2
POLSKA
The Polish Land
Few people have doubted that Poland's geography is the villain of her history.
Trapped in the middle of the North European Plain, with no natural frontier to
parry the onslaughts of more powerful neighbours, Poland has fought an
unequal battle for survival against Germany and Russia. Poland has been vari-
ously described as 'the disputed bride', condemned forever to lie between the
rival embraces of two rapacious suitors; or, more cruelly, as 'the gap between
two stools'. An unfortunate geopolitical location is invoked to explain the
Partitions of the eighteenth century, the abortive Risings of the nineteenth, and
the catastrophe of the Second Republic in the twentieth. As one Polish officer
was heard to exclaim in London in 1940, when told that the Allied Governments
did not intend to fight both Hitler and Stalin simultaneously, 'Then we shall
fight Geography!'
Surely, it is argued, the North European Plain, stretching unbroken from the
French Atlantic to the Russian Urals, must have affected the states which devel-
oped on its seemingly featureless expanses. It offers no protection whatsoever -
no obstacles to the movement of peoples or to the progress of armies. It makes
for constant insecurity. It encourages raids, invasions, and annexations. It has
meant that major territorial changes could be produced by the minor variations
in the balance of power, and that states could expand or contract faster and fur-
ther than anywhere else in Europe. The Polish state was no exception. From a
nucleus between the Odra (Oder) and Vistula Rivers, it expanded in moments
of strength with great rapidity, reaching the Baltic, the Dnieper, the Black Sea,
and the Carpathians. Similarly, in times of weakness, it shrank alarmingly. In
1492, the territory of Poland - Lithuania, not counting the fiefs of Mazovia,
Moldavia, or East Prussia, covered 1,115,000 km^2 or 435,547 square miles. In
1634, at the Treaty of Polanow, with 990,000 km^2 or 386,719 square miles, it
was still the largest territory in Europe, slightly larger than European Muscovy
and nearly twice the size of France. With almost 11 million inhabitants, its pop-
ulation was inferior only to France and Muscovy. Yet by 1686 at 733,500 km^2
(286,524 square miles) it had already fallen to third place; by 1773 to 522,300
km^2 (204,024 square miles), and by 1793 to 215,000 km^2 (84,000 square miles),
the size of Great Britain. In 1795, it vanished completely. In various nineteenth-
century reincarnations, the Duchy of Warsaw between 1807 and 1813 occupied