A THOUSAND YEARS OF HISTORY 11interruption of the thousand-year continuum of the Polish state. In the era of
Nationalism, which in Eastern Europe persists to the present day, the perman-
ent existence of the nation, irrespective of political institutions, has never been
seriously challenged.
In the interwar period from 1918 to 1939, the surviving mandarins of the
Cracovian and Varsovian Schools were joined by a variety of scholars who defy
simple classification. Szymon Askenazy (1866-1935) at Lwow, and his younger
disciple in diplomatic history at Warsaw, Marceli Handelsman (1882-1945),
together with Jan Rutkowski (1886-1949) at Poznan in economic history, com-
manded influential followings in the profession. But the over-all picture was
essentially pluralistic, and by the outbreak of the Second World War no general
consensus concerning the interpretation of Polish History had been established,
nor indeed attempted. After the war, prominent scholars such as Oscar Halecki
(1890-1976), Marian Kukiel (1885-1976), and Wladyslaw Pobog-Malinowski
(1899-196Z) continued their studies in emigration. Halecki's History of Poland,
written in 1942. from a Catholic and nationalist standpoint, was one of the very
few surveys of the subject to be addressed to a foreign readership.^12 Kukiel's
Dzieje Polski porozbiorowej (History of Post-partition Poland), covers the
period from 1795 to 1864.^13 Pobog-Malinowski's Najnowsza historia polity-
czna Polski (Contemporary Polish Political History, 3 vols. 1959-60), written
from a political position close to that of Jozef Pilsudski, covers the period since
1864.^14
With the advent of the People's Republic, historiography in Poland was trans-
formed. In the words of Lenin on a previous occasion, 'Chaos and arbitrariness,
which had heretofore dominated people's views on history and politics gave
way to an astonishingly uniform and harmonious scientific theory.' The theory
in both cases was Lenin's own version of Marx's historical materialism. In 1948,
at the First General Congress of Polish Historians, Marxism—Leninism was
installed as the sole ideological guide to all investigations into Poland's past.
Henceforth, Polish society was to be seen as the object of a dialectical process,
which, by the inherent tensions of its contrary elements, propelled itself forward
inexorably from one stage of development to the next. At any particular
moment, the involuntary struggle of 'progressive' and 'reactionary' forces
advanced from crisis to crisis, as the old order was undermined, and replaced by
the new: and thus ever upward in the dizzy spiral of progress towards the last
blissful Rose of Communism.
Marxism-Leninism offered several substantive attractions to Polish histori-
ans. Quite apart from its political convenience, it promised to supply that sense
of organic continuity which had hitherto been signally lacking. It promised to
interpret the history of the Poles on the same basis as that of neighbouring
nations, and thus to soothe their wounded pride. It promised to justify the emer-
gence of the People's Republic as a natural stage on Poland's bumpy road to
Communism, and thus to calm the chronic insecurity of the new authorities. It
promised to banish the concepts of guilt and of individual responsibility, and to