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Authors: Norman Davies
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archives from Nieświez˙.
In the course of the nineteenth century Russian imperial archivists broke up the Polish-Lithuanian records to suit their own administrative purposes. Anything relating to Ukraine, for example, was sent to Kiev.
In 1887 an incomplete and inaccurate catalogue of the Metryka Litevska was compiled and published in St Petersburg.
In 1921 the Treaty of Riga between Poland and the Soviet republics made provision for the restoration of all archives carried off from Warsaw in 1795. The provision was largely observed in the breach.
In 1939, the Polish Archive Service removed as many records as possible from central Warsaw, but large parts of the pre-war collections were destroyed during the war by fires, bombing and German looting.
One obvious conclusion is that Vilnius and Minsk are probably not necessarily the best places to locate the basic sources for study of the grand duchy.
The task of piecing together the archival jigsaw was first undertaken by Polish scholars in the 1920s and 1930s, but the work was far from complete when overtaken by redoubled wartime disasters. Post-war conditions, which gave absolute priority to the sensitivities of the Soviet Union, were not conducive to impartial research.
So with much delay the star role eventually fell to a heroic American scholar from Harvard University, whose findings began to appear in the 1980s. Her original concern was to summarize the holdings of the Soviet state archives in general, since their guardians treated catalogues as state secrets. But she came to realize that many records originating from the grand duchy, though broken up and widely scattered, had survived under misleading headings and identification numbers. She also realized that the registers in Stockholm, to which she had unrestricted access, were invaluable. They helped her to trace papers which were housed in various parts of Poland or the Soviet Union and whose existence would otherwise have been impossible to pinpoint. The net result was an unrivalled degree of understanding of the grand duchy’s archival legacy. 111
Since then, primary research has been greatly facilitated, and scholars of many nationalities toil to make up the backlog of two centuries. Enormous gaps and problems remain, yet it is a great consolation to know that all was not lost. Even for the amateur historian with no special expertise, it is extraordinarily exciting to open one of the inventories, and to gaze on the raw material of the grand duchy’s history with one’s own eyes.
One important relic, however, was never in the archives. The body of the last king-grand duke, buried appropriately in the church of St Catherine in St Petersburg in February 1798, rested untroubled in its tomb for 140 years. Then, in 1938, by agreement of the Soviet and Polish authorities who were tasked with fulfilling the restitution clauses of the Treaty of Riga, the sarcophagus was broken open and the coffin dispatched to Poland. However, since pre-war Poland’s official view of Stanisław-August was not positive, the government opposed the plan of reburial in the royal crypt at Wawel Castle in Kraków, and the coffin was transported instead to the chapel at Volchin (Wołczyn) near Brest, to Stanisław-August’s birthplace in the former grand duchy. During the war and in the post-war Soviet period, Volchin was totally devastated and the derelict chapel used as the fertilizer store of a Soviet collective farm. So the pulverized human remains ‘brought home’ to St John’s cathedral in Warsaw in 1995 were not in reality homeward bound; nor, with any certainty, were they the remains of Stanisław-August. 112
In the fields of art, architecture and social history, another single-handed labour of love was undertaken by an archivist and librarian who passed the second half of his life in Silesia. In the 1930s the late Roman Aftanazy had been a keen cyclist and photographer, touring the eastern borders of Poland’s Second
In the course of the nineteenth century Russian imperial archivists broke up the Polish-Lithuanian records to suit their own administrative purposes. Anything relating to Ukraine, for example, was sent to Kiev.
In 1887 an incomplete and inaccurate catalogue of the Metryka Litevska was compiled and published in St Petersburg.
In 1921 the Treaty of Riga between Poland and the Soviet republics made provision for the restoration of all archives carried off from Warsaw in 1795. The provision was largely observed in the breach.
In 1939, the Polish Archive Service removed as many records as possible from central Warsaw, but large parts of the pre-war collections were destroyed during the war by fires, bombing and German looting.
One obvious conclusion is that Vilnius and Minsk are probably not necessarily the best places to locate the basic sources for study of the grand duchy.
The task of piecing together the archival jigsaw was first undertaken by Polish scholars in the 1920s and 1930s, but the work was far from complete when overtaken by redoubled wartime disasters. Post-war conditions, which gave absolute priority to the sensitivities of the Soviet Union, were not conducive to impartial research.
So with much delay the star role eventually fell to a heroic American scholar from Harvard University, whose findings began to appear in the 1980s. Her original concern was to summarize the holdings of the Soviet state archives in general, since their guardians treated catalogues as state secrets. But she came to realize that many records originating from the grand duchy, though broken up and widely scattered, had survived under misleading headings and identification numbers. She also realized that the registers in Stockholm, to which she had unrestricted access, were invaluable. They helped her to trace papers which were housed in various parts of Poland or the Soviet Union and whose existence would otherwise have been impossible to pinpoint. The net result was an unrivalled degree of understanding of the grand duchy’s archival legacy. 111
Since then, primary research has been greatly facilitated, and scholars of many nationalities toil to make up the backlog of two centuries. Enormous gaps and problems remain, yet it is a great consolation to know that all was not lost. Even for the amateur historian with no special expertise, it is extraordinarily exciting to open one of the inventories, and to gaze on the raw material of the grand duchy’s history with one’s own eyes.
One important relic, however, was never in the archives. The body of the last king-grand duke, buried appropriately in the church of St Catherine in St Petersburg in February 1798, rested untroubled in its tomb for 140 years. Then, in 1938, by agreement of the Soviet and Polish authorities who were tasked with fulfilling the restitution clauses of the Treaty of Riga, the sarcophagus was broken open and the coffin dispatched to Poland. However, since pre-war Poland’s official view of Stanisław-August was not positive, the government opposed the plan of reburial in the royal crypt at Wawel Castle in Kraków, and the coffin was transported instead to the chapel at Volchin (Wołczyn) near Brest, to Stanisław-August’s birthplace in the former grand duchy. During the war and in the post-war Soviet period, Volchin was totally devastated and the derelict chapel used as the fertilizer store of a Soviet collective farm. So the pulverized human remains ‘brought home’ to St John’s cathedral in Warsaw in 1995 were not in reality homeward bound; nor, with any certainty, were they the remains of Stanisław-August. 112
In the fields of art, architecture and social history, another single-handed labour of love was undertaken by an archivist and librarian who passed the second half of his life in Silesia. In the 1930s the late Roman Aftanazy had been a keen cyclist and photographer, touring the eastern borders of Poland’s Second
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