Kosciuszko Chair & Center for Intermarium Studies

Was Poland’s Smolensk Plane Crash a Russian assassination?  Such is the provocative questioned asked by IWP international affairs student and Kosciuszko Chair research assistant, Pawel Styrna.  

The Nazi German occupation of Poland claimed a staggering death toll: approximately 3 million Polish Jews, and up to 3 million Polish Christians, overwhelmingly Catholics. Since the 1940s – and particularly following the implosion of communism – volumes have been written on this subject, their relative quality notwithstanding. Many lacunae were eventually filled. Even so,…

The post-communist states of Central and Eastern Europe are generally viewed in the West from an elite and top-down, rather than the popular and bottom-up, level. Prof. Chodakiewicz’s lecture on 4 April, 2012, constituting the fourteenth in a series devoted to the Intermarium (the lands between the Black and Baltic Seas), corrects this quite limited…

In his fifteenth and final lecture on the lands between the Black and Baltic Seas (“Intermarium: The Elite Views and Some Conclusions”) on Wednesday, April 18, 2012, Dr. Marek Chodakiewicz addressed an enduring trend of Western elite bias towards Central and Eastern Europe.  

This year’s Annual Kościuszko Chair Spring Symposium – hosted by IWP on Saturday, 14 April – covered a wide array of relevant topics, including: Hungary and post-communism, the CIA and Solidarity, Poland and the Euro, and the New York Times and Poland. 

IWP prides itself on its scholars-practitioners. Their ideas find practical application in the realm of statecraft not only in the United States but also abroad. This is, for instance, the case with the recent call for a referendum to unite Belarus and Poland. After the idea of a federation in the post-Soviet zone was floated…

On 21 March, Dr. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz devoted the thirteenth lecture in a series of presentations on the Intermarium to the “Problems of Methodology and the Case of Koniuchy.”

During the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, South Korea, President Barrack Obama promised to accommodate, after the US presidential election, the interests of Russia’s head of state President Dmitri Medvedev, and, more specifically, his predecessor-cum-successor Vladimir Putin. The latter has vowed to reintegrate the old Soviet Empire.

Delivering his twelfth lecture on the Intermarium on Wednesday, 7 March, Dr. Marek Chodakiewicz addressed the “landscapes and climates” in the region. His presentation was embellished with photographs from his summer 2010 expedition to all the states from Tallin and Odessa from north to south, and from Brest to Smolensk from west to east.

On 22 February 2012, Prof. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz spoke on the majorities and minorities in theIntermarium. This event constituted the eleventh in a series of ongoing lectures on the European region between the Baltic and Black Seas.