News Snapshot:
In its time, the “Polish question” tore Europe apart. When the Poles started an uprising against Russia in 1830, after partitions had erased their country from the European map a generation before, Tsar Nicholas I laid out the choice: “Poland or Russia must now perish.” Free Poland and authoritarian Russia couldn’t coexist. Nicholas put down the Polish insurrection, consigning Russia — as the Russian writer Peter Chaadayev, who saw the uprising firsthand, wrote — to “her own enslavement, and the enslavement of all neighboring peoples.” A century later, Hitler started World War II to enslave his eastern neighbors; after Yalta,...