That time in history when Poland didn’t exist

That time in history when Poland didn’t exist

—Keerthana Satheesh
BSc Economics (2022-25)

History has continually been a fascinating subject. It is perhaps the poetic melancholy of the finality with which the subject is read, that brings out a fascination for it. The factual fixation, the acceptance that the story and the people have been discovered and done for, that there cannot be any alterations to it, no hope for change or revival, brings out an emotion of unmatched romanticism that prompts one to try harder to read it. It is a story not of kings or monarchs, but of people. Their daily life, hopes and dreams entangled by the adamance of the decisions by the political forces of their time. Through this essay I hope to highlight one such story, and I hope to bring out enough emotions to cancel the frequent complaint that history is boring. It is anything but.

Modern day Poland is a country in central Europe, bordered by Germany on the west and Belarus and Ukraine on the east. Countries throughout centuries, witness changes in their territorial boundaries as kingdoms, and republics come and go. But very few, like Poland, go so far to an iteration as to cease to exist.  For 123 years starting from 1795 to 1918, the country simply did not exist. It was erased from the map, engulfed by The Kingdom of Prussia from the west, Russia from the east and the kingdom of Austria from the South through three rounds of partition. The story of how these partitions occurred will involve complicated details of mediaeval European diplomacy. It is what happened in these partitions that interests us.

Thrown into a new country, the Poles faced an identity crisis. As history would play out, they would not submissively accept their fate. They continued to fight through underground insurrections and military operations, whenever the opportunity struck. The 123 years of Polish inexistence were contrasted with violent attempts at Polish expression. Some of the most notable of these insurrections were the November Uprising (1830-31) and the January Uprising (1863-64), both fought against the Russian Empire, considered to be the cruellest of the partitioning powers. Many Poles saw a ray of hope in Napoleon Bonaparte’s military expansion against their common enemies of Prussia, Russia and Austria and fought alongside the French army in the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815). The inclusion of Polish legions in the War helped with the migration of the ideas of the French Revolution, such as democracy.

                          Taking of the Warsaw Arsenal, November Uprising

The Poles who fought against the occupation were imprisoned, executed or exiled. Many notable Poles such as Marie Curie found asylum in Paris during a period known as “The Great Emigration”. The struggle to reclaim their land also came with a struggle to preserve their cultural identity against various forms of oppression and suppression. Most notably, in Russian-partitioned Poland, a programme of “Russification” prohibited the use of the Polish language. Over the course of the next 123 years, the Polish people would fiercely defend and foster the very notion of their cultural identity. This was a difficult and occasionally dangerous task. Everyone was taught to be themselves and, above all, to stay loyal to their national cause through their relationships with one another, their families, and their clandestine education. The likes of Fryderyk Chopin, Adam Mickiewicz, and Henryk Sienkiewicz, to mention a few, used the power of literature, poetry, and music at this period to inspire ideas of a proud history through the power of Romanticism. Two years after the final partition, Józef Wybicki, a Polish nobleman, wrote the song Dąbrowski’s Mazurka or Poland Is Not Yet Lost, which expressed the idea that the nation of Poland, despite lacking an independent state of its own, would not disappear so long as the Polish people were still alive and fighting in its name. It would later become Poland’s national anthem in 1926.

The partition of Poland into three kingdoms had varied effects on its development, language and culture. The Prussian occupied region saw higher rates of development in comparison to Russian or Austria occupied regions. The Prussian-occupied region in modern day Poland has also been reported to have more progressive views. A well-written paper published by researchers Grosfeld and Zhuravskaya in 2013, analyses the influence of these partitions on Poland’s regional differences.

It was only post the first World War, when the powers that controlled Poland weakened that the possibility of independence seemed to be back in sight. Polish armed forces took advantage of the situation and intensified their military campaigns. After a few days of struggle, on November 11 1918, the second republic of Poland was formalised in the 13th point of Woodrow Wilson’s infamous Fourteen Points.

‘An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.’

The scene of Polish independence in Warsaw. On November 11 1918, When Europe celebrated Armistice day, Poland celebrated its resurrection.

And thus the country came back into existence. Modern Poland stands testimony to the fact that a nation’s conscience cannot be conquered simply by seizing the land. A nation is more than the soil people stand on— it is the intricate interaction of millions of stories bonded together by a shared history, community, practices and language. Vanished and vanquished, the very existence of Poland is a story of resilience throughout a century of generations to bring a divided nation’s reality back alive.