Russia yesterday and today. A historical and political study | Facing history. Promethean writings | The essence of Russian strength and weakness. Journals on Russia
We present a three-volume collection of the writings of Włodzimierz Bączkowski, an eminent sovietologist and founder of Polish Eastern thought. Bączkowski was one of the clearest voices in Polish discussions of national and eastern politics in the 1930s, a political writer and analyst with a capacity for cool and rational reasoning.
The cornerstone of his thinking was the conviction that ‘the East is the greatest issue of the Republic’, and its solution requires consistent action on several closely related fronts. Many of his diagnoses and prescriptions are even strikingly up-to-date.
- Włodzimierz Bączkowski is worth reading today because his reflections from several decades ago can tell us what Poland's relations with our closest neighbour, Ukraine, should look like. Especially now, when it is struggling with Russian aggression. Many of Włodzimierz Bączkowski's observations, reflections and recommendations could in principle be applied one-to-one to today's relations and draw interesting conclusions on what policy to pursue, how to build Poland's position in the region, but also how to react to our eastern neighbour invading Ukraine. - said Ernest Wyciszkiewicz, director of the Mieroszewski Centre.
Volume I. Włodzimierz Bączkowski, Russia Yesterday and Today. A historical and political study
The book Russia Yesterday and Today. A Historical and Political Study was published in February 1946 in Jerusalem, just as the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the West was beginning. At exactly the same time, George Kennan sent his famous ‘long telegram’, which provided the basis for the United States' Cold War strategy towards Moscow. Bączkowski's book, also published in English a year later, was intended to serve a similar function - to be an analysis of the various dimensions of Soviet policy and the sum of the author's many years of reflections on ‘eternal Russia’. For he saw in the Soviet Union a rebirth in new clothes of Russian imperial traditions, aspirations for territorial expansionism and nationalism. For the essence of Russian statehood remained unchanged, only its form had changed.
Volume II. Włodzimierz Bączkowski, Frontem do historii. Promethean writings
This volume collects thirty-nine articles by Włodzimierz Bączkowski (1905-2000) on Ukrainian and Promethean themes. All but three were published between 1933 and 1939, the most creative period of his journalistic activity. The vast majority of the selected texts originally appeared in the Polish-Ukrainian Bulletin, a weekly edited by Bączkowski, one of the few forums for open discussion between Poles and Ukrainians. Other texts came from the biweekly Myśl Polska, the quarterly Wschód and the monthly Problemy Europy Wschodniej. Three articles were published after the war in ‘Kultura’ and the annual ‘Niepodległość’ and are an attempt to summarise the Ukrainian cause and the Promethean movement in the Second Polish Republic.
Volume III. Włodzimierz Bączkowski, The Essence of Russian Strength and Weakness. Writings on Russia
This publication contains twenty-three articles by Włodzimierz Bączkowski (1905-2000) published between 1932 and 1983, which representatively show how he viewed Russia and the Soviet Union. Five of the texts in this collection were published before 1939, when he focused on the Ukrainian question and Prometheism in his writing and research at the time. The others were published after the Second World War in various Polish émigré and English-language periodicals, including Sprawy Bliskiego i Środkowego Wschód, Kultura, Wiadomosci, Kurier Polski, Orbis, The Middle East Journal and The National Review, among others. Bączkowski's most important subject was an analysis of Russian strategic culture, the nature of power in Russia and its international actions, including in particular towards Poland, and Russian colonialism in its historical and 20th century dimensions. He saw in the misinterpretation of Soviet reality and a kind of wishful thinking the causes of errors in the assessment of Russia, its nature or its potential. For the West constantly sought in Russia factors of thaw, a desire for dialogue, often elements of disintegration, and Moscow effectively knew how to exploit this. Bączkowski revised a similar approach without illusions and painfully realistically.
The book can be purchased here.
It took seventy-six years to reissue one of the most important, though almost completely forgotten, Polish works on Sovietology. And it is invariably up-to-date reading that also helps to understand today's Russia.
