Posted on 02/28/2014 8:50:14 AM PST by Rusty0604
Had the Commonwealth survived at least in some form, today it would have served as a powerful middle ground between the West and East and a lot of tragedies that went on to befall Europe could have been avoided.
Actually, P-L came pretty close. Very high personal, political and religious freedom. Very proud of it they were, too. They called it their "Golden Freedom."
Unfortunately, this freedom was solely for the szlachta, or nobility, who were perhaps 10% of the population. A major part of their "freedom" consisting of freedom to tyrannize over those who were not szlachta.
Much as in ancient Sparta or Rome, where being a citizen meant you could stomp all over those who weren't. Or the pre-war US South, where freedom and whiteness constituted a kind of rank in society.
The Golden Freedom of the szlachta of course meant they were also incapable of combining, even with each other, much less with their subject peoples, to resist subverson and/or invasion by better-organized, though less free, neighbors.
Or even worse things might have happened.
My maternal grandmother immigrated from Ukraine about 100 years ago. We are Jewish. I have no *side* in this, just watching, as we all are.
Yeah, the TV *news* is the elect interpreting the shadows for the masses.
While I think you have a point about aristocratic republics, I think "imperialistic" doesn't quite fit in this case -- not in the sense of classical imperialism anyway. The original Lithuanian state (if I remember correctly) was largely an East Slavic country. It was joined to Poland in marriage, and (as Poland was more populous and developed) Belorussian, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian landowning elites gradually became "Polonized" without much difficulty. Much of the talk about ethnic conflict and "subject peoples" -- at least in the early days -- had more to do with class, with resentment about the burdens landowners imposed -- than with nationalism. There were similarities to the situations in Ireland, Bohemia, and elsewhere, but the situation didn't entirely correspond to classical models of imperialism.
I do agree that it would have been very difficult for a nation run like the old Rzeczpospolita to survive, but (as in the case of Russia) one can ask whether things were necessarily fated to develop as they did or whether history might have taken another course given different contingencies.
I cheerfully agree that history of Ukraine can be viewed as one of nations contending for dominance (or freedom) only by imposing a present-day, or (more accurately, a 19th-century) version of history on the actual events.
To your admirable summation I’d like to add that there was often a strong religious component in the hostilities, with the lower classes Orthodox and the Catholics making resented headway among the upper classes due to the process of Polonization you describe.
There was a great deal of anti-Semitism in the mix, too. While deplorable, it is too seldom recognized that the peasantry had quite legitimate grievances against the Jews they dealt with, who were mostly the agents by which the Polish or Polonized aristos actually implemented their oppression.
IOW, it’s complicated. Any attempt to turn it into a simple story of good guys vs. bad guys must mutilate the actual events until they fit.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.