52.2. POSTSCRIPT
historiography of the partitioning powers, had now been pressed into the ser-
vice of a Soviet imperialism. The Stalinist authors of the Soviet bloc deliberately
cultivated the wounded nationalisms of each and every one of their captive peo-
ples. Moscow's rule in post-war East Central Europe was accompanied not just
by the imposition of Communism, which Stalin himself admitted to be alien and
unsuitable, but also and in particular by the careful cultivation of existing
nationalist forces. Moscow's inimitable policy of praising the supposedly glori-
ous victories of Polish Socialism, and the recovery of Poland's supposedly his-
toric frontiers, appealed directly to Polish vanity, and was the exact modern
equivalent of St Petersburg's one-time policy of praising the 'Golden Freedom'
of the szlachta. All the ideologists of the bloc had been taught to maximise
xenophobia and, by inflating their citizens' sense of insecurity, to increase their
dependence on the great Soviet ally. To buttress the rule of the imperial power
by encouraging the divisive tendencies of the subject peoples was a manoeuvre
as old as Nebuchadnezzar, and the Poles had been one of its principal victims.
By exploiting and magnifying Polish resentment against the Germans (if that
were possible), the authorities had successfully diverted attention from the com-
parable evils of the Soviet record. By stressing the exclusiveness of the Polish
heritage, and by underplaying its links with that of the Germans, Jews,
Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Czechs, Solvaks, and Russians, they were effectively
shielding the Soviet Union from any united challenge to its imperial supremacy.
For people who knew the purposes for which nationalist ideology was first
developed, this is an interesting turnabout. Indeed, the propagation in Poland
and in neighbouring countries of the sort of primitive, uncritical Nationalism
which first took shape during the Stalinist era, continued to provide a fair mea-
sure on the health of the Soviet Union's European empire.
If the Poles were to escape from the mental strait-jacket imposed by their
political masters, therefore, they had to start, as their forebears did, by re-
examining their history. The post-war generation had to be content to find that
they were still alive and that they were still Poles; their children and grand-
children may well want to be Europeans, cosmopolitans, citizens of the world,
in which light, it was perfectly possible to foresee that the Soviet empire would
one day crumble. From the vantage point of the late 1970s, Poland's predica-
ment felt awfully permanent. To the faint-hearted, it may have seemed that no
force on earth could loosen the Soviet grip. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn was
always reiterating, the Soviet system was inhumanly strong, and in the nuclear
age no one could dare contemplate the benefits of armed resistance, or, like
Mickiewicz, pray to God for a universal war of liberation. The Helsinki
Agreement of 1975 had given but the latest expression of the Kremlin's hopes of
eternalizing its supremacy. Yet the one thing that History does teach is that
power is transient, and worldly success ephemeral. One day, the captains and
the commissars were always going to depart. Soviet pomp was surely to be one
with Nineveh and Tyre. In the meantime, Poland's room for manoeuvre was
limited.