Poland's history: a state taken apart and put back somewhere else

How the Piasts turned tribes into a kingdom

The Western Polans, a Lechitic tribe whose name denotes people living in open fields, gave the country its name from the plain they farmed. The first ruler the written record names is Mieszko I, whose reign began some time before 963 and ended in 992, and who accepted Western Christianity in 966 after marrying Doubravka of Bohemia. That event, known as the baptism of Poland, is the date Polish statehood is conventionally counted from. It was a political act as much as a religious one, because a duke who took Latin Christianity from Bohemia could no longer be converted at spearpoint by his German neighbours.

Mieszko's son Bolesław I the Brave was crowned the first king of Poland in 1025, near the end of a reign spent at war with the Kingdom of Germany between 1002 and 1018. The Congress of Gniezno in the year 1000 had already secured the thing that outlasted the crown: Emperor Otto III recognised an archbishopric at Gniezno, which gave the Polish church a hierarchy of its own.

The kingdom then took itself apart. Bolesław III divided his lands among his sons in his testament of 1138, and for the century and a half that followed the Piast dukes fought one another while their neighbours took the edges. Conrad of Mazovia invited the Teutonic Knights in 1226 to fight the pagan Prussians; the Order conquered Prussia, kept it, and became the state that fought Poland for the next three centuries. Mongol armies burned Little Poland and Silesia in 1241 and killed Duke Henry II the Pious at Legnica. Casimir III, the last Piast king, reunited what was left, codified its law, founded a university at Kraków in 1364, and in 1334 confirmed the charter of Jewish liberties that Bolesław the Pious had granted in 1264. He also renounced Silesia formally in 1339 and never recovered Pomerania, so the kingdom he handed on in 1370 was cut off from the Baltic.

How a marriage joined Poland to Lithuania

When Casimir died without a male heir the crown went to Louis I of Hungary, and after Louis it went to his daughter Jadwiga, who took the throne in 1384. The lords of Little Poland then chose her husband: Jogaila, grand duke of Lithuania, who accepted Roman Catholicism, was crowned as Władysław II Jagiełło in 1386 and ruled until 1434. The Union of Krewo of 1385 had set the terms.

The arithmetic of that marriage is the point. Poland in the middle of the sixteenth century covered about 260,000 square kilometres and held some 3.5 million people. Lithuania brought with it most of what is now Belarus and much of Ukraine. The joint state fought the Teutonic Order at Grunwald in 1410, took Royal Prussia in 1454, and closed the Thirteen Years' War with the Peace of Thorn in 1466.

The dynastic link became a single state on 1 July 1569, when the Union of Lublin created the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Sigismund II Augustus forced the issue by incorporating Podlasia, Volhynia and the province of Kyiv into the kingdom on his own authority, which left the Lithuanian deputies a choice between full union and a mutilated independence. At its greatest extent in the early seventeenth century the Commonwealth covered close to a million square kilometres and held around 11 million inhabitants: Poles, Lithuanians, Ruthenians, Germans, Jews, and smaller numbers of Tatars, Armenians and Scots, under Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Jewish and Muslim law and worship. The Warsaw Confederation of 1573 guaranteed religious toleration across the whole of it, and Jewish communities administered themselves through the Council of the Four Lands.

How the szlachta turned a monarchy into a republic

The Nihil novi act of 1505 moved most legislative power from the monarch to the Sejm, and the century that followed built a constitution unlike anything else in Europe at the time. The szlachta, the gentry, insisted on the formal equality of every one of its members, from landless yeomen to the great magnates, and as a political body it made up 8 to 10% of the population, a wider franchise than most European states had even in the early nineteenth century.

When the Jagiellonian line ended in 1572 the nobility elected its next king outright. The 1573 election was held viritim, with every noble entitled to attend in person, and it was preceded by the Henrician Articles, which converted Poland into a republic with an elective chief magistrate. The king had to summon the Sejm every two years and to accept a set of personal obligations called the Pacta Conventa; if he broke an article, the nation was released from its allegiance. The first man elected under those terms, Henry of Valois, was crowned in Kraków in February 1574 and fled the country at midnight on 18 June the same year to take the French throne.

The machinery that made the republic distinctive also broke it. A deputy first used the liberum veto in 1652 to dissolve a sitting of the Sejm, and unanimity became a weapon that any single member could hold. The Khmelnytsky Uprising of 1648 to 1657 tore the south-east away, the Swedish invasion of 1655 to 1660 ran through the Polish core, and the Truce of Andrusovo in 1667 divided Ukraine permanently with Russia. John III Sobieski relieved Vienna from the Ottoman siege in 1683, and that was the last military high point. The Silent Sejm of 1717 marked the beginning of the Commonwealth as a Russian protectorate, with the tsardom guaranteeing the noble liberties that kept the central government weak.

Why three neighbours took the Commonwealth apart

The partitions were treaties rather than conquests, and they were spaced across twenty-three years.

Russia, Prussia and Austria signed the first on 5 August 1772, after the Bar Confederation's revolt against Russian influence had been put down. It took roughly a third of the Commonwealth's land and about half of its people, and the Sejm ratified it under duress on 30 September 1773. That same Sejm established the Commission of National Education, which is often called the world's first ministry of education.

The rump state then tried to reform itself. The Four-Year Sejm, sitting from 1788, passed the Constitution of 3 May 1791, the first codified supreme law of a state in modern Europe. Catherine of Russia treated it as a threat; conservative nobles formed the Targowica Confederation in Saint Petersburg on 14 May 1792 and invited the Russian army in. Prussia joined, and the Second Partition followed on 23 January 1793, confirmed by the Grodno Sejm with Russian troops around the chamber. Tadeusz Kościuszko, a popular general and a veteran of the American Revolution, proclaimed a national insurrection at Kraków on 24 March 1794 and emancipated peasants to fill its ranks; Russian and Prussian forces took Warsaw that November. On 24 October 1795 the three powers divided what remained, and King Stanisław August Poniatowski was escorted to Grodno and made to abdicate.

What Poles did without a state

For 123 years the answer took two forms, and they alternated with each defeat.

The first was armed. Jan Henryk Dąbrowski's Polish Legions fought in French campaigns between 1797 and 1802 in the expectation of being paid in a homeland, and Józef Wybicki wrote the marching song for them in 1797 that is now the national anthem. Napoleon created the Duchy of Warsaw in 1807; the Congress of Vienna replaced it in 1815 with a Kingdom of Poland joined to the Russian Empire under the tsar, with its own constitution and army. The November Uprising of 1830 became a full war with Russia and ended in defeat in 1831, after which the kingdom lost both the constitution and the army. The January Uprising of 1863 was fought by partisan units until the spring of 1864, when the last commander, Romuald Traugutt, was captured. Congress Poland was then demoted in official usage to the Vistula Land.

The second was civil. After 1864 the effort went into what was called organic work: cooperative banks, trade associations, village reading rooms, private Polish-language teaching against Russification in the east and Germanisation in the west. The Polish Academy of Learning was founded at Kraków in 1872, in the Austrian partition, where policy was loosest and Galicia was granted limited autonomy from 1867. Around the turn of the century some 15.5 million Polish speakers lived across the three partitions, and their economies had grown apart: Warsaw metallurgy and Łódź textiles selling into Russia, farms and railways in the Prussian lands selling into Germany, oil and poverty in Austrian Galicia. The republic reassembled in 1918 inherited three of everything and no integrated infrastructure joining them, which disrupted industry, transport and trade for years.

How Poland put itself back together

All three partitioning empires collapsed within four years of each other. Józef Piłsudski, released from German imprisonment, reached Warsaw on 10 November 1918, was granted authority by the Regency Council the next day, and became temporary head of state on 22 November. Independence is dated to 11 November 1918.

The borders took another three years and six wars. The Treaty of Versailles gave Poland an outlet to the sea and left other lines to plebiscites, which produced three Silesian uprisings between 1919 and 1921. The Polish-Soviet War was the largest of the conflicts: Polish armies reached Kyiv in June 1920, a Soviet counter-offensive reached the outskirts of Warsaw in August, and the Polish victory at the Battle of Warsaw reversed it. The Peace of Riga of March 1921 fixed an eastern border that kept a substantial part of the old Commonwealth's eastern lands inside Poland.

That settlement decided what kind of country the Second Republic would be. By the language criterion of the 1931 census, Poles made up 69% of the population, Ukrainians 15%, Yiddish speakers 8.5%, Belarusians 4.7% and Germans 2.2%. The March Constitution of 1921 deliberately kept the presidency weak; Gabriel Narutowicz, elected under it, was assassinated on 16 December 1922 after five days in office. Piłsudski seized power in the May Coup of 12 May 1926 and governed until his death in 1935 through a movement called Sanation, which allowed parties and manipulated elections, imprisoned opposition deputies before the 1930 vote, and held about three thousand people without trial at the Bereza Kartuska camp between 1934 and 1939. The economy stayed flat. Population grew from 26.3 million in 1919 to 34.8 million in 1939, industrial production barely moved between 1913 and 1939, and output per head fell by 18% over those years.

What the two occupations did to Poland

Germany invaded on 1 September 1939 with 60 divisions and nearly 1.5 million men, more than 2,000 tanks, nearly 900 bombers and over 400 fighter planes. Britain and France declared war on 3 September and sent nothing. The Soviet Union invaded from the east on 17 September, and on 29 September the two powers signed a treaty in Moscow partitioning the country along the Bug. Warsaw had surrendered the day before; the last Polish units stopped fighting on 6 October.

Germany annexed West Prussia, Poznań, Upper Silesia and Danzig outright in October 1939 and administered the rest as the General Government. The Soviet side deported some 325,000 Polish citizens east in 1940 and 1941 and shot about 22,000 officers and officials at Katyn. Both occupiers targeted the educated: the AB-Aktion and Operation Tannenberg on one side, Katyn on the other.

Six German extermination camps operated on occupied Polish soil. At Auschwitz Birkenau, which ran from 1940 to 1945, historical investigations put the number murdered at 1.5 million, and about 90% of the victims of the complex died at Birkenau. In Warsaw, between 22 July and 21 September 1942, German units deported about 265,000 Jews from the ghetto to Treblinka and killed some 35,000 inside it. When they returned for the remainder, about 700 fighters of the Jewish Combat Organization held them for twenty-seven days from 19 April 1943, and on 16 May the SS commander reported that the Jewish quarter no longer existed.

The Home Army began the Warsaw Uprising on 1 August 1944, expecting the Red Army across the Vistula to come on. It halted instead. The Poles surrendered on 2 October after two months, and the Germans then demolished what was left of the city on Hitler's orders. Around 6 million Polish citizens died in the war, about half of them Jews, and roughly 90% of the deaths were non-military. The country lost 38% of its national assets, against 0.8% for Britain and 1.5% for France.

Why the borders moved west after the war

The Great Powers agreed at the Tehran Conference in late 1943 that Poland's borders on both sides would be redrawn, and the Potsdam Conference of 17 July to 2 August 1945 settled the terms. The Soviet Union kept the eastern territories it had taken in 1939, including Lwów and Wilno. Poland was compensated with most of Silesia, most of Pomerania, the southern part of East Prussia and Danzig, up to the Oder and Neisse rivers, pending a final German peace conference that never met.

Polish authorities called the new western lands the Recovered Territories. The net effect of the exchange was a country 77,500 square kilometres smaller than the Poland of 1939, a fifth of its former area, with a longer coast and a more compact shape. It also came with a developed industrial base and infrastructure taken over from Germany, and the loss of 70% of the pre-war oil capacity to the Soviet Union.

Then the people were moved to match the lines. By 1950 some 8,030,000 Germans had been evacuated, expelled or had migrated west, including in wild expulsions carried out by Polish forces in June and July 1945 before Potsdam had concluded. Between 1.5 and 2 million Poles were moved out of the areas annexed by the Soviet Union, most of them resettled in the former German territories. Close to 95% of the roughly 700,000 Ukrainians and Lemkos inside the new borders were deported to Soviet Ukraine or, in 1947, dispersed across the north and west under Operation Vistula. The census of December 1950 recorded a population 97.6% ethnically Polish. The multi-ethnic Commonwealth had produced a nation-state, by removal, a hundred and fifty-five years after it stopped existing.

How communism ended at a negotiating table

The Polish People's Republic was proclaimed under its 1952 constitution, and it was broken open four times by strikes before it fell. Workers rioted at Poznań in June 1956, and the Polish October that followed brought Władysław Gomułka back and ended collectivisation, which left most farmland in private family hands, unusually for the bloc. Price rises brought protests in December 1970 in Gdańsk, Gdynia and Szczecin, where troops and police killed dozens; Edward Gierek replaced Gomułka and borrowed heavily in the West to raise living standards, a strategy that had turned into negative growth by 1979. Another attempt to raise meat prices, with foreign debt above 20 billion dollars around 1 July 1980, set off the strike wave that mattered.

The Gdańsk Agreement of 31 August 1980 conceded the right to independent trade unions and the right to strike. Delegates from across the country formed Solidarity on 17 September 1980; by March 1981 the union claimed 9.5 million members. Martial law was declared on the night of 12 to 13 December 1981, Solidarity's leadership was interned, nine workers were killed in the pacification of the Wujek colliery, and the union was reduced to a few thousand underground activists. Martial law formally ended in July 1983, and a general amnesty in September 1986 released nearly all political prisoners.

What ended the system was a bargain. Strikes through 1988 and an economy in decline brought the government to the Round Table talks of April 1989, which legalised independent unions and set elections for 4 and 18 June. Only 35% of Sejm seats were freely contested, along with the whole Senate; the opposition won almost every seat it was allowed to contest, and the arithmetic of the deal collapsed. Tadeusz Mazowiecki formed a government approved by the Sejm on 12 September 1989, the first in post-war Poland led by a non-communist. Inflation reached 900% by the end of that year, and the Balcerowicz Plan approved in December 1989 converted the planned economy to a market one at speed. A new constitution was approved by referendum in 1997. Poland joined the Council of Europe on 26 November 1991, the OECD on 22 November 1996, NATO on 12 March 1999, the European Union on 1 May 2004 and the Schengen Area on 21 December 2007, and kept the złoty.