Alexander Lieven examines a new study of Poland' Christian history.

Poland — moral values outlasting catastrophes
SELDOM has a work of serious historical scholarship been published at a more opportune time than God's Playground, Norman Davies's ,two-volume history of Poland.* Few comprehensive histories of Poland are a,vailable in English, and none at once so readable and.so broad in its sympathies. There is, of course, 'far more to this book and its subject than mere passing topicality.
-It is not simply that what has been going on 'ffiere over the last couple of years may well, • certainly in so far as Europe is concerned, and 'Perhaps* even the world at large, represent the * Most important set of events since the Russian geyolution. To British public opinion Poland has many years been, depending on the point of k:lew, a touchstone, a stumbling block or a trigger. It was, after all, for the sake of Poland that Britain Went to war in 1939.
ittPlut long before that, throughout the Nineteenth Century, Poland stood for two things. To theradicals and reformers of the time, it was a model of resistance to tyranny and oppression (the word imperialism was tIien not as yet in quite such common use). To Catholics, not least in Ireland, it was a beacon of true and unwavering religious dedication standing between Western doubt and dark Eastern Christian practices.
No matter whether these beliefs had any fcimidation, and if so to what extent, they played ' their part in shaping the outlook of several generations.
. And it must be said, as Dr Davies makes it Pear, that it was some 250 years of Russian oppression which consolidated the unquestionable hold of the Church over the spirit of the Polish nation. Perhaps the chief merit of this book is the way in which the author combines a high sense of Poland's role, almost of kind of moral mission, with a very sober view of the many myths that have come to congregate round the country's past and its traditional image.
The significance of recent developments in Poland — the assertion of a social role and responsibility by the Church, the rise of a free workers' movement, the public disclosure of the inefficiency and widespread corruption of the Communist regime and its leaders — is selfevident for immediate purposes.
But if one tries to understand how these things have come about. uniquely in Eastern Europe, and how events are likely to shape from now on, some grasp of the course of Polish historical development is essential.
To take only the simplest and best known example, many observers of recent events in Poland, even many deep sympathisers with the causes promoted by the Solidarity movement among them, have been puzzled by the headlong impetus of the movement, sometimes akin to recklessness.
This feature of Polish public life becomes easier to see in perspective when one remembers that by the Seventeenth Century every decision by the Polish Parliament had to be taken unanimously.
Any member had a right to bring a motion to a halt by crying 'Veto, Veto, I will ndw allow it', to the great despair of all those concerned with the promotion of business.
In this sense, perhaps the most immediate interesting passages are those dealing with the history of the Polish Communist Party. The way in which any chances it might have had of making headway, which was not great in any case, were defeated time and again by interference from Moscow; any real vitality that it possessed contained a strong, if latent element of opposition to Russia and the dictates of the Kremlin.
This was true between the two world wars, and it clearly still applies today. The book's account of, post-war Poland does not extend beyond the massive popular reaction against the sudden raising of food prices in 1976 (except for a few pages about Solidarity as an after thought) but anyone who has read these final chapters will find it sadly easy to pick his way through what has happened since, including the imposition of martial law. For the interested layman, at any rate, these two volumes provide a most necessary, lucid and almost compulsively readable set of background information (which makes it all the more regrettable that their price should put them well out of reach of the ordinary reader).
The professional historian, on the other hand, will almost certainly find aspects to carp at, in the way in which professional historians usually do. His chief complaint will probably be that Norman Davies's work is short on the sort of detailed, mainly statistical analysis which is required in historical writing nowadays and, on the contrary, rich in vivid background details, illuminating quotations and lively stories which, it seems to me, do much more to bring the sense of any country's history home to a foreign reader than any amount of learned disquisition.
And the depth of the author's knowledge and understanding of all things Polish is beyond question. Moreover, as the title God's Playground
— a description of Poland by an early chronicler — indicates, Dr Davies sees in Poland and its tradition something more than just another East European country beset by that area's problems.
Poland,' he writes, is a repository of ideas and values which can outlast any number of military and political catastrophes. Poland offers no guarantee that its individual citizens will observe its ideals, but stands none the less as an enduring symbol of moral purpose in European life.'
*God's Playground: A history of Poland by Norman Davies (two volumes — £27.50 each; Clarendon Press).