BOOKS
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over, in just a few years Poland was to plunge into a series of
disastrous wars, never to recover fully again. Still, it is a fact that at
the turn of the sixteenth century the Polish-Lithuanian Com–
monwealth was one of Europe's superpowers. With
990,000
square
kilometers, it was the largest state in Europe; with a ten-million–
strong multi-ethnic population, it equalled Italy and Spain and out–
numbered England. With rich and cultivated soil, it drew enormous
profits from the grain trade. Most important, its unique political
system of "noble democracy" with elected ,kings, central power kept
at a necessary minimum, relative religious tolerance and personal
liberties enshrined in laws seemed to have made it a miraculous oasis
in the midst of a Europe plagued by wars, religious persecution, and
growing absolutism .
Against this background of prosperity, stability, and relative
calm of the old Commonwealth, the more recent course of Polish
history seems all the more shocking. In Neal Ascherson's words, "No
other nation has suffered so much in this century, and gained so lit–
tle." Not only the last century but the last three have been for the
Poles one long series of calamities, punctuated from time to time by
spectacular outbursts of reformist or insurrectionist activity, after
each of which there usually came an even worse disaster. The liberal
and democratic Constitution of the Third of May
(1791)
made null
and void almost immediately by the final Partition of Poland in
1795;
the insurrections of the nineteenth century defeated by the op–
pressor with sickening regularity; the regained independence of
1918-39
smothered by World War II and Communism; Solidarity
swept underground by martial law - the pattern repeats itself too
often, and the series is too long to be explained by an accidental run
of misfortunes. In the traditional stock of patriotic allegories, Poland
has usually been presented as a figure of a mother protecting her
children. It seems sometimes that this allegory should be reversed:
Poland is an underachieving, hopelessly unsuccessful child, whose
parents - the Polish people - torment themselves endlessly with the
question: "What went wrong?"
The worldwide attention attracted by the most recent of Po–
land's misfortunes, the suppression of Solidarity, is the reason why
this question is asked with increasing frequency by Western
historians as well . Only ten years ago one would have had a hard
time trying to find a comprehensive and up-to-date history of Poland
written by a British or American specialist. The eighties alone have
brought about several such books, to mention only
The History of
