denied and repressed by its instigator, abetted by the “responsible” political and economic interests.
12
This semiparliamentary style of government which Piłsudski launched on the morrow of his coup in 1926 was to prove a failure by 1930. The elections of March, 1928, whose politico-historical function was to proclaim the nation’s judgment on Piłsudski’s seizure and subsequent utilization of power as well as on the earlier period of legislative and party hegemony that had largely elicited his coup, gave Piłsudski an inconclusive victory. True, the BBWR and its satellites emerged as by far the largest constellation, but it failed to achieve an absolute legislative majority. Furthermore, to Piłsudski’s intense irritation, the parties of the Left also gained by riding—illegitimately, in his view—on Piłsudski’s coattails as a prewar Socialist. On the other hand, nemesis struck specifically the Right and Center parties of the Witos coalition, and not all the “old” parties across the entire pre-BBWR political spectrum, as Piłsudski had hoped. The results thus indicated considerably stronger public approval of the coup itself than of Piłsudski’s subsequent efforts to restructure the pattern and style of Polish political life to his own mold. Moreover, in the context of the incipient mutual alienation of the Piłsudski camp and the parliamentary Left, the failure of either to win a clear and unequivocal majority was ominous, despite their parallel successes relative to the Right and the Center. The capacity of the Polish political system either to accommodate itself, or to offer effective resistance, to the Piłsudski experiment was thrown into doubt.
Heightening this uncertainty were the polymorphous nature and the disparate constituency of the Piłsudski camp. It indeed enjoyed some support in almost every sector of the society, but most of the workers, peasants, petite bourgeoisie, Roman Catholic clergy, and ethnic minorities had remained outside it. Would the backing of the conservative stratum, on the one hand, and of the technical intelligentsia, on the other (assuming, for the moment, their reliability), prove sufficient to compensate for the soft and spotty support of the intermediate social classes in a country finding itself in the socioeconomic transitional stage that characterized interwar Poland? In the context of Piłsudski’s reluctance to institute an explicit dictatorship as the capstone to his coup, and his entourage’s technocratic, managerial outlook, and given his decision, instead, to try to rule through and within the established constitutional and parliamentary machinery, the prospects for an affirmative answer to this question were rendered doubtful by the inconclusive outcome of the 1928 elections.
The statistical results are given in table 10. Turnout was 78.3 percent of eligible voters in the Sejm elections of March 4, and 63.9 percent in those for the Senate a week later, on March 11. This time the Ukrainians of eastern Galicia joined those of the former Russian Empire in participating. The disproportionate rise in invalid votes, many of which were intended for the Communists, over 1922 indicates the political “engagement” of the bureaucracy. This “engagement” did not yet amount to terror; nevertheless there was modest chicanery involved in the elections of 1928.
TABLE 10
PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS, MARCH, 1928
Though now reduced and isolated, Dmowski’s National Democrats quickly consolidated their forces and strengthened their ideological militancy; they were destined to reemerge in the later 1930s as the Piłsudski camp’s most dynamic ideological adversary. In the meantime, the National Democrats in this new legislature were soon joined in their current hostility to the Piłsudskist regime, albeit from different ideological perspectives, by centrist, leftist, and National Minority opposition. All objected to the regime’s conservative socioeconomic policies, or to its cavalier contempt for legislative prerogatives, or to its occasional violations of civil legality. The Sejm majority could only frustrate the government, lacking as it did sufficient cohesion to replace it, and soon became locked in a futile struggle with Bartel.
This situation eventually provoked the exasperated Piłsudski into inaugurating the tougher “colonels” regime in September, 1930, which action was accompanied by the brutal beating and inhumane incarceration of a number of opposition leaders and the quite vigorous application of police pressure in the new elections of November, 1930. Though superficially these tactics of intimidation proved successful—the BBWR now received absolute parliamentary majorities—Piłsudski paid a heavy price for his recourse to atrocities that, unlike his coup four years earlier, were almost universally condemned as a gratuitious abuse of power, not a necessary or purgative seizure of it. Already rapidly losing the nationalistic youth to Dmowski’s Right-Radical nostrums, Piłsudski had now repelled the influential intelligentsia of virtually all political hues, sacrificed the support of many of his prestigious conservative allies, driven an ultimate chasm between himself and his earlier Socialist and Left-peasantist partners, and even shaken the confidence of some of his immediate coworkers. Moreover, he was simultaneously destroying whatever credit he may still have possessed, thanks to his onetime sponsorship of federalism, with the Slavic minorities by seeking to break the Ukrainian nationalist movement through brutal military repression of the disaffected eastern districts between mid-September and the end of November, 1930.
Thus, the November, 1930, elections were a success only in terms of numbers for the regime. The turnout was 74.8 percent of those eligible in the balloting on November 16 for the Sejm, and 63.4 percent on November 23 for the Senate. A joint opposition list was run by five Center and Left parties, among whom the three peasant groups were soon to merge into the united Peasant Party on March 15, 1931 (see section 3). The results are shown in table 11.
TABLE 11
PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS, NOVEMBER, 1930
13
The depression was now to strike Poland with devastating rigor and superimpose additional socioeconomic problems upon her chronic political ones. In the economic realm, restored Poland had been seriously handicapped by the heritage of over a century’s separation of her several regions and their diverse development, followed by the catastrophic devastation during World War I. Trade among the divided parts of Poland had been minimal before the recovery of independence; afterward their economic integration lagged behind their political and administrative integration and, indeed, was not really completed by 1939. Galicia and the kresy remained far poorer, less industrialized, and crippled by more primitive agricultural patterns than pertained in western Poland and the Kongresówka.
The first years of recovered independence had been economically darkened, as described earlier, by chronic dislocations, inflation, unemployment, and turmoil, which cumulatively undermined the then reigning parliamentary-party system and facilitated Piłsudski’s bid for power. On the morrow of his coup, the Polish economy was suddenly blessed with a windfall. A lengthy British coal miners’ strike from May to December, 1926, gave a massive and lasting spurt to Polish coal exports; this was sufficient to pull the entire industrial economy into a few years of prosperity. Agricultural prices and exports were also relatively high between 1926 and 1929. These favorable indicators, in turn, attracted foreign capital, enabling Poland to stablize her złoty and to outflank Germany’s tariff war and credit boycott. The Piłsudski-Bartel regime was thus initially the political beneficiary of an economic revival flowing from a happy conjunction of international developments with its own technocratic, yet fiscally conservative, policies; the whole was lubricated by the general impression of strength and confidence that Piłsudski projected.
Alas, during the 1930s the Piłsudski-”colonel” regime faced dimmer economic vistas, which exposed the precarious and dependent quality of the preceding recovery. The currency had indeed been stabilized, but mass purchasing power remained deficient;
