Polish Encounters, Russian Identity

8. The Geopolitical Dimension of Russian-Polish Confrontation in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

122 eight The Geopolitical Dimension of Russian-Polish Confrontation in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Leonid Gorizontov Russian-Polish confrontation can be analyzed in geopolitical categories. This type of analysis has already been attempted by the American scholar John LeDonne.1 The central concept in his study of empire is the core area of the nation-state. The space between neighboring cores—the frontier—which is the main arena for their confrontations, is not qualitatively uniform. The frontier is divided into three zones: the proximate, the intermediate, and the ultimate. The definitions are relative so that the ultimate zone of one is the proximate zone of the other. In this approach the overlapping peripheries become objects of study on a par with the cores. It is also useful to identify strategies that highlight aggressive and hidden-border policies applied by a state expanding its boundaries. The core areas to be discussed in this chapter are the Moscowcentered Russian Empire and the Warsaw-centered aspiring Polish state. While LeDonne is primarily concerned with analyzing intergovernmental confrontations, the focus of this study is the process that occurs in an imperial governmental organization that has already taken form. Nevertheless , there is no reason to reject a geopolitical perspective in examining the western borderlands of Russia in the period from 1815 to 1915. The absence of The Geopolitical Dimension of Russian-Polish Confrontation 123 a Polish state was compensated for by a deeply rooted state tradition and the Poles’ bitter struggle for the restoration of state sovereignty, as well as by the closely associated process of the creation of the Polish nation. State traditions can be expressed in geopolitical terms not only by the example of Poland but also by the example of Russia. First, I need to clarify the configuration of the two cores. In the late eighteenth century the partitions of the Polish Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita) and the incorporation of the northern littoral of the Black Sea into the Russian Empire created qualitatively new geopolitical realities in Russia, and, as a result, Russians formed concepts of the interior provinces based on certain domestic traditions in which the center was Moscow.2 The idea that all the Eastern Slavs shared an ethno-historical unity and should therefore be reunited was connected with the mythical Kievan origins of the Russian state. While the symbols of Kievan unity remained relevant, by the nineteenth century the Moscow-centered idea had displaced this ancient notion . Moscow had now come to be perceived as the ‘‘core’’ of the Eastern Slavs. The first half of the nineteenth century saw the formation of firm conceptions of what made up the core, accompanied by descriptors such as ‘‘indigenous ,’’ ‘‘central’’ Russia and the ‘‘interior gubernias.’’ Interior gubernias (provinces) was an officially recognized category, which, though not entirely clearly defined, was used as an administrative-territorial regional division of the empire. Interior Russia was conceived of as a circle with a radius of 450 versts.3 Occupying the most distant orbits around Moscow’s center of gravity we find Nizhnii Novgorod, Voronezh, Vologda, and, with certain reservations, Smolensk . According to Konstantin Arsen’ev, one of the most authoritative geographers of the first half of the nineteenth century, ‘‘interior European Russia includes the following gubernias: Iaroslavl’, Kostroma, Nizhnii Novgorod, Penza, Tambov, Voronezh, Kursk, Orlov, Kaluga, Tula, Moscow, Vladimir, and Riazan’.’’ Normally Tver’ gubernia and less often Smolensk gubernia were considered ‘‘interior’’ as well. The territory thus described did not cover the whole of Great Russia and comprised a special, functionally significant region of the empire, possessing its own historical, ethnic, geopolitical, environmental , and economic characteristics. Arsen’ev characterized the area as ‘‘the best of Russia, especially in the political-economic and administrative arenas.’’4 ‘‘The central or interior space,’’ according to Arsen’ev, was ‘‘the heart of the empire, the true basis of its greatness, the real homeland of the Russian people, the center of all European Russia, the receptacle of all its treasures, produced by its level of education, by its widespread industrial capacity and extensive domestic trade.’’ ‘‘The Russian lands,’’ he wrote, ‘‘show their similarities in the identical characteristics of their inhabitants, in the commonality of their language, in identical civil statutes, in a common religion, and in an almost identical level of education of the people living there, and these areas are the true fatherland of the Russians, the bastion or principal 124 The...