You didnt understand, (my poor english maybe the cause), Stroński didnt atrribute the "miracle" to someone specific afaik, in Polish you can say: "This was a miracle!" , when you want to express that something unexpected happened, something that cannot be rationally explained, without being very religious or having someone/thing specific (like the Virgin of Częstochowa) in mind. Maybe very religious people believed that Częstochowa Virgin or the God himself was the reason of vicotory, probably yes. But what is important here - Stroński was first to use the teriminology of "miracle" and he's goals weren't religious but political. As was said earlier, the "miracle" lost the anti-Pilsudski meaning quickly (already in the interwar era i think).RCW Mark wrote:I stand corrected about the "Miracle on the Vistula" line. So, if Stroński said that Piłsudski shouldn't get the credit, then who did he attribute the "miracle" to?
My understanding was that the intervention of the Częstochowa virgin was believed by some as the decisive force and that the church was not about to disagree (which is different, of course, from actively promoting it as an explanation). Those people may not have used Stroński's wording, but their explanation still acted to effectively discredit Piłsudski.
Mark
Conclusion - i only wanted to clear things up by informing who exactly was the first to use the expression "Miracle on the Vistula" and what were the goals of using it in first place. It was Stroński who created the expression as a tool to discredit Pilsudski. It wasnt created by the Church (but it doesnt exclude the Church from using it for different reasons than Stroński). Later the expression lost its original pejorative anti-Pisudski meaning. Today its in popular use - even historians use it altough they find it silly, the victory wasnt especially "miraculous" considering the odds (numerical parity of forces, over-extended Soviet lines, etc...).
I hope that it clears the things up.
While Belrussians literary come from the term White Rus (Bila Rus), the term itself comes way before the existance of "russians" as such. In the Middle Ages, present day Russia was reffered by its neighbours as Moskovia, while modern Belarus was called White Russ and Ukraine as simply Rus (Western Ukraine or Galicia was referred to as Red Rus).
