Kost Elisevich

Often, when thoughts come to mind of eastern Europe, the Warsaw Pact or simply those nations immediately west of the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), it is Poland that comes to the fore. Since it has broken loose the chains of its Soviet-style socialist existence and regained a true sense of self-determination, Poland has announced itself to the world in a manner that suggests it is set to lead. It both speaks and acts boldly and is dictating its own destiny.

First recognized as a territory within the Slavonic ethnolinguistic core of Europe as an amalgamation of Slavic tribes in the sixth century, it evolved into a unified state with its first territorial ruler, Mieszko I, in the 10^th century. This coincided with the similar evolution of a neighboring state, Kyivan Rus, in present-day central Ukraine where Vikings had settled along the Dnieper River. There, they overcame and intermixed with local Slavic tribes and remnants of nomadic Asiatic peoples to ultimately establish the origins of what would become Ukraine which adopted Christianity in 988.

The Piast dynasty, originating with the ascendency of Miescko I, is credited with formally founding Poland on the date of its adopting Christianity in 966. The dynasty ended with the death of Casimir the Great in 1370 when the crown came to rest on the head of Louis I, the King of Hungary and son of Casimir’s sister, Elisabeth, who had married the Angevin king of Hungary, Charles I. Louis’ daughter, Jadwiga, was ultimately chosen to succeed on the throne of Poland on Louis’ death, as was the wish of the Polish nobles of the time. It was Jadwiga’s 1386 marriage to Jogaila, the grand duke of Lithuania, who would become Jagiello of Poland, that would lead to the founding of the powerful union of Poland and Lithuania. This union would ultimately become the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1648-1764), one of the largest of the 16^th to 17^th century European countries, covering 400,000 square miles, including most of the territory of present-day Ukraine.

A number of wars, including conflicts with the Cossack Hetmanate in Ukraine, Sweden and with the Ottoman and Russian Empires, sapped its strength and ultimately ruined the economy of the Commonwealth. The eastern Ukrainian territories were first lost to the Russian Empire. Internal conflicts within Poland, then the dominant entity with the Commonwealth, arose leading to a weakening of leadership. Russian forces gradually overtook much of the remaining territory in the east while central European powers threatened it from other directions. It would suffer a series of three partitions between 1772 and 1795 brought by its neighbors, the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. This effectively eliminated the sovereign status of both Poland and Lithuania for the next 123 years.

Despite partitioning, Polish nationalism continued to manifest itself with several uprisings throughout the 19^th century. Most notable of this defiance was the participation of approximately 100,000 Polish troops in Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia. Less than two decades later, another insurrection (1830-31) against Russian imperialism was suppressed and a dictatorial Russian regime followed under a newly established Russian Viceroy, Ivan Paskevich, from 1832 to 1856. Another failed insurrection arose in the Prussian partition in 1848 and then again in 1863 in the Russian partition resulting in further stricter Russian control. A major part of the 1905 Russian Revolution actually occurred in Russia’s Polish partition with a massive strike, brought about primarily by worsening economic conditions within the Empire, and coinciding with renewed calls for independence for Poland. By 1907, the unrest had been quelled but new conflicts were arising in the Balkans that finally would result in the outcome the Poles had long desired.

World War I (WWI) brought about the defeat of Germany and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires and, with this, the reinstatement of Poland as an independent republic in 1918. In the early stages of WWI, the Polish nationalist, Jozef Pilsudski (1867-1935), had correctly envisioned the defeat of the Central Axis powers and the collapse of the Russian Empire, those entities that had taken away Poland’s sovereignty over a century previously. He organized a Polish military force, the Polish Legions, specifically to oppose Russian forces on the eastern front and assured Britain and France that the Poles would not engage with their respective forces. Despite their short-lived existence during WWI, the Legions became part of the mythology in the story of the founding of modern Poland.

Conflict with Russia continued after WWI in the Polish-Soviet War (1919-21) over territorial disputes along Poland’s eastern border. Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), the Bolshevik leader who sought to overthrow Russia’s Provisional Government at the time, also had quasi-imperialist designs of assisting international communist efforts in overtaking other European governments as part of a larger international movement. He saw an independent Poland as an obstacle in this circumstance. As Russian forces overtook present-day Lithuania and Belarus in their westward advance in 1919, Polish forces succeeded in controlling Eastern Galicia in present-day Ukraine. In a 1920 alliance with Ukrainian forces led by the nationalist, Symon Petliura, the Poles initiated an eastern offensive that captured Kyiv but a Russian counteroffensive pushed the alliance back into Polish territory. Further Russian progress, however, failed and a ceasefire was declared resulting in the Peace of Riga of 1921 which established Poland’s eastern border and which lasted until the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 at the outset of World War II (WWII). Following the creation of the Second Polish Republic (1918-39), Pilsudski became Chief of State (1918-22) and then Minister of Military Affairs (1926) until his death in 1935. He would be the first of many courageous Poles during the 20^th century to leave their mark on Polish self-determination.

The aftermath of WWII for Poland brought forth the realization that it, with both its other eastern European and Baltic neighbor nations, would be imprisoned behind an Iron Curtain which, as Winston Churchill put it, stretched from the Polish city of Szczecin on the Baltic Sea to Trieste in northeast Italy on the Adriatic Sea. The succeeding 46 years from 1945 to 1991 would see it not only subject to Moscow’s political influence but be transformed into a communist state by 1952, as was required by Soviet Russia in this new world order. As such it would suffer the consequences of assuming a state-run economy based on the Soviet model that characteristically led to limited growth, government deficit and crippling inflation. Its transition to a market economy after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 took Poland through a decade-long struggle that saw its gross national product (GDP) rise finally to a suitable global standard and a system of privatization of major enterprises mature to a point where by 2012 the private sector commanded more than 80% of GDP.

But Soviet repression started well before the end of WWII with Russia’s invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939 in accordance with the agreement between it and Nazi Germany in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed on 23 August 1939. At the time, Stalin reasoned that Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland would bring England and France into a war with Germany while Russia remained protected under its new agreement with the Nazis. He predicted that the growing crisis would exhaust the capitalist countries militarily until such time that Soviet Russia could overtake much of Europe with its version of communism. Soviet armies took over 50% of what was then Poland which included parts of present-day western Belarus and Ukraine. Hence, the ethnicity of the almost 14 million people occupying this territory was 38% Polish, 37% Ukrainian and 14.5% Belarusian. Over the succeeding almost two years, the Nazi Gestapo and Russian secret police, the NKVD (transl. People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs), coordinated plans for the brutal suppression of Polish resistance.

During the same autumn of 1939, Soviet Russia, using extortionist tactics, compelled the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, to sign “mutual assistance pacts” allowing it to establish military bases on their territories. Accusations of conspiracy by these nations against Soviet Russia led to outright invasion followed by installation of puppet communist regimes. The latter then sought admission within the USSR as the final outcome of a well-executed plan by Moscow to overtake neighboring nations and absorb them into the USSR, a plan familiar to present-day tactics in Ukraine. The presidents of Estonia and Latvia were imprisoned and ultimately died in Siberia. Mass deportations of “enemies of the state” were initiated to begin a process of denationalization and elimination of culture and language, typical of the Russification programs conducted elsewhere.

In Poland, Soviet forces and the NKVD (Soviet Secret Police) imprisoned 250,000 Polish combatants in Soviet gulags where many would perish from deprivation. Military officers were simply murdered as in the notorious Katyn Forest massacre wherein an estimated 22,000 were executed including approximately 14,500 officers along with government administrative officials, academics and professionals. Ironically, the incident and the site of the atrocity was discovered by the Nazis after their invasion of eastern Europe and the USSR. They lost no time exposing this to the international community but a detailed investigation wouldn’t be launched until the United States House of Representatives established the 1951 Madden Commission.  The latter concluded that the NKVD was indeed responsible for the executions. The findings were released to the public by the Obama administration in 2011.

For the Soviets, any resistance was interpreted as “counter-revolutionary” as if their ideology was now to be regarded as inherent within the occupied nation and its newly established government. This allowed the NKVD to continue arresting Polish intelligentsia, including civil servants, clergy, scientists and, frankly, anyone who posed a threat to Soviet authority. By the time the initial two-year interval of Soviet occupation had ended, prior to the Nazi invasion of the territory, an estimated 100,000 Poles had been imprisoned while at least a further 150,000 had died.

Once the tide had turned against Soviet Russia with the Nazi invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941 in Operation Barbarossa, a treaty was signed between it and Poland, the Sikorski-Mayski agreement, on 30 July 1941. It allowed the release of Polish prisoners of war from Soviet camps and amnesty to Polish citizens allowing for their recruitment into a Polish military corps under British military command. During this time and over the course of a week following the Nazi invasion of Soviet-controlled territory, Stalin retreated to his dacha and dithered there drinking, refusing to accept that Hitler had betrayed him, despite several prior warnings given to him. By the time, he returned to Moscow, much of the western territories of the USSR had been overrun, massive military and civilian casualties had been incurred, large amounts of armament, including aircraft, destroyed and vast networks of communication had been disrupted. The military was in disarray and without reputable leadership, largely a consequence of Stalin’s own paranoia that brought about a reign of terror in the late 1930s in which several of Russia’s senior military command were purged.

The Nazi’s 1943 discovery of the Katyn burial sites tying Soviet Russia to the mass execution of Polish military officers and citizens led to the dissolution of the Sikorski-Mayski agreement. At this critical stage of the war, with the Russians having routed Nazi forces at the battle of Stalingrad to begin a westward advance, they used their influence with the Allies to install a pro-Soviet puppet government resident in Moscow that would dictate the Polish affairs-of-state in exile. The subsequent Soviet invasion of Poland as other Allied forces approached from the west marked the end-stages of WWII and allowed for the resumption of mass deportations of Poles thought to oppose Soviet ideology. They would enter remote labor camps in the USSR where their identities would be lost to the world. Within Poland, the poorly disciplined Russian military otherwise continued to violate norms of civil conduct, much in the manner witnessed today in Ukraine, not only with unwarranted imprisonment and torture of civilians but the rape of countless Polish women. Both private and Polish government property was seized and redistributed disrupting the economy. A program of forced collectivization of farmland and confiscation of crops for the fulfillment of state quotas was now instituted in Poland. This same program had led to the disastrous consequences in Ukraine during the early 1930s and met with the expected decline in agricultural production in Poland.

The new Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland, established by the Soviets gave the impression that the country was once again a sovereign state despite remaining under Soviet military occupation until 1993. A violent struggle for genuine independence occurred throughout the late 1940s with a determined Polish underground. The NKVD continued to be actively engaged in hunting down dissidents and deporting them to Siberia by the tens of thousands. Leaders of the Polish Underground State were kidnapped in 1945 by the NKVD and brought to Moscow to undergo a show trial in which they were falsely accused of collaborating with the Nazis and opposing Soviet forces. They were sentenced to prison terms which several did not survive or were simply murdered subsequently. The investigative division of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, titled The Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, undertook a review of this trial in 2003–2009 but reporting has remained inconclusive with the refusal of the Military Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation to cooperate.

The newly established socialist governments of the seven countries of Central and Eastern Europe lying east of the Iron Curtain entered into the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance with the USSR in 1955. The Warsaw Pact, as it came to be known, also established a defensive alliance against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) although it seemed to be more a theater for internal military conflict rather than confrontation with the West as was readily witnessed in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. In Poland, the 1956 anti-communist Poznan uprising was the first of several protesting both working and living conditions, food shortages, and basic income. Underlying these fundamental issues was a demand to pursue a course toward better governance other than that based upon the Soviet Russian model. The event required military intervention led by the Soviet general, Stanislav Poplavsky, and resulted in several deaths, hundreds of wounded and several hundreds of arrests.

The Gdansk uprising in 1970 was accompanied by demonstrations in other cities protesting food prices and again required quelling by the military. On this occasion, a regime-change in Poland, undertaken with Moscow’s approval, was felt necessary to afford an easing of tensions for although the protests contended with social and economic conditions, there developed an undercurrent of political activism once more within Polish society. The Solidarity Union-led mass movement under Lech Wałęsa of 1980-81 erupted in Gdansk and became a formidable challenge to the Polish communist regime and its subordinate relations with Soviet Russia. A leadership change within the Polish United Workers’ Party was instituted at Moscow’s request bringing General Wojciech Jaruzelski in to impose martial law. Military intervention with Warsaw Pact countries was contemplated but plans were withdrawn ostensibly because of U.S. pressure from the Carter administration against such an action, Russia’s concurrent and very troubled involvement in the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-89), and the threat of escalation of rebellion throughout Poland. The Union had a membership of 10 million at the time and represented a third of Poland’s working population. Martial law did ultimately bring forward Polish security and military forces that ended attempts at democratizing the country. Less than a decade later, however, Wałęsa would become president of Poland (1990-95).

Soon after the conflict in Poland had gotten underway, the threat of a dissemination of dissent in other Warsaw Pact countries was subdued by force and increased domestic repression. Soviet State Security, known at the time as the KGB, imprisoned or exiled dissidents throughout the USSR, and disbanded the Helsinki Group in Moscow which monitored Russia’s compliance with the humanitarian provisions of the Helsinki Accords (1975). Individual state security apparatuses in the Warsaw Pact countries worked in concert with the KGB to crush any notions of democratization and human rights. The death of Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982 led to a succession of short-term leaders with Yuri Andropov dying in February 1984 and Konstantin Chernenko in March 1985. When it was Mikhail Gorbachev’s turn, Soviet Russia and the USSR were in economic decline and Russia’s Afghan debacle was in clear view for the world to witness. Serious reform was in order but this brought with it only further internal discord and an attempted coup d’état in 1991. The latter would bring about the ultimate dissolution of the USSR during Boris Yeltsin’s tenure as leader of Russia. Yeltsin’s resignation on 31 December 1999 resulted in Vladimir Putin’s ascendency as Russia’s leader in the new millennium and the resumption of authoritarian rule, defiance of international rules of conduct, and outright criminality.

The Warsaw Pact was formally dissolved on 1 July 1991 after a decision was made secretly by the Soviet Politburo in March 1989 to no longer enforce Communist rule in Eastern Europe. During its time as a communist state, Poland existed as the Polish People’s Republic, a one-party state ruled by the Polish United Worker’s Party. A constant internal struggle existed with democratic forces in the country which led to numerous arrests of opposition leaders and functionaries by the secret police and the murder of at least 22,000 people from 1947 to 1989. This was the legacy left by a failed Communist-inspired authoritarian regime controlled remotely by an equally flawed and ultimately moribund system of government. A new scheme is underway to replace the latter but now in the guise of empire in order to reclaim a past glory perhaps better perceived then actuated for it too was grotesquely flawed. Its now well-established leader, Putin, has made his intentions quite clear regarding Ukraine, however unjustified. In doing so, he threatens the stability of neighboring nations, not least of which, Poland, and others in eastern Europe and the Baltic region which are all too familiar with Russian aggression and repression and want none of it. 

Poland’s ties with Ukraine have strengthened considerably in the past year for its support given to Ukraine militarily and for its generosity taking in more than 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees and sheltering them now for more than a year, providing them their basic needs, medical care, work, and a place to raise and educate their children. In keeping with Poland’s emergence as a democracy in control of its destiny, a strong economy and an increasingly powerful military, it has taken the lead in voicing support for tougher sanctions against Russia, providing more military aid to Ukraine per capita than other nations apart from the Baltic states and prompting other nations like Germany to do more of the same. “We will not just watch Ukraine bleed to death,” were the words of Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.

The two neighboring nations, Poland and Ukraine, share a common ethnolinguistic origin and a common history, endured conflict with one another, faced a common enemy on their border and suffered immense tragedy perpetrated by this enemy. A very particular bond has formed naturally of late between the two, enough so that the idea of a political union has emerged in a proposal by Dalihor Rohac of the American Enterprise Institute, a confederation of sorts. Poland is both a member of the European Union (EU) and NATO. Ukraine has been given EU candidate status and is deserving of consideration as a member of NATO. It has proven its acumen for warfare by its conduct in the present standoff against a formidable enemy by its courage, determination, strategic reckoning, leadership and innovation. Who would not want it as a partner in a military conflict? Moreover, its naval and ground facilities in Crimea would provide NATO with expansive defensive capability.

Ukraine’s restoration ideally can be financed in large part through the seizure of Russian foreign assets, both state and private. Reconstruction itself will help forge stronger relations with Europe and the United States by engaging industry in its various forms in contractual arrangements. New trade relations within a Polish-Ukrainian Union, and between it and the EU and the rest of the world, would reaffirm its place as a powerful entity in eastern Europe. It would also create a more equitable balance within Europe itself as well as a strong presence in the global community. Support from the West and, particularly, the United States would give the project the sort of impetus it would need. Once in place following Russia’s defeat, a Polish-Ukrainian Union would be a strong deterrent against any further Russian aggression and a reminder for Russia of where bad decisions may lead.

Copyright @Kost Elisevich, MD, PhD 2023. All rights reserved. Any illegal reproduction of this content will result in immediate legal action.