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
