AHC: Strong Poland, weak Russia?

Maur

Banned
Disclaimer: I don't think it's actually important. Linguistics are just that - what matters is actual identities, and i have no doubts that there were strong common 'eastern slavic' identity, which coexisted with more local identities, be it Muscovite, "Lithuanian", Zaporozhian, etc. It was by no means sure how will they evolve, whether Russia will absorb today's Belarus and Ukraine or if they stay separate (much easier if you have them not subjugated by Poland, obviously), or even if Grand Duchy will absorb today's Russia. (even if the last is a bit ASBish, it's because of geopolitics, not culture)

And it (the one word for all) actually works both ways. It can be seen with today's, umm, 'heated', arguments about who's the real descendants of Kievan Rus, Ukrainians or Russians (oh, the wiki talk pages are so enlightening sometimes... :D)


That said, i am genuinely curious. Let me say what i think, and hopefully you'll be able to correct me.

I should made clear it was about today's languages (which is irrelevant to the topic, so, yeah). And i'm not even sure, but i think that in Russian, the word for "russians" and for "east slavs" is the same 'russkiye', while in Belarusian and Ukrainian languages there are two different words for naming both concepts. Or rather that's what i though, because trying to check it now left me very thoroughly confused :D (seriously, wikipedia is fun. Article about one word in one language hyperlinks to another article in another language, which apparently describes totally different thing. And it links back to yet another article in the previous language. Good job wiki! And i thought that at least the names won't be controversial much. Seriously: Start at Ruthenians, link to Ukrainian, link to Polish, link to Russian, link to Ukrainian, link to Polish, link to English and you are in totally different place :D)

Obviously, every language has another words for naming inhabitants of Ukraine and Belarus.

I am a bit less clear what was the case in the past. I think that it was just one word (the "Rus" in its various declinations) that was used at all in the beginning, then the Rossiya emerged some time around the end of middle ages. Which means we actually agree. Dunno why i wrote all that, then.

Ok, i give up. I don't have idea about the whole naming clusterfuck, and i'm tired. Just tell me what you think.

On a side note, it's funny that each group of Slavs ended up divided in three major groups. Eastern - Russians, Ukrainians, Belorusians, Western, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Southern - Bulgarians, Slovenes and Serbo-Croats :D ;)
 

Maur

Banned
And this is not really all that important. What's important is how to buff Poland.
So, to try to somewhat make up for my long off-topic ramble, i'll try to contribute.

I see three problems with PLC. From easiest to hardest:

Administration (in the widest sense) efficiency:

The royal power route:

1. I heard that Louis of Hungary (the first one, from XIV century, not the Jagiellon) had meant to give privileges to Polish nobles only temporarily, and that he had long-term plans. So if he managed to establish dynasty it might have been different than Jagiellon attempt - they had to deal with already stronger knights.

2. Make some smart and long-lived king really bent on gathering power back in royal hands. A bit Deus Ex Machina, but why not. So, eg, Sigismund Vasa instead of being fanatical catholic, is fanatical power grabber, and he still reigns for 50 years or something.

The noble republic route.

The opposite. Make kings irrelevant and make actual noble parliamentary government a'la England.

Cultural struggles:

Basically, east-west, and religious splits. Would be easiest solved with royal power, as Crown doesn't lose anything with limiting orthodox rights. But there are many other ways, for example, maintain balance between protestants and catholics in power, so the orthodox aren't just one oppressed minority, but more something to be won and allied with in power struggle.

Economy: extensive serfdom based agriculture and decline of cities.

Well, that's the hardest part unless you nuke Netherlands :D I don't know how to do it, really, but then again - it's not necessary to counter Russia - it's not like Russia isn't in very similar situation (with the additional drawback of being isolated from the west by Sweden and PLC, who, despite being enemies, didn't actually mind cooperating in that aspect.
 
And we continue to pride ourselves on the passion of our debate!:D

So, the question is to bring the Szlachta into line. One way to do so would be to lower the actual number of them (less people to persuade),
So disfranchise the poorest? This would weaken magnates, thus you would need more people to persuade.
the other is to develop the middle class into a viable counterweight. The latter would require Poland to develop a strong merchant economy at least in Greater Poland. To do that, one would need to drive the Germans from Prussia and Pommerania and create and maintain a Polish naval dominance in the Baltic, so some merchant economy can exist.
There were middle class of landed gentry (their power was based on grain export) whose rivalry prevented rise of bourgeois middle class.
It would be intresting to see some of reforms attempted in the end in 18th century aplied in the begining of 16th (disfranchise the poor slachta, alloving shlachta to live by commerce in towns without losing privileges, enoblement of succesiful townspeople etc)

Another way to develop this middle-class is to go further back, to the Mongol invasions. The Mongol plundering of western Poland and associated loss of Polish population led to many local nobles attempting to resettle the lands with Germans, which led to what became German Silesia and German Pommerania. Keep the Mongols out of western Poland, and you can keep the areas of Silesia and, perhaps more importantly, the Baltic coast ethnically Polish. This gives Poland more interest in the Baltic trade routes, which leads to a growth of a Polish merchant class.
It looks when speaking about Poland Germans is another name for fairies. Just get rid of Germans and there would be no headache any more after tree days of heavy drinking ;).

I'd love to completely agree with you and say that yes, we both have a point, but you're actually kind of incorrect. There's just one word for the historical "Russian People" in both Ukrainian and Belarussian, unless you want to specify "people of Russia the country" as opposed to "people of Ukraine the country". Needless to say that the distinction's also a relatively recent thing.

That said, the ahem, East-Russian project to assimilate West-Russian lands (and we really ought to treat Ukraine and Belarus separately) certainly failed politically. So you have half a point. And this is not really all that important. What's important is how to buff Poland.
Thus all disagreement is about meaning of a term. "People speaking East Slavic dialects and calling themselves Russians" vs "subjects of tsar of Russia"
 
I should made clear it was about today's languages (which is irrelevant to the topic, so, yeah). And i'm not even sure, but i think that in Russian, the word for "russians" and for "east slavs" is the same 'russkiye', while in Belarusian and Ukrainian languages there are two different words for naming both concepts.

Russian has "Russkiy" and "Rossiyanin" too; pertaining to the wider culture and the state respectively. The words are the same in Belarussian except with one S. Ukrainian wiki studiously avoids having to say "Ruskiy" at all except in relation to the Rusins, but there is a concept of "Ruskiy" in a historical sense, and it was used by (irrelevant I know) Rusyn intellectuals in the 19th c. to emphasise sameness with the *east Slavs of Imperial Russia. However, though Ukrainian official historiographese prefers "Rosiyskiy" (they can't exactly say Moskali in polite company) for anything east-Russian, they don't use "Ruskiy" in relation to themselves either, hence the jokes about the ancient-Ukres and Kievan Ukria.

So uh, anyway. Both the words exist in both Ukrainian and Belarusian in the exact parallel to Russian usage but the application or non-application is a matter of pretty recent politics. And to be honest, it doesn't matter to me except to acknowledge that there is political motivations both behind the "triunity" and the "one-s-not-Moskali" narratives.

On a side note, it's funny that each group of Slavs ended up divided in three major groups. Eastern - Russians, Ukrainians, Belorusians, Western, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Southern - Bulgarians, Slovenes and Serbo-Croats :D ;)

There's two explanations:

1. Three is a magic number!
2. You're eh, bending the count selectively to ensure the result. :D

...and I will discuss some of your and abas' ideas about Poland later today. No time, grrrrr.
 
There's two explanations:

1. Three is a magic number!
2. You're eh, bending the count selectively to ensure the result. :D

Linguistically speaking he's quite right. Serbian, Montenegrin, Croatian, and Bosniak are closer together than, say, Scottish and American forms of English. Granted they do use different scripts.

If anything, he's exaggerating the count upwards. The Bulgarian/Macedonian tongue is probably closer to Serbo-Croat than the Sicilian and Venetian "dialects" of Italy are to each other.
 
Linguistically speaking he's quite right. Serbian, Montenegrin, Croatian, and Bosniak are closer together than, say, Scottish and American forms of English. Granted they do use different scripts.

If anything, he's exaggerating the count upwards. The Bulgarian/Macedonian tongue is probably closer to Serbo-Croat than the Sicilian and Venetian "dialects" of Italy are to each other.



Venetian is a language indeed. :) At least, Venetians say so, and don't ever try to contradict them on this point. And they really have some points. Venetian actally was the national language of the Venetian Republic (alongside with standard Italian, though) for centuries and has a written standard different from the Italian one (with a couple of letters used that are not in Italian) a literature of its own, etc.
Sicilian has not a unified written standard AFAIK, and i don't know of a modern literature of some importance (but I don't understand any of Sicilian dialects, while I do understand Venetian, so maybe i'm wrong).


About Slavic languages: the main groups of the Western Slavs are actually FOUR: Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, and the poor mistreated Lusatians.
I don't know Macedonian, but modern Bulgarian has traits of the Balkan sprachbund like postponed article and simplified declension, while Serbo-Croatian has no article IIRC, and keeps extended case declension. So they are not all that close. I think your claim is correct for Old Bulgarian, which is the base of Church Slavonic (and thus heavily influenced Eastern Slavic). IIRC, its more direct modern continuation would be Macedonian.

Apart from that, the Slavic languages started diverging no earlier than around 600 AD or so, so no wonder they could differ LESS than average Romance "dialects" within Italy. Romanization of Italy was well underway in early centuries AD, so for example Venetian and Sicilian started diverging uhm, let's say around 100 AD? Maybe even earlier (well, modern Sicilian has a particular history because of strong Arab and Greek and Norman influx, plus Sicily was a province and not part of Italy under the Romans so was Romanized later, so I really don't know).
 
About Slavic languages: the main groups of the Western Slavs are actually FOUR: Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, and the poor mistreated Lusatians.

And the Sorbs, but they were always so negligible that no-one really cared. You have to be a pretty tiny Slavic minority to live in Germany and have the Nazis forget to come after you.

I don't know Macedonian, but modern Bulgarian has traits of the Balkan sprachbund like postponed article and simplified declension, while Serbo-Croatian has no article IIRC, and keeps extended case declension. So they are not all that close. I think your claim is correct for Old Bulgarian, which is the base of Church Slavonic (and thus heavily influenced Eastern Slavic). IIRC, its more direct modern continuation would be Macedonian.

Macedonian and Bulgarian were a straight linguistic continuum until a generation or so after the former was assigned to Serbia. Not Portugal-Spain so much as Michigan-Kentucky. Demographics at Bulgarian independence "should" technically have denied it a coastline and included Macedonia. Up to that point the eastern half of modern Macedonia was viewed as part of the center of Bulgaria.

Of course, demographics barely entered into it. The Russians had come down the coast, so the Bulgarians got the coast. Without Macedonia, the Ottomans couldn't hold the balance in the Balkans, so the Ottomans kept Macedonia. Then the Balkan War came 30 years later and countries took what they could.
 
And the Sorbs, but they were always so negligible that no-one really cared. You have to be a pretty tiny Slavic minority to live in Germany and have the Nazis forget to come after you.



Macedonian and Bulgarian were a straight linguistic continuum until a generation or so after the former was assigned to Serbia. Not Portugal-Spain so much as Michigan-Kentucky. Demographics at Bulgarian independence "should" technically have denied it a coastline and included Macedonia. Up to that point the eastern half of modern Macedonia was viewed as part of the center of Bulgaria.

Of course, demographics barely entered into it. The Russians had come down the coast, so the Bulgarians got the coast. Without Macedonia, the Ottomans couldn't hold the balance in the Balkans, so the Ottomans kept Macedonia. Then the Balkan War came 30 years later and countries took what they could.

I counted Lusatians and Sorbs as one, like Poles and Kashubians or Ukrainians and Rusynians.
Sorbs and Lusatians were probably just viewed as Germans, since German was their cultural language anyway and they had belonged to German polities for centuries. They had little national rivendications at all, AFAIK, so the Nazis simply didn't care. Plus, the Nazis were concerned with race more than nationality in the normal sense. They didn't mind recuiting SS everywhere provided they ahd a basis to define the recruits as "Aryan".
They even deported Aryan-looking children from Poland to be raised in German family to bring them "back" to their racial heritage or some crap of that kind. Of course those children were 100% Poles by any standard, except if viewed through the distorting lens of Nazi ideology.
Also, the Pomeranian slavic minority was left realtively undisturbed by the nazis, and suffered much more because of the Soviet advance. The Soviet didn't discriminate between them and German-speaking germans.
However I guess that the Nazis forgot about Sorbs because they were too ignorant to know they were there, or too disturbed by the the very idea of a distinct Slavic culture existing within Germany to admit its existance.
 
So to go back to Poland:

I also am skeptical about some underlying economic salvation; like Maur said, Poland was victim to a very unblanced grain trade which reduced it to a giant latifundia, which naturally is good for nobility, hence the szlachta power. But can you avoid it? I don't think it's easy if possible at all. Every other country around went through the exact same experience. But not every country got partitioned for the trouble.

Poland needs, at the very least, to get AHEAD of the curve in terms of military profesisonalism. You can have an export oriented, serf-powered society and still have a large and well-trained army in the 18th c. Russia and Prussia both are great examples though Prussia needed a little luck, being right in the middle of things. Can Poland do it? Well, Maur thinks a particularly monomaniac king can pull it off. Maybe. But the tricky part is that it has to happen earlier than it had to for Russia; somewhere in the mid-17th c. at the latest.

That may be a problem...but then they do have Sweden as a contemporary example to emulate.
 
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