Following nearly two centuries of personal unions, Poland and Lithuania formalized a Commonwealth in 1569, which extended from the Baltic nearly to the Black Sea. It was one of Europe’s largest political entities. Poland is once more one of the strongest powers in Europe and key to resisting Russian aggression against Ukraine.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth disappeared from the map in 1795 after being partitioned by Russia, Prussia, and Austria.
Between the two world wars, Poland and the three Baltic states became independent, only to become parts of the Soviet empire again from the 1940s until the 1990s.
My memories of that era illustrate how Eastern Europe suffered under Moscow’s rule. American exchange students at Moscow University in 1958, like me, were not allowed a Christmas tree, because they were told North Koreans objected to such religiosity. A Polish student, however, attended a mass that was permitted for foreign diplomats.
Two years later, visiting Poland for the first time, I was pleasantly shocked by the avant-garde art in galleries — a vivid contrast to the socialist realism mandatory in Moscow. The biggest Soviet influence on Warsaw was the 44-story Palace of Culture and Science, built in 1955 and conceived by the same Russian architect who designed the seven Stalinist skyscrapers in Moscow.
I returned to Poland in 1968 as Czech and Slovak reformers strove for “Socialism with a human face,” efforts that convulsed the Soviet empire with hope and rage. Having met reformers at the magazine Literárne Listy and the Academy of Sciences in Prague, my partner and I took the train to Starý Smokovec in Slovakia’s High Tatras.
I planned to climb with a guide I knew from a previous visit, but he phoned at 3 am to say he had been mobilized to face Warsaw Pact invaders.
My partner and I stayed in our hotel for several days while our radio repeatedly played Smetana’s My Country. For news, we listened to Ősterreich Eins from Vienna and finally escaped by hitchhiking to Zakopane, Poland, then by bus to a small hotel in Krakow.
There, we were awakened at 1:30 am and arrested by security. Why? My partner had sketched in the hotel guestbook what we saw painted on the main street in Starý Smokovec: a swastika with names of the invading armies on each arm.
This broke a Polish law banning any image of a swastika. Concluding that we were not NATO agents, even though we spoke German, security released us after a long weekend but ordered us never to return to Poland. When our airplane landed in Vienna, I kissed the tarmac.
In the 1980s, Lech Wałęsa was organizing Gdansk workers into Solidarność, a popular trade union movement demanding self-rule as well as economic change. Observing its transforming role and influence on other Soviet satellites, I expected a domino ripple and questioned whether the Soviet empire could survive 1984. What a change since 1968!
As Russia sought to take Ukraine in the 2020s, Poland was the first nation to give Ukraine heavy weaponry. Nearly all foreign military and humanitarian supplies from other nations transit through Poland into Ukraine, and it has trained more than 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers and facilitated joint defense projects.
Poland spends a larger share of its GDP on defense than any NATO country in Europe. Of an estimated 10 million Ukrainians who have arrived in Poland since 2020, roughly 1.5 million are currently living, studying, or working in Poland.
Recently, however, an issue from their tangled past has disrupted relations between Warsaw and Kyiv. The conflict was sparked by Ukraine’s decision to name a military unit “Heroes of the UPA.”
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) is revered in Ukraine as an independence force, but Poland officially classifies its actions against Poles in the 1940s as genocide.
Poland’s president revoked Zelenskyy’s Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state award. Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian officials returned their awards to Warsaw.
The dispute centers on the Volhynia and Eastern Galicia massacres of World War II, in which UPA units are accused of killing some 100,000 Polish civilians. Ukrainians note that Polish partisans killed up to 20,000 Ukrainians.
Recent polls in Poland show that negative attitudes towards Ukrainians have surged to 43% since the dispute. Moderates in both countries are trying to quiet these tensions, but damage has been done to the relationship. The Polish-Ukrainian dispute cannot be allowed to fester; their relationship is just too important.
Walter Clemens is Associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, and Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Boston University. He wrote The Baltic Transformed: Complexity Theory and European Security, Foreword by Jack F. Matlock (2001); Baltic Independence and Russian Empire (1991); and Can Russia Change? The USSR Confronts Global Interdependence (1990 and 2011).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
