banks failed as deposits were withdrawn in panic.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
