Wojtek the Bear [paperback]

by Orr, Aileen;

  But by the early eighteenth century, the Commonwealth was growing weaker. On either flank of Poland, new and hostile states were emerging. The duchy of Muscovy expanded to become Russia of the Tsars, consolidating central power over what is now European Russia and pushing eastwards to grasp the infinite wealth of Siberia. To the west, small and backward German princedoms along the Baltic coast now merged under the new and formidable kingdom of Prussia.

  The Polish Commonwealth was really a ‘pre-modern’ state. Central authority was weak, regional diversity was wide and political influence lay in the hands of the nobility. The new Russia and Prussia, by contrast, represented a very different and ‘modern’ model of power. These were grimly centralised and authoritarian states, intolerant of ethnic or religious diversity and – above all – obsessed with the training and equipping of large professional armies.

  Culturally, the Polish Commonwealth considered itself more civilised than its big neighbours, whom Poles regarded as primitive. In return, the despots of Prussia and Russia loathed the relative freedom of Polish society, regarding it as a threat to their own strictly controlled systems of government. In addition, both had historical reasons to resent Poland. On the Prussian side, the Teutonic Knights had been defeated by the Poles in the fifteenth century, frustrating their drive to conquer the whole Baltic region. The Russians had suffered repeated Polish invasions and political interference in earlier centuries, in the times of Muscovy’s weakness, and saw Poland as a deadly rival for control over Ukraine and Russia’s western borderlands.

  As the eighteenth century passed, Poland continued to decline both economically and politically. Hostile powers found that its archaic semi-democracy, with its elected monarchy and its parliament operating on a rule of unanimity, was fatally easy to corrupt and subvert. At the end of the century, Poland’s neighbours used their military power to force a succession of Partitions, dividing Polish territory between Russia, Prussia and the Habsburg Empire to the south.

  But after the Second Partition, Poland’s last king – Stanisław August – and his advisers suddenly launched a dazzling programme of political and social reform, based on the principles of the American Revolution and the European Enlightenment. Poland set up the first ministry of education in Europe, and in 1791 adopted the Constitution of the Third of May, modernising the whole state structure and introducing a limited version of civil rights.

  It was far too late. The Constitution enraged Catherine II, the Russian empress; she saw it as a deliberate provocation which would bring the democratic principles of the French Revolution up to her own borders. The armies tramped forward again, and the Third Partition of 1795 finally wiped what was left of Poland off the map. The eastern regions, later including Warsaw, went to Russia. The Prussian kings took what remained of western Poland, while the Habsburg Empire held southern Poland and the province of Galicia, including the city of Kraków.

  There followed 123 years in which Poland did not officially exist. The three partitioning powers agreed that the very name should never be used again. Especially in the Russian area, there was a sustained effort to abolish Polish identity by suppressing the language, discriminating against the Catholic faith and criminalising those who tried to celebrate Poland’s rich culture or tell the truth about its history.

  This policy was an almost total failure. Polish national identity retreated into a continuous national conspiracy against the foreign occupants, which preserved culture and tradition and often erupted into armed insurrections. The first of these took place in 1795, as the Third Partition closed over the country. Led by Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Wallace-like popular hero, peasant armies won early victories until they were overwhelmed by Russian numbers. A few years later, in 1812, Napoleon promised to restore Polish independence as he invaded Russia. Tens of thousands of Poles joined his armies, fighting not only in Russia but in Austria, Italy, Spain and even in Haiti. They shed their blood in vain, but the memory of Napoleonic reforms to Poland’s legal and administrative system was preserved, and revived when Poland regained its independence a century later.

  In 1830, another insurrection – the November Uprising – broke out in Warsaw and rapidly spread. It took the Russians a year of hard fighting to defeat the rebels. Fierce repression followed, and almost the whole intellectual elite of Poland, most of whom had fought in or helped to organise the rising, went into exile in western Europe. The Great Emigration in effect made Paris the political capital of Poland for the next 80 years. And for the rest of the century Poland’s literary and musical culture – now reaching its dazzling zenith in the work of the poets Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki and Cyprian Kamil Norwid, and the composer Frédéric Chopin – was almost entirely created in France.

  There were other, lesser, insurrections and a network of Polish patriotic conspiracies spread over Europe. But the next full-scale rebellion – the January Uprising – did not take place until 1863. Once again, the Poles fought in their streets and in their forests, and held out for over a year. Once again, the collapse of the rising was followed by hangings and police terror, and by the familiar sight of columns of chained men and women being marched away across the snow to Siberian captivity.

  But the disaster of the January Uprising led to a change of mood in Poland. There was a feeling that the time for ‘romantic’, sacrificial rebellions was over. Instead, Poland should concentrate on patient, ‘positivist’ campaigns to build up the nation’s economic strength and modernise its social structures. In the Prussian partition, which after 1871 became part of a united German Empire, Polish farmers fought a long and successful struggle by legal and peaceful means to defend their land against Bismarck’s policy of German colonisation.

  To the east, there was a lull in the general risings against the Tsardom until the Russian Revolution of 1905, which spread throughout the Russian Empire and in Poland became simultaneously a battle for social justice and for national independence. Armed conspiracies continued to attack Tsarist officials and institutions with bomb and gun right up the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. One of these movements, the underground Polish Socialist Party, was led by a petty aristocrat from Lithuanian Poland, the charismatic plotter and soldier Józef Piłsudski.

  The outbreak of the war meant that Poles in the Russian army would be fighting their Polish brothers in the German and Austro-Hungarian armies. But it also meant that the partitioning powers were fighting each other, and almost at once they began a competitive auction of offers designed to win Polish support. Russia offered semi-independence under the Tsar while Germany and Austria-Hungary attempted to set up a puppet ‘Polish Kingdom’ in the regions they conquered from the Russians. Piłsudski raised ‘Polish Legions’ in the Habsburg Empire and invaded Russian Poland; this had little effect on the war, but created a heroic legend around the legions and Piłsudski himself.

  In the end, the Poles did not win back independence by their own efforts. The Polish state reappeared because of a political earthquake which transformed Eurasia and the Middle East: the collapse within a year or so of the three partition empires and the Ottoman Empire to the south. The Tsardom fell in 1917; the German and Austrian empires 18 months later. Piłsudski entered Warsaw in triumph, proclaiming the restoration of independence on 11 November 1918.

  There followed several years of vicious local wars as the new Polish Republic fought to establish its frontiers in the east and west. Poland took most of the Upper Silesian industrial basin and the Poznań region from Germany, the city and district of Vilnius (Wilno) from the new Lithuanian state, and western Ukraine with the city of Lwów from Ukrainian nationalists. At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin had allowed both Poland and Finland to take independence from Russia. But in 1920, as Polish forces reached Kiev and tried to create a Ukrainian puppet state under Polish control, the patience of the Bolsheviks ran out. The Soviet armies surged westwards, and after defeating the Poles in central Ukraine, rode on across Poland until the ‘Red Cavalry’ wa
s almost on the outskirts of Warsaw.

  There they were halted. Piłsudski’s troops launched a counter-offensive which cut round behind the Soviet attackers and severed their communications. The Red Army fell apart, and was driven back almost to its starting-point. At the 1921 Treaty of Riga, a new eastern frontier was drawn for Poland, leaving large areas with Ukrainian or Belorussian majorities under Polish control.

  The Polish–Soviet War of 1920, coming only two years after the restoration of independence, set the scene for much of what was to happen in the following decades. Although the Battle of Warsaw (the so-called ‘Miracle on the Vistula’) was a providential victory for Poland, the long-term consequences of the conflict were dire.

  Firstly, it powerfully and permanently strengthened the ancient prejudices of both sides. The Russians were confirmed in their view that the Poles were predators and agents of Western capitalism who had exploited Russia’s weakness to seize borderlands which had always owed allegiance to Moscow. The Poles, certain that the invaders had intended to turn Poland into a Bolshevik province ruled from the Kremlin, saw the war as yet one more attempt by their traditional foe to crush Polish independence. The Bolshevik Revolution, they concluded, had merely wrapped up Russian imperial instincts in the red flag.

  Secondly, grievances over the frontiers drawn at Riga were to bring disaster on the next Polish generation – the generation of soldiers who adopted Wojtek. Their homes and their families lay mostly in these borderlands. But the eastern frontiers were a compromise which satisfied neither side. Piłsudski had dreamed of a vast confederation, rather like the old Commonwealth, which would include Poland, Ukraine, Belorussia and Lithuania. In the event, he got a mainly Polish state with large and often discontented ethnic minorities: only 69 per cent of its population was Polish, while Ukrainians and other minorities outnumbered ethnic Poles in the rural parts of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia. Between the wars, Warsaw government policy towards the minorities was often brutal, and Ukrainian nationalist organisations fought back with bombs and political assassinations.

  Józef Piłsudski was the dominant figure in independent Poland until his death in 1935. Always impatient with parliamentary democracy, he retired after a few years but in 1926 returned to lead a military coup which installed an authoritarian regime. After his death, power passed into the hands of army officers with extreme right-wing opinions (the so-called ‘Sanacja’). Political opposition was suppressed, left-wingers found themselves in detention camps and in the late 1930s the regime allowed itself to be pushed into racial discrimination against Jews. In foreign policy, the Sanacja pursued Piłsudski’s principle of balance between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, favouring neither dictatorship against the other but building up Poland’s independent military strength to deter German or Russian invasion.

  This was an illusion. The third fateful consequence of the Polish–Soviet war was an unreal overestimate of Poland’s military potential, coupled with an equally unreal faith in the infallible judgement of the army’s commanders. The 1920 victory over the Red Army had been brilliant, but military technology soon moved on. The Polish army was large in numbers – it could mobilise a million men – and high in morale. But its equipment with tanks, anti-tank artillery and aircraft fell far behind the pace of rearmament in the USSR and above all in Nazi Germany. The efficiency of the Polish navy and the code-breaking skills of Polish military intelligence could not compensate for the weaknesses of the army in the field.

  But the ‘Second Republic’ could also show some astonishing achievements. In the century and a quarter of partition, the three segments of Poland had grown apart; legal systems, education, military training, even railway gauges now had to be unified. After 1918, ambitious central planning rapidly gave Poland the outlines of an effective infrastructure and reorganised its industrial base. The new port of Gdynia was planted at the end of the ‘Polish Corridor’, Poland’s narrow foothold on the Baltic Sea, a city complete with docks and shipyards which sprang up in a few years on the site of a fishing village. But in spite of these successes, Poland remained a strikingly backward and underdeveloped country when compared to its western neighbours. Three out of four Poles lived in the countryside, almost all of them poor peasants. Illiteracy was widespread, and rural overpopulation was recognised as the cause of shocking poverty; a plague for which the Second Republic was given no time to find a cure.

  In spite of the ‘non-alignment’ policy, many Poles realised in the 1930s that a German attack was almost inevitable sooner or later. They also saw that non-alignment, by irritating both of Poland’s dangerous neighbours and conciliating neither of them, threatened to bring about the ultimate national nightmare: an agreement between Russia and Germany to join forces and destroy Poland.

  This had already happened several times in history. It was the story of the eighteenth century partitions, while at the 1812 Convention of Tauroggen, Prussian generals had agreed with the Russians to form an alliance and turn their weapons against Napoleon and his Polish supporters. Now, on the eve of war in August 1939, this lethal pattern was repeated. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union staggered the world by suddenly overcoming their ideological enmity and signing the infamous Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The Poles did not then know that a secret protocol to the pact had arranged for a Fourth Partition between Russia and Germany and the abolition of Polish independence. But all their instincts about this new alliance told them to expect the worst.

  Piłsudski had made a non-aggression agreement with the Soviet Union in 1932, and a similar pact with Nazi Germany in 1934. Neither Stalin nor Hitler had the slightest intention of respecting these pieces of paper. As tensions increased, the government in Warsaw made itself believe that if Germany attacked Poland, France would come to the rescue with effective military support. It was true that a French military mission led by General Weygand (and including a spindly young officer named Charles de Gaulle) had come to Warsaw and given significant help and advice during the Polish–Soviet war of 1920. But French forces, though large in numbers and well equipped with tanks, were in no condition to defend their own country in the late 1930s, let alone to fight their way across Europe to rescue a distant ally.

  As Hitler crushed Czechoslovakia in 1938 and early 1939, it was obvious that his next target would be Poland. Germany had never accepted the loss of territories to Poland after the First World War. Now Hitler concentrated his threats on the Baltic port of Danzig (Gdańsk), which the 1919 Versailles Treaty had redefined as an independent ‘free city’, and on the ‘Polish Corridor’ (another Versailles invention) which separated the main Reich territory from the German territory of East Prussia.

  Hitler’s carefully planned onslaught began in the early hours of 1 September 1939, as the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish forts at Danzig. At the same time, the Luftwaffe bombed Polish cities and the German army drove across the frontier at a dozen points.

  The Second World War had begun. In some ways, the Polish forces were prepared for it. Months earlier, Polish intelligence – which had broken the German Enigma military code – had passed its secrets and an Enigma machine to the British, a gift which was to prove infinitely valuable to the Allied cause. And two days before war broke out, the Polish destroyer flotilla slipped out of Gdynia and made its way to Scotland to join the Royal Navy – another long-planned move.

  But there was no way that the Poles could hold the overwhelming weight of the German attack. Against 2,600 German tanks they had only 150, and only 400 modern aircraft to send up against the Luftwaffe’s 2,000 bombers and fighters. And they were facing a new kind of war: the ‘blitzkrieg’ use of fast-moving armoured divisions which punched through defensive lines and circled round to outflank the enemy, while dive-bombers destroyed transport and communications and drove thousands of fleeing civilians out to block the roads.

  Given their weaknesses, the Poles put up noble resistance during the September Campaign. The tales of Polis
h lancers charging German tanks are mostly fantasy (though there were a few such incidents), but the Germans suffered over 50,000 casualties – more than the British and French together inflicted on them in France the following year. The Germans had not expected such a stubborn defence, and were dismayed when a counter-attack on the Bzura river temporarily threw them back and caused them heavy losses. But the Poles had a strategy problem as well as an equipment problem.

  In 1939, both France and Britain had promised to declare war on Germany if Poland were invaded, and they duly did so on 3 September. There had also been military talks that summer, which the Poles had understood to mean that in the event of war France would attack Germany across the Rhine with full force. The Polish task was therefore to hold up the German armies for about two weeks to allow the French offensive to succeed. But nothing of the kind happened. There was no French offensive, and no military, air or naval assistance was sent to Poland from either France or Britain. This was the first of Poland’s many bitter disappointments with the Western Allies.

  Warsaw was soon surrounded, although the government managed to escape to the south-east. The Polish armies were in retreat, but still fighting hard, when on 17 September the Red Army crossed the frontier without warning and attacked them from behind.

  Moscow announced that Poland had ceased to exist, and that its eastern provinces of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia were being taken over by the Soviet Union to protect their inhabitants. Caught between two enemies, the Polish forces fell apart and organised resistance ceased. Many thousands of prisoners of war were rounded up by the Red Army, and transported eastwards to unknown destinations in the Soviet Union.