Polska i Rosja. Sąsiedztwo wolności i despotyzmu X-XXI w.

“The  time will come when you say with pride: ‘Let me be a slave, but the slave of the master of the world.’” This epigraph from Mikhail Lermontov is the perfect introduction to professor Andrzej Nowak’s fascinating story about the nature of Russian despotism. This single sentence encapsulates the bizarre link between enslavement and expansion, the obverse and reverse of the same Russian coin, and a  recipe for the  endurance of an empire in which the absence of domestic freedom is compensated by the enslavement of others.

Many scholars are trying to penetrate the depths of the Russian soul, to find an answer to the question: How can an “evil empire” exist in twenty-first century Europe? Nowak finds it in history: both the most distant, reaching back to  the  Viking conquest of the Eastern Slavs, and the most recent, in the era of Putin’s rule. Traversing the centuries, Nowak presents concrete examples demonstrating that every despot, tsar, general secretary and Russian president must constantly sow terror, lest he lose his mandate to rule the slaves in his own country. Putin, like his predecessors, seems to be saying: I give you neither freedom nor prosperity; instead, I am reviving a great empire. The historical perspective of this book reveals the civilisational chasm dividing “eternal Russia”, a state of permanent terror, from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the birthplace of the democracy of the nobility. Poland exported freedom and civil rights; Russia supported itself with endless conquest. Both orders were doomed to confrontation. Andrzej Nowak offers a fascinating account of its successive chapters.

This book presents a  significant contribution to the Polish historical tradition that maintains that Russia is an invariably imperial country deprived of freedom, property and civic traditions – a state of affairs continually reproduced in contemporary Russian history.