It’s the end of the world

Disclaimer: I’m an evil Polish pan (Polish Lord) - that’s the label a very angry very patriotic Ukrainian Twitter lady with many followers gave me. I think she could in fact be a deep Russian agent who tries to antagonize Poles with her love of Bandera and Galizei.

So… back to the subject, while the shrapnel of Russia’s genocidal war falls voer the border that Stalin carved out in Poland, I’ll talk about how borders matter and don’t.

Here’s the Polish concept of the ‘Kresy’ (borderlands). The grey is Kresy around 1939.

Via Wikipedia.

That’s only the 1939 part of Kresy which covered lands further east.

Kresy could also be considered to cover the red areas of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine on this map. Not Prussia, Latvia, Estonia, or Ukraine beyond the Dnipro, Crimea or Kyiv.

Anyway you can call this a Polish-Lithuanian empire (Lithuania nobility was heavily polonized), a Commonwealth or a geographic area with cultural, historical and economic ties: “The Polish word kresy ("borderlands") is the plural form of the word kres meaning 'edge'. According to Zbigniew Gołąb, it is "a medieval borrowing from the German word Kreis", which in the Middle Ages meant Kreislinie, Umkreis, Landeskreis ("borderline, delineation or circumscribed territory")” - Wiki.

Regardless you can see that large areas of Belarus (almost all) and Ukraine are part of Kresy however you define it.

From Polish wiki: “The Kresy before the Second World War were portrayed sentimentally and nostalgically as “the country of childhood” or a paradise lost. During and after the war, the Kresy became in Polish culture a place of tragedy, where being Polish became victim of atrocity.” (Polish Wiki - not exactly IM).

Kresy is almost 1:1 the area of the Pale of Settlement - the area where the extremely antisemitic and viciously racist Russian empire kept the Jews it had enslaved in the old Commonwealth lands it had stolen.

Timothy Snyder portrays the area as well as lands to the west of it as the “Bloodlands”. 1 There was plenty of genocide and pogroms in the Kresy. Lots of pogroms. The Russians taught the Poles, Belarussians, Ukrainians and Balts how to do pogroms properly. It is after all a Russian word. Poles were antisemitic, often violently, before Russian (and Prussian and Austrian) occupation but there was a reason Jews lived in Poland fairly freely - these goys didn't murder them quite as often and effectively. Then they found themselves under Russian rule. That was a lot more pogromy. And the Germans and Austrians invented modern ‘scientific’ antisemitism based around nonsense science which led to the gas chambers (shout out to the French with their own artistic brand of anti-semitism). Modern Polish anti-semitism mixes the less murderous 19th-century Catholic strand of antisemitism with full on “all Jews are Jesus Satan murderer conspiracy Nazis” of Russian Orthodoxy. Thanks for that, Russia.

Kresy weren’t all bad. Raphael Lemkin of genocide fame, portrayed his life as a Jew in a Belarussian/Polish village as bucolic. The children he played with couldn’t be told apart, apart from some minor differences in clothes and diet.2 Lemkin finished Uniwersytet Lwówski (Lviv University) where his mentor and friend was a professor Makarewicz, a converted Jew and outspoken anti-semite and Polish nationalist in words... who nonetheless befriended the future Zionist, Lemkin.3 Hersch Lauterpacht, the equally brilliant lawyer and future QC, however experienced antisemitism leading him to leave Poland - which probably saved his life, Lemkin was insanely lucky to survive the German-Soviet invasion.

Obviously Lviv University is an important scholarly seat in Ukraine. Professor Makarewicz even survived the war and continued his lectures in the Soviet Ukrainian SSR! But see the above list of lawyers, three Jews. One very Polish who became a Soviet citizen. One equally Polish who was driven into exile in America and experienced Zionism but wrote the important and mostly ignored until now Soviet Genocide in Ukraine about the fate of Ukrainians at Russian hands. 4

Kresy were a deeply important part of Poland throughout Prusso-German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian occupation - after Polish regained independence, one of the key elements of Polish politics was to regain lands to the east (Kresy as well as Wilno/Vilnius) as well as the west (Silesia, sometimes called the West Kresy).

This wasn’t just a form of Polish imperialism. The lands to the east of the Bug river (current Polish border) were deeply integrated in Polish culture and economics. Remember that Warsaw lay in the Russian sphere of occupation. What is now much of western Poland wasn’t Polish after 1919. Poland’s Goethe equivalent, Mickiewicz, arguably most important work, Pan Tadeusz (1834, Paris… because of course), starts with “Lithuania, my fatherland, you are like health.”. Pan Tadeusz is important for Poles, Lithuanians and Belarussians. Some Belarussians even try and deny Mickiewicz his strident Polishness… That said it would have been madness for Adam Mickiewicz to view himself as ‘only a Pole’, or only Lithuanian or Belarussian. He would have called anybody trying to pigeonhole him mad. As would have most inhabitants of Kresy up to perhaps 1939. Except for Jews… who were still highly integrated as Lemkin’s example shows.

My grandmother was born to a Polish officer and an Ukrainian lady, Olga (blonde blue eyed, unlike most Ukrainians). My grandfather was born in Białystok, the ‘gateway’ to the Kresy in Poland proper. Now its almost a border town instead of being in the middle of Poland. He was also blonde and blue eyed, saved him from Auschwitz.

Polish ties with Ukraine and Belarus were violently ripped apart during the Soviet invasion of Poland alongside the Nazis.

See the tankie, laugh at the tankie!

Polish ties with Lithuania had weakened for reasons I’m not quite sure about during the 19th and early 20th century, up to Poland occupying Vilnius, the current and proper Lithuanian capital.

Despite what tankie imbeciles like Brenton might think, the Eastern Bloc was a deeply racist, tightly controlled place. A Soviet citizen (Belarussian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian including the dominant Russians) who wasn’t a spy, diplomat or soldier couldn’t and wouldn’t travel to Poland. More likely to go on a tightly controlled trip to the ‘decadent West’. The ties between nations were broken apart in the cage of Russian empire. What else would you expect of a system where the PEASANTS couldn’t leave their administrative region within the ‘republics’ of the Soviet (Russian) state? Travel around the USSR required internal ‘passports’. Peasants didn’t get them. External passports were handed out with more care and supervision than assault rifles. Those internal passports even had ‘nationalities’ like “JEW”, what do you think of that Brenton?

After the fall of communism and that of the Soviet Union, initiated by Lithuanian (ps good old Gorbachev murdered Lithuanians) and then Ukrainian independence - the borders became paradoxically easier to cross than within the Soviet Russian Warsaw Pact empire.

One example of this is a certain ex of mine… born to a Polish-Ukrainian mother and a Pole. They grew up near Lviv, then moved quickly to Poland, near Rzeszów (where the US military has quietly built a major logistics hub in response to the buildup to and during this war). She speaks better Polish than me. And lives in Geneva. Next to another ex of mine :) Which speaks volumes about me I guess. My best friend is married to an Ukrainian lady. He now has an adopted Ukrainian son who speaks fluent Polish. The two sisters to the lad are half-Polish. The mother helps Ukrainians and Belarussians get residence in Poland. Her mother now lives in Poland permanently. I’m sitting in a bar, writing this, run by an Ukrainian. One of his barmen is a Belarussian who can’t go back to Belarus for reasons… The cleaning lady at the bar also cleans my flat from time to time. My hairdresser now employs only Ukrainian women. The male barbers have all gone back to Ukraine to fight. I hear Ukrainian on the street almost as often as Polish. It’s almost a given that any mother with a young child I see in my favorite park is Ukrainian. Some Polish racist Putinophiles demand “A STOP TO UKRAINIZATION!”. I think Ukrainians are more threatened with Polonization for a variety of reasons. And any Ukrainization of Poland would also be good. It might push out Russian elements in Polish culture - like sometimes violent antisemitism and racism towards brown and Asian people. When I see examples of antisemitism and racism I think those Poles should be ashamed of behaving in a Russian way.

Anyway, Poland and Ukraine, and to some degree Belarus (Down with Lukashenko) are rebuilding old ties of blood, culture and history.

And that doesn’t mean I want my grandmother’s birthplace to be in Poland again. I want Ukraine in the EU and in NATO. And maybe my son can marry a nice Ukrainian or Belarussian girl or boy. Sort of tradition.

Putin isn’t rebuilding the Russian empire. He is driving Ukraine and Belarus west. Into the European Union. Into the old Commonwealth family. Not the Russian family with the drunken stepfather rapist bully.

PS We’re a strange family… my grandfather was in four Nazi concentration camps. My son’s grandfather was the Polish ambassador in Vienna and Germany… Europe is tied by blood. Not blood and soil ethno-fascist states like those that tortured my family, but those commonwealths that tied people of ethnicities and cultures and languages together.

Russia and Russians are murdering, raping, looting and torturing the people they call Slavic brothers. Russia has always viewed itself as the bestest Slavs (first among equals in the same way as Stalin, yes I know a Georgian traitor, was equal to a Gulag inmate) of all. Poles view them as the Slavs that got kicked back east out of Poland, unfair but hey, there are reasons. Now Poles have been massively patronizing towards Ukrainians and Belarussians in the past but that’s slowly disappearing. Which is one of the reasons that the most Ukrainian refugees are in Poland, an ethnically, culturally, geographically and linguistically, closer place rather than richer European countries - or even say Czechia. Might turn out that Ukrainians will decide Polish is more similar to Ukrainian than Russian.

On the note of Russian genocide, I got a present today:

UPDATE 22 January 2023 - well that’s akward.

Thanks for reading Fallout! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.

Subscriptions are hugely important for us.

PS The Guardian three days later does this subject but not as well :)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/19/eastern-poland-putin-war-russian-aggression-poles-ukrainians-history