Russian-Polish Relations Revisited, or The ABC's of "Treason" under Tsarist Rule

Andrzej Chwalba, Polacy w sluzbie Moskali [Poles in Muscovite Service]. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1999. 257 pp. + bibliography, index of names, English-language summary. ISBN 8301127538.

Leonid Efremovich Gorizontov, Paradoksy imperskoi politiki: Poliaki v Rossii i russkie v Pol´she.Moscow: Indrik, 1999. 270 pp. + appendices, index of names. ISBN 5857590922.

Magdalena Miciska, Zdrada, córka nocy: Pojcie zdrady narodowej w wiadomoci Polaków w latach 1861-1914 [Treason, the Daughter of the Night: The Concept of National Treason in the Consciousness of Poles in the Years 1861-1914]. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sic!, 1998. 263 pp. + index of names. ISBN 838605655X.

A novella set during the January Insurrection of 1863-64 by the Polish writer Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz pits a zealous tsarist patriot, a lieutenant in the Russian army, against a turncoat &#8212 a renegade officer now fighting with the insurgents. Their names: Heydenreich and Laudaski. A case of a quintessentially loyal Baltic German battling yet another unfaithful Pole? No, Heydenreich was the renegade colonel, while Laudaski was the young "Russian" officer. The identities of the two protagonists were probed repeatedly throughout the story, as those whom they encountered strove to figure out who they were: Poles, Russians, Germans, or perhaps even ... traitors? The questions of identity and allegiance &#8212 perceived and real &#8212 raised by Iwaszkiewicz have recently absorbed a new generation of historians studying the last half-century before World War I. ¹ At the time, government officials and Russian subjects alike found themselves seeking answers to the same questions: Who is a Pole? Who is a Russian? Who is "one of us" &#8212 and, thus, trustworthy?

Such questions may seem rather disingenuous from the perspective of the 20th century, an age that has witnessed more attempts at drawing clear distinctions between nations &#8212 in the form of population exchanges, ethnic cleansing, and the like &#8212 than perhaps any other. But such distinctions could hardly be drawn with any certainty in the 19th century. While historians may still fall prey to tendencies to project current ethno-linguistic identities back in time, the reality, as Jeremy King reminds us, was much more complicated: overlapping local, denominational, or imperial allegiances better characterized the lives of most 19th-century folk than the exclusivist identities we associate with modern nationalism. ² Even the division between "Poles" and "Russians" lends a deceptive clarity to a rather messy business. After all, were not both Poles and Russians equally imperial subjects, allowing them some common ground? Iwaszkiewicz's novella demonstrates how purportedly "national" strands of identity could be crossed: the "Polish" patriot and renegade officer Heydenreich reportedly spoke an accented and uncomfortable Polish and longed for a good cup of tea, while Laudaski, whose language of choice was Russian, admitted &#8212 when pressed &#8212 that he was a "Pole from Lithuania." And caught in between Russian and Polish identities were many residents of the Western Provinces, lands and people claimed by both Poles and Russians as their own but which we now think of as Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian.

Yet to what extent was it possible to choose or reject different identities &#8212 national or imperial (and others, as well as various permutations of the above) &#8212 in accordance with Ernest Renan's famous "daily plebiscite"? That both protagonists were considered suspect even by members of their "own" side, on account of their Polish or non-Polish roots, suggests a growing sense of boundaries separating "us" from "them," as well as a growing preoccupation with the subjects of patriotism and treason. How did this different slate of identity options fare when empire and nation (as reflected in the terms rossiiskii and russkii) were increasingly being equated? Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev's assertion, "the Austrian emperor can speak of his nations, but we have one nation [u nas narod odin]," provides a telling example (Gorizontov, 105).

The three monographs under consideration here, two published...