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
