Success at last

A couple of years ago, Adam Zamoyski — who is, yes, a friend — told me that he was revising The Polish Way, a history of Poland he had published back in 1987. At first he had thought merely to shorten a few over-long paragraphs and check facts. But as he re-read his work, he decided it needed more dramatic changes. In 1987, Poland had not been a sovereign country: Polish domestic and foreign politics were still directly controlled by the Soviet Union, which itself was still very much in existence. That meant, he explained, that he was writing the history of a country which had failed. His task, as a historian, had been to explain that failure.

Twenty years later, Poland is not only a sovereign country, but one which is growing, economically and politically, with astonishing speed — so much so that one Polish acquaintance describes the last decade as ‘the most successful in three centuries.’ Mistakes have been made since 1989, when Poland held its first democratic elections since the second world war. But the country is a functioning democracy, where power changes hands peacefully, and has a functioning capitalist economy, with some of the highest growth rates in Europe — even now. This success requires some explanations. In Poland: A History, Zamoyski has tried to provide them, rethinking assumptions that he and others made in the past, and along the way retelling the whole story of Poland, from the Slavic tribes of the early Middle Ages, up to the most recent elections in 2007.

Not everything looks different. But, for example, the 19th century does. Back when Poland was still in mourning for its independence, the years between Poland’s partition by Russia, Prussia and Austria in 1795 and its regaining of statehood in 1918 were invariably described as a series of rebellions against the occupying powers.