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ОглавлениеMap 2. Poland
· Chapter Two ·
POLAND
1
THE Polish Commonwealth, before its decline in the second half of the seventeenth century, had been one of the major European powers, second only to France in population and to Russia in territory. When her fortunes thereafter waned, she lacked the asset of a peripheral geographic position such as had permitted Spain and Sweden, for example, to withdraw into hard and relatively immune shells once their bids for expansion had been defeated. Poland’s location being more central and pivotal, she was doomed to obliteration as a state in the second half of the eighteenth century, rather than the gentler lot of a mere reduction in power and size.
Before its partition at the hands of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, this Polish Commonwealth had been a multiethnic state governed through quasi-federalistic and decentralistic constitutional arrangements by a nobility of Polish and polonized Lithuanian, Belorussian, Ukrainian, German, and even Tatar, Armenian, and apostate-Jewish stock. Its political principles had required neither linguistic nor ethnic uniformity: Latin was the language of state functions, and caste rather than race was the criterion of access into the ruling establishment. Indeed, even religious uniformity was not highly valued until the last century preceding the partitions. Thus, at a time when the rest of Europe had been convulsed by the post-Reformation religious wars and persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Poland had enjoyed the widest degree of religious toleration and freedom of any state on the continent. Such latitudinarianism, while morally admirable and culturally interesting, may well have been a political hindrance in an age when language and religion were the mortar and bricks of nation-building.
Political life in the restored Polish state after 1918 was heavily colored by a craving to avoid repeating the errors that had weakened the old commonwealth; there was, however, no unanimity in identifying those errors. Did historic Poland’s mistake lie, for example, in having first tolerated wide religious dissent in an age when nationalism was closely tied to a specific religion, or in later having alienated her Eastern Orthodox and Protestant subjects through Roman Catholic exclusivism? Politically, had Poland been originally too generous, or subsequently too restrictive, toward her non-Polish populations? Was it a misjudgment to have contested the rise of Muscovy, or to have failed to smother her when she was still vulnerable? Did the Poles blunder in refusing to elect a Habsburg to their throne, which would have identified that dynasty’s interests with the fate of their commonwealth? Or did they err in saving Vienna from the Ottomans, which simply rescued and revived one of their own later partitioners? Interwar political and ideological stances were heavily influenced by the virtually universal Polish awareness of such historical problems and of their ambiguity. By and large, the parties of the Right and Center interpreted Polish history as validating their preference for an ethnically and religiously homogeneous modern society with a centralistic state apparatus and a foreign policy particularly alert to the assertedly primary threat of German eastward expansionism. The Left and the Piłsudskist movement, supported in part by the ethnic minorities, read that same history as a prescription for pluralism and federalism and as a lesson that Poland’s main external foe was Russia.
In the century and a quarter between independent Poland’s annihilation in 1795 and her restoration in 1918, the former gentry-nation had transformed itself into the Polish społeczeństwo, a term conventionally but inadequately translated as “society.” Społeczeństwo signified, in fact, the more complex notion of the organized, politicized, albeit still stateless, community of all Poles, led now by an intelligentsia that preserved, at the same time as it modified, the values and the style of the old szlachta, or gentry. Indeed, the new intelligentsia was not only psychologically strongly anchored to the former szlachta, but also heavily descended from it, as that class had protected itself from the degeneration that might otherwise have followed the loss of statehood by transforming itself into the leading fraction of the intelligentsia. Bourgeois and peasant sons who also entered the intelligentsia assimilated to its gentry-derived norms. Thus, whereas among the neighboring Czechs the native medieval nobility had vanished and a new bourgeoisie allied with a prospering peasantry furnished the political leadership, among the Poles the ancient szlachta lived on through the newly ascendant intelligentsia.
Though Polish economic and political patterns were to develop along different lines in the three partitioning empires among whom the nineteenth-century społeczeństwo was divided, the fact that the intelligentsia preserved a uniform code of values and style and a network of social connections across the partition-borders was to prove immensely important. It sustained Polish historical and political consciousness during the era of subjugation, and it also facilitated the eventual political reintegration, which proceeded more rapidly than the economic reintegration, of the several parts of the restored, independent state after 1918. The intelligentsia then not only mastered the state apparatus, but effectively controlled all political parties no matter how contrasting their programs. It was thus a sociological, rather than an organizational, entity. Not deliberately dictatorial, the intelligentsia simply took for granted its supposedly unique qualification for public affairs. The independence movement had allied it with the peasantry and proletariat in 1918, but thereafter the intelligentsia blocked, deflected, and captured the claims of the other classes to power and, though a numerical minority, charged itself with the task of reunifying the reborn Polish state and presiding over its subsequent development. Not until the mid-1930s did the peasants and workers challenge and repudiate this political and psychological domination on the part of the intelligentsia, which was by now heavily bureaucratized, over the state and over their own movements.
2
During the long era of the partitions, the three separated segments of the Polish nation had developed different political and economic patterns. The Poles of Prussia had achieved a high level of economic development during the nineteenth century, which in Poznania and Pomerania was based on a prosperous agriculture and an ancillary processing industry, and in Silesia on mining and heavy industry. They had also reached a high level of national consciousness. Though economically integrated into the German imperial market, they had resisted political assimilation and in the process had developed a remarkable degree of national solidarity that transcended class lines. In restored Poland their social stance was more “bourgeois-capitalistic” and their economic patterns often healthier than the socialist, or peasantist, or aristocratic ones prevailing in the generally poorer areas that had been recovered from the Austrian and Russian empires. In the ex-Prussian western regions both the peasantry and the bourgeoisie were economically enterprising and innovative. In the southern and eastern regions, the peasantry was generally more primitive, and the Polish middle class was heavily composed of members of the professions and of bureaucrats, allowing the specifically economic bourgeoisie to remain preponderantly Jewish. Even the landscape reflected these differences; in the ex-German areas frequent small towns which were the loci of agricultural marketing and processing industries and collieries and foundries dotted the countryside, while in much of the rest of Poland the endless vista of fields, forests, and villages interspersed with an occasional city, which functioned mainly as an administrative and garrison center, prevailed.
Politically, these western Poles manifested a strong regional identity combined with a somewhat contemptuous and resentful pride toward their compatriots. Though passionately anti-German, they regarded themselves as the sole bearers in restored Poland of such positive, “Prussian,” cultural virtues as industriousness, efficiency, perseverance, and punctuality. Convinced that they alone worked hard and effectively, these westerners came to feel themselves exploited by the southern and eastern Poles, whom they viewed as economic parasites and political schemers. Their view was somewhat analogous to the one that the Transylvanian Romanians took of their Regateni brethren in interwar Romania. There, too, intense nationalism was combined with resentment of the allegedly slovenly “Levantine” style of their fellow nationals from the other regions, and passionate anti-Magyarism did not preclude appreciation for the relatively high standards of competence which had been inculcated and acquired in old Hungary (see Chapter 6, section 3). The western Poles’ sense of grievance was fed by the economic dislocations consequent upon their severance from Germany, by the subsequent chronic financial turmoil of the first half of the 1920s, and, finally, by the sacrifices required during a long German-Polish tariff war that lasted from June 15, 1925, to March 7, 1934.
In Galicia, the Austrian share of partitioned Poland, the Poles were overwhelmingly agricultural and the Jews controlled most of what little commerce and industry existed. Politically, the Polish nobility and intelligentsia had been favored by the Habsburgs, both locally and in Vienna. Hence, in the first years of the restored Polish state, only this region was capable of supplying a large reservoir of trained civil servants, until Polish universities began to graduate a steady flow of new bureaucrats and managers in the mid-1920s. But though politically, administratively, and culturally privileged, Galicia was economically poor and demographically overpopulated relative to the primitive level of its agronomic technology. Since the turn of the century, the hitherto exclusive political hegemony of its conservative Polish gentry had come under sustained challenge by peasantist, socialist, and Ukrainian nationalist movements.
The area that reverted to restored Poland from Russian rule consisted of two quite different parts: (a) the Kongresówka, created by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 as a political adjunct of the Tsarist Empire with a certain degree of administrative autonomy, which was whittled away in the course of the nineteenth century, and with a solidly Polish population; and (b) the kresy, or eastern borderlands, which had been administered as integral parts of Russia since Poland’s partition and where the Polish ethnic element consisted of a relatively thin upper crust of aristocracy and gentry exercising economic and cultural “stewardship” over a socially and ethnically still “immature” Belorussian and Ukrainian peasantry. Though basically agricultural, the Kongresówka also boasted a fairly highly developed industry, which was second only to ex-German Silesia’s. The kresy, on the other hand, were well-nigh exclusively agricultural and economically backward, with the Jews monopolizing the indispensable minimum of commerce and handicrafts. In both regions the tsarist authorities had consistently sought to weaken the Polish szlachta as punishment for its insurrections of 1830-31 and 1863-64 by such measures as peasant emancipation, cultural russification, and administrative repression. The Poles, in turn, had developed a tenacious and ramified political life—partly conspiratorial and revolutionary and partly pragmatic—characterized by a wide spectrum of ideological hues.
3
Independent Poland’s political parties both reflected and in part bridged these regional differences. There was a great multiplicity and duplication of parties, and by 1926 there were twenty-six Polish and thirty-three ethnic minority parties, with thirty-one of the total having achieved legislative representation. Given their number and their propensity to splits, fusions, and general instability of organization, it seems preferable to depict their policies and clientèles in broad, rather than in detailed, strokes, identifying only the largest and most stable parties.
The Polish Right, stemming from the mid-nineteenth century rise of integral nationalism, and politically allied with Roman Catholicism, which it perceived as the protector of Polish nationhood, rejected the multiethnic and federalistic traditions of the old prepartition commonwealth. Insisting that Poles alone be masters in the restored state, it wished to exclude the ethnic minorities—though they numbered over 30 percent of the population—from effective participation in political power. It also wanted, if possible, culturally to polonize all of them except the Jews, whom it viewed as unassimilable and hence to be preferably expatriated. Thus an integral Polish society would be achieved. Basically bourgeois in its appeal, the Right endorsed private enterprise, called for rapid industrialization linked to the polonization of the entire economy, and insisted on constitutional and administrative centralization. Its leading ideologist was Roman Dmowski; its main organizational expression, the National Democratic movement (Narodowa Demokracja). Interwar Poland’s geographically most universal party, the National Democrats were particularly strong in ex-Prussian western Poland, in the Kongresówka, and among the Polish urban islands in the Ukrainian peasant sea of eastern Galicia.
Frequently allied with these National Democrats, though ostensibly preferring to regard themselves as centrist rather than rightist, were the Christian Democrats (Chrześcijańska Demokracja). This party was a more specifically clericalist movement, professing the Christian-social ideology of Rerum Novarum. It was popular with the proletariat and petite bourgeoisie of industrial Silesia.
Further toward the political Center stood the National Labor Party (Narodowa Partia Robotnicza), which was nonsocialist and had strong support among the nationalistic Polish workers of the light industries of Poznania and Pomerania. It enjoyed less solid but still significant popularity with a similar constituency in the Kongresówka.
The most quintessentially centrist party, in terms of its policies as well as its pivotal location on the parliamentary seesaw, was the Piast Peasant Party (Stronnictwo Ludowe “Piast”). Its support came mainly from the Polish peasantry of Galicia. Quite nationalistic, hence intermittently allied with the Right, it was reluctant to promote a truly radical land reform lest Belorussian and Ukrainian peasants in the eastern areas benefit at the expense of the Polish element, and lest the principle of private property be jeopardized. Hence the Piast Party preferred to gratify the expectations of its constituency through such devices as patronage, public works, and other state favors. This required it to strive to be always a government party; indeed, under its dexterous leader Wincenty Witos, Piast was the leading “broker” party that manipulated coalitions during the first years of interwar Poland.
A second peasant party, the Wyzwolenie (Liberation) Party (Stronnictwo Ludowe “Wyzwolenie”), was authentically leftist but politically less effective than Piast. It was sympathetic toward the grievances and aspirations of the ethnic minorities, anticlerical, and committed to radical land reform. Just as the Piast Party was basically Galician, so the Wyzwolenie was also something of a regional party, its home being in the Kongresówka. Not until the depth of the agrarian depression, on March 15, 1931, was a united Peasant Party (Stronnictwo Ludowe) formed through a merger of the Piast, Wyzwolenie, and interim groups that had split away from one or another of these two parent parties in the mid-1920s and were known collectively as the Stronnictwo Chłopskie.
The classic bearers of the ideology of the Polish Left were the Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna) and, originally, the Piłsudskist movement. (At that time the Communists, identified with a historic and contemporary foe of Poland, and obliged by that foe to advocate the cession of Poland’s kresy to the Soviet Union, were viewed suspiciously as a party of the “East” rather than of the “Left” by most Poles.) The Socialists and the Piłsudskists, who had been one movement before World War I and were still closely linked by many ideological, personal, and sentimental ties throughout the 1920s, identified with the old commonwealth’s multiethnic, federalistic, and latitudinarian religious traditions, as well as with the anti-Muscovite insurrections of 1794, 1830-31, and 1863-64 which had been intended to recover an independent Polish state. Hence, not only the proletariat but much of the state-oriented intelligentsia endorsed these two unimpeachably patriotic movements of the Left in interwar Poland. The Socialists enjoyed substantial urban support in all regions except those of ex-Prussian western Poland, while the Piłsudskists did not, until 1927, function as a distinct party, but rather as coteries within several parties, which they sought to win over to Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s policies. Though the Socialists and the Piłsudskists differed over socioeconomic policies and legislative-executive relations, they were initially at one in repudiating the integral nationalism, ethnic chauvinism, and clericalism of the Right.
It follows that the ethnic minorities, who sought to maximize their bargaining power by organizing a quite cohesive parliamentary bloc during the 1920s, long expected more favorable treatment from the Left than from the Right-Center coalition. After 1930, however, the Ukrainians became profoundly alienated from a by-now unresponsive Piłsudski, and toward the end of the decade the Jews were deeply troubled by his heirs’ reluctant, but nonetheless shameful, concessions to popular anti-Semitism.
Finally, mention must be made of the political stance of the surviving upper aristocracy, who were fearful of the Left’s espousal of land reform and alienated by the Right’s raucous chauvinism and bourgeois political outlook. Though they had served the governments of the partitioning empires until 1918, though they declined thereafter to adapt themselves to the rules of the parliamentary game in independent Poland, and though the peasant and worker masses would in any event have used the power of universal suffrage to exclude them from government, they were nevertheless viewed and wooed by Piłsudski as the bearers of an allegedly suprapartisan tradition of public service, that went back to the days of the old commonwealth. He felt that this tradition was desperately needed by a Poland deeply lacerated by the incessant strife of parties and factions. Soon after seizing power in May, 1926, to stem the apparent disintegration of the body-politic, Piłsudski arranged a rapprochement with this aristocracy that supposedly embodied the state and whose political ideology was conservative rather than rightist in the integral-nationalist sense. By then exasperated with all political parties, whom he held collectively responsible for the travails of the state, Piłsudski was undeterred by the consideration that this move implied and signaled an early break with the Left which had hitherto been his ally.
4
Interwar Poland’s foreign and domestic stances were to a large extent determined by the historic vision of Józef Piłsudski—and by the Right’s deliberate frustration of that vision. Piłsudski’s moral authority in interwar Polish politics derived from his successful leadership of the political and military struggle, before and during World War I, to achieve the resurrection of an independent Poland. Then, as chief of state and commander in chief of the armed forces in the immediate postwar years 1918-22, he sought through military efforts to carve out for the restored state the wide eastern frontiers and, in consequence, the multiethnic population that had characterized the old commonwealth before its partition. This program implied a federalistic constitutional structure.
The Right, meanwhile, which before the war had been less concerned with independent statehood than with the economic and cultural strengthening of Polish society was concentrating its diplomatic efforts on persuading the Allied statesmen at the Paris Peace Conference, who recognized the Rightist leader Dmowski as head of the Polish delegation, to grant Poland generous frontiers vis-à-vis Germany. Simultaneously, the Right was using its domestic political power to achieve the adoption of a highly centralistic constitution on March 17, 1921, which implied that the proportion of the state’s non-Polish population would be small enough to be effectively assimilated.
Between Piłsudski’s and Dmowski’s visions, Polish policy fell between two stools. The former, though not entirely successful in his endeavor to recover all the Lithuanian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian lands that had been lost by the old commonwealth to Muscovy, nevertheless did manage, thanks to Russia’s momentary postwar and postrevolutionary prostration, to incorporate into Poland extensive eastern territories of a non-Polish ethnic complexion. Simultaneously, the centralistic constitution and generally chauvinistic stance of Dmowski’s adherents alienated these large minorities, rendering them unabsorbable even on a political level. Cultural assimilation, which might have been possible a half century earlier, was now out of the question. Russia, meanwhile, was wounded without being permanently crippled by these territorial losses to Poland. Since Germany’s enmity was inevitable—being utterly unreconciled to having been obliged to yield to interwar Poland a “corridor” to the Baltic Sea through Pomerania, as well as the rich industrial region of Silesia—it seems, in retrospect, unwise for Poland to have gratuitously saddled herself, in addition, with Russian resentment and with an unsolvable ethnic-minority problem—a triple complex which entailed an acrobatic and basically hopeless foreign policy. At the time, however, in the first euphoric years of independence, the gravity of this problem was not appreciated, as most Polish—and most European—political leaders entertained exaggerated impressions of the extent to which Russia had been weakened—supposedly permanently—by war and revolution. Furthermore, in justice to Piłsudski, one might now well share his skepticism that even a generously treated Russia would have reciprocated in kind once her leaders were persuaded that their interests indicated otherwise.
5
The ethnic, social, and demographic difficulties confronting the restored Poland are suggested by the results of her two censuses of September 30, 1921, and December 9, 1931. Spokesmen for the ethnic minorities criticised the categories and the actual tabulations as being skewed. Indeed, the official distinction between “Ukrainian” and “Ruthenian” (in 1931) as well as between “Belorussian” and “local” (tutejsi) nationality (in 1921 and 1931) appears to have been an artificial, dubious, and politically motivated Polish attempt to reduce the statistical visibility of the Ukrainians and the Belorussians. However, on balance, the census returns can be used with profit. It should be noted that in 1921 ethnicity was defined by the respondent’s national identification, whereas a decade later it was inferred from his native tongue (jȩzyk ojczysty), “in which he conventionally thinks and communicates with his family.” This change may have figured in the sharp drop in the number of Germans recorded between the two censuses, though emigration also played a role here. A less significant variation is that the 1921 census included in its various subcategories the barracked military personnel, whereas the 1931 census did not. In the latter year they numbered 191,473. Furthermore, as the frontiers were not finally delimited until 1922, the population statistics for Silesia and the Wilno (Vilnius, Vilna) region were interpolated into the 1921 census from 1919 data. Thereafter, the area of interwar Poland from 1922 up to her peremptory incorporation of Czechoslovakia’s fraction of Silesia (the Teschen, or Cieszyn, or Těšín district) at the time of the latter country’s “Munich” travail and truncation in September-October, 1938 (see Chapter 3, section 11), was 388,634 square kilometers. Within that territory resided a highly heterogeneous population (see tables 1 and 2).1
It may be useful at this point to indicate a number of internal correlations as well as problems within these official data. The Polish population was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic with only a very small Protestant minority. The Lithuanians were even more exclusively Roman Catholic, but four-fifths of the Germans were Protestant. The bulk of Jews-by-religion also regarded themselves as Jews-by-nationality and spoke Yiddish or Hebrew, yet a significant minority indicated Polish as their native tongue and identified correspondingly in national terms. While the other three major minorities were concentrated geographically—Germans in the west, Belorussians and Ukrainians in the east—the Jews were concentrated in a different but equally vivid sense. Four-fifths of them were urban, and in 1931 they furnished 25.2 percent of the inhabitants of the twelve largest cities with populations of over a hundred thousand, though only 9.8 percent of the general population. (This concentration would be even more strikingly illustrated if the four large cities of ex-Prussian western Poland, which had few Jews, were subtracted, and Jewish urban proportions were then recalculated for Galicia, the Kongresówka, and the kresy together.)
TABLE 1
POPULATION BY ETHNICITY
TABLE 2
POPULATION BY RELIGION
TABLE 3
AVERAGE ANNUAL RATE OF POPULATION INCREASE (IN PERCENTAGES)
| Region | 1921-31 | 1931-39 |
| Central Provinces | 1.7 | 1.2 |
| Eastern Provinces | 3.0 | 1.4 |
| Western Provinces | 1.0 | 1.1 |
| Southern Provinces | 1.3 | 1.1 |
| All of Poland | 1.7 | 1.2 |
The census returns for the Slavic eastern minorities present problems. Since the adherents to the Eastern Orthodox and Uniate (Greek Catholic) confessions came almost exclusively from among Belorussians, Ukrainians, and Russians, it is somewhat discrepant that the sum of the worshippers in these two churches (table 2) should substantially exceed the sum of these three ethnic minorities (table 1), and it appears that many Belorussian and Ukrainian adherents to the Orthodox and Uniate rites were persuaded or pressured to declare themselves Polish by ethnicity. In addition, Roman Catholic Belorussians often identified themselves as believing in “the Polish faith” and were accordingly recorded as Polish by ethnicity as well. Being politically still somewhat immature—though not as much so as Polish propagandists of the Right often alleged—such eastern-minority peasants might have been ready to have their nationality or language, but not their religion, recorded incorrectly. The majority of Belorussians were Eastern Orthodox, the minority Roman Catholic; and Ukrainians were Uniate in ex-Habsburg eastern Galicia, and Orthodox in the ex-tsarist kresy. It should also be noted that the rate of population increase (table 3) was highest in the eastern provinces where these two ethnic groups were concentrated and constituted the rural majorities. Hence, some skepticism is elicited by the statistics purporting that the combined percentage of Ukrainians, Ruthenians, “locals,” and Belorussians in Poland as a whole rose between 1921 (18.4) and 1931 (19.2) by as little as 0.8 percent (table 1).
Throughout the entire country, the socioeconomic pressures accruing from this high rate of population increase were aggravated by the interwar throttling of emigration outlets. Furthermore, the failure of industrialization to develop sufficiently to absorb the bulk of this increase meant that approximately four-fifths of the population remained confined to the villages. The census recorded 17.1 percent of the population as urban and 82.9 percent as rural in 1921, and 20.4 percent as urban and 79.6 percent as rural in 1931. Here the official census definition of an urban locality was one with a population of ten thousand or more.
6
Before commencing a chronological analysis of interwar Poland’s politics, this is a suitable point to scan her society’s relations with the ethnic minorities. Polish culture had historically been magnetic and absorptive. The old commonwealth’s assimilation of non-Polish gentries has been mentioned. Somewhat surprisingly, this power of Polish culture to attract other people continued even after the loss of independent statehood. Still more surprisingly, it first waned (initially unperceived) during the second half of the nineteenth century among the allegedly still primitive eastern neighbors (Lithuanians, Ukrainians, later the Belorussians), while it remained potent in the west, among the supposedly more advanced, heavily germanized, Silesians, Kashubs, and Mazurians, and the border-Germans proper, who continued to be culturally and linguistically repolonized and polonized throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This imposing magnetism of Polish culture, even in the absence of a Polish state, seduced many interwar Poles, especially on the Right, into underestimating the new recalcitrance of the still young nationalisms of the country’s ethnic minorities, and hence into rejecting a federalistic in favor of a centralistic constitutional structure.
Of the four important minorities, the Belorussians and Ukrainians were as overwhelmingly agricultural and rural in social structure as the Jews were commercial, artisanal, and urban, while the Germans were mixed. The two Slavic minorities were also consciously autochthonous in the regions of their settlement, while the Jews and Germans were somewhat on the defensive, the former having been invited to Poland in medieval times and the latter having come as modern colonists. While the three Christian minorities intially enjoyed the patronage of neighboring powers of their own ethnicity and might in theory realize their national aspirations through yet another truncation or even partition of the Polish state (ignoring for the moment the realities of Stalin’s own hostility toward Ukrainian nationalism), the Jews’ political dilemma was more problematical. Having no contiguous “mother country” into which to be incorporated, and hence no clear ethnic interest in the territorial fragmentation of Poland, their political stance oscillated between general ethnic-minority solidarity against Polish domination on the one hand, and occasional efforts to come to a particular arrangement with the ruling Poles on the other—an arrangement by which they would hope to trade their endorsement of the state’s territorial and political integrity and of its governments in return for special recognition of their cultural peculiarities and educational needs. Alas, as rightist ideology permeated Polish society ever more deeply, the governments, in turn, somewhat reluctantly acceeded to popular anti-Semitism and rebuffed such overtures for an authentic accommodation. Hence many Jews sought a third alternative, Zionism.
Already at the moment of Poland’s rebirth, the Jews had been caught in the crossfire of Polish, Ukrainian, Bolshevik, and White Russian armies and bands: 1919 was a traumatic year in East European Jewish history. Later, they were held responsible for inducing the Paris Peace Conference to impose on Poland the Minorities Protection Treaty of June 28, 1919, which was intended to shelter the minorities against coerced assimilation by guaranteeing them legal equality as well as civil and political rights. Poland resented this treaty as implicitly denigrating her sovereignty, since the established powers, many of whom also housed substantial ethnic minorities, did not commit themselves to the same international legal obligations as they enjoined upon the new states. The frequent petitions filed against Poland under the terms of this treaty at the League of Nations, both by the minorities themselves and by interested (malevolently interfering, in the Polish view) states, embittered the Poles. And, as neither the treaty nor the League had enforcement teeth, eventually the minorities became cynical. Finally, on September 13, 1934, Poland unilaterally refused further cooperation with the international bodies that monitored the treaty, pending the universalization of its obligations to all states.
The vast bulk of Polish Jewry was culturally unassimilated, and the pattern of its economic structure was almost the reverse of the general society’s (table 4). The high, and allegedly provocative, prominence of Jews in the developing urban economic sectors of commerce, industry, culture, and communications, and their virtual absence from agriculture can be illustrated even more vividly through the proportions of adherents to the various religions engaged in the several economic sectors (table 5). In other words, whereas table 4 gives the total Jewish and Gentile populations across the various economic sectors, table 5 gives the religious distribution within these sectors. (Economic identification by linguistic criteria would have been more helpful than by religious ones for reconstructing the separate economic profiles of the other minorities and of the Polish majority, but unfortunately it was not available.)
TABLE 4
POPULATION BY ECONOMIC SECTORS (INCLUDING DEPENDENTS). 1931 CENSUS
TABLE 5
ECONOMIC SECTORS BY RELIGION. 1931 CENSUS (IN PERCENTAGES)
Lest, however, an erroneous impression be here conveyed, that a thoroughly affluent and powerful Jewish minority dominated the modern nerve-centers of interwar Poland, the following considerations should serve as correctives: (a) the census category of “Mining and Industry” included many small and technologically obsolescent sweatshops and handicraft establishments; (b) Jews, like the other minorities, were emphatically underrepresented in the public services, which the Poles understandably wished to monopolize in a Polish state; (c) the Jewish community maintained an extensive school system with only a pittance in state financial support; (d) poor Jews were numerous—one-third of the Jews were on charity—and just as poor as poor Gentiles; (e) the Jews were originally invited into Poland by medieval rulers precisely to develop its commerce and trade, which the szlachta then disdained—hence, their overrepresentation in this sector was historically as much a result of Polish as of their own preferences.
From his seizure of power in 1926 until his death in 1935, Piłsudski had sought to honor the nonexclusivist traditions of the old commonwealth in its age of glory. His epigoni, however, not only encouraged economic discrimination against Jews, including boycotts which occasionally degenerated into quasi-pogroms, but also tolerated explicitly political anti-Semitic violence, especially at the hands of nationalistic university students. Here the supposedly “strong” government of 1936-39 showed itself suspiciously weak in failing to curb or apprehend the culprits. While it refrained from racially anti-Semitic legislation, this regime did indulge in administrative policies intended to weaken and damage the Jews’ role in the economy and the free professions, even to a degree that was irrational from the perspective of Poland’s own interests. Experienced Jewish entrepreneurs, who often employed Poles and extended credit to them, were taxed into oblivion on behalf of clumsy and unprofitable state monopolies. In a country desperately short of physicians, engineers, and other professionals, Jews were virtually excluded from such academic studies. Their proportion of the entire university student body was reduced through a numerus clausus from 20.4 percent in the academic year 1928-29 to 9.9 percent in 1937-38; the latter percentage was about the same as the Jewish proportion of the entire population but far under the Jewish proportion of the urban population, which classically furnishes the academic youth. Within the university walls, the rightist student body was allowed to impose ghetto benches and other humiliations, including frequent beatings, on their Jewish classmates.
The economic and social context partly explains, but does not justify, this malevolence. Poland’s slow recovery from the depression threw Polish workers, craftsmen, peasants, entrepreneurs, and intelligentsia into severe competition with the highly visible Jews for the limited supply of employment, credit, entrepreneurial, and professional opportunities. There was real, if misplaced, anxiety lest the Poles become a nation of peasants, proletarians, and officials while the Jews flooded commerce and the free professions. Nevertheless, thoughtful members of the Polish elite became concerned that the specifically anti-Semitic violence might eventually degenerate into a broader rightist assault on all political rivals and, indeed, on public order per se. As war clouds darkened the horizon in 1938-39, even some government leaders indicated misgiving lest anti-Jewish excesses identify Poland with, and undermine her vis-à-vis, Nazi Germany.
Interwar Poland’s German minority, being economically prosperous and socially well-balanced, and enjoying more political support from the Weimar Republic—and later in a different way from Nazi Germany—than the other minorities were given by any external power, complained primarily about educational discrimination. Especially in Silesia was it subject to a vigorous effort at cultural polonization. The manner in which land reform, industrial investment, and bureaucratic recruitment were administered also aggrieved the Germans, many of whom emigrated to Germany. In the 1930s, those who remained divided politically into Nazi (the majority), bourgeois-nationalist, Catholic, and Socialist groups. As the Polish government was then cultivating good relations with Berlin under the rubric of their joint Non-Aggression Statement of January 26, 1934, it did not support the Catholic and Socialist parties against the pressure of the Nazi-controlled one. By the same token, the latter cooperated with the Polish government rather than with other minority parties and, being unable to win parliamentary representation under new and restrictive electoral laws of 1935, it thereafter accepted two appointive senatorial seats from the hands of the Polish president.
The poor and heavily illiterate Belorussians were regarded by the Polish authorities as having the lowest degree of political consciousness of all the state’s minorities. At the beginning of the interwar era, when the still embryonic Belorussian nationalist awakening was expected to develop primarily into a sense of differentiation from Russia, the Polish Left and the Piłsudskists had even nursed it along. By the second half of the 1920s, however, this potential accommodation had soured as the Belorussian peasants became offended by the economic hegemony of old Polish landlord-families and the physical intrusion of new Polish colonists (osadnicy) into their territory. In 1931, 37 percent of the arable land in the Belorussian areas of Poland was owned by Poles, and the region’s extensive timber resources were also exploited in a predatory manner. Many Belorussians now became enamoured of the supposedly better political and economic lot of their conationals in the Soviet Union’s Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Their fascination with the neighboring Communist model, in turn, alarmed the Polish authorities, who attempted to repress politically this Belorussian nationalist movement that now appeared even more concerned about differentiating itself from Poland than from Russia. Yet even this Polish repression of the late 1920s was still intermittent and inconsistent; though severe against explicit political expressions of Belorussian “subversiveness” and brutal in the villages, it left the central Belorussian cultural institutions in Wilno unmolested. In the 1930s, finally, the repression was extended to cultural expressions as well; Belorussian schools were polonized or closed, and the youth given the unhappy choice of studying in Polish or remaining illiterate. As is generally the case in such circumstances, Belorussian nationalism was only strengthened and rendered yet more subversive by the efforts to destroy it. By the time of Poland’s destruction in September, 1939, the loyalties of its Belorussian citizens were divided between aspirations for independence and hopes for unification with their Soviet Belorussian brethren.
The Ukrainians were the largest national group in interwar Europe to whom the doctrines of political self-determination and unification had not yet been applied. They were then divided between the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, not as dispersed minorities, but as compact local majorities in the regions of their settlement. The fraction of the Ukrainian nation that was assigned to interwar Poland was overwhelmingly agricultural. But even in the midst of a solidly Ukrainian rural countryside, the populations of the southeastern towns consisted of Polish officials and garrisons, and of Polish and Jewish professionals and merchants. The land-hungry Ukrainian peasants craved the estates owned by Polish landlords. Thus, the Ukrainian problem in interwar Poland was social, economic, and cultural as well as political—a complex which the Polish Right, preferring to dismiss Ukrainian nationalism as either immature or a German machination, declined to acknowledge.
The Ukrainians were aggrieved and alienated by linguistic pressure and cultural polonization, economic exploitation and Polish colonization, as well as by restrictions on their access to higher education and public careers, and their gerrymandered underrepresentation in the legislature. In the 1930s, Polish-Ukrainian relations sporadically degenerated into quasi-guerrilla warfare, characterized on the one side by assassinations of Polish politicians, officials, and colonists, and on the other by dragonnade-like military brutalization and “pacification” of Ukrainian villages. But as interwar Poland was not a police-state, the conscience of the Polish intelligentsia restrained the political authorities from stripping the minorities of their rights altogether. Thus, through all the vicious cycle of provocation and revenge, the Ukrainians managed to develop an active intelligentsia and a lively cooperative movement, which functioned as a school of politico-administrative self-education as well as a bulwark of economic self-defense. They also succeeded in easing pressure to transform their ecclesiastical institutions into funnels of polonization. Though Poland’s Eastern Orthodox (i.e., Ukrainian, Belorussian, Russian) dioceses did assert their autocephalous organization with respect to the Moscow Patriarchate in the early 1920s at the urging of the Polish authorities, they resisted heavy pressure in the late 1930s to polonize their sermons, prayerbooks, and calendars. The Uniate Church functioned even more emphatically as an explicit expression of Ukrainian national consciousness in interwar Poland.
In the mid-1930s, as Stalin moved to destroy Ukrainian national culture and imposed the hated kolkhozi on the Ukrainian peasantry in the Soviet Union, and as Warsaw achieved diplomatic détentes with both Berlin and Moscow, the Ukrainian nationalist movement in Poland was for the time being deprived of the patronage of any major state. This would appear to have been a likely moment to reconcile the isolated Ukrainians to the Polish state. The Poles, however, failed to seize it. Instead of viewing the situation as an opportunity to bid for their Ukrainians’—and, analogously, their Belorussians’—allegiance, they myopically interpreted it as a license to ignore and repudiate their minorities’ aspirations.
Statistics may also help to explain, though not to excuse, why so many Poles, especially on the political Right, succumbed to the temptation to dismiss the two Slavic, eastern minorities as too immature and primitive to merit serious consideration as authentic nations. The census tabulations for illiteracy indicate considerably higher rates in the provinces where these two minorities were concentrated than in Poland as a whole (see table 6). Similarly, the economic structure of their Orthodox and Uniate denominations show higher absorption in agriculture and lower representation in more “advanced” economic sectors than the general average (see table 7).
TABLE 6
ILLITERACY ABOVE THE AGE OF TEN (IN PERCENTAGES)
| Region | 1921 | 1931 |
| Provinces of Ukrainian concentration: | ||
| Wołyń | 68.6 | 47.8 |
| Stanisławów | 46.0 | 36.6 |
| Tarnopol | 39.2 | 29.8 |
| Lwów | 29.2 | 23.1 |
| Provinces of Belorussian concentration: | ||
| Wilno | 58.3 | 29.1 |
| Nowogródek | 54.6 | 34.9 |
| Polesie | 71.0 | 48.4 |
| Poland | 33.1 | 23.1 |
TABLE 7
RELIGIONS BY ECONOMIC SECTORS (INCLUDING DEPENDENTS). 1931 CENSUS*
*Tabulations for Jews were presented in table 4.
Of course, except for the Jews, who have been analyzed earlier, religion does not quite correspond with ethnicity. Here, for example, the Roman Catholic Belorussians and Germans cannot be separately identified as such. Also, about a third of the Protestants were Poles, though almost all the rest were Germans. On the other hand, the Uniates and Orthodox were entirely composed of Poland’s eastern Slavic minorities and hence table 7, even when interpreted conservatively, does demonstrate that these were overwhelmingly relegated to the relatively poor and backward agricultural sector. This was the result of long historical neglect far more than of interwar Poland’s policies. Indeed, illiteracy rates of these peoples declined dramatically under Polish rule (table 6).
It must be acknowledged that even a rich and long-established state—and interwar Poland was neither—might well have been baffled by the staggering problems presented by her ethnic minorities: their number, their size, their recalcitrance, their external support, and, in the eastern regions, their poverty. Poland was doubly handicapped by having simultaneously to cope with the postpartition reintegration of the long-severed parts of the Polish state-nation as she vainly sought for a consistent and feasible approach toward the minority problem. Her search for a solution was fatefully compromised by the apparent incompatibility between her frontiers and her institutions. Piłsudski’s military efforts had incorporated non-Polish populations whom Dmowski’s domestic arrangements could not digest. The Right, which by the 1930s had ideologically saturated Polish society, viewed all expressions of nationalism on the part of minorities as treasonable and to be stifled. Believing that the old quasi-federalistic commonwealth had too long been suicidally indulgent toward the non-Polish and non-Catholic populations, the Right insisted that restored Poland either assimilate or expel her minorities. But they were too numerous, already too conscious, and still too rooted for either of these alternatives to be practicable at that time. They were simply alienated by the whole sterile paraphernalia of discriminatory devices which this program entailed: skewed census tabulation, boycott, numerus clausus, colonization, biased land reform, prejudicial tax assessment, and violence.
7
Already in reborn Poland’s first and most important assertion of sovereignty, the drafting of its constitution, the chasm between Piłsudski and the Right proved crippling. The resurrection of an independent Poland at the close of World War I was made possible by that war’s singular outcome, which Piłsudski had uniquely anticipated: the defeat of all three of her partitioning powers—first of Russia by Germany, then of Germany and her Austrian partner by the Western Powers. Piłsudski and his Legionnaires had fought as associates of the Central Powers until Russia’s defeat had been assured in the spring of 1917. Then, insisting on Polish priorities, they had refused further collaboration and were interned until the war’s end. This audacious, skillful, and successful conduct had won such high moral authority for Piłsudski that he was promptly acknowledged as chief of state and commander in chief of the armed forces upon his return to Warsaw from German confinement on November 10, 1918. Thus, for the moment, he eclipsed his rightist rival Dmowski, who had endorsed the Russian and Western war efforts and whose wartime activities had been diplomatic and political rather than military and political. The Polish Right had traditionally been more interested in the development of a modern society than in independent statehood; hence it liked to see in the Russian Empire—Piłsudski’s bête noire—both a shield against what it feared was the more pressing menace of Germany to Polish society, and a vast market for that society’s nascent industries.
To the disappointment of his friends of the Polish Left, who hoped at one stroke to achieve land reform, nationalization of industry, social security, secularization of culture, and the democratization of society, Piłsudski now refrained from instituting a radical-reform dictatorship and insisted, instead, that fundamental social changes could only be initiated by an elected legislature. Accordingly, he arranged for the early election of a unicameral Constituent Assembly, which on February 20, 1919, proclaimed itself the sovereign authority while unanimously confirming Piłsudski as chief of state, which became an office of reduced authority, and commander in chief, which remained a position of great power. Piłsudski’s apparent self-restraint during this period may be interpreted either as a manifestion of an impressive sense of democratic responsibility, or as an intended (but unsuccessful) maneuver to free himself from all partisan and ideological affiliation and thereby render himself the umpire among the several political phalanxes whom he hoped would emerge deadlocked from the elections to the Constituent Assembly.
The Right, however, emerged from these elections as the strongest phalanx but not sufficiently dominant to give Poland stable governments. Thus, whatever may have been Piłsudski’s hopes and intentions, the elections were politically premature and inaugurated seven-and-a-half years of party anarchy and fragile coalitions until Piłsudski closed this painful era with his reseizure of effective power by a coup d’état in May, 1926.
The effectiveness of the Constituent Assembly as a potential vehicle for national integration was seriously compromised ab initio by the circumstance that its election was confined to areas under Polish control at the beginning of 1919 and was later extended, on a staggered schedule, to the ex-Prussian provinces and some northeastern localities. Thus, the large Belorussian and Ukrainian minorities of the east, whose incorporation into Poland was not settled until 1921, were unrepresented in the constitution-drafting process—-just as neighboring Czechoslovakia excluded her numerous German and Magyar minorities from the same process (see below, Chapter 3, section 4). Furthermore, these Polish elections, held so early in what had recently been a major battle area for over three years and in regions politically separated for over a century, were characterized by much passion and confusion, a truly stunning plethora of lists, considerable administrative incompetence (but not pressure), and frequent irregularities in such matters as eligibility, tabulation, and verification. The system was proportional and complicated, and it appears that somewhat over 70 percent of the eligible electorate (men and women over twenty years of age) participated. Table 8 gives approximate coherence to the quite disjointed results. Even here, the tabulation for “Seats” is somewhat arbitrary since the various parliamentary clubs divided and merged several times during the nearly four years that this Constituent Assembly remained in session. (The Christian Democrats and the Communists had not yet differentiated themselves, respectively, from the National Democrats and the Socialists in 1919 and are thus included in the latter parties’ data.)
TABLE 8
ELECTIONS TO THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY
The Constituent Assembly’s main achievement was to rally the nation to a rare moment of solidarity during the summer crisis of the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, when Piłsudski’s armies, having been repulsed in their attempt to conquer the Soviet Ukraine in the spring, stood embattled before Warsaw and finally triumphed. Its chief failure was the mishandling of its most specific task, the drafting of the constitution. Here the Right feared that Piłsudski, whom it detested as a former Socialist and as the current protagonist of federalistic notions for “coddling” the ethnic minorities, would become president, since he was the spectacular hero of Poland’s resurrection to independent statehood; and so it decided to tailor the constitution to its own apprehensions. It used its powerful position in the assembly to endow the country with an emasculated presidency and an omnipotent legislature. Poland’s basic institutions of government were thus shaped ad personam—a fatal political procedure. Particularly crippling for any presidential ambitions which Piłsudski might have entertained was Article 46, which, while making the president titular head of the armed forces, prohibited his exercising command in wartime. Ironically, just as the Right in 1919-21 violated its own general belief in a strong executive and, for fear of Piłsudski, proceeded to cripple the presidency as an institution, so in May, 1926, the Left, out of resentment against the policies of the legislature’s dominant Right-Center coalition, was to help this same Piłsudski stage a military coup d’état against the parliamentary institutions which the Left, in principle, championed.
Though the constitution was formally adopted on March 17, 1921, and the Polish-Soviet War was concluded with the signing of the Treaty of Riga just one day later, the Constituent Assembly, still fearful of allowing the newly acquired eastern minorities to share political power, extended its own existence for another year and a half and postponed the first elections for a regular parliament until November, 1922. This time the Belorussians and Ukrainians of the former Russian Empire participated while the Ukrainians of ex-Austrian eastern Galicia abstained. Of those eligible, 67.9 percent voted in the election of November 5 for the Sejm, the lower but more powerful house, and 61.5 percent in that of November 12 for the Senate. The results failed to correct the fragmentation and paralysis of the parliamentary system. To convey, albeit inadequately, an impression of the deputies’ penchant for political permutations and combinations, the allocation of Sejm seats is given in table 9 for the beginning and the close of the legislature’s five-year term. In the Senate, party alignments were firmer and, except for a major defection from the Piast Party, seat allocations did not change much.
8
The next four years witnessed the accelerating degeneration of Polish parliamentary life and of governmental stability. Piłsudski’s response to the constitutional engineering of the Right was to decline nomination to the presidency. The new Sejm and Senate, sitting jointly as the National Assembly, thereupon elected Gabriel Narutowicz on December 9, 1922, in an exceedingly bitter contest requiring five ballots. The winning balance of 289 versus 227 was supplied by a coalition of the Left, the Center, and the National Minorities. A week later, on December 16, 1922, the new president was assassinated by a rightist fanatic because he owed his margin of victory to non-Polish votes. The murder deepened the chasm between the Right and Piłsudski, who never forgave the National Democrats for what he regarded as their moral responsibility for the murder of Poland’s first president.
TABLE 9
PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS, NOVEMBER, 1922
On December 20, 1922, the same Left-Center-National Minorities coalition, by a vote of 298 to 221, elected to the presidency the founder of Poland’s cooperative system, Stanisław Wojciechowski. The victorious coalition broke up soon thereafter when Wincenty Witos took his Piast Peasant Party into partnership with the Right in the spring of 1923. In any event, Wojciechowski’s election was already something of a concession by the other parties to the Right, which considered him the least objectionable candidate outside its own ranks.
Wojciechowski’s office was weak in the manner of the French presidency under the Third Republic. Elected for a seven-year term, the president had neither legislative initiative nor a veto, and he could dissolve the Sejm only with the assent of three-fifths of the total number of 111 Senators in the presence of at least half the 444 Sejm deputies, the Senate thereby dissolving itself simultaneously. In fact, these provisions for dissolution by the president were a dead letter, and their ineffectiveness became an important factor that contributed to the crisis of 1926. Equally inoperative was the power of the Sejm to dissolve itself by a two-thirds vote.
In effect, executive power rested within the cabinet, which was dependent on a Sejm majority. The large number of parties and their tendency toward splits, excessive maneuvering for office, and frequent change of partnerships rendered such majorities highly unstable. Ministerial upheavals were consequently frequent. The cabinet that Piłsudski ousted by his coup of May, 1926, was Poland’s fourteenth since November, 1918—not counting reshuffling of portfolios within any one cabinet.
This instability tended to weaken the ministers in relation to both party leaders and individual deputies. The minister, frequently so transient as to be unable to familiarize himself adequately with the work of his department, was often bullied by his party’s leaders into transforming both its policy and its personnel into a party rampart. Individual deputies, acting as messengers for powerful interests and constituents, shamelessly applied pressure on both ministers and civil servants. The government, in turn, would try to secure a deputy’s support through judicious use of state credits, import and export licenses, land leases, forest concessions, and the administration of the alcohol and tobacco monopolies. Ironically, the deputies, who on the one hand habitually exceeded their authority by chronic interference with administration, would simultaneously shirk their basic legislative and budgetary responsibilities through excessive recourse to delegated legislation and to ex post facto legalization of economic and fiscal departures by the cabinet. A raucous and intensely partisan press aggravated the general political debasement and maximized the timidity of the ministers.
While corruption and venality were probably not as extensive as the public thought them to be, the very belief in their pervasiveness proved fatal to the prevailing political order. By 1926 the Sejm, though elected by universal suffrage, was out of touch with a public that craved stronger and more disciplined and responsible government. The beneficiary of this decline in the prestige of the legislature in particular, and of parliamentary politics in general, was Piłsudski, who in May and July of 1923 had followed up his earlier refusal of the presidency by resigning from his military functions and withdrawing into intensely political retirement.
Piłsudski had been provoked into resigning from all his public offices by the formation, on May 28, of a Right-Center coalition government in which the Piast leader Wincenty Witos was prime minister but the National Democrats held the most important portfolios and set the political tone. Its refusal to assuage the peasants’ hunger for radical land reform and its failure to stem a disastrous inflation provoked serious unrest and brought this cabinet down on December 14, 1923. It was replaced by a supraparty ministry led by the financial expert Władysław Grabski, who was close to the National Democrats.
A mixture of politicians and experts, the Grabski cabinet governed largely through delegated legislation, thus indicating the legislature’s declining authority and prestige. It drastically revised the currency and banking systems, replacing the hopelessly inflated mark with the gold-based złoty; it resolutely collected taxes and energetically promoted industrialization. But it was undermined by a decline in the world market price for three major Polish exports—coal, lumber, and sugar—and by Germany’s launching a politically motivated tariff war against Poland on June 15, 1925. Under these circumstances, Grabski’s program of combining industrial expansion with financial stabilization proved untenable, and another run on the złoty, together with public unrest, forced his resignation on November 14, 1925. His fall was widely interpreted as a failure not only of democracy but even of semidemocracy, for democracy was assumed to have already been abdicated with the legislature’s grant of wide decree powers to Grabski at the beginning of his tenure.
Another inflationary spiral now uncurled and unemployment increased starkly. Public disillusion was profound; the great sacrifices of the past two years appeared to have been in vain. But though he was the beneficiary of this atmosphere of crisis and frustration, Piłsudski’s time had not yet come; the political parties decided on one more try at a broad parliamentary coalition. On November 20, 1925, a cabinet headed by the foreign minister of the outgoing Grabski cabinet, Count Aleksander Skrzyński, took office.
Inauspicious was the manner in which the Skrzyński cabinet was formed. The parliamentary leaders of the five member parties—National Democratic, Christian Democratic, Piast Peasant, National Labor, and Socialist (the Wyzwolenie Peasant Party was the one major Polish group to decline participation or support)—distributed the portfolios and then invited Skrzyński as a nonparty man to head this cabinet. The prime minister, who also retained the foreign affairs portfolio, was thus virtually an outsider in his own government. He owed his position to the fact that the party leaders did not trust each other sufficiently to agree on an oustanding political figure as prime minister, and to the expectation that his good reputation in the West (he had accommodated Poland’s foreign policy to the Locarno system) would facilitate Poland’s quest for loans and credits there. Known as the government of “national concord,” this five-party coalition was a particularly inept one, composed as it was of parties with diametrically contradictory fiscal and economic theories in a situation of immediate and intense fiscal-economic crisis. The National Democrats had insisted on holding the ministries of Finance and Education, which were crucial for economic and ethnic-minority policy, as their price for entering the cabinet. The Socialists on the other hand were determined to force pump-priming and welfare spending on the government through their Ministry of Public Works and that of Labor and Welfare. Though the assignment of the War Ministry to one of his protégés had briefly purchased Piłsudski’s toleration, this cabinet was wracked by too many internal contradictions to take a strong position on any controversial issue or to avoid eventual schism.
In March and April, 1926, the złoty currency broke. Many banks failed as deposits were withdrawn in panic. A third of the industrial labor force stood unemployed, and this did not include youths entering the labor market for the first time or the several million “superfluous” village poor. Demonstrations of unemployed and riots, with attendant loss of lives, took place in many towns. Calls for a dictatorship became ever more general and open, and even those who opposed this drastic remedy were demanding early constitutional revision so as to strengthen the president and give him effective power to dissolve the legislature.
The National Democratic finance minister insisted on a thoroughly deflationary policy toward the crisis. He severed the automatic correlation of wages to prices (the abolition of the cost-of-living bonus), dismissed 18,000-25,000 railroad workers, and sharply reduced (by about 35 percent) compensation payments to the sick, the disabled, and the aged. He also raised all taxes, except for those on real property, by 10 percent and instituted a head tax of five złoty per person. The price of gas, electricity, oil, salt, tobacco, matches, and alcohol was raised so as to render these state enterprises and monopolies economically viable.
The Socialists also wished to balance the budget but not at the shameless expense of workers, employees, and civil servants. They were caught in a double embarrassment. Initially they suggested cutting down expenditures by reducing police and army outlays but dropped the latter proposal at the request of their former comrade Piłsudski, whom many among them still considered one of their own. Initially, also, they had agreed to a three months’ reduction in the cost-of-living bonus of state employees, but, embarrassed by the Communist pressure on their left and by the outraged response of those affected, they refused toward the end of March to extend this concession. Then they also demanded immediate massive investments in construction and industry so as to break the unemployment curve, as well as a heavy capital levy and a substantial increase in the real property tax. When the National Democrats refused to consider such a policy, the marshal (speaker) of the Sejm summoned an extraordinary conference of political leaders on April 18, 1926, which proved abortive. The discussion was more formal than genuine since each side had for days been warning that it would not retreat. Failing to force the substitution of their own fiscal-economic program for the Right’s, the Socialists withdrew their ministers from the government on April 20.
The next day Skrzyński offered President Wojciechowski the resignation of his entire cabinet, but he was persuaded to delay this step until the budget estimates for May and June had been accepted by the Sejm and Senate in order to avoid a governmental vacuum at the critical time of the workers’ May Day demonstrations. The Right and Center leaders, who had been negotiating with each other for a renewal of their coalition of 1923, urged Skrzyński to replace the departing Socialists with members of their own parties and to carry on the government on such a reconstructed basis. At that time, however, Skrzyński was convinced that Poland could not be governed against both Piłsudski and the Socialists. He therefore provisionally reassigned the Socialists’ erstwhile portfolios on a nonparty and “acting” basis, and, with May Day as well as the national holiday of May 3 peacefully behind him and the May-June budget estimates passed, he then resigned on May 5, 1926, opening the parliamentary era’s last and most severe cabinet crisis.
The Right and Center leaders chose to disregard the skepticism of Skrzyński and other reflective men concerning the feasibility of governing Poland against both Piłsudski and the Left, and to disregard also the fact that the legislature in which they commanded an arithmetic majority no longer mirrored the political mood of a public exasperated by chronic crises. Their formation of another Witos-led coalition cabinet on May 10, and their simultaneous intimations of a radical purge of their enemies out of the state apparatus, provoked Piłsudski’s and the Left’s violent riposte of May 12-14, 1926. By then Piłsudski believed that he had given the party system more than enough time to correct itself and that he could no longer be accused of a premature or unnecessary or merely self-serving grab for power.
9
In addition to this unhappy record of parliamentary degeneration, two other sets of problems—army organization and foreign policy—helped pave the path to Piłsudski’s coup d’état. He and his fellow ex-Legionnaires were constantly at odds with military veterans from the former Austro-Hungarian armies and with rightist politicians over the proper organization of the armed forces’ high command and its appropriate relations with the government. Here Piłsudski’s enemies insisted on the primacy of the war minister, who was answerable to the Sejm and thus represented the principle of civilian, constitutional control over the armed forces. Piłsudski, on the other hand, argued that since Polish cabinets were discouragingly unstable and the tenure of war ministers all too brief, the armed forces must be protected from partisan political influences through a command structure assuring the autonomy and superiority of the Inspector General, the officer designated to be commander in chief in the event of war. This arrangement was also dictated, he believed, by Poland’s precarious geopolitical situation. Furthermore, Piłsudski’s argument for the autonomy of the military command was rooted in his fear that restored Poland might neglect the military establishment the way the society and Sejms of the old commonwealth had during the century preceding the partitions.
The quarrel proved profoundly divisive and many responsible persons otherwise well disposed toward Piłsudski, including some of his Socialist admirers, were disturbed by his insistence on an organization of the military that appeared to them to confuse the necessary apoliticism of the army with its impermissible exemption from parliamentary accountability, and hence to be incompatible with the political and constitutional principles of democracy. On the other hand, the Right-Center’s determination, signaled by Witos as he formed his last cabinet in May, 1926, to frustrate Piłsudski’s return to active service and to purge his former Legionnaires out of the army clearly provoked the opposite results.
International developments during 1925 and 1926 starkly emphasized Poland’s vulnerabilities and thus also facilitated Piłsudski’s coup by undermining the prestige of the party-dominated parliamentary system. Warsaw’s inability to raise substantial Western loans during the economic crisis of 1923-26 testified to Germany’s success in weakening international confidence in Poland. The multilateral Locarno Treaties of October 16, 1925, which acknowledged Germany’s insistence on a differentiation between the legal and political validity of her western borders and that of her eastern frontiers, were also a defeat for Poland. Not only did Locarno legitimate by implication, as it were, Germany’s anti-Polish territorial revisionism, but it also exposed the unreliability of Poland’s French ally, then striving for an independent understanding of her own with Germany, and it emphasized Britain’s indifference to Poland’s security interests vis-à-vis Germany. Moreover, Germany’s rapprochement with France and Britain at Locarno did not prevent her continued cooperation with Russia to Poland’s detriment. Indeed, half a year after Locarno, these two historic enemies of Poland reaffirmed their Rapallo rapprochement of April 16, 1922, with the Berlin Treaty of April 24, 1926. Though overtly only a nonaggression and neutrality agreement, this pact nevertheless appeared in fact to confirm Poland’s isolation. It thus contributed to the general sense of political malaise in Poland, to the increasing suspicion of prevailing policies, personalities, and institutions as bankrupt, and hence to the widespread readiness that was born of hope and despair to look to Piłsudski for salvation.
10
Though Piłsudski won his coup d’état after three days of street fighting in Warsaw between May 12 and 14, 1926, and thus achieved political control of the Polish state, the episode was a personal psychological disaster for him. He had anticipated that the entire army would rally to him, its creator and victorious former chief, and that this cohesion of the military would morally oblige the politicians to yield without fighting. Instead, the army had split between those units, usually commanded by his fellow Legion veterans, that followed him and those that, from political or legal motives, remained loyal to the constitutional Right-Center government. Piłsudski, in fact, owed his victory in large part to the refusal of the Socialist-affiliated railroad workers to transport troop reinforcements to Warsaw for his enemies—a political debt that chagrined him and that he never acknowledged. He was also helped by the judicious decision of the Witos government to yield after three days, even though it still held a number of strong military and political cards in the country at large, lest full-scale civil war invite German and/or Russian intervention or related insurrection by the ethnic minorities.2 That he, the restorer of the Polish state, the father of its army, the protagonist of a strong presidency, should lead a revolt against the state authorities, sunder the unity of the army, and overthrow a constitutional president—for Wojciechowski refused to legitimate the coup by remaining in office—were facts that would haunt Piłsudski for the remaining nine years of his life. This was not merely a case of a remorseful personal conscience, but of a violated political model. Piłsudski liked to see himself as the educator of the Polish people to civic virtue, away from the antistate attitudes inherited from the era of partition, and he now had set a pedagogically ominous example. Convinced that this regeneration of the nation required his own control, or at least supervision, of her state apparatus, he wanted categorical and ultimate power—but he had wanted it legally and consensually. The fact that his coup was bitterly contested had exposed as vain Piłsudski’s hope to be accepted as a suprapolitical guardian of the national interest, as the olympian nemesis of all transgressors and malefactors. To the politicians of the Right and the Center and to their sympathizers in the officer corps, he remained a partisan, unacceptable figure, who might seize and hold power but could not harmonize the nation to a collective, cathartic effort at rededication.
This contradiction between his preferred self-image and his actual role accounts for the inconsistent cat-and-mouse game that Piłsudski was henceforth to play with the country’s established constitutional, parliamentary, and political institutions. He permitted all of these institutions to survive and formally honored them, yet also sought to manipulate and eviscerate them. The result was a peculiar lockstep of intimidating, undermining, and cajoling the parliament and political parties that he had inherited and that he habitually blamed for the nation’s ills. Piłsudski would not establish an overt dictatorship, yet he could not tolerate authentically autonomous loci of power. Thus his style came to require splintered parties, a submissive legislature, and an obedient president. Yet he remained pathetically aware of the contradiction between this campaign of emasculating the nation’s institutions of government and his desire to educate that nation to political maturity. This awareness accounts for the tortured quality, the combined brutality and hesitancy, of Piłsudski’s reluctant yet inevitable vendetta against parties, legislature, and constitution over the next years.
11
These contradictions in Piłsudski’s perception of his proper role in Poland’s political life quickly surfaced with his assumption of power. He began his nine years of hegemony by declining the presidency, now vacated by the upright and embittered Wojciechowski, and arranging for the election to that office of the electrochemist Professor Ignacy Mościcki, a choice intended to symbolize a new technocratic approach to Poland’s problems in place of the allegedly obsolete, and slovenly partisan, political habits of the past. Simultaneously, he did not follow through with the universally expected new parliamentary elections, fearing a leftist victory at a time when there was as yet no organized Piłsudskist political party. He shrewdly permitted the 1922-27 legislature, with its now chastened Right and Center majority, which had analogous reasons to fear early elections, to live out its term, simultaneously extracting from it a series of constitutional amendments to strengthen the authority of the executive.
Piłsudski was capitalizing on a dual trend within a Polish society deeply riven by six years of economic and political turmoil: (a) the masses still viewed him as a man of the Left and hence looked to him for salvation, and (b) the vested interests needed him as an alternative to social revolution. Piłsudski’s manifest unwillingness to be identified with any party’s ideology, his vividly signaled preference for supposedly apolitical, technocratic approaches to the nation’s problems, his early flattery of the surviving aristocracy as the alleged bearer of state-service traditions stemming from the golden age of the old commonwealth, his self-congratulation on the morrow of his coup for having made a political revolution without socially revolutionary consequences, but also his colorful denunciations of injustice and exploitation, were designed to satisfy all expectations, no matter how contradictory. These approaches also enabled him to keep a free hand for himself, and, most subtly, to isolate the National Democrats by peeling away their erstwhile, and somewhat reluctant, aristocratic and peasantist allies.
Assigning himself to the two offices of war minister and inspector general of the armed forces, Piłsudski identified his own considerable personal popularity with the genuinely revered army, regarded by the public not only as the nation’s defence against rapacious neighbors, but also as a model of proper administration. The other cabinet portfolios, including the premiership, in the fourteen cabinets that held office during the nine years of Piłsudski’s rule were rotated at his command, and the function of their ministers was to implement Piłsudski’s intentions and to supply the technical expertise that he lacked in the nonmilitary fields. Until 1930, his favorite and frequent prime minister was the mathematician Professor Kazimierz Bartel, who gave his name to a style of government, the bartlowanie, characterized by tempered firmness and the avoidance of definitive deadlock in relations with the parties and the legislature. Thereafter, and coinciding with the sharpening of social tensions during the depression, a more self-consciously tough and truculently antiparliamentary “command” style was to emerge, with the rise to ministerial office of the so-called colonels. The “colonels” were Legion veterans whose sole political raison d’être was personal dedication to their old commander, Piłsudski.
The Piłsudski-Bartel style of government from 1926 to 1930 was not only intrinsically interesting, but also anticipated Gaullism. Bartel would argue and sincerely believe that his regime was by no means an aloof bureaucratic one and that the nation’s social and political interests were adequately represented in it, in consultative roles. Cooperation among the “objective” technocratic experts in the government, the “independent” theoretical experts from the universities, and the “subjective” but informed and politically articulate interest groups was Bartel’s idea of good government. He also acknowledged the ultimate veto power of the political forces in the form of the parliamentary censure vote. Let, however, the “subjective” political forces and parties claim direct policymaking and executive power, and Bartel would become indignant. The ministers were chosen for their technical expertise and as such enjoyed Bartel’s and Piłsudski’s confidence. Simultaneously, the “colonels” served as Piłsudski’s personal eyes and ears throughout the state apparatus. Though not yet the ministers that they were to become in the 1930s, they were put in second-ranking yet crucial posts of the government departments and public agencies to supervise them politically for Piłsudski. In both its bartlowanie and its “colonel” incarnations, the Piłsudski regime claimed to embody a sanacja (regenerative purge) against the debilitating former partyjnictwo (partisan corruption and chaos).
While sincere, this commitment to sanacja was more of a general stance, even a frame of mind, than a specific program. Sanacja, in fact, came to imply a buttressing of the Piłsudski executive in relation to the multiparty legislature, a superordination of the Piłsudskist state over the allegedly politically immature society, purging that state’s apparatus of its incompetent and/or inconvenient personnel, and the cultivation of a mystique of Piłsudski as the nation’s heroic father, wise guide, and benevolent protector. Formally, sanacja implied three things. First, it suggested immunization of the army from political influences; this meant in practice the transformation of the army into Piłsudski’s own instrument and a reflection of himself. Second, it suggested the healthy cleansing and professionalization of the state apparatus; this came to mean its infusion with a technocratic-managerial (and again antipolitical) stance. Third, there was the laudable but vague admonition, expressed by Piłsudski himself during the first night of his coup, that “there must not be too much injustice in the state toward those who labor for others, there must not be too much wickedness, lest the state perish”; this eventually came to mean the strategy of seeking to form an allegedly nonpolitical phalanx of all classes and parties supposedly prepared to elevate general state interests above particular partisan and social ones. (Piłsudski’s traditional National Democratic enemies were presumed to be unequal to this test.) Piłsudski’s resumption of power thus took the form of an uneasy yoking of excessively specific purposes to exceedingly general ones: on the one hand, the purging of the army and polity of certain undesired personnel; on the other hand, the regeneration of moral excellence in the service of the state. Though he would attempt to make a virtue of his and the new regime’s freedom from ideological preconceptions, to the distress of his recent supporters on the Left, Piłsudski and Poland were to pay a heavy price for this absence of a clear, long-run, middle-range political program in the sanacja.
The strategy alluded to in the preceding paragraph, that of fashioning an allegedly nonpolitical, or rather suprapolitical, phalanx to assist the regime in supposedly elevating state interests above partisan ones, was Piłsudski’s organizational anticipation of new parliamentary elections. Having committed himself after the coup to a major effort at exercising his power through legal, constitutional channels, Piłsudski had thereby accepted an obligation to put that power to an electoral test sometime after the expiration of the legislature’s mandate in November, 1927. This challenge, in turn, made it necessary to weld his diversified following into a cohesive and disciplined camp in preparation for these elections. This camp, however, could not be like the other political parties. For one thing, no serious social and ideological agreement was possible among the post-coup Piłsudskists, who represented a great variety of political views. Hence, a vague, general program was essential for the new organization. On the one hand, this vagueness was a condition imposed by diversity. On the other, it could be turned into a lure to induce defections from the traditional parties. Yet another factor rendering a typical political party unfeasible was that Piłsudski’s own political views, which were seconded and lent some theoretical refinement by Bartel’s concept of proper administration of government, were by now passionately antipartisan and statist. His own political machine therefore had to be a kind of state-party, capable both of expressing his sanacja notions and of subsuming within itself the widest possible spectrum of old and new, genuine and self-styled Piłsudskists.
The party that came into being was given the awkward but candid name of the Nonpartisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government, generally referred to by its Polish initials as the BBWR (Bezpartyjny Blok Współpracy z Rządem). The core of the BBWR consisted of Piłsudski’s ex-Legionary paladins, who were intellectually reinforced and “modernized” by the sponsors and practitioners of the new cult of technocracy. To this inner core were assimilated converts from all the earlier political orientations in Poland—conservative, Socialist, peasantist, centrist, Catholic, even from the ethnic minorities—regardless of whether they came out of conviction, prudence, opportunism, anxiety, or resignation. This great variety of the BBWR’s membership could be accommodated on only one common political ground: the appeal of strong executive government after a decade of confused parliamentary instability. Its apologists desperately tried to surround this perfectly obvious and quite respectable, if somewhat prosaic, fact with an aura of ideological profundity and historical necessity. They claimed, in the fashion of the day, that the BBWR represented the positive answer of national solidarity to the Marxist challenge of class conflict, that it signified the healthy rejection by resurrected Poland of the fatal prepartition tradition that had elevated opposition per se into a virtue, and that it symbolized the victory of responsibility over demagoguery, of service to the state over the spirit of party. The fact was that in political practice the mission of the BBWR was simply to support Piłsudski. Precisely because this was its only intended function, and because its ideological poverty was otherwise so drastic and its ability to express social claims so deficient, the BBWR was able to split but not to replace the political parties, to win the adherence of office-seekers but not to attract the youth, to channel policy problems into the inner councils of the regime but not to articulate, refine, or adjudicate them in the course of its inevitably hollow and formal internal discussions.
At the apex of the regime, whither these problems were directed for solution, a statist-managerial theory of government held sway. Both the technocratically inclined supporters of Bartel and the inner core of Piłsudskist colonel-praetorians were convinced that Poland’s problems were not solvable by ordering the interests and claims of the various sectors of her civil society through political parties competing in the public and parliamentary arenas. In their view, the immaturity of Polish society for such a performance had been too glaringly exposed during the first few years of her recovered independence. No, Poland’s primary need was to emancipate the state from, and to elevate it above, civil society and to grant the state apparatus, rather than any part of the society, priority of claim and jurisdiction. Poland was to be purged, cleansed, and modernized through state direction, not political competition. She was to be administered, rather than governed. Interest of state, not of class or party, would alone determine the government’s political, social, and economic policies.
Alas, this cult of the state was both intellectually and politically dubious. In practice, it was useless because it had no program and no direction. The concept of “interest of state” was, under certain circumstances, an adequate guide to foreign policy, but it was not sufficiently refined to be serviceable for the resolution of serious domestic socioeconomic policy problems. It might spotlight obvious national goals, such as industrialization, but could not indicate cost-free paths to their realization. Hard political choices still had to be made. Decision-making was simply transferred from the faction-ridden legislature to the inner councils of the regime. While one might acknowledge that the men who ultimately made the regime’s policy decisions in these inner councils believed themselves to be ideologically neutral, while one could credit them with being motivated by a high sense of public service and duty to the state, while one could concede that the BBWR as an organization was probably too docile to impinge significantly on their evaluation of policy imperatives, it was futile to pretend that they were not making political choices among political options, that they were simply applying a manifest “interest of state.”
Though the BBWR could win elections and thus enable Piłsudski to retain legal control of the state apparatus, it proved in a deeper sense a political failure due to Piłsudski’s political misanthropy. On the morrow of the 1926 coup, he could have exploited the collective national catharsis to rally the Polish people around himself, activate them politically, elicit rededication, demand sacrifices, and accomplish much. But, distrusting the spontaneity of the masses, he chose to do the opposite. He imposed political passivity on the nation and reserved the responsibility of governing to himself, to the technocratic elite recruited by Bartel, and to his own immediate coterie of “colonels.” The function of the BBWR was to insulate the regime from antagonistic social and ideological pulls and pressures, not to draw the nation into political activism. Though a number of “new” recruits were accepted and were promoted quite high up in the sanacja hierarchy, the regime managed tragically to isolate itself. Piłsudski and his entourage succeeded in asserting their monopoly over the state apparatus and its power structure, but they lost control and leadership over Polish society to the allegedly corrosive political parties.
The achievements of his regime, which were undeniable despite their immolation in the 1939 catastrophe, were a series of structural and diplomatic reclamations achieved within and by the state apparatus. Among them were: the postcoup constitutional amendments that strengthened the executive; the revival of military morale; the professionalization of the civil bureaucracy; the reintegration of all preponderantly Polish-populated areas, including the once disaffected western regions, into one political system; the balancing of budgets; and the raising of Poland’s international prestige and self-confidence. But no fundamental social problem was solved or even seriously tackled in Piłsudski’s lifetime.
Given his reluctance to take the nation into genuine confidence and political partnership, Piłsudski might have done better to establish an explicit dictatorship on the morrow of the coup rather than lead the country through a demoralizing pseudo-parliamentary charade. This dictatorship need not have been “leftist” to achieve some positive “revolutionary” corrections. However, such a solution was precluded both by Piłsudski’s own scruples, fears, and hopes, and by a general national craving to demonstrate that the reborn Poland was, despite the coup, sufficiently mature to emulate successfully the Western model of constitutional parliamentary government. Hence, the coup fell between two stools. It was a potentially revolutionary action whose revolutionary potential was immediately denied and repressed by its instigator, abetted by the “responsible” political and economic interests.
12
This semiparliamentary style of government which Piłsudski launched on the morrow of his coup in 1926 was to prove a failure by 1930. The elections of March, 1928, whose politico-historical function was to proclaim the nation’s judgment on Piłsudski’s seizure and subsequent utilization of power as well as on the earlier period of legislative and party hegemony that had largely elicited his coup, gave Piłsudski an inconclusive victory. True, the BBWR and its satellites emerged as by far the largest constellation, but it failed to achieve an absolute legislative majority. Furthermore, to Piłsudski’s intense irritation, the parties of the Left also gained by riding—illegitimately, in his view—on Piłsudski’s coattails as a prewar Socialist. On the other hand, nemesis struck specifically the Right and Center parties of the Witos coalition, and not all the “old” parties across the entire pre-BBWR political spectrum, as Piłsudski had hoped. The results thus indicated considerably stronger public approval of the coup itself than of Piłsudski’s subsequent efforts to restructure the pattern and style of Polish political life to his own mold. Moreover, in the context of the incipient mutual alienation of the Piłsudski camp and the parliamentary Left, the failure of either to win a clear and unequivocal majority was ominous, despite their parallel successes relative to the Right and the Center. The capacity of the Polish political system either to accommodate itself, or to offer effective resistance, to the Piłsudski experiment was thrown into doubt.
Heightening this uncertainty were the polymorphous nature and the disparate constituency of the Piłsudski camp. It indeed enjoyed some support in almost every sector of the society, but most of the workers, peasants, petite bourgeoisie, Roman Catholic clergy, and ethnic minorities had remained outside it. Would the backing of the conservative stratum, on the one hand, and of the technical intelligentsia, on the other (assuming, for the moment, their reliability), prove sufficient to compensate for the soft and spotty support of the intermediate social classes in a country finding itself in the socioeconomic transitional stage that characterized interwar Poland? In the context of Piłsudski’s reluctance to institute an explicit dictatorship as the capstone to his coup, and his entourage’s technocratic, managerial outlook, and given his decision, instead, to try to rule through and within the established constitutional and parliamentary machinery, the prospects for an affirmative answer to this question were rendered doubtful by the inconclusive outcome of the 1928 elections.
The statistical results are given in table 10. Turnout was 78.3 percent of eligible voters in the Sejm elections of March 4, and 63.9 percent in those for the Senate a week later, on March 11. This time the Ukrainians of eastern Galicia joined those of the former Russian Empire in participating. The disproportionate rise in invalid votes, many of which were intended for the Communists, over 1922 indicates the political “engagement” of the bureaucracy. This “engagement” did not yet amount to terror; nevertheless there was modest chicanery involved in the elections of 1928.
TABLE 10
PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS, MARCH, 1928
Though now reduced and isolated, Dmowski’s National Democrats quickly consolidated their forces and strengthened their ideological militancy; they were destined to reemerge in the later 1930s as the Piłsudski camp’s most dynamic ideological adversary. In the meantime, the National Democrats in this new legislature were soon joined in their current hostility to the Piłsudskist regime, albeit from different ideological perspectives, by centrist, leftist, and National Minority opposition. All objected to the regime’s conservative socioeconomic policies, or to its cavalier contempt for legislative prerogatives, or to its occasional violations of civil legality. The Sejm majority could only frustrate the government, lacking as it did sufficient cohesion to replace it, and soon became locked in a futile struggle with Bartel.
This situation eventually provoked the exasperated Piłsudski into inaugurating the tougher “colonels” regime in September, 1930, which action was accompanied by the brutal beating and inhumane incarceration of a number of opposition leaders and the quite vigorous application of police pressure in the new elections of November, 1930. Though superficially these tactics of intimidation proved successful—the BBWR now received absolute parliamentary majorities—Piłsudski paid a heavy price for his recourse to atrocities that, unlike his coup four years earlier, were almost universally condemned as a gratuitious abuse of power, not a necessary or purgative seizure of it. Already rapidly losing the nationalistic youth to Dmowski’s Right-Radical nostrums, Piłsudski had now repelled the influential intelligentsia of virtually all political hues, sacrificed the support of many of his prestigious conservative allies, driven an ultimate chasm between himself and his earlier Socialist and Left-peasantist partners, and even shaken the confidence of some of his immediate coworkers. Moreover, he was simultaneously destroying whatever credit he may still have possessed, thanks to his onetime sponsorship of federalism, with the Slavic minorities by seeking to break the Ukrainian nationalist movement through brutal military repression of the disaffected eastern districts between mid-September and the end of November, 1930.
Thus, the November, 1930, elections were a success only in terms of numbers for the regime. The turnout was 74.8 percent of those eligible in the balloting on November 16 for the Sejm, and 63.4 percent on November 23 for the Senate. A joint opposition list was run by five Center and Left parties, among whom the three peasant groups were soon to merge into the united Peasant Party on March 15, 1931 (see section 3). The results are shown in table 11.
TABLE 11
PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS, NOVEMBER, 1930
13
The depression was now to strike Poland with devastating rigor and superimpose additional socioeconomic problems upon her chronic political ones. In the economic realm, restored Poland had been seriously handicapped by the heritage of over a century’s separation of her several regions and their diverse development, followed by the catastrophic devastation during World War I. Trade among the divided parts of Poland had been minimal before the recovery of independence; afterward their economic integration lagged behind their political and administrative integration and, indeed, was not really completed by 1939. Galicia and the kresy remained far poorer, less industrialized, and crippled by more primitive agricultural patterns than pertained in western Poland and the Kongresówka.
The first years of recovered independence had been economically darkened, as described earlier, by chronic dislocations, inflation, unemployment, and turmoil, which cumulatively undermined the then reigning parliamentary-party system and facilitated Piłsudski’s bid for power. On the morrow of his coup, the Polish economy was suddenly blessed with a windfall. A lengthy British coal miners’ strike from May to December, 1926, gave a massive and lasting spurt to Polish coal exports; this was sufficient to pull the entire industrial economy into a few years of prosperity. Agricultural prices and exports were also relatively high between 1926 and 1929. These favorable indicators, in turn, attracted foreign capital, enabling Poland to stablize her złoty and to outflank Germany’s tariff war and credit boycott. The Piłsudski-Bartel regime was thus initially the political beneficiary of an economic revival flowing from a happy conjunction of international developments with its own technocratic, yet fiscally conservative, policies; the whole was lubricated by the general impression of strength and confidence that Piłsudski projected.
Alas, during the 1930s the Piłsudski-”colonel” regime faced dimmer economic vistas, which exposed the precarious and dependent quality of the preceding recovery. The currency had indeed been stabilized, but mass purchasing power remained deficient; the budgets had indeed been balanced, but at too low a level. With the onset of the world agricultural crisis at the turn of the decade, the international prices for Polish agricultural commodities fell so drastically, that any increases in their production and export were thereafter utterly swallowed up by the decline in their value. Misery and near-starvation now stalked the Polish countryside.
As an overwhelmingly agricultural country, Poland experienced the depression most painfully in that economic sector, which was plagued by acute overpopulation, underemployment, underconsumption, and inequality and fragmentation of land distribution. Admittedly even a radical land reform and redistribution could not have satisfied the landhunger of the fecund peasant population in the absence of simultaneous and rapid industrialization. Yet even a moderate reform was inhibited by political considerations, which included an awareness that in the kresy and eastern Galicia land reform would benefit Belorussian and Ukrainian peasants at the expense of Polish landlords. In the end, Poland opted for a minimal reform that, next to Hungary’s, was the least extensive of any in interwar East Europe. The maximum beyond which large owners were obligated to sell their excess land was generously set at 180 hectares (444.8 acres), except in the eastern regions where it was extended to 300 hectares (741.3 acres). Furthermore, estates “that were devoted to highly specialized or unusually productive agricultural enterprises of national importance”—a definition so vague as to be open to the most subjective interpretations—were exempt from this ceiling. Thus, it is hardly surprising that the total amount of land transferred during the entire interwar era from large estates to peasants—2,654,800 hectares—was but 20 percent of all land in holdings larger than fifty hectares, or 40 percent of all agricultural land in such holdings of over fifty hectares. If these calculations are augmented by the 595,300 hectares received by peasants in exchange for the surrender of usufructs, then the total land distribution to peasants still comes to only 23 percent of all the land and 54 percent of agricultural land in holdings larger than fifty hectares.
Peasants also benefited from the consolidation of 5,423,300 hectares of hitherto fragmented strips into unified farms; but this land had already been in peasant ownership, albeit irrationally organized. However, renewed parcelization through inheritance within the prolific peasantry negated the effects of such officially sponsored consolidations. Similarly, the 548,700 hectares that were realized for agriculture through drainage and other reclamations were not transferred out of large estates. Due to the minimalistic nature of the reform, the structure of land ownership remained highly inegalitarian.3
Contrary to conventional expectations, the productivity of large estates was not significantly greater than that of small plots since the latifundists had little incentive to replace cheap and plentiful peasant labor with modern agronomic technology. There was, however, great regional variation in productivity, with western and central Poland boasting substantially higher yields per hectare than the southern and eastern areas. Yet the national average remained considerably below that of Europe in general and even of Central Europe. Interwar Polish agriculture suffered from lack of capital, and was hampered by primitive market transportation, poor processing facilities, inadequate use of fertilizer (virtually none was used in the east), low technical competence on the peasant’s part, and uneconomic but politically sustained distribution of ownership. But the most devastating hindrance was the lack of that external and essential deus ex machina: rapid industrialization to syphon off its surplus population. Estimates of the proportion of interwar Poland’s agricultural population that was surplus even at the prevailingly low levels of agronomic technology vary from a fourth to a half,4 but even the lower estimate indicates economic pathology.
More interesting, but also more difficult to evaluate, is interwar Poland’s industrial performance. Here one begins with the observation that except for coal, timber, and the largely untapped water-power potential, she was rather poorly endowed in natural resources, especially metals. Furthermore, the industries with which she entered the interwar era were (a) geared to what were now, after 1918, unfriendly foreign markets in Russia and Germany, and (b) heavily destroyed and looted between 1914 and 1918. They required not only extensive physical reconstruction, but also commercial reintegration into either the internal Polish market, which was weak, or new and different foreign markets, which tended to close themselves off, especially in the general world flight into autarky during the depression.
It would be possible but superfluous to illustrate statistically the painful blows inflicted on the Polish economy by the depression. Foreign capital was withdrawn, production declined, unemployment soared, and the peasant’s purchasing-power vanished. Poland’s recovery from the depression was initially slowed by Piłsudski’s cleaving—from mixed motives of state-prestige, fear of repeating the politically fatal inflationary trauma of 1923-26, and simple economic philistinism—to the gold standard long after other countries had abandoned it. This unfortunate monetary policy imposed an unnecessarily prolonged stagnation of production upon the Polish economy.
After Piłsudski’s death, however, the administrative technocrats whom Bartel had earlier recruited were joined by economic technocrats whom the “colonels” now sponsored. Etatism replaced orthodoxy as the economic ideology of the regime, vast investments for “social overhead” and direct production were sunk into state-owned enterprises, and industrialization proceeded apace in the last three interwar years before the Nazi assault and occupation interrupted these promising developments. The experience of this abbreviated period of state capitalism in the late 1930s served as a useful exercise from which helpful experience was accumulated for the rapid industrialization of the post-1945 era.
While impressive, this belated spurt of industrialization was running a hare-and-tortoise race against the older, remorseless, population growth. The employment opportunities it opened up scarcely made a dent in the vast army of rural paupers. It came too late to stem an erosion of living standards over the span of the decade as a whole—and Polish living standards were already among the lowest in Europe to begin with. Finally, despite the patriotic and nationalistic rhetoric with which it was promoted, it failed to rescue the post-Piłsudski “colonels” from their political isolation.
14
This political isolation of the regime deepened throughout the 1930s. The flawed—because “pressured”—elections of 1930 had given the BBWR a legislative majority adequate to pass the sanacja camp’s ordinary legislation, but not the two-thirds majority required to amend the constitution. Such amendments to strengthen the executive still further were deemed essential by Piłsudski, who regarded the more modest postcoup revisions of August, 1926, as inadequate. Declining to decree a new constitution by fiat—he always showed greater-respect for the letter than the spirit of legality—Piłsudski had his paladins maneuver a new constitution through the legislature by utilizing an extended series of parliamentary tricks and formal casuistries. This exercise in sharp practices was politically and morally at least as demoralizing as straightforward dictation would have been.
Coming into formal effect on April 23, 1935, the new constitution provided for a massive extension of presidential powers, including the suspensive veto, the dissolution of the legislature, the dismissal of the cabinet and of individual ministers, the authority to issue ordinances with the force of law, the appointment of a third of the senators, and the nomination of one of two possible candidates to succeed the incumbent president in peacetime and the direct appointment of his own successor in wartime. Not unsuited to the Poland of that day, it was to become a partial model for Gaullist France’s charter of 1958. Piłsudski’s new constitution was immediately devitalized by his death on May 12, 1935, and by his “colonel”-heirs’ supplementing it with electoral ordinances of July 8 that were blatantly designed to ensure that the regime would always win, thus humiliating the electorate. It was one of the many ironies of interwar Poland’s history that both its constitutions were drafted with Piłsudski specifically in mind: that of 1921 to cripple the presidency which the Right feared he would occupy; that of 1935 to extend this office to suit his style and authority. In each case the drafters miscalculated: in the first, he declined to serve; in the second, he died, and this legacy was transmitted to inadequate heirs.
In protest against the manifest intent of the new electoral regulations to produce a rubber-stamp legislature through a transparently rigged system of screening and selecting candidates, the Polish opposition parties boycotted the elections of September 8 and 15, 1935. Even the government’s own publications conceded that only 45.9 and 62.4 percent respectively of the eligible Sejm and Senate electorates had participated in this “plebiscite of silence,” and the opposition claimed that these official figures were exaggerated. Interestingly, the turnout was higher in the kresy and in Silesia, i.e., in the areas of Belorussian, Ukrainian, and German population concentration, than in the country as a whole. Perhaps these ethnic minorities were indifferent to an internal Polish quarrel among antagonists who were by now almost equally unfriendly to the minorities’ interests; perhaps they were more vulnerable to official intimidation or seduction. In any event, the Germans, Jews, and Ukrainians (but not the Belorussians) appear to have made quiet arrangements with the regime to assure themselves at least some representation. The new legislature was nevertheless totally dominated by the BBWR, which furnished 153 of the statutory 208 Sejm deputies under the new constitution, and 45 of the 64 elected Senators. The latter were elected indirectly by a narrowly limited group of supposedly distinguished citizens (holders of advanced degrees, of certain decorations, of local office, and of important positions in officially recognized professional, economic, and cultural organizations) under the recent electoral ordinances. Thanks, presumably, to previous arrangements, the ethnic minorities then received presidential appointments to a few of the 32 remaining Senate seats as a minimal redress of their electoral underrepresentation and as a reward for their participation.
That the regime’s intention had been to destroy the political parties and produce a nonpolitical parliament was confirmed when its own BBWR was dissolved on October 30, 1935, avowedly to demonstrate that henceforth there was no longer any need for “an organization of a political character intervening between the legislature and the country.” The naiveté of this attitude was soon exposed, as the locus of political struggle simply moved out of the halls of parliament into the streets and villages—to the regime’s thorough disadvantage—and as the sanacja camp, deluded by its formally consolidated grip on the state apparatus, henceforth indulged in the luxury of internal quarrels, which Piłsudski’s authority had hitherto prevented.
The first of these two developments, the shift in the locus of political conflict, was an aspect and a consequence of a general radicalization within all political camps. This radicalization, in turn, was in part a response to the depression and specifically to the regime’s initially slow and helpless reaction to the depression, in part an expression of increasing interethnic tensions, and in part a repudiation by the peasantry and proletariat of the hitherto unchallenged hegemony of the intelligentsia. Openly fascistic trends came to the fore within the rightist camp led by the National Democrats; peasants engaged in desperate food-delivery strikes against the cities and forced the hitherto moderate political leadership of their centrist movement to move sharply leftward; the underground Communists made gains among indigent peasants, unemployed workers, the younger intelligentsia, and the Belorussians; to avoid being outflanked, the Socialists sponsored a series of massive strikes; as for the ethnic minorities, Ukrainian extremists resorted to assassinations, the bulk of the Germans turned Nazi, and ever more Jews opted for Zionism; finally, the regime itself became more radical in both its economic (étatist) and its political responses. Radicalization was truly universal, but all camps, including those of the opposition, remained mutually divided. Indeed, their very radicalization widened the gaps among them.
Piłsudski’s heirs were split as to the proper course and content of the more radical policies that they agreed were needed. Distressed by the isolation of their state apparatus from the nation’s most energetic social forces, they quarreled over the correct direction in which to steer in order to close this gap. The virtually byzantine intricacy of their internal divisions and maneuvers over this crucial and charged issue can be simplified—hopefully without distortion—by dividing their camp into three lobbies. The first was the generally older generation of Piłsudski’s original comrades from the prewar underground struggles against Tsarist Russia, who recommended a reconciliation with the Socialist movement of which Piłsudski had been a founder and early leader at the turn of the century. The second was a more daring coterie who pushed for a swing toward the Right in order to tap for the regime the impressive energies of the by-now partly fascistic Polish youth; in other words, to trump the National Democrats by adopting their ideology and constituency. The third was the technocrats and protagonists of an “organized economy” who believed that sheer physical modernization would prove both necessary and sufficient to solve the country’s and the regime’s problems. These three lobbies were led, respectively, by Piłsudski’s closest personal friend, Colonel Walery Sławek, by Colonel Adam Koc, and by President Ignacy Mościcki. The chief of the armed forces, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, oscillated between the second and the third, finally opting for the latter. By the outbreak of World War II this third group had blocked the first two but had not yet achieved its own conclusive victory. In retrospect, one doubts whether its sheer technocratic gambit could have succeeded without an accompanying dynamic political ideology of leftist or rightist variety: rapid industrialization always entails social mobilization.
Thus, by the late 1930s, the strategy of isolation with which Piłsudski had hoped politically to cripple the Right on the morrow of his coup had been turned against his own camp. Piłsudski’s personal charisma and authority had obscured this trend during his own lifetime, but now his epigoni were left stranded by the sanacja’s ideological poverty and lack of social bases. Hence, at the end they were reduced to the “blackmail of patriotism,” to trying to smother the opposition parties’ boycott by transforming the last parliamentary elections of November 6 and 13, 1938, into a plebiscite of endorsement of the recent annexation of the Cieszyn region from Czechoslovakia (see Chapter 3, section 11). As a result of this demagogic appeal to national pride, 67.1 percent and 70.0 percent, respectively, of the Sejm and Senate electorates voted. This time the regime’s lists took 166 of the 208 Sejm seats and almost all the 64 elective Senate positions, and it also used the occasion to purge out of the legislature those of its own cadre who wished a reconciliation with the Left. That these results did not truly reflect public opinion was exposed by the stunning successes of the Socialists and the Right in the subsequent municipal-council elections of December 18, 1938. In short, as interwar Poland entered its last year, the regime’s “ownership” of the state was counterbalanced, and indeed outweighed, by the various opposition parties’ ideological saturation of the society and their political leadership of its classes.
With the sharpening of the German danger in 1939, the government undertook conciliatory gestures toward its domestic foes. Its awareness of the strength of public feeling undoubtedly influenced its stubborn resistance to Hilter’s pressure. Per contra, the challenge of the semifascist Right, which was the most dynamic of the opposition parties, was handicapped by the fact that the regime was already nationalistic, militaristic, and authoritarian. But it was not totalitarian. Though badgered, the opposition parties operated legally, except for the Communists who were obliged to resort to the subterfuge of “fronts”; though harassed, the trade unions and press remained independent and active; outspoken enemies of the regime continued to teach at the universities and to publish their criticisms; the autonomy of the judiciary from the administration was preserved; and the administration, while rigid, was technically competent. Interwar Poland’s faults and weaknesses were many, and serious: the imprudent imbalance between frontiers and institutions, the alienation of the ethnic minorities, rural overpopulation and industrial backwardness, the political decline from the original semidemocracy to Piłsudski’s semidictatorship and then to his heirs’ spasmodic authoritarianism. But in no way did they justify her neighbors’ decision to inflict a fifth partition on her in September, 1939. With their heroic resistance in that campaign and under the next years of occupation, the Polish people demonstrated that they had overcome the most demoralizing error of the old commonwealth in its last century of decadence: the lack of a readiness to make personal or partisan sacrifices for the sake of the nation as a whole. In World War II Poland, in again fighting for her own freedom, was again fighting for Europe’s.
1. All statistics are from the official statistical yearbooks of the Main Bureau of Statistics of the Polish Republic (Główny Urzad Statystyczny Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej), entitled during the 1920s Rocznik Statystyki and in the 1930s Mały Rocznik Statystyczny.
2. Joseph Rothschild, Piłsudski’s Coup d’Etat (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), chs. 4-8.
3. It would be possible, but awkward, to demonstrate the generalization statistically as the two censuses of 1921 and 1931 were not strictly comparable in this regard: the first registered all land by various size-categories, the second only agricultural land; the size-categories were also slightly altered from the one census to the other; finally, the second census was taken only in the middle, rather than at the close, of the interwar era. Cf. Mieczysław Mieszczankowski, Struktura Agrarna Polski Miȩdzywojennej (Warsaw: PWN, 1960), chs. 1, 2, and 10.
4. Cf. P. N. Rosenstein-Rodan, “Agricultural Surplus Population in Eastern and South Eastern Europe,” summarized by N. Spulber, The Economics of Communist Eastern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1957), p. 276, versus Wilbert E. Moore, Economic Demography of Eastern and Southern Europe (Geneva: League of Nations, 1945), p. 64.
