Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations by Norman Davies Read Free Book Online Page B

over the Russian Empire. But the man who threw the bomb that killed Tsar Alexander II in 1881 was a déclassé nobleman from the district of Bobruisk, Ignacy Hryniewiecki (1856–81). The socialists long remained undistinguished from the anarchists, and until the end of the century were largely undifferentiated between the democratic and undemocratic tendencies. Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935), who hailed from a minor landowning family from the Vilna district, became a leading light in the illegal Polish Socialist Party (PPS), having spent five years in exile in Siberia. He was to emerge in 1918 as the first head of state of a reborn Poland. Yet he always stayed true to the multinational traditions of the grand duchy, contesting nationalism in all its forms and longing for close co-operation between Poles, Jews, Lithuanians and Belarusians. The Bund , or Jewish Labour League, came into being in Minsk in 1897. (Ironically enough, Piłsudski’s ethnic, social and geographical origins were almost identical to those both of Ignacy Hryniewiecki and of Feliks Dzierz˙yński (1877–1926).
    In late nineteenth-century Europe, nationality issues rose to the top of the agenda almost everywhere. Any number of national movements took to the field in opposition to the central authorities, aiming in the first instance to capture cultural affairs – to promote a national language, to publicize national literature and to formulate a national history. Then they moved on to demand political autonomy, and, as the final stage, the creation of a national state.
    In this context, the lands of the former grand duchy offered abundant, politically fertile ground. The brutal tsarist regime invited resistance, and social structures were crumbling due to the proscription of the nobility and the liberation of the serfs. The result was fierce competition, not only between tsarist officialdom and its opponents, but equally between nationalist and socialist groupings and between rival national movements. A spectrum of separate national dreams arose that could not be satisfied without conflict.
    The Russians had developed a state-backed nationalism of their own that was projected from Moscow and St Petersburg into the imperial provinces. It viewed the Poles, dominant in the former ruling class of the Rzeczpospolita , as the prime enemy. The Lithuanians (though Roman Catholic) and the Jews were seen as prospective allies against the Poles, while the Ruthenians were classed as Russians. In the past ‘Polishness’ had been associated both with the landowning nobility and with Roman Catholicism, but these associations gradually broke down. Increasingly it was linked to all Polish-speakers, irrespective of social, economic or religious status. A large group of déclassé Polish nobles strove to keep up appearances. A Polish bourgeoisie held the fort in Wilno, as they called it, and a sizeable Polish sector of the peasantry was concentrated in the surrounding district. All tended to show solidarity with their compatriots in the former kingdom.
    The Ruthenians, almost entirely enserfed until 1861, possessed little awareness of nationality. If asked about their national affiliation, they were famous for replying that they were tutejsi or ‘locals’. Nonetheless, they were deeply offended by the forcible introduction of Russian Orthodoxy, and grew more receptive to the activists who were collecting and publishing Belarusian folklore and codifying the Belarusian language for educational purposes. Contrary to some predictions, they never sought to join their fellow Ruthenians in Ukraine. Instead, some of them sought to imitate Polish culture. Jan Czeczot (1796–1847), who was Polish, is often regarded as the pioneer of Belarusian identity. Vincent Dunin-Marcinkiewicz (1807–84) initiated the Belarusian literary tradition by translating Pan Tadeusz .
    The Lithuanian national movement started from similarly humble beginnings. Church-based Lithuanian primary