Academic literature on the topic 'Polish-Russian relations'

Contemporary Polish-Russian relations are examined, taking into consideration the broad internal conditions in Poland and in Russia. Negative mutual stereotypes prevail in both countries, shaped in the course of a complicated history of mutual relations, while the concepts of international policies in both states are underdeveloped and divergent. Polish-Russian relations are increasingly more influenced by external conditions, such as the profound change Europe is going through and the evolution of the entire international order. The most important modern issues in Polish-Russian relations concern the persistent differences in the perception of the history of mutual relations, dissimilar concepts of the European security system, and energy security. The conditions of relations between Poland and Russia affect Poland’s ability to pursue its international interests in many areas: in relations with Russia and the CIS, in the forum of international organizations (NATO, EU, Council of Europe, OSCE and the UN), in relations with Poland’s closest allies and partners (Germany, France, U.S. and Ukraine). Finally, Polish-Russian relations influence the position and international role of Poland, limiting it when these relations are bad or augmenting it when they are good. Since late 2007 Poland has been trying to conduct a pragmatic policy and normalize its relations with Russia. In general, Polish-Russian reconciliation seems feasible.

The article highlights the multilateral aspects of the Polish-Belarusian relations in 2005–2015. It is noted that having achieved the most important goals of foreign policy, becoming a full member of the EU and NATO, Poland decided to develop and deepen the Eastern vector. Relations with Belarus in the previous period, unlike the relations with Ukraine and Russia, remained at the low political level. At the same time, after Poland joined the EU in 2014, its foreign policy was consistent with the general policy of the European Union towards Belarus. It was established that the main reason for the negative tendencies in the Polish-Belarusian relations was the Belarusian authorities' interference with the activities of the Polish minority and organizations that represented it, as well as the strengthening of the authoritarian government in the internal political life of Belarus. The Polish authorities consistently supported their own minority, as well as the opposition forces and civil society in Belarus, which usually caused dissatisfaction of the official Minsk. Relations between Belarus and the West, and Poland in particular, were changeable, depending on its relationship with the Kremlin. Russia's support, supplemented by the accelerated process of privatization of the Belarusian economy with the participation of Russian capital, led to the financial-economic and military-political dependence of Belarus, which over the years, not only decreased, but deepened. It was noted that the policy of isolation and diplomatic pressure on the Belarusian political elites narrowed the space for the maneuvering of Polish authorities, and they lost the opportunity to influence the political processes in Belarus. Therefore, Poland was trying to use the Russian-Belarusian conflicts in order to draw the Belarusian leadership closer to the western world and depart it from Moscow. In particular, this was to be facilitated by the European Eastern Partnership program, which, however, did not produce significant results for Belarus. The Belarusian authorities continued the policy of authoritarian rule, persecution of the opposition and falsification of elections. At the same time, under the influence of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the leadership of Belarus cautiously took a course on improving relations with the Western countries and a more balanced foreign policy. Keywords Republic of Belarus, Republic of Poland, Russian Federation, foreign policy, sanctions.

This paper presents Stanisław Mikulski’s (one of the most popular Polish actors)relations with Russia. These include, among many others, his work as a young actor inthe plays written by Russian writers and playwrights, which were staged in the JuliuszOsterwa Theatre in Lublin, his most famous role as a Russian secret agent – codenameJ-23 – both in television theatre and the TV series More Than Life at Stake (Stawkawiększa niż życie), and his participation in six Russian films. Moreover, Mikulskiworked as the director in the Centre of Information and Polish Culture in Moscow, thuscontributing to Polish-Russian cultural relations.

This thesis seeks to explain Poland’s energy security policies towards Russia in the period from 1990-2007. It is inspired by the puzzle that Poland’s commitments to reduce its dependence on imported oil and gas from Russia have varied considerably during this period. Numerous large-scale projects to enhance energy security have been proposed, abandoned and revisited, all in the absence of a significant change to Poland’s level of dependence on Russia or its exposure to supply risks. This puzzle poses a challenge to conventional approaches to energy security, which tend to explain policies as a function of ‘material’ shifts in the price, supply or demand for fossil fuels. Though these factors are undoubtedly important it is argued that, in the case of Poland, energy security is more affected by domestic decision-making processes than by such material shifts. In particular, the degree and form of intervention in the energy sector by the political executive in Poland is highlighted as a key factor explaining energy security policy output. These interventions in Poland are classified and distinguished according to three types of ‘policy network’ – statist, corporatist and liberal, each of which represented a different outlook on the optimal means for ensuring energy security. These policy networks were embedded within different governments, and their preferences fashioned Poland’s responses to energy security challenges occurring under similar material conditions.

This dissertation seeks to conceptualise and operationalise the concept of soft balancing in international relations by articulating a “theory of tripartite strategic balancing” which is applicable to both international and regional unipolar systems. It has a twofold purpose: one theoretical and the other empirical. First, it seeks to develop a theory of tripartite strategic balancing which encompasses three forms of strategic balancing: internal, external, and soft balancing. The second part seeks to test the theory’s utility in explaining international political outcomes in the post-Cold War international system. In particular, it seeks to ascertain whether and how “second-tier great powers” have strategically balanced against the United States on a global level since the end of the Cold War. The analyses will focus largely on the foreign policies of Russia and France – the chief soft balancers. However, this dissertation also seeks to extend the concept of soft balancing into the regional level of analysis by examining whether and how minor-regional powers soft balance against regional unipolar leaders. For instance, it will examine whether and how the Russian Federation has been soft balanced against by states in the “European Near Abroad.” The analyses will focus primarily on the foreign policies of Poland – the chief soft balancer in the region. The dissertation will employ three in-depth case studies – the Kosovo Crisis (1999), the Iraqi wars (1991-2003), and the Georgia Crisis (2008) – to verify whether or not tripartite strategic balancing is actually occurring as the theory predicts. It will heavily rely on sources and interviews conducted during my time working at the United Nations Security Council and the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These findings seek to contribute a more nuanced strand of thinking to the realist paradigm in international relations, and they offer practical implications for both US and Russian foreign policymaking.

The goal of this dissertation is to describe an evolution of visions of the Slovak future, as they were introduced during the Great War (1914-1918) by groups of Slovaks living mainly abroad. It strives to decide, which of these visions had a chance to become real and which were only fantasies without real political importance. To reach this goal it tries to describe Slovak relations to other relevant nations in pre-war years and also the position of Slovaks in their fatherland or abroad including the ideologies by which they were influenced. One of most decisive goals of this dissertation should be answering the question if the Czecho-Slovak orientation was the only alternative to the idea of Hungarian state for Slovak politicians, or if the victory of this conception in 1918 was just a result of unpredictable processes, and whether other conceptions had their chance to influence the Slovak future, too.

W recepcji literatury rosyjskiej w Polsce w ostatnich latach twórczość Mikołaja Gogola zajmuje szczególną pozycję. Gogol jest odkrywany na nowo: jego utwory są coraz częściej wydawane i przedstawiane na scenie polskich teatrów, powstają kolejne interpretacje dzieł pisarza, co więcej – nowe tłumaczenia. Językowa niebanalność Gogola stanowi dla tłumaczy ogromne wyzwanie. Autor jest nieprzewidywalny nie tylko w konstruowaniu neologizmów, w grze słownej i tworzeniu licznych anomalii językowych – zaskakuje również różnymi sposobami opowiadania o wydarzeniach lub opisywania bohaterów, czyli tym, na co składa się narracja w tekście literackim. Zasadniczym celem niniejszej rozprawy doktorskiej jest szczegółowa analiza narracji Mikołaja Gogola w utworach z „cyklu petersburskiego” z uwzględnieniem implicytacji (niewyrażonej wprost informacji semantycznej) oraz zbadanie sposobów odzwierciedlenia oryginalnych właściwości narracyjnych w przekładach na język polski. W rozprawie zaprezentowano, w jakim stopniu informacja implicytna (niejawna, domyślna) jest zachowana w polskich przekładach, a które elementy narracji nie znajdują w nich odzwierciedlenia i jakie są tego przyczyny; przeanalizowano również skutki nieuzasadnionych transformacji tłumaczeniowych w narracyjnej strukturze przekładów oraz specyficzne problemy translatorskie, jakie narracja Gogola stawia przed tłumaczem. W płaszczyźnie teoretyczno-metodologicznej praca mieści się w obszarze literaturoznawstwa, językoznawstwa i translatoryki.
The topic of this doctoral thesis, which is entitled Gogol’s Narration as a Translatoric Problem (as exemplified by “St Petersburg Stories” and Polish Translations) is a presentation of the translatoric issues of the peculiarities in N. Gogol’s narrative style which are not explicit, but implicit in his prose. The theoretical part (chapter 1) starts with the explanation of the definition translated narrative discourse and the main discourse relations are based on Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT, Asher and Lascarides 2003), i.a. coordinating relations and subordinating relations. The former push the discourse structure from left to right (i.a. narration, backgrounds etc.), while the latter (i.a. elaboration, explanation, restatement etc.) are the discourse relations that push the structure down. The narrative discourse is considered as connected and coherent, when coordinating and subordinating relations perform their prototypical functions. The subsequent practical part of my dissertation is based mainly on the assumptions of SDRT. The second chapter is devoted to implicit and explicit relations in discourse. The British philosopher of language, Paul Grice, known for his theory of implicature, wrote that the meaning of “what is said” and “what is implied” must be distinguished (Grice 1975). The meaning of a discourse is more than the sum of the meaning of the clauses and sentences it consists of. One and the same clause can be understood in many different ways depending on the context it occurs in and one of the aspects of this additional content that comes on top of the semantics of the clause as such is its relation to other clauses in the discourse. In current pragmatics implicit relations are described by using the terms “implicature” and “presupposition”. In this chapter I show in specific examples from “St Petersburg Stories” why it is important for a translation to take account of implicatures and presuppositions and what the consequences are of ignoring them. The third chapter is concentrated around the peculiarities of Gogol’s narrative style in “St Petersburg Stories” – primarily it is about ambivalence, uncertainty and fluidity. Some of these peculiarities are marked by Russian and Polish literary scholars, but I examine them from a different angle, conducting a deep linguistic analysis by using methods of pragmatics (indicated in chapters 1 and 2). The fourth chapter (the main practical one, which deals with translation problems) opens with an explanation of the difference between the role of the narrator in Gogol‘s original text and in the Polish translations. It involves a description of the terms “domestication” and “foreignization” (Venuti 1995), which are used in the translation of culturally specific words. I draw attention to constructions which, on the face of it, serve to highlight the national “local color”, e.g. with the qualifier russkij, ‘Russian’, referring to phenomena deeply rooted in Russian culture. Yet on a closer inspection one finds that, contrary to expectations, these constructions reflect the alienation of the narrator with respect to reported events, being a kind of exoticism and thus additionally complicating translation. The next phase of this chapter is focused on one of the most obvious stylistic devices employed by Gogol – restatements (i.a. repetitions, tautologies and pleonasms) – which at first sight seem to be under-informative, superfluous and at variance with prototypical functions appropriate to restatements in artistic texts. The methods of reproduction in the Polish translations, as well as the reasons for their occasional omissions are presented at some length. It is shown why, having access to a vast variety of stylistic devices, Gogol so often prefers repetitions, tautologies and pleonasms, and what the perils of distortion of their basic semantic/pragmatic features, or of their omission in translation are. A deeper linguistic analysis of Gogol’s texts, taking into consideration the relevant connotations intended by the author, as well as the semantics of context, leads the author to establish several less-studied functions of repetition, tautology and pleonasm, and to view them as a means of implicit organization of discourse structure. In this chapter I also consider the translation issues of the nominations in Gogol’s narration, first of all “unexpected” nominations, or nominations not related to the context, which can cause difficulties in interpretation and translation. The role of these nominations in the development of certain motives in the narration and in restoration of the backstory lost in narration is analyzed. Finally in chapter four, I show how prototypical models of relating portions of text to each other are eroded in Gogol’s narrative – in particular, how the thematic-rhematic structure of sentences is deformed, expected anaphoric links are interrupted, anti-narration effects arise in those parts of the text which most certainly should be of narrative nature. The result is that erosion of syntactic relations is characteristic of Gogol’s text as a whole. The findings of the discourse analysis in this PhD thesis show that most of the meanings in Gogol’s narrative style are not expressed clearly (they are not explicit), but implied. Otherwise the discourse relations in Gogol’s text often don’t perform their prototypical functions (for example, explanations don’t explain why a situation arose, but inform about other situations or non contextual things), which can mislead the readers and translators. The results of the analysis show that ignoring Gogol’s narrative peculiarities as described in this dissertation leads to wrong translations. Translators of Gogol’s works would be well-advised to be mindful of this special variety of exoticization characteristic of his prose. Asher, N., Lascarides, A. (2003), Logics of Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grice, H. P. (1975), Logic and Conversation. Syntax and semantics 3: Speech acts., ed. by P. Cole & J. L. Morgan, New York: Academic Press. Venuti, L. (1995), The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. New York: Routledge.

The main topic of the thesis is the investigation of the Polish influence on Russia during the Time of Troubles, as it's described by the Russian writers of the first half of 17th century in their Historical narrations. In the first part of the work there is introduced the Time of Troubles as a phenomenon that significantly influenced all its contemporaries. The thesis also pays attention to the historical sources, to their causes and circumstances of creation and also some of their authors. In the most extensive part of the work there are, based on extensive source material, discussed various topics that are focused on the Polish factor on the Russia during the period. There is mentioned the Polish support of False tsars, who aspire to the tsar title, the king's Zikmund military intervention and also the final victory of Russian militia over foreign interventionists. In conclusion there are compared individual historical narrations with each other, if there are any different topics that they describe or if they describe any element of Polish intervention in the same way or if there is any connection between the authors' lives and their works.

The chapter is an attempt to analyze the Polish problem and its influence on the development of Soviet-American and Russian-Ukrainian relations. The Polish problem consists of two parts: firstly, the question of territorial claims of the Soviet power concerning Western Ukraine and Western Belarus (the territory of Poland till 1939); secondly, the return of the Polish government-in-exile to Warsaw and its recognition as the only legitimate government. The chapter examines the evolution of the US position, which was caused by the logic of development, and not by the change of the state leader, as it is commonly believed. The presence of the Soviet army on the territory of Poland has created objective difficulties in the return of the Polish territories and the comeback of the Polish government from emigration. Despite pressure from the multi-million Polish diaspora, American presidents could not resist the will of the Soviet Union and were forced to abandon further disputes. The history that became a reality in 2014 in Ukraine led to an unprecedented war of memories.

Revolutionary events in many European countries in 1848 caused fears in St. Petersburg that further development could cause collapse of the multinational Austrian Empire and thus revive the so-called Polish question in the international arena, which would pose an immediate threat to the integrity of the Russian Empire. Evaluating the threat that had arisen, Nicholas I, after hesitation, decided to send troops to the Danubian Principalities, to annihilate revolutionary unrest, in accordance with the right to their patronage, which Russia possessed under the Adrianople Peace Treaty of 1829. In 1849 the corps of Russian troops stationed in Moldova and Wallachia took part in the campaign in Transylvania as well as the suppression of the Hungarian revolution. In this article, the events of that time are examined through the prism of the reports of Russian officers, participants of the military campaign. This source is valuable because it contains description of the situation in the Danubian Principalities and Transylvania, reflects interethnic contradictions in Transylvania. Active participation of Polish revolutionaries in the events made it possible to link more closely the situation in remote lands with the situation in Russia itself. The officers' reports demonstrate the allied relations between Russia and Turkey in the face of the revolutionary events of 1848 in Central Europe, their lose cooperation in "restoring order" in Wallachia; as yet little augured a new, very early aggravation of the relations between the two powers, which eventually led to the Crimean War in 1853.

After the turbulent events in Ukraine of 2014 and 2015, the geopolitical and geoeconomic situation in the Central-Eastern Europe changed. Ukraine outrightly chose the pro-Western orientation. The Russian Federation, despite some minor success in the form of Crimea incorporation, lost a lot of its former influences in the Ukraine. Ukraine's rapid reorientation opened new possibilities and threats for Poland. Poland, as the biggest Western neighbour of Ukraine with enormous historical bonds with this country, is vividly interested in the developments taking placing there. The author presented in this chapter the most germane points of issue between Warsaw and Kyiv as well as their common interests. Furthermore, the author briefly presented how Moscow and Washington try to impact Polish-Ukrainian relations. Moreover, the prognosis of future evolution of mutual bilateral Polish-Ukrainian relations will be depicted in the chapter. The increasing economic bonds of two countries may portend closer relationships in the future.

This chapter addresses the impact of the war on relations between Warsaw's two principal and competing national groups, Poles and Jews, by exploring themes that take into account the dramatically different attitudes of the Russian and German regimes toward the Jewish population. To be sure, the actions of the Russian Army were largely responsible for the large Jewish refugee population in the city during the first part of the war, one of the main contributing factors to Polish–Jewish tensions. By contrast, the principal goal of the German occupation regime was to maintain stability, which required a balancing act between Poles and Jews in Warsaw—an approach that many Poles interpreted as serving Jewish interests.

The policy of the Polish authorities in the sphere of education in the territory of Belarus was applied in different ways in different regions. The administration needed to take into account the ethno-confessional composition and general political attitudes of the local population, as well as the position of the Belarusian national movement. The struggle faced by federalists and supporters of incorporation in the educational sphere was manifested in the choice of tactics that constrained the development of non-Polish schools. The rapid increase in the number of Polish schools in the Brest region occurred through the reorganization of Russian and Belarusian schools and was promoted by both blurred ethnic identification of the local population and the Belarusian national movement's weak position. The attempt to introduce universal Polish education based on educational programs adopted in the Polish state became the main peculiarity of the activities of representatives of the educational authorities in the Belarusian counties of the Vilnius Region. Most local school inspectors opposed the organization of secondary schools, and sought to deprive schools of clergy influence. There was no single head of education in relation to the non-Polish schools. In the Minsk region, the Polish authorities had to allocate additional funding primarily to Belarusian and Jewish schools in order to counter that of Russian schools, which had a significant impact on the local population.

The paper aims at presenting to answer: can cooperation within local border traffic (LBT) be a platform for cross-border relationships in rural areas? Rural areas located in the border zone were subjected to analysis, limiting the study area to the Polish Warmia-Masuria Province and the Kaliningrad Oblast of the Russian Federation. For the needs of the present task, survey studies were designed and carried out, targeting rural governments of Warmia-Masuria Province (rural areas) covered by the Agreement on LBT on the Polish side, as well as respondents residing in the Kaliningrad Oblast on the Russian side. Individual interviews represented the basic research method in data collection. The interview questionnaire was the research tool applied. As results from the carried out surveys: cross-border relationships on rural areas within LBT expand economic innovation, infiltrate social and cultural influences, overcome negative stereotypes, and reinforce cooperative habits. Furthermore, they support the development of additional cross-border cooperation area.