Month: March 2022

Changing Maps, Moving Borders

In 1795 the once great Kingdom of Poland, which reached the height of its power in Europe in the 16th and 17th Centuries, disappeared into history as three dominant continental European powers completed a 30-year project to dismember Poland and the confederated Duchy of Lithuania.

Unique to the Polish kingdom is that it did not have an hereditary monarchy. Its kings and sometimes queens were elected by the nobility. Eventurally it became a confederate state that combined -with due respect for the sovereignty of each – the Kingdom of Poland, including much of present day Ukraine, and the Duchy of Lithuania: Lithuania then not a tiny nation on the Baltic but a sprawling territory spreading east into parts of what are now Poland and Byelorussia.

In dismembering Poland, Prussia, tsarist Russia and the Austrian Empire set the stage for the 19th Century across central Europe, affecting tides and currents in history that are felt to this day — including emigration by millions of Poles, eastern European Jews, indeed of virtually every central and eastern European nationality and ethnicity, to the United States during the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Above all, they laid the foundation for pan-European claims, animosities, hostilities, and aggession that produced two World Wars and have now produced this war in Ukraine.

Taken togther the 20th Century world wars that germinated in part from the seeds of the Polish kingdom and its demise constitute a second 30 Years War, which slaughtred more than 60 million Europeans, including 5.8 million Jews murdered in the unique German industrial genocidal inferno we call the Holocaust.

If you see and understand history as connecting dots, of consequences begetting consequences, then the 1795 partition of Poland connects to all these events and currents – to the present, to this very moment — to the very immediate series of dots that is forming the historical blot and blight that is the Russian War against Ukraine.

To understand how the dots move, moved, connect and connected we can look at maps that tell, graphically, the stories of ever changing national fortunes in central and eastern Europe, that show the tides that carried and yet carry the ebb and flow of power and population on that continent.

The 1795 partition was actually the last of three engineered variously from 1772 by Russia, Prussia and Austria. Adjustments later at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 enabled Russia to move even farther west to incorporate Warsaw and surrounding territory.

This map (source Wikipedia) traces them as it presents the elimination of Poland and the redistributon of its land and that of the Duchy of Lithuania.

The main points are that the total partition moved Russia west so that it now incorporated then eastern Poland, which today includes substantial areas of Byelorussia and Ukraine; delivered to Prussia lands that united it with its eastern part, and moved Austria south and east into what had been southern Poland including all of Galicia – where 145 years later the death factory at Auschwitz would be located.

The partitions produced boundaries and borders that stood through the 19th Century and into the 20th Century until WWI erupted, a war that pitted Austro-Hungaria and Imperial Germany, then a united nation for just 60 years under the Prussian Hohenzollern dynasty, with Ottoman Turkey against France, England and Tsarist Russia. The first three the Triple Entente, the second three, later with Italy, the allies.

The war in the west as we know, became stuck in trenches across “no man’s land” for more than four years of slaughter along a gruesome front that extended 400 miles from Belgium south and west through France to its border with Switzerland, with a secondary front along the Alpine border between Italy and Austria.

The war in the east was a broader ebb and flow of battle between the Entente and Russia. Its ultimate direction after some quick preliminary Russian success against Prussia was determined very early in the war in late August 1914 at the Battle of Tannenberg.

There Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and Genderal Erich Ludendorff, his chief of staff, led Germans to decisive victory in an epic battle in late August 1914 that destroyed an entire Russian army and revealed Russia’s rot and weakness. In later years both men would play significant roles in the ascension and accession to power of Adolph Hitler.

Tellingly though the lands on which the battle took place were then part of Germany, today all of that battlefield is in Poland.

Tannenberg revealed that Russia was a hollowed out, backward, poorly governed autocracy with an ill and inadequately equipped, untrained, barely literate army of peasants and conscripted workers who by the end of 1916 had had more than enough of dying for the Tsar.

In February 1917 the Tsar was overthrown, forced to abdicate in favor of a mderate social democratic republic under the premiership of Alexander Kerensky, a well-meaning man who stupidly kept Russia in the war, seeding the ultimate overthrow of his fragile government within the year.

As the Russian army began to throw down its arms and begin the long walk home, the Germans saw opportunity. They arranged to send into Russia the leaders of an extremist faction of the world socialist movement, the Bolsheviks, who were pledged to take Russia out of the war. They conveyed them through the eastern territories they held into Russia. Among them, Lenin.

In November 1917 in “ten days that shook the world” (John Reed), the Bolsheviks siezed control of Moscow and St. Petersburg and founded the state that became the Soviet Union. They promised peace and bread. They knew it would be easier to deliver the first, which they did by ending Russia’s participation in the war, negoiating with Germany in March 1918 the Treaty of Brest Litovsk.

The treaty ceded vast teritory to Germany. For the Bolsheviks the treaty meant they could concentrate on establishing their Marxist state and defend it against counter-revoluton. They did this over the next three years as the Red Army under Leon Trotsky defeated variously White Russian, Polish, British and Czech forces arrayed against it (the civil war portrayed in “Dr. Zhivago”) while also defeating Polish forces in the west contending for control of vast Polish territory that had been Russia’s since 1795.

Russia’s removal from the war enabled Germany to move its big eastern army to the western front where in March 1918 it launced a massive offensive that almost succeeeded in winning the war. But by July the German offensive ground to a halt against stiff allied oppostion in part from the introduction of American marines and soldiers into the battle.

Germany’s power and reserves were spent, opening the way for the allies, greatly bolstered by the arriving Americans, to initiate a last offensive in the fall of 1918 that shattered German power and led to armistice at 11 a.m. Nov. 18 (the eleventh hour of the elevent day of the eleventh month) that ended hostilities.

The lands ceded by the Bolsheviks to Germany and in the bargain also to Austria-Hungary however briefly, essentially included much of what we know today as Ukraine and eastern Poland, and vast areas on the Baltic, including today’s Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

This was the first fundamentally new arrangement of sovereignty and boundaries in the north and center of eastern Europe since the Polish partition.

The next map (source United States World War I Centennial Commission) show the lands ceded by the Bolsheviks to Germany and the resulting shrinkage of Russia in 1918.

Area Lost by Russia in Treaty. Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918)

This next map (source Omniatlas) shows Europe after the Treaty of Brest Litovsk from March 1918 at least to November that year. Ukraine, notably, is not part of Russia/Soviet Union. It’s position was unclear until in 1920 it declared itself a separate, independent nation, a status that changed in the civil war between Whites and Reds and the Red Army’s war with Polish forces that followed and allowed the Bolsheviks to consolidate their revolution and recover much, but not all of the land ceded to Germany at Brest-Litovsk.

In June 1919 the armistice was formalized by the Treaty of Versailles, the resulting peace treaty that had been written for six months in a negotiation solely among the victors. The treaty, largely the nasty work of David Lloyd George of Great Britain and George Clemenceau of France, is as disputed as any document in history. It engendered deep resentment in Germany that became the fount for German neo-nationalism, the myth of a socialist stab in the Fatherland’s back, the rise of the Nazi Party and German’s criminal aggression leading up to and throughout WWII.

The treaty moved boundaries and borders across Europe, willy nilly creating or aggrvating toxic national disbursements and animosities. It created a new nation, Czechoslovaki, combining the Austro-Hungarian Czech lands of Moravia and Slovakia to form that country (now two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia).

Most importantly, after 126 years it reconstitued Poland. It did that with boundaries that gave to the new Poland chunks of the lands ceded by the Bolsheviks to the Germans in the west that, formerly, were inorporated in the eastern regions of Russia, encroaching on Ukraine and what we know as Byelorussia.

Note, in particular present day Lviv, so much in the news currently. As part of Ukraine, it is Lviv. But when it was in Poland was Lvov or Lwow and under the Austro-Hungarian empire had been Lemberg. Today it is the western most major city in Ukraine but was very much within pre-WWII Poland.

Why? Because of WWII. It is not the purpose here to describe the ebb and flow of battle in that war or the minutae of diplomacy, plotting, the machinations of Joeph Stalin – not any of that.

Suffice it to say that at at Yalta, Stalin largely dictated the boundaries of post-war Poland because he could; once again to be reconstituted as a nation after six years of brutal, criminal German occupation that on every day in ever way, was a crime against humanity (crimes including the six German Holocaust death camps – Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmo, Maijdenak, Auschwitz- the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in March/April 1943, the destruction of Warsaw and the Polish Home Army in August 1944, the murder of 6 million Poles including 3 million Polish Jews,the enslavement of millions more Polish people).

Stalin wanted a buffer, a big buffer beween potential future invasion from the west. More than any other ground in Europe, Poland was his buffer.

The United States and England agreed to the new Polish borders because they had to, because all of it was already occupied and in full control by the Red Army, which of course had taken all of Poland on the way to Berlin and the destruction of Nazi Germany and they agreed that German’s punishment would and should include the loss of much of its east.

Stalin’s map pushed Poland west into what Germany had taken from it and onto ground that had been German since the 18th Century. It thereby moved the Soviet border west, incorporating the land the Soviets received in their August 1939 non-agreesion pact with Hitler – and then some.

The map below (source Redit) shows the boundaries of the reconstituted Poland in 1921 and, within the larger boundary of 1921 Poland, shows the post-WWII Poland drawn at Yalta. See how the boundaries shifted from the end of the first war to the end of the second, moving west, ceding large areas to the Soviet Union, which incorporated them in Ukraine and Byelorussia.

Today a million plus refugees in Poland are Ukrainians. In 1795 many might have been thought of as Polish. In 1914 they might have been deemed citizens of Austria or Russia. At the end of 1939 they would have lived under German or Russian control. At the end of the war the victors gave them still new boundaries, new national identities.

It has been ever thus for more than 200 years across northeatern Germany/Poland/the Baltics/Byelorussia/Ukraine.

The end and breakup of the Soviet Union 30 years ago produced or restored separate nations from among its 16 “republics” with Ukraine voting for independence in 1991.

In 1994 in a deal by which Ukraine cemented its recognition as a separate, sovereign nation it agreed in the Budapest Memorandum with co-signatories, the United States, Russia and and the United Kingdom to give up 1,700 fomrer Soviet strategic and tactical nuclear weapons then located within its boundaries.

Key to the agreement was and is that Russia recognized Ukraine as a sovereign nation, surrendering as successor to the Soviet Union any claim to it or any part of it, including the Crimea.

The world sighed a great sigh of relief knowing those weapons woud be removed and disabled. It was done. It seemed order and peace could prevail in Ukraine, in Europe with a reduced nuclear threat.

For 77 years the peace of Europe held until Russia broke it.

When and how can it be restored?

When if ever, when, if not now, will history be done with that troubled space of Europe?