"I do not believe in the differences of the organic nations. Poles are of course no better than others, and I say not worse either. They are only through education, infinitely lied”
Józef Mackiewicz
The story of the “tsarist oppression” is 1 of the most crucial lies which poison on a mass scale Polish historical consciousness, consequently Polish political thought, or even broader, due to the fact that due to the importance of the Russian issue for Poland, disrupting the Polish view of the planet in general. In almost all discussion of politics, even with people of good will, whether it be progressive unians or righteous, devout patriots sooner or later, we come across this painful place at the interlocutor, which, after approaching it, should be gently, but carefully, bypassed or discussed.
Otherwise it will turn out that Katyn, kibitki, Siberia, zabory, katorgy, that Russian is Asia, that grandpa or uncle, that Coneny already, that Turkish civilization, that they raped you, and even ships from Polish shipyards bought them, which we did for them for free. Confronting the universal uniqueness of what Poland on the part of Russia has touched can exposure us to the charge of deficiency of patriotism or even human feelings. And it will not aid a quiet translation that specified an account of harm can be put on each another by almost all the nations neighbouring each other, that it was no different from the oppression of, for example, the Irish by the English, from the past of the French-Spanish wars, from the destiny of many Slavic nations in this Poles under the regulation of Hungarians and Austrians, or, finally, from the amazingly easy escape from the Polish memory of the methodical dullness of Polishness in the Prussian and Silesia partitions.
From the beginning Stanislaw Staszic saw this coming from another ends, those which fell as a consequence of the First Partition of Prussia. It was the Prussians who, according to him, wanted to make Germans of Poles, and they were fundamentally different from the Russian authority, which respected local language and customs. An crucial work to break the story of “czaristic oppression” he did Mariusz Swider in the book “How We Created Russia” (it has late been published another edition enriched with an index of names entitled “How We Built Russia”) collecting with Benedictine care in 1 work a description of countless examples of superb careers that were the participation of our compatriots in Tsarist Russia.
For the deconstruction of the story of “carriage oppression” peculiarly significant, due to the fact that based on individual experience are works or memories of those Polish authors who remembered pre-revolutionary Russia, or were raised in Polish families surviving in Russia. From a strict elite Mieczysław Jałowiecki, boy of an aristocrat and entrepreneur of a millionaire, through the memoirs and publications of Joseph Mackiewicz, feature memories Michał Kryspin Pawlikowski, up to the almost fairy tale saga, which is “Nadberezins” by Florian Czarniszewicz, a local noble village.
Key to knowing the falseness hidden in the Polish story of the “tsarist oppression” that Poles were expected to have experienced is the conviction Józef Mackiewicz: “Tsarsk Russia was a state state state. In spite of the sometimes draconian means of rusification, it was based not on the nation but on the state layers. As far as everyday life in Poland is concerned, the actual “Lord” on his land remained as he was, the nobleman of Poland, not an authoritative or a Russian policeman who bowed to him alternatively low. Looking at the yearbooks of officers' nominations before the revolution, the largest number of noble Polish names is found in the Pazi Corps, in cavalry regiments, kirasjers of the Guards and another Guards. This percent is rapidly decreasing in the average army's infantry, giving up by name only almost Russian". M. Świder writes: “However, while Poles accounted for more than 20 percent of the management and engineering staff in Siberia, there were little than 3 percent of the Polish workers among all the workers in this part of Russia”, elsewhere he mentions the same – 20 percent of the Russian generality.
Katkov case
Paradoxically, the only period during which modern, modeled on Western patterns of nationalism and the postulate of rusification followed it resulted in a crucial trend in Russian reasoning of its country, took place after 1863 and was mostly a reaction to the January Uprising. The most celebrated typical of this direction was Mikhail Katkov, who then diametrically changed his attitude towards the Polish issue (before that, according to a rather common feeling and plans of Alexander II, suggested a return to the state before the November Uprising, excluding a separate army). Even then, however, it was not a dominant trend, and the writings “Russian Wiestnik” and “Moskowskie Wiedomosti” edited and published by Katkow were suspended and were having problem censorship. Until the end of Tsarist Russia, conventional imperial wisdom prevailed, consisting in coopting the elites of national minorities into power.
This was the case for the Germans, including the very influential Baltic Barons, but besides the Finns (some 300 generals in the Tsarist army), the Georgians and to a large degree Poles, though the pop-tan repression closed the way to authoritative careers, frequently under the pretext of spiritual differences. In the multi-national empire, this was the most logical solution known since ancient times. frequently demonized as “sharing and governance”, it had its better sides, due to the fact that applied skillfully and with moderation, it provided peace and stableness in the confusion of conflicting interests and cultures. It is besides hard to defy the impression that if it had not been for the uprising, if we had not failed the policy exam after 1815, which he so convincingly documented in his work Lech Mażewski, then we could not only build Russia, but co-organise it, due to the fact that as Staszic wrote: “The Polish nation is more enlightened than the Russians.”
An additional advantage, but besides a determining origin for this approach for the Czarski authorities, was the fact that most of these elites lived in areas where another cultural groups, whose modern national consciousness was only born, frequently coincided with economical and sometimes spiritual divisions, but not always geographical. In the case of Poles it was mixed with us Belarusians, Lithuanians and Rusini, in the case of Baltic barons Latvians and Estonians, in the case of Finland surviving under the dominance of the Swedish aristocracy Finns (Swedish roots were among others marshals Carl Gustav von Mannerheim). The Empire was besides struggling with the problem of the judaic minority, which successive tsars with unwavering tenacity tried to convince them to do farming alternatively of hammocking and drinking peasants. In Austria – Hungary, a similarity can be seen in relations on the lines: imperial, Austrian center, Hungarians, Slavic nations, but besides Poles and Rusini.
The first Republic of Poland, including the Lithuanian and Russian elites, did the same to any extent. A akin policy is besides observed in 3 Polish as a distant state of the Americanum Empire. The Imperial office maintains in provinces several, preferably 2 competing parties, regulating interior tensions through its politician – ambassador, in addition supports immigration from countries with completely different cultures to divide and regulation even more efficiently. However, while in Russia Polish culture and Polish people mostly enjoyed respect and interest, for large Brother from across the ocean, or his intermediary from Berlin, we were and are a useful element, but culturally, politically, and erstwhile listening more closely, it is besides racially inferior, although Radek Sikorski's boy will possibly make a career in the American military.
Certificate of Jałowacki
An example of the past of the elite position of the Pole in the time of the “tsarist oppression” is Mieczysław Jalowiecki's memoirs entitled “On the Edge of the Empire”, which are a fascinating chronicle of events and observations by the author, who was fortunate or who prefers to observe the 3 regimes: Tsarska Russia, the birthing Bolshevik communism and democracy; first it is simply a rumbling in Russia, and then in full decline until the May bombing in Poland. In addition, it was an reflection utilizing the language of sociology participating. In Russia, he was the heir to the property and a large company from the dynamic improvement of the railway industry, he attended parties with the Tsar family, had extended contacts in the highest business and political spheres. He besides learned very well at the time imperial Germany, where to prepare well for taking over his father's schema in the ancestral Syłgudyszki in Lithuania he first did agricultural practice, then served in Russian diplomacy. On his father's instructions he besides worked respective months as a individual at his factory.
Already in school times he faced examples of national differences at school, erstwhile 1 of the boys tried to torment him for his Polishness, it ended in intervention and ostracism of Russian colleagues towards the aggressor, as the teachers reacted. It was dominated by the belief that Poles are somewhat crazy, but in their national aspirations noble and as specified they deserve respect. The princely origin and this after the Rurykowiczs surely did its own in the case of Pieriejesławski – Jalowiecki, but it came from a very different layer, due to the peasant-living Florian garden nobility Blackshevik It besides describes the school years as a period of rusification, but it besides cites situations where the higher school authorities inhibited besides zealous teachers and the discrimination of the Polish student was determined by cognition and intelligence alternatively than religion and nationality. On the another hand, Józef Mackiewicz, referring to the memories of Władysław Studnicki from his stay in Siberia, writes that he would be happy to replace his emigration vegetation with a Siberian exile: “political crime (in Tsarist Russia – O.S.) was a category of “honorable” and was treated in contrast to today's communist norms not as something “worse”, but as something “better” than another crimes.”
The Russian nationalists' writings dominated the belief that Poles were dangerous due to their civilisational, spiritual, social advantage, and in the case of bordered landowners besides a strong economical position. It seems that in no another planet power Poles enjoyed specified political respect, and above all the cognition and popularity of Polish culture. Andrzej Walicki wrote a lot about the second as another great, unused chance in his articles in the volume “About Russia differently”.
Drakonian populist sentences were frequently softened and even donated, resulting in confiscated property returning to the families of the earth in subsequent generations. So it was with the Silgudis of Jałowiec, so it was in my family, in which great-grandfather Boleslaw Swolkien For his participation in the January Uprising he was first sentenced to death, then the conviction was changed to 12 years of katorgi, then in a romanticist way (in female disguise) escaped from prison. However, his son, and my grandfather, married to the granddaughter of his father's savior, who provided women's clothes and was temporarily in prison, in 1915 as a loyal Tsarist subject withdrew in front of a moving east front from his rather large estate. That's why my father was born in Kostrom, Russia. My grandparents were like that after a bath. Solidarity and a sense of common duty, advanced morale, residence in thousands of hectares of ancestral mothers, where all have known for generations the economy, wise marriages and careful agricultural education or in liberal professions (often at abroad universities) were stronger than were violent but always inconsistent Cary repression. Paradoxically, in the Kresach, they were felt little emotionally than in the Congressional and strangely in the “caric oppression” known only from the second hand of Galicia. Even today, I am always amazed by the local – Galician Russian phobia voiced from the position of any pompous Western superiority, against the rumours of Asian Russian wilderness, and it was shown by people who “cut a saw” as Wyspiański wrote “all forgot”.
Jalowiecki thus characterized the “Galileuszes”: “The inferiority complex they brought from Galicia towards the Germans and inferiority towards foreigners, specified as the English, did not service Polish interests well.” On the another hand, in the border families that knew the old white Russians, they were mostly mentioned as very nice, highly cultural people, but it was for the Russians that the reception in the Polish home was a social nobilitation, never vice versa. Welsh speaks of them as “Russian Europeans”. Interestingly, the simple Russians, even attached to the russian machine, did not show the Poles hostility or contempt, frequently helped to survive, as evidenced in turn by the fates and memories of another of my relatives, who, while being an aquamer, got into russian captivity in Miedniki after the action of the Sharp Gate. Many another Poles gave akin testimonies. The people of Galicia besides seem not to accept the facts specified as the creation of the Kingdom of Poland in 1815 and the fact that they themselves owe the improvement of their destiny in the 19th century to the military defeat of Austria, on the 1 hand, and on the another hand the faithful politics of their own elites, which declared that they were standing and standing in front of “the brightest Lord”. Even then, however, the degree of independency that was the share of the Kingdom of Poland, almost completely erased from the Polish memory, which was created against the West, only due to the efforts of Russia and 3 years after Napoleon's invasion and Moscow's burning. The analogy to establishing Polish borders after the Second planet War, where again against the West, is that the "bad east" sought solid limits of the Polish buffer.
Perhaps a somewhat idealized image of the ancient times of these authors was besides influenced by the fact that the end of the advanced position of Lithuanian landowners laid planet War I, the same 1 that brought about the revival of the Polish state. any of them lost how Michał K. Pawlikowski property which was left on the russian side, others like Florian Czarnaszewicz had to flee from beyond Berezyna in order not to be simply murdered, which happened to his relatives during the genocide of the Polish Action in 1937-38, others experienced agricultural improvement which was carried out in Końska Lithuania, while everyone without exception was affected by the economical disaster, which was cut off from the Russian markets and found in the Vilnius bag. At this point, it is worth recalling that regardless of the system, the beginning of Poland to the east always brought to our country the improvement of manufacture and economical boom, regardless of whether it was a "taristic oppression" or a PRL. However, erstwhile I ask a statistical fellow countryman about how the Polish manufacture developed best, I usually hear the answer that in Prusai, only the indication of sources makes the interviewors reluctantly respect the Zagłębie Dąbrowskie, the districts of Warsaw, Łódź, Białystok as economically more crucial than sugar mills, distilleries and agricultural machinery factories.
"Mongolian heritage and Russian soul"
The second profoundly rooted story about Russia in Polish heads is the belief that Bolshevikism, Stalinism and communist totalitarianism were in any organic way due to Asianism, the heritage of Mongol regulation and another dark qualities of Russian souls or possibly even genes. In contrast, in the belief of Poles who lived in Tsar's Russia and then experienced the horrors of revolution, panic and totalitarian communism, Tsarist Russia and Bolshevik Communism were something standing on antipodes of political, political and spiritual. The false belief in the organic Russian character of communism was most radically scored in all his work by erstwhile pupil of the Winogradowa mediate School Józef Mackiewicz. A literary hero whose way of life symbolizes this fact is ulan Paul Zybenko – 1 of the protagonists based on his own biography of the author of war epopea from the time of the Polish-Bolshevik War, which is the fresh “Left Left”. He is simply a white Russian fighting in the Polish army and then scarred by the kunktatory and the actual cooperation of Piłsudski with the Bolsheviks in 1919 deserting for the Bułak-Balachowicz branch. There, in 1 of the skirmishes, he chops up a saber of Polish communists from the Earth family. It was in his mouth that Mackiewicz put the celebrated phrase about Bolsheviks as those who wanted to take the soul and turn the man into a free-willed masa, and elsewhere added that in relation to them only 2 things should be done: save free thought and beat the Bolsheviks until victory, let us add in the context of the large Reset; beat the Bolsheviks of all ointment.
Communism appears here as a kind of disease, a soul virus that in Russia found an organism completely immune-free, and the origin of this was not Asianism, but the opposite; besides much attention to Western ideological concepts, in the absence of natural immune mechanisms that give longer conflict with germs. This came to Russia like smallpox on the people of America, additionally weakened by respective years of war and deficiency of religion in their own solutions. However, erstwhile religion in communism besides collapsed, then Russian communism collapsed as rapidly as it arose. possibly that's why, taught by the tragic experience of today's Russia with somewhat little enthusiasm than the West, carries out crazy social plans by Davos engineers, who erstwhile again, having fresh technologies, decided to "move the world's lump out of their jobs" and make a "human kind new, socially more progressive".
Mackiewicz repeatedly emphasized that Bolshevikism was neither a trait nor an invention of Russian, the elite of this global sect were members of non-Russian minorities, and a group of then father-of-phobias who despised or even hated their own country and nation, were assisted at a decisive minute by Germans who wanted to destruct 1 of the enemies in the large War. Andrzej Walicki, I am certain 1 of the best Russian thinkers in the planet put it this way: "The explanation of this (of the native Russian origin of communism – O.S.) is that the leaders and theorists of Bolshevikism with Lenin at the head tried to put into practice the thoroughly reconstructed Communist utopia of Marx and Engels, which they considered to be the last word of the Western thought of the future of the human world, while they turned distant from their national past with disgust, treating it (with large exaggeration) as a reality of the most shameful slavery, and for many years calling on cultural Russians to collective repentance for faithful service to the emperor."
It is simply a large shame for Poles and Poland that the works of specified a thinker as Andrzej Walicki are practically unknown in Poland.. They have been almost completely stifled by the barbaric jazgot of simple rusophobes, who have deluded themselves and effort to convince the planet that their primitive, ignorance-based complexes and resentiments should be taken for any peculiar cognition of Russia, while the planet of their ignorance and blind confusion sees, smiles and cynically exploits them. This dreary phenomenon besides has another reason and the desire to hide another lie: it is not Poles, but the Russians who were most experienced by communism and terrible; it was the Russians who overturned communism, to the despair and professional supporters of the West, and the illness that has passed on their own makes them more resistant to fresh mutations.
To Bolshevikism by Democracy
In highly pervasive observations of Tsaric Russia by Jalowiecki there is another thread. A country like Russia could not proceed and be ruled by democratic schemes. Bolsheviks with Bolsheviks, but the illness started earlier. Jalowiecki sees its sources not only in the weakness of the character of the last emperor, but in the increasing layer of mass people, officials, quarter, half intelligents, it is easier than the erstwhile elite to undergo intellectual fashions and exultations.
This is how he recalls the atmosphere in the Petersburg cafes immediately after the abdication of the Tsar and after the Interim Government took power: “There was talk of revival at the tables. The word “revolution” sounded someway very promising. Anarchy and banditism raged on the streets at that time. present we'd call these people cool-ass.
It was this climate that yet weakened the defence mechanisms against the illness of Bolshevikism. On the another hand, there was no longer a known fanaticism and blind belief in (and how) scientifically justified laws of history. In this context, Jałowiecki describes Lenin as “From this distance I could look at the speaker’s face. It was a mixture of Mongolian features seasoned with Jewry. Something in that face was so ugly that I couldn't keep my eyes on her anymore. It was not good to look for something noble in these features. Small, colorless eyes ran anxiously across the faces of the assembled crowd. Underneath them, the Mongol nose, protruding bones, and above them a large, round, bald skull with light skin. It was the face of not man, but Satan.”
The consequence of clashing these 2 forces – the environment could only be one, and Jałowiecki concluded this as follows: "Russia's biggest enemy is democracy." He besides failed a democratic ally like England, due to the fact that "At the minute of sincerity Hall (a British intelligence agent in St. Petersburg – O.S.) explained to me that 1 of the main principles of English politics is weakening its partners, even the most loyal."
It is characteristic that J. Mackiewicz was besides skeptical of the emerging democracy and the emergence of mass people. In his “Victory of Provocation” he wrote: “The Analabetism rightfully fought by all the nations of the world, and in the practice of east Europe besides played a affirmative role. Namely, during the pre-revolution period, he deprived the social pits of this pseudoculture which is flooding the West today, uncovering recipients among the half-and quarter-intelligence masses. In the east, the alleged society was then exclusively advanced layers of culture that did not yield to the highest level of Western culture. same – made – man from social pits, went consecutive to this culture and started by reading classics with the omission of this middleman, who in German is called "Schundleteratur".
He expressed it in another of his large novels, “The case of Colonel Miasoyedov” in which all vile intrigue stems from the submission of actors to the mechanisms of mass democracy, media dictatorship and public opinion, and in the background are games of increasingly powerful secret services. We would like to say again: how current. The same applies to his descriptions of the russian business from 1939 to 1941, which in the late times of the Polish People's Republic we frequently considered to be anachronistic, but lockdown, censorship of the “speak of hatred” and another rampages which have been brought upon us in fresh years, make it worth coming back to them to realize the mechanisms of manipulation, stupidity, intimidation and terror, which despite changing signs are unchanging.
Also in “Contra” and in the collection “Facts, Nature, People” J. Mackiewicz compared moral abominations of crimes in Katyn and Ponarach to treason over Drawa, and “The case of Colonel Miasojedov” ends with a thrilling description of the genocide raid of the Allies – Democrats on Dresden, the image of thousands of charred human bodies mixed into the tormented consciousness of Klara Miasojedov with a figure – a ghost tormented by the Germans, and everything in the background of the old days erstwhile the imperial gendarme with the same hebrew was doing large interests in the Romanov state, in a country where “it was not crucial who is the belief but what man he is”, “it was not crucial who rules, but whether he will live or not”, and the most natural kind of patriotism was “the patriotism of the landscape”.
Olaf Swolkień
Think Poland, No. 29-30 (14-21.07.2024)
