Poland's Borders Are Wrong

This is Poland. But just over 100 years ago, this was Poland. And if you go back to the 1700s, then this was Poland. And a few centuries before that, it was this. If you overlay all of them, you do get a core Polish territory, but a lot of lost land too, which, according to some, Behind it is the argument of that historical occupation, but also theories of irredentism and desires to reach some natural borders like rivers or mountains. So, is this completely crazy or somewhat justified? Let's find out. To really understand why some people look at parts of Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Kaliningrad and think that should be Polish, you have to go back to how the country took shape in the first place. In the 10th century, the early Piast rulers built the first de facto Polish state. Back then, under Duke Miesko and his son Boldzlau the Brave, the realm was actually situated fairly close to where modern Poland is right now, centered on the plains around the Warta and Vistula rivers, touching the Baltic coast and reaching south towards the mountains. But that early kingdom went through brutal feuds. It fragmented into dozens of small principalities and eventually lost grip on the edges of its territory. Over time, Poland began pulling its weight, if you will, to the east. The big turning point happened in the late 14th century, when Queen Jadwiga of Poland married Grand Duke Jogaila of Lithuania. That personal union tied the Polish kingdom to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which at the same time controlled huge stretches of Eastern Europe reaching down towards the Black Sea. By 1569, with the Union of Lublin, this became a single federated state, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. And here we have an issue, because a lot of the territory that some of these Polish irredentists claim was just Lithuanian territory that they came to rule through that personal union. But anyway, the Commonwealth was huge. It covered around 1 million square kilometers, making it the biggest country in Europe during its prime. It stretched from the Baltic Sea far to the east past Smolensk and south into the fertile plains of Ukraine. During the times of the Troubles in Russia, Polish forces even took and held Moscow for two years. This was a huge, diverse society where Polish nobility, language, and culture spread deep across what is now Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Big cities like Vilnius and Lviv became vital hubs of Polish education, literature, science, and just everyday life for the Polish people. But then came the decline. Internal political paralysis, driven by things like the Liberowetu, where a single nobleman could shut down the entire parliament, combined with huge, devastating invasions, started leading to the end of the Commonwealth. The mid-17th century brought the Cossack Uprising under Bohdan Khmelnytsky in Ukraine, followed by devastating invasions from Sweden and Russia, remembered as the Deluge. It was an insane time. Cities were burned down, the entire economy broke down, and large parts of the lands were signed away to the Russians, and I think maybe to the Swedish a little bit too. By the end of the 18th century, Poland was too weak to defend itself against the rising absolute monarchies around it. Imperial Russia, Prussia, and Austria. In a Commonwealth among themselves. And by 1795, Poland was completely wiped off the map. For 123 years, there was no independent Polish state on any world map. Yet, even during this period, Polish identity refused to die. During that long century of partition, Polish writers, soldiers, and families kept alive the idea of their homeland, some even from within the Russian court. When national heroes like the poet Adam Mickiewicz wrote, they looked back at the grand days of the lost Commonwealth. And that feeling of loss helped forge Polish irredentism, the belief that the Polish nation had a rightful claim to the lands where these Polish people lived, held their lands, and built cities before the partitions tore them apart. Poland doesn't have these lands anymore, and to the Polish people, these places have sort of become forgotten landscapes. And if you love forgotten landscapes, or even better, creating your own fantasy worlds, then the sponsor of today's video, World Anvil, is about to become your best friend. You know guys, as somewhat of a geek myself, I'm kind of obsessed with World Anvil. 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Thank you so much to them for sponsoring this video and now let's get back to it. When World War I tore through the empires of Eastern Europe, Poland finally got its opening. There was a window of opportunity and in November of 1918, the country reappeared, finally, as the Second Polish Republic. But an immediate question came up. What were the borders supposed to be? The Western allies of the Entente at Versailles wanted to draw neat lines that were similar to the previous existence, but on the ground in Eastern Europe, things were very messy and violent. Józef Pilsudski, the military leader who took charge of the new Poland, had a grand concept known as Intermarium. I did a whole video about this a few months ago. In summary, he wanted to create a broad federation of supposedly independent countries between the Baltic and the Black Seas, bringing together Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine to act as a united front and also a buffer that could stop both German and Russian aggression. But Poland's neighbors didn't trust him. Many Lithuanians and Ukrainians worried it was just a cover-up for Polish dominance. Instead of a willing union, borders were decided by fighting. Not only did Poland not get all of that land, but the little that it did get, it got through war. They fought one against the temporary West Ukrainian People's Republic for control of Eastern Galicia and the city of Lvov. It fought the Polish-Soviet war against the Bolsheviks, pushing deep into Ukraine before being thrown back into the gates of Warsaw, where Pilsudski pulled off an impressive and decisive victory in the 1920 Battle of Warsaw. Along the northern front, Polish units seized Vilnius from Lithuania, creating a short-lived puppet country called the Republic of Central Lithuania before annexing it directly back into Poland. When the dust settled with the Treaty of Chiga in 1921, the Second Polish Republic was shaped very differently from modern Poland, but also from the Commonwealth that preceded it. It included a large strip of land in the east, universally referred to as the Kresy or Borderlands. It held Vilno, Nowogrodek, Brzek, and Lvov. It was an eastern heavy country. Nearly a third of the population consisted of ethnic minorities that weren't Polish. There were millions of Ukrainians, a lot of Jewish people, Belarusians, Germans, and Lithuanians. But culturally, the cities in the east were undisputably Polish centers. Lvov and Vilno had famous universities, publishing houses, and long Polish histories. To millions of citizens, these lands weren't just new colonies or recently-annexed territories. They were the heart and soul of the Polish nation that they knew from history. Then came 1939. Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, deciding in secret to divide Poland between them once again. When the invasion came in September, Germany struck from the west, the Soviets marched in from the east, and the Second Republic was dismantled, with Poland being wiped off the map once again. When World War II ended in 1945, the victorious Allies sat down to redraw Europe once again, but Joseph Stalin made it crystal clear that the Soviet Union was going to keep the eastern territories that it took in 1939. The Kurson Line became the new eastern frontier. Those lands were gone forever from Polish lands. Vilno went to Lithuania, large tracts went to Soviet Belarus, and West Galicia, with Lvov, went to Soviet Ukraine. To make up for this loss of nearly half of Poland's pre-war territory, the Allied powers picked up Poland and kind of literally moved it roughly 200 kilometers west. They handed Poland former German lands east of the Oder and Neisse rivers, Silesia, Pomerania, and the southern part of East Prussia, which the post-war communist government called the recovered territories. But millions of Germans were forced out, and millions of Poles who were expelled from the eastern Kresy were packed into trains and resettled into the newly acquired western farms and towns. When you look at statistical maps of Poland today, you can still see how that forced change is there, sort of as a phantom border, namely in electoral maps. On paper, Poland lost about 20% of its total land area, shrinking down to roughly 300,000 square kilometers. It went from being an ethnically mixed, wide open country that stretched deep into Eastern Europe, to a very compact, almost purely Polish state in Central Europe, locked between two rivers and the Baltic coast. So here maybe the natural borders argument kind of goes out the window for those who want to expand now. Poland today has quite natural borders. There's rivers on each side, a sea to the north, and mountains to the south. But at the same time, this forced relocation is exactly why the movement claiming that Poland's borders are wrong exists. The current borders weren't chosen through democratic consent, or natural evolution through conquest. They were drawn with a pencil by Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt, or I don't know, by their aides probably. And that historical wound has sort of fed modern irredentist arguments centered on four distinct areas that they claim. Part of Lithuania, part of Belarus, part of Ukraine, and Kaliningrad. The claim on parts of Lithuania focuses almost entirely on Vilnius and the surrounding area. For centuries, Vilnius, Vilno in Polish, was closely tied to Polish culture. It was the But over generations, the nobility, the city population, and the intelligentsia adopted Polish ways because they were the majority within the commonwealth. It was home to the famous Stefan Batory University, where major figures of Polish history, like Adam Mickiewicz that we mentioned, studied. In the interwar Second Republic, Vilno was a big Polish city, not a Lithuanian majority city. The Lithuanian state between the wars even had to make Kaunas its temporary capital because Poland held Vilnius. Today, while this is now firmly the capital of a new independent Lithuania, irredentists still point out that modern borders separate Poland from a historical capital of Polish high culture. Even now, a noticeable Polish minority lives in the region around it, keeping schools and customs and the language alive. From an irredentist view, the transfer of Vilno to Lithuania after 1939 was just an arbitrary Soviet gift that cut off a big part of Polish heritage. Of course, the Lithuanians would disagree. Then there is Belarus. The western parts of modern Belarus, including cities like Grodno, Nowogrodek, and Brzek, was part of Poland for hundreds of years, right up until the Soviet And those historical bonds are also very deep. Polish nobles, poets, and soldiers lived and worked in these provinces. It's not impossible for a Polish person today to have grandparents that were from there. Irredentist sentiment towards Belarus often points out how arbitrarily the border was set. Towns along the modern border share very close cultural and family connections with strong Polish-speaking minorities still living inside of western Belarus. Some Polish nationalist movements look at this border and they see a line that was just forced by Soviet Moscow to break apart centuries of shared civilization. They argue that those towns, which were thriving Polish provinces before the war, belong inside the Polish sphere rather than under another regime. Then we have the argument surrounding Ukraine, which is perhaps the most emotionally charged, and today it's often used in Russian propaganda to try and weaken Polish support for Ukraine. For centuries, southern Poland and western Ukraine were intertwined. The crown of Poland ruled Red Ruthenia and eastern Galicia all the way back to the 14th century under King Kazimir the Great. The jewel of this area was Lvov. In the Second Polish Republic, it was one of the three or four most important cities in the entire country. It was a cultural powerhouse known for its theaters, trade fairs, world-class universities, including the famous Lvov School of Mathematics. When it was awarded to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1945, it kind of stunned the Polish people. Hundreds of thousands of Poles had to be uprooted and moved north to places like Rokflau. Under the communist regime, public discussion of the loss was banned, but ordinary people kept it alive in secret. There was a kind of terrifying folk rhyme from the post-war years that went, just one atom bomb and we will be back in Lvov. Today, when Polish irredentists speak about wrong borders, western Ukraine is sometimes also on the list. They argue that Lviv was Polish by architecture, Polish by education, and Polish the people that are buried there long before Soviet planners decided to attach it to Ukraine. Finally, there's the question of the Kaliningrad Russian Oblast. It's an exclave wedged right between North Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic coast. Before 1945, it was just northern East Prussia centered on Konigsberg. Historically, East Prussia was a fiefdom of the Polish crown for about a century after the Teutonic Knights fell from power. The city of Konigsberg, known in Polish as Królewiek, had very deep commercial and political ties with Poland. When East Prussia was carved up in 1945, Poland received the southern part, Warmia and Mazuria, while the north went straight to the Soviet Union. In fact, right after the war, Polish administrators briefly tried to move to towns in the southern strip of the area before the Red Army pushed them out and kept the entire zone. Today, with Kaliningrad turned into a heavy militarized Russian base right on Poland's northern flank, some argue that having a foreign exclave on that coast makes no sense from a geography and security sense, and that from a natural borders viewpoint, Kaliningrad also breaks the natural line of Baltic coast between Poland and Lithuania, leaving an unnatural military wretch, justifying Poland's annexation of it. But to be fair, I think Germany would have a bigger claim on it than Poland, history-wise. Either way, when you put all of these pieces together, you can see why the argument that Poland's borders are wrong never really goes away. Those who look at the map through the lens of history don't see modern Poland as a completed project, they see a country that was pushed into a western mold that doesn't match its long eastern heritage. Something that is perhaps countered by the fact that the modern borders are pretty close to the original kingdom ones, just skipping the rest of history in the middle, and also ignoring the fact that many of their modern western lands would, by the same logic, have to be returned to Germany. But when they look to the east and see those lost territories throughout time, they see pieces of their homeland left behind on the wrong side of lines that were just drawn by foreign hands. Today, Lithuania and Poland share free movement within the EU, so that issue is kind of out of the window. And the solidarity towards Ukraine as a frontline against Russia seems to have also pushed away claims over those lands. So, all that remains to be settled is the lost land to Belarus in the bothersome Kaliningrad exclave. I guess have to wait and see what the future holds for those territories.