THE POLISH LAND 49
territory, both in itself and as a means of passage to points further afield. To its
German neighbours, it offered space and the prospect of land for colonization,
the notorious Lebensraum (living space) of the twentieth century. To its Russian
neighbours, it offered valuable granary provinces, particularly in the south and
south-east; a long-desired link with Europe; and a strategic buffer zone. It was
also extremely accessible. Armies and people moving westwards out of central
Asia, or eastwards out of Europe, were automatically channelled across Polish
territory by the configuration of the land mass. Everyone from the Goths,
Vandals, Avars, and Magyars, to Batu Khan in 1241-2, Napoleon in 1807-12,
and Hitler in 1939-41, not to mention the Crimean Tartars, whose annual
incursions lasted for centuries, rode into Poland with the minimum of hin-
drance. As in Russia, it has always been virtually impossible to deny the enemy
an easy initial penetration. Extended lines of defence left unguarded loopholes
which could always be swiftly exploited. On the other hand, the country was
extremely difficult to hold in subjection. Invading armies melted away into the
vast countryside. Insurrectionary forces found easy refuge in remote wilder-
nesses. Almost without exception, the only effective way of controlling Poland
for any length of time, once it was overrun, has been by indirect rule and local
autonomy. This line has been followed by the Tsarist Government in the eigh-
teenth century and from 1815 to 1830; by the French from 1807 to 1813; by the
Germans in 1915-18, and by the USSR since 1944. Numerous attempts to
impose direct rule, by the Tsar after 1831, and 1864; by the Bolsheviks in 1919-
20; and by the Nazis in 1939—45, have invariably provoked immense local resis-
tance.
From all of this, it should be evident that geopolitics have indeed affected
Poland's development, but only in a negative way. The absence of any out-
standing geographical features, has served to give added importance to forms of
state organization, to the exploitation of resources, and to dynamic psycholog-
ical factors. The historical geographer is left with questions such as why Poland
was unable to organize its considerable human and economic resources as
efficiently as its neighbours; why, in the crises of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, in terms of soldiers per head of population, Russia was ten and
Prussia thirty times more efficient than Poland; or why both Russia and Prussia
possessed the demonic drive to expand whilst Poland did not.
One line of approach is provided by relative chronology - by the fact that
Poland developed much more quickly than her neighbours. The Polish kingdom
as unified in the fourteenth century developed with precocious rapidity,
expanded into territories once ruled by the moribund Ruthenian principalities,
and associated itself with the overblown Grand Duchy of Lithuania. At this
stage, Muscovy was still an insignificant backwater, struggling to shake off the
Mongol yoke. Prussia still lay in the grip of the Teutonic Order. In the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, Poland—Luthuania was the largest, and arguably
strongest, state in Eastern Europe. In 1569, when the constitution of the
united Polish-Lithuanian Republic was finally sealed by the Union of Lublin,