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
