Norman Davies - God’s Playground: A History of Poland, Vol. 1 + 2, Revised

GODS PLAYGROUND A History of Poland

IN TWO VOLUMES VOLUME I THE ORIGINS TO 1795

NORMAN DAVIES

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York

Copyright 2005 Norman Davies All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0-231-12817-7

10 98765432

Typseset by Hope Services (Abingdon) Ltd.

Printed in Great Britain on permanent and durable acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd.

Kings Lynn, Norfolk

for DANIEL

So that he may know and love the land of his birth, (if he wants to).

To write the history of someone elses country is, no doubt, to take a terrible liberty. Judging by the reticence which professional scholars show before pronouncing on minor episodes in the past of their own country, it would seem that only the young and foolhardy might attempt to publish their thoughts on other peoples millennia. A proper appreciation of the complexities of the task deters most of those best qualified to perform it. An Englishman who has dared to write a History of Poland, therefore, must be aware that any number of Polish scholars know vastly more about the subject than he does. At the same time, free from the burdens of their knowledge and from political circumstances which inhibit the expression of independent views, he can still hope to contribute perspectives and insights of value. Fortitude, no less than Modesty, must be his constant companions.

This study is not inspired by any particular ideology. It cannot claim to be objective, of course, since objectivity is always impossible. Like all history books, it had to be written through the distorting medium of the mind of the historian, whose private quirks necessarily select a finite quantity of information from the infinite details of past reality. It can faithfully reproduce that reality no more than a two-dimensional photograph, formed through the refracting glass of the cameras lens, can produce an accurate picture of the three-dimensional world. The historian, like the camera, always lies. He is incapable of telling the whole truth. All he can do is to recognize the particular distortions to which his work is inevitably subject, and to avoid the grosser forms of retouching and excision. Like the photographer who demonstrates the effect on his picture of all the available light filters, he can present the various interpretations of controversial issues with equal prominence, and refrain from arbitrary judgements. By so doing, he can hope if not to be objective, then at least to be impartial.

In this regard, a note on the historians private philosophy of history may not be entirely irrelevant. Two formative influences have tended to pull me in opposite directions. A period of study at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, where the requirements for the doctoral examinations included reading matter of a distinctly ideological nature, certainly aroused my curiosity about the problem of Causality. Whilst not converting me to the cogency of Marxism, Leninism, or Marxism-Leninism, it did reinforce my earlier suspicions that something akin to historical forces might exist, and might be responsible in part for the way that things happen. Concurrently, an earlier period of study in

the School of Modem History at Oxford under the tuition of Mr A. J. P. Taylor did not pass entirely into oblivion. Unlike our illustrious predecessor at Magdalen College, Edward Gibbon, I cannot pretend that my years at Oxford were the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life. I did not accept that Mr Taylors inimitable opinions are invariably perverse, and I respect his promptings that both chance, and the will of individual human beings, play their part in directing the course of events. As a result, in trying to reconcile the contrary influences, I have come to hold that Causality is not composed exclusively of determinist, individualist, or random elements, but from a combination of all three. In any given historical situation, I insist at the start on identifying a matrix of social, economic, cultural, institutional, military, personal, and dynamic political factors which are pertinent to all further developments. But there I draw the line. I think that the matrix of historical forces determines the limits of the possible, but does not, and cannot determine what course events will subsequently take within those given limits. I believe that a range of choices is always available to individuals, especially to those set in positions of authority, and that their response to the options before them can influence mankinds fate decisively. In the realm of human motivation, I happen to believe in the primacy of the irrational, seeing Reason as the servant, not as the master of our fears, emotions, and instincts. Finally, I believe that all human beings are fallible; that all leaders of men are inadequate to their calling: and that the results of their actions are rarely an exact measure of what they intended. As Bismarck once remarked, they are not so much in full control of events, as in a position occasionally to deflect them. When they fail to do either, they lay themselves open to what the ancients called Fate or Providence, what the moderns call Accidents, and what the British call muddling through. In short, life is not entirely absurd; but it is not entirely rational either. Among British and American scholars, attitudes of this sort are not uncommon; but whether they find any coherent expression in the text only the reader can judge.

In writing the history of a modern country, however, philosophical reflections must often take second place to more practical problems. Among them is the problem of hindsight. On the one hand, the cautious historian is bound to wonder whether the teleological exercise of tracing the origins of a modern state or nation from the present into the past is essentially unhistorical. It tends to confuse antecedent and postcedent with cause and effect, and obliterates the multifarious alternatives which faced the actors of the drama at each stage of their progress. It justifies the course of events in terms of their outcome. In the Polish case, it suggests that the present Peoples Republic of Poland is the one and only conceivable product of the historical process. On the other hand, the historian is unable to deny that he is living in the fourth quarter of the twentieth century, and not in the Dark Ages, and that he is blessed with the benefit of hindsight whether he likes it or not. Nor can he ignore the interests of his readers, whose curiosity about a modern country will have more probably been aroused by the happenings of their own times than by any thirst for knowledge about the

remoter past. He is bound to pay some special attention to those aspects of his subject most closely connected to the world in which we live.

There is, above all, the capital problem of definition. For the historian who aims to write a comprehensive survey of a European country, the really difficult task lies less in the interpretation of historical facts than in defining what facts are supposed to be interpreted. In this regard, it is much easier to discredit the syntheses of rivals and predecessors than to construct a coherent scheme for oneself. Oddly enough, modern Marxist-Leninist historians in Poland have swallowed the old nationalist ideology hook, line, and sinker. Although their socio-economic analysis of the development of the Polish national community represents a new tack in modern historiography, their unquestioning acceptance of the permanent existence of that community throughout recorded history stands in complete agreement with the definition of Polish History as assumed by pre-war nationalist scholars. Very few Polish historians have doubted the contention that the Polish community of their own day was the sole legitimate claimant to the soil on which they live, and that they are the natural and exclusive heirs of all those earlier communities who occupied those same lands. Yet such a contention, though politically convenient, is demonstrably false. The citizens of the Peoples Republic do not have the same things in common as the citizens of pre-war Poland, still less with the subjects of the stateless Polish nation of the nineteenth century or of the Kingdom and Republic of earlier times.