Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/134

 When the Poles realised that political situation, they employed all their force to come to a reconciliation with Russia. They saw their only salvation was in the defeat of the German power. But that work of reconciliation with Russia was not easy, especially after the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, when it was evident that a war between Russia and her western neighbours, the Central Empires, was inevitable. So the Poles were in a hurry to organise as quickly as possible Polish influence in Russia against the Central Empires. But there was a very great difficulty because of the Poles and because of the Russian Government. The Poles had the long-standing tradition of a struggle against Russia. Between the Poles and the Russians there was a sea of blood shed in secular struggles, and fresh memories of insurrection followed by oppression did not favour the movement of reconciliation. A yet stronger difficulty was the policy of the Russian Government, which was anti-Polish until the outbreak of the present war. There was a curious contradiction between the foreign and home policy of the Russian Government in the period preceding this war. The foreign policy was anti-German, because Russia in her foreign interests was threatened by Germany; but the home policy was pro-German, and, in Poland on the western frontier, supported the Germans against the Poles, owing to the peculiar situation of the Polish Protestants. The Russian authorities, represented chiefly by men with German names, considered the Polish Protestants Germans, and enforced the German language in their schools. The Poles were obliged to fight desperately for the retention of the Polish language in