A THOUSAND YEARS OF HISTORY 21historians of the People's Republic would run into the sands and that the next
generation of scholars 'would be obliged to rewrite Polish History from the
beginning, all over again.' That prediction proved remarkably accurate.
For many reasons, therefore, the first fruits of the new harvest were slow to
ripen. Indeed, it was the turn of the Millennium before a substantial crop
matured. Predictably enough, the former official Establishment proved less pro-
ductive than some of the centres less favoured previously. The Institute of East
Central European Studies of the Catholic University of Lublin, for example, had
entered long neglected territory. It devoted itself to Poland's immediate eastern
neighbours - Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, which had once formed part of
the pre-Partition Commonwealth, and hence to a multinational (and anti-
nationalist) vision of the past. It was equally inspired by the notion that East
Central Europe, whilst possessing a set of distinctive regional features was none
the less a region of the wider Europe. Its director, Professor Jerzy Kloczowski
(b. 1924) could not easily have propagated such views during the lifetime of the
Soviet Bloc.
Kloczowski had excellent qualifications for serving as pilot of the new direc-
tion. In the days of the PRL, his biography could not have been politically more
incorrect. He was a veteran of the Home Army and of the Warsaw Rising; he
had been a founder after 1956 of the movement for Catholic Intellectual Clubs
(KIK); he was a close associate of Pope John Paul II, who had once worked as a
fellow professor in Lublin; he was a Solidarity activist; and, as a historian, he
was largely inspired by the work of the French 'Annales' School. In other words
he had very little in common with the Communist-run, semi-Marxist,
pro-Soviet, anti-Catholic, and anti-European historiography of the previous
era. Symptomatically, one of his ground-breaking initiatives was a historical
symposium in which the participants were encouraged to speak in any of the
languages of the old Commonwealth. Held in Rome under the patronage of the
Pope in 1990, when the USSR was still functioning, this symposium provided
one of the very rare occasions when Polish, Lithuanian, Belarussian, Ukrainian,
German, and Jewish scholars could meet to discuss their common problems in
congenial and neutral surroundings.
Kloczowski's personal publications, such as his Europa Slowianska w
XIV-XVw. (Slavonic Europe in the 14th-15th centuries),^32 were largely
confined to the medieval period. But his Mlodsza Europa (The Younger Europe,
1998) was a frontal attack on the negative stereotypes which still circulated
abroad about anywhere east of the Elbe; and his institute at Lublin promoted
several broad-based works of great significance. One of these was a two-volume
regional history of East Central Europe.^33 Another was a two-volume history of
Ukraine^34 ; and a third was a three-volume history of Poland written in the new
multinational, European spirit.^35 'The greatest experience of the
Commonwealth of many nations.. .', Professor Kloczowski explained, was
'The experience of citizenship. It [had] enormous significance for the history of
our resistance to imposed regimes from the 18th century onwards, and in the