Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  By 1914, therefore, the political scene was fragmented in the extreme. Visions of the future were irreconcilably diverse:

  [T]he old capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a desired political capital to Lithuanians, Belarusians, and Poles… a spiritual capital to the Jews… and an ancient Russian city to the officials who exercised power. Most of the city’s schools taught in Russian, most of its churches were Roman Catholic, more than a third of its inhabitants were Jews… The city was… ‘Vilnius’ in Lithuanian, ‘Wilno’ in Polish, ‘Vil’nia’ in Belarusian, ‘Vil’na’ in Russian and ‘Vilne’ in Yiddish…

  Vilnius was for Lithuanian activists the capital of the Grand Duchy, built by Grand Duke Gediminas at the dawn of Lithuania’s glory. Increasingly, they saw the medieval Grand Duchy as the antecedent of an independent Lithuanian state…

  Belarusian national activists, too, harkened back to the Grand Duchy, regarded themselves as its heirs, and claimed Vil’nia as their capital. Unlike [the Lithuanians]… they favored a revived Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth… The Belarusian idea began to compete seriously with the imperial idea [of ] ‘West Russia.’ In Vil’nia city, Belarusian speakers far outnumbered Lithuanian speakers. In the Vil’nia province… [they] were more than half the population. The first important Belarusian periodical, Nasha Niva (Our Soil), appeared in 1906.

  Under Russian imperial rule, a special sort of Polish culture consolidated its hold on… the Wilno region (Wileńszczyzna). Despite a series of [discriminatory] laws… Poles still owned most of the land, [and] were probably the city’s plurality… Assimilation to Polish language was regarded not so much as joining a distinct national [group] as joining respectable society… Aware of their families’ roots… and often bilingual or trilingual themselves, [such Poles] regarded the Grand Duchy as the most beautiful part of the Polish inheritance… In the early twentieth century, their political views were given a federalist structure by patriotic socialists such as Józef Piłsudski…

  The Jews, who represented 40 percent of the city’s population and perhaps three quarters of its traders… had inhabited the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’ in large numbers for four hundred years. The ‘Lithuania’ in question was the old Grand Duchy, which had included cities such as Minsk (by this time about 51 percent Jewish), Homel (55 percent), Pinsk (74 percent), and Vitebsk (51 percent). The Vitebsk of this era is best known from the paintings of its native son, Marc Chagall (1887–1985).103

  Thanks to international convulsions beyond their control, all the national movements that had taken root in the former grand duchy were about to be overwhelmed by outside interests. During the First World War (1914–18), the area saw fierce fighting between German and Russian armies on the Eastern Front; and after the outbreak of the Russian Revolution and Civil War it was subjected to a series of political experiments. In March 1918 at Brest (which the Poles call Brześć Litewski and the Germans Brest-Litowsk), Leon Trotsky signed away a large swathe of the dead Tsarist Empire, including most of the former grand duchy, where the experiments mushroomed. The stunted Republic of Lithuania, founded with German support in 1917 in Kaunas (Kovno), could not realize its claims on Vilnius; and the resultant Polish-Lithuanian feud ever the city obstructed all attempts at post-war co-operation.104 The Byelorussian National Republic, created by local activists in Minsk, lasted for little more than a fortnight.105 The Communist-run Lithuanian-Byelorussian Republic which succeeded it, the ‘Lit-Byel’, created in conjunction with the Bolsheviks, endured barely a year.106 In 1919–20 the Polish army of Józef Piłsudski established a brief interval of dominance in the region. After its victory in the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–20, Poland held onto ‘Middle Lithuania’ and partitioned Byelorussia with the Soviets.107 The official name of Vilna reverted back to Wilno.

  In the inter-war period, the Lithuanian Republic lost its democracy to the regime of Antanas Smetona (1874–1944), while partitioned Byelorussia lost all prospect of self-government. Western Byelorussia, under Polish rule, remained a backward region, but its difficulties bore no comparison to the horrors taking place beyond the Soviet frontier. Under Lenin’s auspices, the Byelorussian SSR – in eastern Belarus – was granted use of the Byelorussian language and a nominally autonomous administration in Minsk. In reality, it was run from Moscow through the iron dictatorship of the Soviet Communist Party. The Uniate Church, which had resurfaced during the German occupation of the war years, was eradicated even more viciously than in tsarist times. Under Stalin, the young Byelorussian intelligentsia, educated in the 1920s, was almost annihilated; the leaders of the Byelorussian national movement were shot. Any independent peasants were destroyed during the collectivization campaign. The Jewish community was deeply split between the secular, pro-Soviet element organized by the all-powerful Yevsektsiya or Jewish section of the Communist Party and the traditional, religious and non-Communist majority. Many decades later, the Kuropaty Forest near Minsk would reveal the secret mass graves of hundreds of thousands of unidentified victims of Stalin’s ‘Great Terror’.108

  In the Second World War the former grand duchy lay in the eye of the storm from beginning to end, being subjected to an ordeal unparalleled in the whole of European history. Both Western Byelorussia and Lithuania were awarded by the Nazi–Soviet Pact to the Soviet sphere of influence. A joint Nazi–Soviet victory parade was staged in Brest in September 1939, and Lithuania was overrun by Stalin’s Red Army in June 1940. The first Soviet occupation was marked by mass executions, deportations and repressions. German occupation followed when ‘Operation Barbarossa’ crashed over the frontier in June 1941; it spurned all the many opportunities that arose to present the Nazi regime as a liberator. A quick glance at the wartime map reveals that (with the exception of Leningrad/St Petersburg) the weight of devastation and Nazi oppression were not inflicted on Russia but on the non-Russian republics. (The German military Reichskommissariat Ostland coincided in large measure with the post-1569 grand duchy.) The year 1941 also signalled the onset of the Nazis’ two largest crimes: the genocidal Holocaust against Jews and the liquidation of Soviet prisoners by starvation. The scene of these crimes largely coincided with the horrors of unbelievably ferocious anti-partisan warfare. In 1944 the victorious and vengeful Red Army smashed its way west regardless of the human cost. The retreating Germans created ‘scorched-earth’ zones and last-ditch ‘fortresses’ to be defended to the death. In one single campaign, Operation Bagration, which drove the front to the River Vistula, Marshal Rokossowski reoccupied the whole of Byelorussia and destroyed more than fifty German divisions. In the process, Minsk and several other cities were completely razed, with enormous loss of civilian life. Then the world’s record-breaking murder machine, Stalin’s NKVD, appeared to filter, arrest, shoot, torture, deport and terrorize the survivors.

  A land so afflicted could never be the same again. The Lithuanians had been severely depleted by Soviet actions in 1940–41 and 1944–5. The Poles were decimated, partly by the early Soviet deportations, partly by the German occupation, and partly by the post-war ‘repatriation campaign’. The Jews, murdered by the Nazi SS during the Holocaust, had been virtually exterminated. The Byelorussians suffered from all sides. By 1945 human losses in Byelorussia were estimated at 25 per cent of the population. No other part of Europe – not Poland, not the Baltic States, not Ukraine and not Russia – had sustained such mind-numbing levels of slaughter.109

  For forty-six years after the war, Lithuania and Byelorussia sweated out a further spell within the Soviet Union, where the question of their reintegration was not even considered. Not only were they behind the Iron Curtain in the post-war period; they were corralled behind the extra grille that separated them from other countries of the Soviet bloc. The watchword was reconstruction. But they were poorly treated compared to more favoured republics. Politically and economically, they were held in the stranglehold of Communist Party control and of centralized command planning. Socially, they had been artificially homogenized, and they could e
xploit a tiny margin of autonomy only culturally and linguistically. In the Lithuanian SSR, the Lithuanian language was retained as the principal medium of education and administration, and a Lithuanian Communist elite took pains to keep the influx of Russians at bay. By the late twentieth century over 80 per cent of the citizenry remained Lithuanian by speech and nationality. As the Soviet Union began to crumble, Lithuania became a viable candidate for separation. Early in 1991 it was the first of the Soviet republics to demand independence.110

  The Byelorussian SSR was less coherent in its ethnic composition and far more confused in its objectives. It had never recovered fully from its wartime devastation. The inflow of ethnic Russians was not stemmed, especially into top positions, and Russophile sentiment came in with them. The great mass of people were indigent, collectivized state serfs, whose knowledge of their own history and culture was minimal. Religion was sorely curtailed. The native Uniates were not reinstated and the Roman Catholic churches stayed shut, as they had since 1917. The Byelorussian language, written exclusively in Cyrillic, was rarely a vehicle for subversive thoughts. And the border with Poland remained closely guarded.

  Nonetheless, when the moment of Soviet collapse arrived, the Byelorussian Communist Party did not falter. It acted as host to a secret meeting held in the tsar’s former hunting lodge at Viskuli in the Belovezh Forest on 9 December 1991, when the representatives of Russia, Byelorussia and Ukraine declared the USSR to be extinct. The world’s largest state expired painlessly. It met a much easier death than that suffered by the grand duchy almost two centuries earlier.

  Archives are, in a sense, the dust and ashes of a dead polity. They contain the records of monarchs who reigned, of institutions that functioned and of lives that were lived. Like boxes of family papers in the attic, they are an indispensable aid to accurate memory and to trustworthy history.

  The condition of archives, therefore, gives a good indication of the strength of memory and the reliability of the history books. If archives are well ordered, one may conclude that the legacy of past times is respected. If not, it is likely that memory and history have been neglected. One of the first decisions of ill-willed regimes is to order the destruction or sequestration of their predecessors’ archives. In the case of the grand duchy, large parts of the archives have totally disappeared.

  The Metryka Litevska or ‘Lithuanian Register’ is the commonest collective name for the original indexes/archival inventories of the grand duchy’s central chancery. Since it no longer exists in one place, it is difficult to estimate its size. But, at a minimum, it was made up of a thousand huge, leather-bound ledgers, and it contained six main divisions: Books of Inscriptions (i.e. summaries of laws and decrees), Books of ‘Public Affairs’ (records of the Chancellor’s Office), Sigillata (copies of documents issued under the grand-ducal seal), Court Books, Land Survey Books, and Legation Books relating to foreign affairs. The time-span stretches from the very early thirteenth century to the very late eighteenth century. The principal languages employed are ruski (Old Belarusian), Latin and Polish.

  Locating and reconstructing the Metryka Litevska has demanded a fascinating saga of academic sleuthing that could only be undertaken with modern technology. It was long delayed, partly because the most interested parties had no access, and partly because Russian and Soviet archivists were following their own agenda. Nowadays, one can state with some confidence that the dispersal of the grand duchy’s records took place in nine or ten stages:

  In 1572, following Union with Poland, the main body of documents (though not the registers) was taken by the last chancellor of the pre-Union grand duchy, Mikołaj ‘the Red’ Radziwiłł, and was housed in the Radziwiłłs’ palace at Nieświez˙. According to the Radziwiłłs, the priceless papers had been consigned to them for safe-keeping; according to others they were stolen.

  From 1572 to 1740 the archives of the post-Union period, together with the older registers, were kept in the Chancery in Vilnius. Most papers relating to foreign policy were filed in the Metryka Koronna. The Metryka Litevska received numerous files relating to Muscovy and the Tartars.

  During the Swedish invasion of 1655–6, large quantities of documents and inventories were plundered and taken to Stockholm. Part of the loot was returned by the Treaty of Oliwa (1660), but an important group of registers remained in Sweden.

  In 1740 the grand-ducal Chancery and its records were moved to Warsaw; sometime later a joint Polish-Lithuanian archival administration was established. After 1777, since the majority of clerks could no longer read Cyrillic, Polish summaries were added to the contents of each ledger. A start was made on a huge project aiming to produce a full copy of the entire archive and to transcribe all the ruski texts into the Latin alphabet.

  In 1795 the contents of Warsaw’s archives and libraries, together with the surviving registers, were seized by the Russian army, and transported to St Petersburg, where they were duly joined by the archives from Nieświez˙.

  In the course of the nineteenth century Russian imperial archivists broke up the Polish-Lithuanian records to suit their own administrative purposes. Anything relating to Ukraine, for example, was sent to Kiev.

  In 1887 an incomplete and inaccurate catalogue of the Metryka Litevska was compiled and published in St Petersburg.

  In 1921 the Treaty of Riga between Poland and the Soviet republics made provision for the restoration of all archives carried off from Warsaw in 1795. The provision was largely observed in the breach.

  In 1939, the Polish Archive Service removed as many records as possible from central Warsaw, but large parts of the pre-war collections were destroyed during the war by fires, bombing and German looting.

  One obvious conclusion is that Vilnius and Minsk are probably not necessarily the best places to locate the basic sources for study of the grand duchy.

  The task of piecing together the archival jigsaw was first undertaken by Polish scholars in the 1920s and 1930s, but the work was far from complete when overtaken by redoubled wartime disasters. Post-war conditions, which gave absolute priority to the sensitivities of the Soviet Union, were not conducive to impartial research.

  So with much delay the star role eventually fell to a heroic American scholar from Harvard University, whose findings began to appear in the 1980s. Her original concern was to summarize the holdings of the Soviet state archives in general, since their guardians treated catalogues as state secrets. But she came to realize that many records originating from the grand duchy, though broken up and widely scattered, had survived under misleading headings and identification numbers. She also realized that the registers in Stockholm, to which she had unrestricted access, were invaluable. They helped her to trace papers which were housed in various parts of Poland or the Soviet Union and whose existence would otherwise have been impossible to pinpoint. The net result was an unrivalled degree of understanding of the grand duchy’s archival legacy.111

  Since then, primary research has been greatly facilitated, and scholars of many nationalities toil to make up the backlog of two centuries. Enormous gaps and problems remain, yet it is a great consolation to know that all was not lost. Even for the amateur historian with no special expertise, it is extraordinarily exciting to open one of the inventories, and to gaze on the raw material of the grand duchy’s history with one’s own eyes.

  One important relic, however, was never in the archives. The body of the last king-grand duke, buried appropriately in the church of St Catherine in St Petersburg in February 1798, rested untroubled in its tomb for 140 years. Then, in 1938, by agreement of the Soviet and Polish authorities who were tasked with fulfilling the restitution clauses of the Treaty of Riga, the sarcophagus was broken open and the coffin dispatched to Poland. However, since pre-war Poland’s official view of Stanisław-August was not positive, the government opposed the plan of reburial in the royal crypt at Wawel Castle in Kraków, and the coffin was transported instead to the chapel at Volchin (Wołczyn) near Brest, to Stanisław-August’s b
irthplace in the former grand duchy. During the war and in the post-war Soviet period, Volchin was totally devastated and the derelict chapel used as the fertilizer store of a Soviet collective farm. So the pulverized human remains ‘brought home’ to St John’s cathedral in Warsaw in 1995 were not in reality homeward bound; nor, with any certainty, were they the remains of Stanisław-August.112

  In the fields of art, architecture and social history, another single-handed labour of love was undertaken by an archivist and librarian who passed the second half of his life in Silesia. In the 1930s the late Roman Aftanazy had been a keen cyclist and photographer, touring the eastern borders of Poland’s Second Republic with a camera and notebook, and starting a collection of annotated pictures of castles and country houses. After the war, when many of the historic buildings had been destroyed, he realized that his collection, though incomplete, was unique. And he spent the next forty years compiling a detailed photographic and descriptive record of every single landed estate in Lithuania, Byelorussia and Ukraine. He contacted all the surviving former owners or their neighbours, persuading them to submit every available photograph, plan, inventory or family history. His daring operation in Communist times was completely illegal, but its results were sensational. In 1986 he published the first volumes (out of a total of twenty-two) of a work which lists and describes in detail more than 1,500 residences. Part I, consisting of four volumes, deals with the former grand duchy, and is organized by the palatinates that existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There are 148 substantial entries, from Abele to Z˙yrmuny, for the Palatinate of Vilnia alone. This is no mere catalogue. It is a comprehensive compendium, giving full accounts of almost every landed family and their estates, together with their homes, their galleries, their gardens, their furniture, their genealogies, their legends and their fortunes. It is an intellectual rescue operation of a lost world on a grand scale.113