonwealth as a burden and embracing the peasant and his language as the nation”. ^[29] For Poles it meant an attempt to treat the whole post-Commonwealth realm as a future Polish “empire”. For the first time, ethnic Poles began to think about Kiev or Smolensk as properly Polish. Their modern nationalism became a model and the main rival for Lithuanians and Ukrainians.
The very fundamental characteristics of the Romantic-republican ideology of a future Polish state as the cultural and political center for a large part of Eastern and Central Europe were undermined from within. This crisis came to a head with the tragic defeat of the next great uprising in 1863. It provoked another wave of criticism of the Romantic idea of Poland, this time formulated on the right wing of the Polish intellectual life by conservative historians in Krakow (Józef Szujski and Michał Bobrzyński). They were closer rather to Mickiewicz than to modern nationalists in their concept of a tolerant, multiethnic polity. But they were radically vehement in their assault on the Romantic Sarmatian belief in any specific virtues of the old Polish Commonwealth’s political culture and civilization. Just like the Enlightenment philosophers a century before, Krakow’s historical school renewed a perception of Poland as a retrograde country that should be civilized by Western European standards and should change radically its political “anarchic” tradition to those represented by such centralized states as Prussia or France. They actually deplored the consequences of the union with Lithuania as entangling Poland in the mud of eastern politics and mores. They preferred a smaller Poland strictly following western civilizational and political patterns. Together with modern nationalists, they dealt another blow to the “imperial” belief of the old Sarmatianists and the nineteenth century Romantics that Poland could be an independent political leader in the whole of Eastern Europe and that it could be a leader in the strategically vital region, independent both from Russia and united Germany.

4. THE SECOND REPUBLIC – A FAILED EMPIRE?

The last practical effort to revive Mickiewicz’s and Czartoryski’s dreams came in the person of Józef Piłsudski and the idea of a socialist federalism ascribed to him by his followers. During his activity as the leader of the independence-oriented Polish Socialist Party, he reinvigorated the program for the restoration of the old Polish-Lithuanian union including a Ukrainian element more important than the Lithuanian one. He defended the old concept of early modern nation not as a linguistic, but as a status group sharing a republican idea of Polish citizenship. He defended this concept against his domestic rivals, the modern nationalists led by Roman Dmowski as well as against modern Lithuanian and Ukrainian nationalists. He was determined to defend his beloved idea of the restored unity of a multiethnic republican power in the old Commonwealth realm against the traditional enemy of imperial Russian now in the form of the Soviet Union. Pilsudski grabbed the opportunity when all three partitioning empires crumbled during the World War I and a Polish state emerged. The general aim of his policy as the Polish head of state during the war with the Bolshevik Russia was to redress a strategic balance in the region. He intended to achieve this aim by forming a Polish-led coalition of lesser nations in Eastern Europe that would be a counterweight to any Russian state. There is no better symbol of his political intentions than his manifest published on the occasion of the taking of Vilnius from the Bolsheviks in April 1919. The manifest was addressed to the dwellers of the old Grand Duchy of Lithuania and was printed in four languages: Polish, Lithuanian, Jewish, and Belarusian. He appealed to this multilingual audience to join him in his multiethnic vision, to take their place as citizens of the new republic that would again unite Vilnius and Warsaw. During the campaigns of 1920, Piłsudski revealed the most ambitious range of his plans. In the long tradition dating back to the times of the Sarmatian liberation doctrine vis-à-vis Moscow and in a continuation of Mickiewicz’s Romantic vision, the first Polish head of the state intended to form a kind of pro-Polish party among the Russians and to help them to win power in the Kremlin in order to effect a more liberal and democratic change in the Russian political system. His main concern was to influence the nature of any future Russian state by cutting it off from any possibility of regaining its imperial ambitions by cutting Moscow off from Kiev and other strategic borderland holdings betweens the Caucasus and the Baltic republics.
Piłsudski’s projects were rejected and not only by most Russians. They were rejected as an especially dangerous imperialism by the majority of new national elites of his would-be partners in the former Commonwealth, the Lithuanians and Ukrainians. They were rejected too by the Western powers that did not believe (to say the least) in the potential of Poland to form the center of a stable political order in Central and Eastern Europe. While France was ready to see a valuable and even a relatively strong satellite in a reconstituted Poland as a counter to defeated Germany from the east, Poland could only be a small buffer state between Eastern Europe’s traditional powers of Russia and Germany for the Anglo-Saxon powers. Piłsudski was determined to break this mode of thinking of Poland as a necessarily dependent and weak state and he failed.^[30]
The results of his operational success against the invading Red Army in August and September 1920 spared most of the newly created east and central European states the fate of the Soviet republics for at least 20 years. But his political defeat was obvious. Poland did not form any counterweight, either to Russia or to German power. Instead of a federation or at least a close alliance with the nations of the old Commonwealth, Poland was forced to reach a new agreement with Russia, now Bolshevik, to partition Ukraine and the territories of the old Duchy of Lithuania. This failure was the effect of the lack of really popular partners for Piłsudski’s policy in Ukraine and Lithuania as well as of Poland’s relative military and economic weakness (relative to the great task of constructing and supporting a new independent power between Germany and Russia). Modern nationalism triumphed in Poland, too. The truncated territory of the old Commonwealth that formed the Second Polish Republic was to be treated for most of its existence as an ethnic Polish state in the making. It was also conceived, by its Piłsudskiyte elites at least, as a mini-empire, a regional power, struggling against her two powerful neighbors and their revisionist ambitions. If there was anyone in contemporary Polish history approaching the rank of emperor, it was Piłsudski in personality, his power (after the coup in 1926), and in his statist, supra-national ideology.
The new Polish state had no strategic partners to the east, but one major enemy in Soviet Russia, and smaller enemies with Lithuania topping the list. Two concepts that evolved during this period tried to address the problem of this geopolitically critical position by drawing on the old Commonwealth and Romantic ideas of a Polish mission in the East. One of them was rather theoretical and developed in historical circles mostly by professor Oskar Halecki, an eminent historian of the Jagiellonian state and the Polish-Lithuanian Union. He presented his theory of civilization differences between the western and eastern parts of Eastern Europe, coining for the first time at two historical congresses (one in Brussels in 1923 and one in Oslo in 1928) the term East-Central Europe, they key position in which was naturally to be occupied by Poland. The rest, that is Eastern Europe proper, was to theoretically removed and classified as a separate, non-European civilization with its different religious roots and cultural and political traditions. The “limes” between East-Central and Eastern Europe was more or less coincidental with the eastern border of the Polish Second Republic and that of the other countries saved in 1920, such as Latvia, Estonia, and Rumania. It is interesting to note that exactly this border was to feature seventy years later in Samuel Huntington’s famous article and then his book on “The Clash of Civilizations”. Actually, this was the most popular self-perception of Poland’s place in post-World War I Europe. Poland saw itself sitting on a fault-line, ready again to play the role of an outpost and a bulwark, then called the cordon sannitaire, against eastern barbarism, now in the form of Bolshevik Russia . But, and this needs to be repeated, the Western powers and most of their public opinion were not seriously interested for long.^[31]
While Halecki’s ideas conceptually defended a privileged Polish position in the region, in practice Piłsudski’s intelligence service worked hard to keep alive the traditions of a Polish anti-imperial mission beyond the old Commonwealth’s borders. A secret history of these efforts is usually referred to as “Prometheism”, invoking both the symbolism of liberation and the place where the eponymous ancient Greek hero was martyred – in the Caucasus. Piłsudski’s closest collaborators established a number of contacts with anti-Soviet organizations from Georgia, Azerbaijan, among the Volga and Crimean Tatars, among the Kuban and Don Cossacks, and Ukrainians from Bukovina up to the Karelians in the North. They gathered them under the banner of the “Promethean League of the Oppressed Peoples”, operating from Warsaw, Paris, Istanbul, Teheran, and Helsinki. This group aimed, along the same lines as Prince Czartoryski’s programme a century earlier, to prepare the elites of the non-Russian nations of the Soviet empire to rise in a concerted fight for freedom when the moment would come and on a signal given from Poland.^[32]
That moment never came, at least not during the existence of the Second Polish Republic. A completely different scenario was realized when two neighboring powers, neither of which Poland was ready to recognize as its superior, decided to collaborate in a concerted action to annihilate the Polish state. Germany and Russia, now operating as The Third Reich and the Soviet Union, partitioned the power in between, too strong (or believing itself too strong) to voluntarily accept one of them as its patron and too weak to defend itself effectively. East-Central Europe was carved up along the lines dictated in the Ribbentropp-Molotov Pact. The “Promethean” program was abandoned as an exotic and anachronistic idea – or as a message sent by the political elites of the late Second Republic to distant future generations.