Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  After the ‘Springtime of Nations’, Polish leaders headed by Gołuchowski pressed for provincial autonomy in the name of political restraint. They were effectively telling Vienna that if put in charge, they would keep the lid on radicalism. At the same time, a group calling themselves the ‘Podolians’ followed the example of Prince Lev Sapieha and emphasized charitable works and social relief. Perhaps as a result, compared to the situation in Russian-ruled Poland, Polish national sentiment in Galicia was relatively subdued. In 1863–4, when the January Rising was raging over the border (see pp. 295–6), active support for the insurrectionaries was limited.

  Galicia was finally granted autonomy in 1871 following the transformation of the Empire into the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy four years earlier. Galicia was to enjoy less self-government than Hungary but more than other imperial provinces. There was to be a Sejm with three chambers; a separate Ministry of Galician Affairs in Vienna; and the governors were given the title of namiestnik or ‘viceroy’. Polish was to be the principal language of administration and education. Conservative landowners were left in a dominant position, and the more assertive Poles began to think of the kingdom as the ‘Piedmont’ of a reunited Poland, that it might mirror Piedmont’s role in Italy’s Risorgimento. Ruthenians and Jews felt increasingly excluded. Between 1871 and 1915, every viceroy, every minister of Galician affairs and every marshal of the Galician Diet, was Polish. The Galician Diet, also dominated by Poles, was notorious for long-winded speech-making and for lack of effective action. The Polish expression of ‘austriackie gadanie’, literally ‘Austrian babbling’, possesses similar connotations to English phrases such as ‘hot air’ or ‘prattle’.

  Nonetheless, social and political conditions in Galicia were conducive to nationalist ideas gaining most ground among the Ruthenians. One group, the ‘Old Ruthenians’, gathered in the parish halls of Uniate churches. A second, the Kachkovskyi Society, named after its founder, was suspected of Russophile tendencies. A third, the Narodovtsy or ‘Populists’, gradually won the support of a clear majority. Backed by the educational Prosvita Society, they made a telling symbolic step when they established their headquarters in the Lubomirsky Palace, formerly the governor’s residence. They too thought of Galicia as being like Piedmont – but of a future Ukrainian state.57

  By 1907, democratic institutions had been introduced throughout the Empire. Male suffrage, which had already functioned for several years, was replaced by universal suffrage for elections to the imperial Reichsrat in Vienna, where Galician deputies took their places alongside Germans, Czechs, Slovenes, Bukovinians and many others. Nationalists of many hues mingled alongside conservatives, socialists and the first Zionists. In 1908 Galicia sent the largest of all delegations, some on horseback, others on foot, and all in brilliant costumes, to the emperor’s diamond jubilee celebrations.

  Yet in that same year, the viceroy of Galicia was murdered in Lemberg by a Ukrainian extremist. The assassination made it to the front page of the New York Times:

  STUDENT MURDERS GOVERNOR OF GALICIA

  Count Andreas Potocki Victim of Bitter Enmity between

  Ruthenians and Poles

  SHOT WHILE GIVING AN AUDIENCE

  Poles crying for vengeance – Great Excitement at Lemberg58

  Five years later, on the eve of the First World War, another political bombshell exploded. Austrian counter-intelligence agents checking suspicious parcels of money in Vienna’s main post office, uncovered a traitorous liaison between the former chief of their military intelligence service and the Russian government. Colonel Alfred Redl (1864–1913), born in Lemberg, part Jewish and part Ukrainian, had been a brilliant officer. But he was also homosexual, and vulnerable to blackmail. Over a decade, he is thought to have supplied the Russians with the Austro-Hungarian masterplan for war against Serbia and details of all the main fortifications in Galicia. When he shot himself in disgrace, the emperor was said to be most upset by the bad example of an officer dying in mortal sin.59

  By the turn of the century, therefore, several social and political chasms were opening up in Galicia. The aristocrats had been joined in the wealthiest sector of society by a small but very affluent bourgeois class, frequently Jewish, while the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) was mobilizing support among a small but militant working class, especially in the oilfield. A sturdy Polish Peasant Movement (PSL), markedly anti-clerical and undeferential, was courting a large constituency. Poor Jews and still poorer peasants were emigrating in droves. Above all, rival nationalist movements were eyeing each other with deepening suspicion. Galicia had little to offer to those demanding ‘Poland for the Poles’, ‘Ukraine for Ukrainians’ or ‘Zion for the Jews’.

  Nowhere could these divisions be seen more clearly than in Krynica, a small spa town nestling in the hills 60 miles south-east of Kraków. Mineral springs had been discovered there and a fine Renaissance-style pump-house had been built in the 1890s beneath the pine-clad slopes. Railway lines connected Krynica-Muszyna both with Kraków and with Budapest. Rich clients, many Jewish and many from Russia and Hungary, came to take the waters, to relax in the mudbaths, to stroll along the elegant Parade and to enjoy the luxurious hotels, villas and restaurants. Elegant Polish ladies showed off the latest Parisian fashions. At the same time, a half-hidden slum of Jewish paupers huddled behind the town hall, and ragged peasants from the surrounding Ruthenian villages drifted into town to seek work as servants or chambermaids, or sometimes to beg. One of them, a deaf-mute Lemko washerwoman, gave birth in 1895 to one of Galicia’s most remarkable sons. Epifanyi Drovnyak, like his mother, suffered from a speech impediment, and spent much of his life begging on the Parade. Yet as ‘Nikifor’ he eventually won recognition as a unique, ‘naive’ (or stylistically ‘primitive’) painter.60 Just as his contemporary L. S. Lowry painted Lancashire cotton mills and matchstick people, Nikifor loved to draw Galician train stations and their passengers.

  A couple of hours on the slow local train to the north of Krynica brought one to Bobowa – an archetypal Jewish shtetl in the middle of verdant Polish countryside. In 1889 the village had burned down. The original inhabitants moved out, and the followers of a Chassid zaddik, Salomon ben Natan Halberstam, moved in. A new yeshivah or Talmudic academy was founded. The old wooden synagogue was rebuilt in stone, and on feast days thousands of Chassidic pilgrims would arrive from far and wide. The owners of the town were the counts Długoszowski, refugees from Russian-ruled Poland. In the years before 1914, the son of the family, Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszowski, was studying in Paris. But he returned home in time to fight with Piłsudski’s Polish Legions during the First World War. His relations with the Jews exemplify the way in which, at their best, different Galician religions and ethnic communities could live beside each other before 1914. Photographs have survived of him in officer’s uniform entertaining Salomon Halberstam’s son – the silver-haired, bemedalled general with the smiling, bearded, fur-hatted Chassid.61

  When war broke out in August 1914, everyone knew that Galicia’s fate was precarious. It was strategically exposed, and fighting between the Austrian and Russian armies immediately took place on Galician soil. Fear of the ‘Russian steamroller’ was great: if the tsar’s armies were victorious, Galicia would be annexed to Russia. If the Central Powers held firm, almost everyone assumed that Galicia would remain a Habsburg Crownland indefinitely.

  Most Galician men who enrolled for military service served in the Imperial and Royal Army. The casualty rate among them was high. A much smaller number, perhaps 30,000, found their way either into Józef Piłsudski’s newly formed Polish Legions or into their Ukrainian equivalent, the United Sich Riflemen. Both of these formations grew out of scouting, sporting or paramilitary groups that had come into being in the previous decade. Piłsudski’s men, who belonged to the anti-nationalist branch of Polish patriotic opinion, upholding the country’s multi-religious and multi-cultural traditions, contained a strong contingent of Jews. And, like Da˛browski’s men a centur
y earlier, they were fired up by the call to fight for the restoration of Polish independence. They actually started the fighting on the Galician Front on 6 August, when they crossed the Russian frontier near Kraków in an act of deliberate bravura. But they soon retreated, and took their place on the frontline alongside all the other formations of the Central Powers. After three years of hard fighting, they were pulled out of the line in preparation for transfer to the Western Front. Having refused to take an oath of allegiance to the German Kaiser, however, they were disbanded. Piłsudski was imprisoned, his officers interned, and the rank and file redistributed among other units. As a result, they played no further part either in the war or in Galicia’s future.62

  The Austrian authorities were equally keen to mobilize Ruthenian manpower. A Ukrainian army corps assembled round the Sich Riflemen by drawing on recruits from eastern Galicia. Their ultimate political aims were not clarified, but their eagerness to fight Russia was shared by their Polish counterparts and satisfied Vienna. Since they stayed in the field, they were able to influence events at the war’s end.63

  At first, Galicia’s prospects had looked grim. The Russian steamroller rolled, driven by huge numerical superiority. Lemberg was occupied, and the fortress at Przemyśl was subjected to a five-month siege. The Austrians pulled back. By early December 1914 Cossack patrols were raiding the outskirts of Kraków. (One of them was captured at Bierzanów, now within the city limits.) But then the line held. In a Christmas counter-offensive, the Austrians recovered almost half the lost ground, retaking most of west Galicia.64

  In 1915 the initiative passed to the Central Powers. Having knocked out one of the two Russian army groups in East Prussia, and having established a trench-line deep inside France, the German command felt free to reinforce its hard-pressed Austrian allies. A massive combined operation pushed off in July from the district of Gorlice (adjacent to Krynica) and all resistance was swamped for a couple of hundred miles. The Germans swung north to capture Warsaw. The Austrians reached Lublin, recovering both Przemyśl and Lemberg. The German and Austrian emperors met to agree on the re-creation of a subservient Polish kingdom in Warsaw and Lublin. Galicia breathed again.

  The next year was one of renewed alarms, heightened by the death of Franz-Joseph. General Brusilov launched a fresh Russian offensive. Lemberg changed hands once again, and Przemyśl was subjected to a second siege. This time, however, the Russians drove south over the Carpathians into Hungary. They eventually ran out of steam, and their positions in the winter of 1916–17 were not dissimilar to those of two winters previously. War-torn Galicia was holding on. It provided the setting for one of the most celebrated fictional treatments of life on the Eastern Front in The Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk.65 Švejk’s Czech creator, Jaroslav Hašek, served in Galicia.

  It was not long before the crash of the cannon was joined by the rumblings of revolution. In the course of 1917 the Russian army fell apart. Mutinous soldiers shot their officers and refused to fight, appealing to the rank and file of their German and Austrian enemies to follow suit. In March the ‘February Revolution’ overthrew the tsar. In November the Bolsheviks’ ‘October Revolution’ overthrew Russia’s provisional government. In consequence, though the fighting raged on in Western Europe, peace was clearly coming to the East. The armies of the Central Powers surged forward, occupying the Baltic provinces, Lithuania, Byelorussia and Ukraine. Both Lithuania and Ukraine declared their independence from Russia, and Lenin, the desperate Bolshevik leader, was forced to sue for peace. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 was signed at the dictate of Berlin and Vienna. Soviet Russia was forced to resign from huge swathes of territory, and Galicia was reconfirmed as a Habsburg possession.66

  The main civilian concerns were now for epidemic diseases and for refugees. Typhoid broke out, followed by the worldwide epidemic of Spanish influenza. Well over a million Galician civilians had been displaced, their sufferings inspiring appeals for international aid.

  The impact of the Bolshevik Revolution on Galicia is difficult to gauge. It may have encouraged the new Emperor Charles to seek a separate peace. Some soldiers, infected by the revolutionary bacillus, threatened to mutiny; most simply demanded to go home. Many of them, while marching off, turned against their imperial rulers less in the name of international revolution than in that of national liberation. Czech and Slovak regiments demanded a Czech-Slovak state; Croats and Slovenes aspired to a new Yugoslavia; Poles talked about a Polish Republic; and Ukrainians about a free Ukraine.

  The ferment came to a head in October 1918. The Central Powers were now falling back in disarray on the Western Front, and the emperors in Berlin and Vienna were facing calls for abdication. In Galicia, the troops of the Royal and Imperial Army, together with Austrian officialdom, were melting away. Officers threw away the keys of their fortresses. Appeals to Vienna went unanswered, and in any case Vienna seemed to be issuing no orders. Kraków was left in the hands of the local garrison. Lemberg was handed over to a division of Ukrainian Riflemen. In west Galicia, a Polish Liquidation Committee declared itself guardian of all ex-imperial assets. In east Galicia, a ‘West Ukrainian Socialist Republic’ was surfacing in parallel to an Austro-German Republic in Vienna. On 11 November the Emperor Charles declared that he was withdrawing from government, and absolved all officials from their oath of office. Unlike the German Kaiser, he did not abdicate but withdrew to his country house at Eckertsau to await developments. After four months, he left for Switzerland, and the Empire just petered out. Ironically, since the emperor had also been king of Galicia and Lodomeria, the helpless kingdom petered out with it. After months of huge confusion, it was joined to the reborn Polish Republic, whose head of state, freshly released from his German prison, was Józef Piłsudski.

  Galicia’s afterlife lasted at the most for one generation. The kingdom itself was never restored, but the multinational community which it had fostered lived on under a succession of political regimes and was not definitively broken up until the Second World War. In 1918–21, the partition of Galicia led to violent conflicts. The Poles of Lemberg rebelled against the West Ukrainian Republic within a week, drove the Ukrainian troops out by their own efforts, and then, calling on military assistance from central Poland, freed the whole of Galicia from Ukrainian control.67 They then embarked on a political campaign to ensure that all of the former Galicia be awarded to the Polish Republic. At the same time, the territory became embroiled in a wider war between Poland and the Soviet Republics. In spring a 1920 it provided the base for Piłsudski’s march on Kiev in the company of his allied Ukrainian armies. That summer, it was the scene of a Bolshevik invasion, headed by the fearsome Konarmiya of ‘Red Cossacks’. In the autumn, following Poland’s decisive victory over the Red Army at Warsaw, it returned in its entirety to Polish rule.68

  In the 1920s and 1930s, reunited and forming a composite part of inter-war Poland, the former Galicia enjoyed a brief period of respite. West Galicia, centred on Kraków, returned to its historical name of Małopolska. East Galicia/West Ukraine, centred on Lemberg (now Lwów), was given the unhistorical name of ‘Eastern Little Poland’. As in late Austrian times, the Poles held the reins of power. Administration and education were strongly Polonized, and for the first time illiteracy was largely abolished. In several easterly districts, substantial numbers of Polish settlers, usually war veterans from 1920, were given grants of land to strengthen the border areas. Loyalty was maintained by a relatively benign regime, by a strong military presence, and by fear of the neighbouring Soviet republics, where political, social and economic conditions were infinitely more oppressive. Refugees reaching the former Galicia from Lenin’s ‘Red Terror’, from Stalin’s forced collectivization or from the Ukrainian Famine of 1932–3 left little doubt in people’s minds about the horrors of the ‘Soviet paradise’.

  The problems encountered by Galicia’s non-Polish minorities, which were to be a favourite topic of Communist propaganda in the decades that followed, have oft
en been exaggerated. The Jews did encounter a certain measure of discrimination, especially during the Polish–Soviet War. But stories of widespread pogroms, though oft repeated, were dismissed by successive international inquiries. The notorious ‘Lemberger Pogrom’ of November 1918 turned out to be a military massacre in which three-quarters of the victims were Christian.69 The Ruthenians/Ukrainians, too, encountered painful episodes. Rural poverty continued to afflict the villages of so-called ‘Polska B’, that is, the poorer, eastern part of inter-war Poland. Though the constitution guaranteed the equality of all citizens, Ukrainian language and culture were never put on an equal footing with Polish. In 1931 a rural strike was countered by brutal pacifications from the Polish military; in 1934 the murder by Ukrainian terrorists of the Galician-born minister of the interior, Bronisław Pieracki, provoked harsh repressions. Even so, none of these ordeals bore any resemblance either to the atrocities in progress across the Soviet border or to the catastrophes that were about to strike.

  Ex-Galicians who became prominent after 1918 were legion. They included Wincenty Witos, peasant politician and premier;70 Stefan Banach, mathematician;71 Karel Sobelsohn, ‘Radek’, Bolshevik;72 Leopold Weiss (Muhammad Asad), Muslim convert;73 Michał Bobrzyński, historian;74 Martin Buber, philosopher;75 Joseph Retinger, a ‘Father of Europe’;76 Omelian Pritsak, Harvard orientalist;77 Joseph Roth, Austrian writer;78 Bruno Schulz, Polish writer and artist;79 S. Y. Agnon, Israeli novelist;80 Władysław Sikorski, general and politician;81 Archduke Albrecht von Habsburg, Polish officer;82 Rudolf Weigl, microbiologist;83 Ludwig von Mises, economist;84 Stepan Bandera, Ukrainian nationalist;85 and Simon Wiesenthal, Nazi-hunter.86

  Space permits only one of these diverse figures to be described. The highly eccentric career of Leopold Weiss (1900–92) was prompted by circumstances that were fairly common among educated Galicians. Weiss was born in Lemberg to a family of liberal Jewish professionals, who took religious tolerance for granted. His father, the son and grandson of rabbis, had broken with tradition to become a lawyer; and, though the young Leopold’s parents gave him a standard Talmudic education, they took great care not to press religious views on him. The result, he said, was a feeling that they lacked any real conviction. Hence, when he arrived in Palestine in the 1920s he parted company with his Zionist colleagues from Galicia, made friends with Arabs, converted to Islam, and took the name of Muhammad Asad. He was the author of The Message of the Qur’an (1964), one of the best-known introductions to Islamic teaching for foreigners. After living for a time in Saudi Arabia and befriending King Saud, he married a Saudi wife, and moved to British India, eventually serving as Pakistan’s first ambassador to the United Nations. In 1939 he was arrested by the British as an enemy alien. His parents, who had stayed in Lemberg, perished in the Holocaust.87