The Last King of Poland

"Well, I mentioned the Commonwealth of Lithuania and Poland. And because I have written about Poland so often, I decided in my new book to write about just one half of it, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, whose origins were separate from Poland and which, in the period before it joined with Poland, stretched all the way from the Black Sea, where Odessa now is, to the Baltic. This is in the 14th and 15th centuries. The Grand Dukes of Lithuania by marriage take over the kingdom of Poland. And because they’re kings, the story is usually told from the Polish angle. All the history books talk about the partitions of Poland in the 18th century. Well, it was the partition of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. And the monarchs – until it became elective – were Lithuanians who took over Poland. Jogaila became the King of Poland but he was a Lithuanian. I’m sure he couldn’t speak a word of Polish when he started. Vytautus the Great, who was his cousin, staged a great Lithuanian campaign to resist the merger with Poland, but it’s a long story and goes on until the end of the 18th century. The Last King of Poland , Adam Zamoyski’s biography of Stanislaw-August Poniatowski, is the book I would recommend for people to get a feel for it. Everyone says he was King of Poland, but he came from Lithuania. He was born on a big estate in what is now Belarus . He was one of Catherine the Great’s many lovers, and he was raised to the throne through his many connections in Russia. The book is extremely well done, very well written. It shows the terrible dilemma he faced. He was a client of the Russian Empire who realised that his political masters, the Russians, wanted him to keep his country as a poor, unsuccessful, poorly educated, poorly organised shambles, because then they could exploit it. He was a big figure of the Enlightenment and a great educator. He attempted to reconstruct all the elements of a successful state in the teeth of opposition from his political masters and neighbours, namely the Russians. All the chapters in my book have three sections. One is a thumbnail portrait of somewhere in the present. In the case of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, it’s Lukashenko’s Belarus. Not many people know that Belarus was at the heart of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Tim Snyder wrote a wonderful book, which could easily be on this list, called The Reconstruction of Nations . It’s about how from the population of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, destroyed in 1795, there arose several modern nations: the Lithuanian national movement, based on the Lithuanian language; the Belarussian national movement; and, interestingly, the Polish national movement. [Józef] Pilsudski, Marshal of Poland and one of the biggest figures of Polish history in the 20th century, said he wasn’t a Pole. He came from Vilna – that is, Lithuania. No, Lukashenko is not Lithuanian in the modern sense. He is, of course, a dictator, and he is trying to cobble together a view of Belarussian history which is separate from that of Russia. Their big danger is, of course, that they will be swallowed up by their dear friends across the border. So he’s doing very strange things with history, one of which is to emphasise that Belarus is the true heir of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, not Lithuania next door. Lithuania, of course, is appalled. They think the Grand Duchy was theirs, but Lukashenko’s people are saying no, it’s ours. I think it will. It’s an absolutely appalling story which I only touch on in the book, but Stalin killed virtually all the educated Belarussians. It was a small peasant country which had for 200 years been told that Belarussians are actually Russians, that their language was just a dialect of Russian, and that educated people spoke Russian. They were forcibly converted – by which I mean their priests were killed – to Russian orthodoxy. And then Stalin comes along. The first generation in the 1920s was allowed to learn the Belarussian language in school. There’s a brief generation of people – teachers, activists, professors – who promote Belarussian identity for the first time. Stalin shoots the lot of them."