It was the summer of 1772 when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth experienced the first attack from the combined forces of three neighbouring powers — Prussia, the Habsburg Monarchy (later renamed the Austrian Empire) and Russia. A staggering 211 000 km² of land and 4,5 million of the populace were lost to this aggression, but it was only the beginning. In 1793 Prussia and Russia struck again, and then again in 1795 with the Habsburgs by their side once more. The third attack sealed the fate of the union of Poles and Lithuanians, whose country was fully annexed and erased from the map. Today this historical event is known as the Partitions of Poland (Rozbiory Polski).
From a young age, Polish people are taught about the struggles and bravery of their ancestors, but rarely about how relevant those events still are in modern-day Poland. It was a threeway onslaught followed by 123 consecutive years of occupation— during which even speaking Polish wasn’t commonly allowed and practising customs was highly limited. Such an event must have left some marks on Polish culture – and it did. We can still see a multitude of differences between regions of Poland, based on who was given the authority over them.
The main character of this article, /r/WidaćZabory (Polish for “the areas of post-Partition occupations can be seen”), is an online group on the social media platform Reddit. Its main purpose is to discuss this “historical heritage” which was left to the Republic of Poland after it regained independence in 1918. At the time of writing this article, /r/WidaćZabory has 17k members, with the amount expanding rapidly everyday. It’s among the top 5% of communities in the “Best of Reddit” ranking and is positioned at 9th place among geography-related ones, which makes it a popular subreddit not only for Polish standards but also for global ones. It’s worth mentioning here that Poland generates only 1,83% of the global traffic share on Reddit.
Interestingly, the /r/WidaćZabory subreddit actively excludes the Austrian occupation from the conversation, with even the group’s bio openly stating “Maps where Poland is divided into A and B.” The community is treating the post-Austrian area as an extension of the past Russian territory due to the qualities they share today. They are less industrialised and less economically developed than the Prussian territory and tend to align themselves with more conservative politicians, putting a bigger emphasis on religion.
However, the above-listed factors are not the only differences discussed in said subreddit, and when they are – it’s in a much more nuanced way.
The posts on /r/WidaćZabory can be divided into three main types: memes (purely humorous posts that showcase e.g. photos from election rallies with the Polish flag distorted on the map to highlight the two “regions” ), information sharing (like posting maps that showcase the Polish railway map with the customary caption “can they be seen?”) and discussion triggers (when members resort to “trolling” — sharing content meant to upset other members due to its controversial statements — like the post applying a profile of the current prime minister of Poland on a Polish map and calling it the eclipse of Poland, which linguistically may also refer to intellectual eclipse).
The atmosphere of the group, however, is often very unserious. Even information-sharing posts or purposeful provocations are usually met with laughs and joking responses in the comments. In some instances, such feedback is more than reasonable— like when the visualised data is clearly unrelated to the Partitions and/or it doesn’t truly align with the post-Partition occupation areas (e.g. the most searched cars in the area and naming patterns for local towns and villages). But there are also posts like the one showcasing information about the percentage of households equipped with an indoor toilet, under which people commented things like “I can’t quite believe they have so many [indoor toilets] in Subcarpathia” or “It appears that all of Eastern Poland just ‘does it’ into the Vistula (the biggest/longest river that runs though Poland).” This post’s example is more interesting since it showcases a phenomenon one could call the “data police”. People in the comments expressed displeasure not only with using a map with such old information (1984) but also about the colour choices of the graphic’s author – “What a * insert slur meaning a person with a mental disability* designed this map? […] The most logical solution would be to mark the higher intensity of the phenomenon with the darkest/most intense colour.”
Sometimes people also get upset with information-sharing posts, which turn them into “discussion-triggers”. This post showcasing the drop in self-declared Roman Catholics in Poland is a perfect example of it. Discrepancies in worldviews— especially religion—rarely fails to cause discord between people, and Poles are no exception. Since the post touches on a major difference between the regions— as already mentioned above— the comment section remains, in large part, serious. The members engaged in discussions about their sentiments on secularisation and the reasons (or lack thereof) behind its growing prominence in Poland.
In the mainstream political discourse the western, post-Prussian area is perceived by some as traitors to God and the fatherland due to their liberal, pro-LGBTQIA+ alignments. The Easterners are in turn referred to as radical-right yokels with aggression issues. The /r/WidaćZabory subreddit reinforces these sentiments in the number 1 post in the “Top” of the “All Time” section.
Although the image used itself is a harsh commentary on the ideological discrepancies between the regions, the group members did not take this post as a long-awaited opportunity to throw metaphorical stones at each other. It was simply received as a funny, light-hearted commentary. People took their chance to make jokes about the “non-heteronormativity epidemic” among western Poles, and the prehistoric stances of the eastern Poles.
In many places on the internet, Polish people choose to target each other as the enemy due to the divided political state of the nation. However, the r/WidaćZabory community seems uninterested in direct combat. Although differences in beliefs are prevalent in the discussions, there is no active war between the West’s slaves and Polish patriots, or between the conservative radicals and the freedom advocates. This community allows its members to point out how funny these discrepancies can be if looked at from different perspectives, and realise that at the end of the day collaborating to laugh can be more fruitful than the constant combat so common on many other platforms.
By Zuzanna Tabakiernik
October 1, 2024
