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[I]t is now evident that there were initially socialist parties which were or became the main vehicles of their people's national movement […] The combination of social and national demands, on the whole, proved very much more effective as a mobilizer of independence than the pure appeal of nationalism […] Poland is an instructive case in point. The restoration of the country after a century and a half of partition was achieved not under the banner of any of the political movements devoted exclusively to this object, but under that of the Polish Socialist Party, whose leader, Colonel Pilsudski, became his country's liberator.

—Eric Hobsbawm

From its earliest days, Polish socialism has been inextricably, often antagonistically and later tragically, linked with Polish nationalism. "The general connection between the seemingly contradictory ideas of socialism and nationalism", argues Timothy Snyder, "is that of idealistic faith in the yet untried people". A great European empire between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, the subsequent and repeated partition, even dissolution, of Poland over the centuries left its mark on society in an enduring way. The overlapping history of the Russian Empire and Polish communists' sympathies for the USSR also infused, rejuvenated, but also complicated, both nationalism and socialism.

The first Polish socialist organisation was founded in 1853 and called Lud Polksi [The Polish People]. It was established, however, in Portsmouth in England by Polish peasant-soldier émigrés, and advocated common land ownership. With industrialisation yet to take hold in Poland, the "proletariat" for Lud Polski, as later on for the narodniki, consisted of the peasantry. The genesis of Lud Polski can ultimately be traced back to a group of szlachta émigrés who formed the Humań Commune on Jersey in autumn 1934. The Humań Commune, whose leading member was Zeno Swiętosławski, born in 1811 in Warsaw, later came to dominate Lud Polski.

In 1863, Polish nationalists staged the last of the major nineteenth century rebellions against Russian rule, but they stood no chance. Perhaps thirty thousand were killed, twenty thousand jailed, and thousands more exiled. The Tsar shut down the only university in the Kingdom of Poland, only permitting it to reopen as a Russian-language institution. This twin approach—mollifying the peasantry while smothering the potential for a dissident intellectual and cultural life—constituted the Empire's main effort to consolidate its russification of Polish territory. Polish cultural influence on Belarussian, Lithuanian and, to a lesser degree, Ukrainian peasants was particularly targeted. Indeed, the Polish Kingdom was even renamed the "Vistula Lands" in an attempt to erase any trace of Polish identity.

If the imperial military and the emancipation proclamation buried the 1863 nationalist challenge to the status quo, they could do nothing to staunch the misery and anger pouring out of Poland's new factories, which had begun to multiply as the industrial revolution belatedly hit Poland in the 1840s. While the extent of the emancipation granted Polish peasantry was greater than that of their Russian counterparts, Russians enjoyed significantly greater press freedom, particularly after 1865. Western and Russian thought intermingled, Russian students debated and acted on new ideas, and Russian groups such as the Narodniks forged a socialist path—but Poland was left behind. Though the Tsar undercut Polish nationalism, it would be the right of national self-determination espoused by Russian groups like Narodnaya Volya that reacquainted many Polish students with nationalist considerations.

Nevertheless, for a time, the Warsaw Positivists' notion of "organic work" held sway. The Positivists insisted that the nation could exist without political form (without a state) and thrive without openly pursuing independence. A depoliticised liberalism manifested itself in Poland as a solution to a paradox: how todream of independence while insisting that states did not matter and political actionwas futile.

by mid-1873 the Russians were spotlighting the Kingdom as the most fertile area for socialist agitation. In 1875 a few recent graduates of Warsaw University formed an ephemeral illegal group called "The Society for National Education" that echoed the populist ambitionsof the "to the people" movement in Russia and sent a handful of students into the countryside to preach the gospel of revolution and patriotism (and literacy) to the peasants.

The shuttered academic life of Poland proper did not affect ethnic Poles elsewhere in the Empire. The gentry in Poland had been crushed, but a generation of sons of the gentry in Ukraine and Volynia could afford to head to Russian universities. These young men, and they were nearly all men, naturally came into contact with flourishing radical student life in Russia, and groups of socialist Polish students sprang up in Russian cities; in St Petersburg, this culminated in the 1880 umbrella formation of the Gmina Socjalistów Polskich (Polish Socialist Commune). The Commune, named after the one that had appeared in Britain amongst socialist emigrés of the 1830–1 insurrection, spread to universities in other cities, and sent its most renowned members back to Poland to encourage and work with the small socialist batches of Warsaw. Socialist activity in Polish universities peaked in the years 1877–9, and the groups attracted the best students. They took the lead in resisting the russification of Polish academia,

Virtually all the revolutonary activity in 1879 was conducted by Poles who had been at Russian universities, though it soon acquired a home-grown The Tsarist destruction of these groups reputedly made Polish agitators all the more determined.

The inherent weakness and fragmentation of Polish socialism was laid bare by WWI, which consolidated it broadly into two camps: the "Social Patriots" on the one hand, the pacificist and internationalist revolutionaries on the other; Piłsudski was in the former. The bulk of the country, however, were with the National Democrats, who were in favour of reconciliation and collaboration with Russia to support a united front against German expansion. Their only attempt at collaboration during the war died after fourteen months.

Ultimately the niepokorni would split into the competing ideological camps of the twentieth century, but the "patriots" and the "socialists". Until 1942, "social patriot" was used by Polish Marxists as a derisive term for those socialists who had strayed into nationalism.

References

Notes

Bibliography

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