Black Earth(23)

For Pi?sudski neither Russia nor the Left was an abstraction. As a student in Kharkiv in 1886, he moved with the Russian revolutionary populists of Narodnaia Volia, the movement that would inspire the Bolsheviks of the next generation. A year later his older brother plotted with Lenin’s older brother in a conspiracy to assassinate the tsar. Pi?sudski was accused of involvement as well, and sentenced to five years of Siberian exile. Upon his return he helped to establish the illegal Polish Socialist Party and edited its newspaper, The Worker. He was a Russian revolutionary, in that he and his comrades operated in an illegal underground along with Russians, Jews, and socialists of all possible origins in the Russian Empire.

Pi?sudski was perfectly aware that there were Jews on the Left: Jews in the Russian socialist movement who opposed Polish independence; Jews who wanted Jewish autonomy with whom he cooperated; Jews in his own Polish Socialist Party. Jews were among the comrades and friends of his political youth and, in some measure, his political maturity. He knew the Polish Jews and other Poles who took part in the Bolshevik Revolution. These were, for him, individuals with names and pasts who had made a terrible mistake. He himself believed that statehood had to precede socialism. During and after the First World War he plotted with and fought alongside numerous Jewish members of his Legions and Polish Military Organization. In his circles the Judeobolshevik idea was known to be a folly. The Soviet Union was an actual foreign threat, whereas the Jewish question was a matter of domestic politics.

Pi?sudski and his comrades tended to see empires as incubators of nations, and progress as national liberation. As people who had themselves built an independent nation-state from territories of the defunct Russian Empire, they tended to believe that the same process could be repeated within the Soviet Union. The major national question, to their minds, was Ukraine. Whereas Hitler and the Nazis tended to see Ukraine as a zone for settler colonization, Pi?sudski and his comrades saw it as a neighboring country and a possible political asset. Indeed, for many Polish leaders Ukraine was home. Pi?sudski was from Lithuania, but he studied in eastern Ukraine. Many of Pi?sudski’s lieutenants were Poles from Ukraine, and much of the 1919–1920 war with the Bolsheviks had been fought there. Thousands of Poles from Ukraine had been killed in battle there, as had thousands of Poles who were not. Poles from Ukraine regarded the country sometimes sentimentally and often condescendingly, but always as a place inhabited by human beings. Unlike the Nazis, no Polish statesman could see Ukraine as a blank slate or as a land without people.

After Pi?sudski’s return to power in 1926, some of his old comrades in the foreign ministry and in military intelligence began a project known as Prometheanism. Named after the titan of Greek mythology who blessed humanity with light and cursed humanity with hope, this policy involved the support of oppressed nations against empires, and in particular the support of the Ukrainian cause in the Soviet Union. The USSR had been established as a union of formally national republics. Soviet leaders imagined that new non-Russian and non-Jewish elites could be recruited through an acknowledgment of the existence of the other nationalities combined with affirmative action. Their optimism was grounded in a Marxist faith about the future triumph of the working class and the socialism it would bring. The Polish Prometheans, working from a different scheme of history, saw the Soviet nations rather than social classes as the historical actors that, with proper support, might weaken the Soviet Union. Prometheanism was the hidden part of Polish foreign policy, funded from secret budgets and carried out by trusted men and women. Its centerpiece was Poland’s most Ukrainian province, Volhynia, where for several years a Ukrainian culture was officially supported in order to attract the attention and sympathy of Ukrainians within the Soviet Union.





Naturally, support of national movements within the Soviet Union, and the whole Promethean idea, were thought to serve Polish interests. Even so, many of those who took part in them also believed that they were continuing a certain ethical tradition, one of sacrifices made by one nation for the good of all. Their liberal nationalism had been confirmed rather than challenged by the outcome of the First World War. The slogan from the romantic patriots of the nineteenth century was “For your freedom and ours!” All would make sacrifices, and all could triumph in the end.

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Pi?sudski was right to see the USSR as a solid political edifice and as a continual threat to Poland, but wrong to view it as a kind of updated Russian Empire. Hitler grasped its novelty and radicalism, but mistakenly reduced the ideas and aims of its leaders to Jewish world domination. Soviet ideologists presented Pi?sudski and Hitler together as “fascists,” which overlooked the very significant differences between an authoritarian defender of statehood and a warmongering biological anarchist. But Marxists were right to notice that the private property regime that prevailed in both Poland and Germany was so different from the Soviet system as to make communism almost impossible to understand in both Warsaw and Berlin.