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,
