onset of the world agricultural crisis at the turn of the decade, the international prices for Polish agricultural commodities fell so drastically, that any increases in their production and export were thereafter utterly swallowed up by the decline in their value. Misery and near-starvation now stalked the Polish countryside.
As an overwhelmingly agricultural country, Poland experienced the depression most painfully in that economic sector, which was plagued by acute overpopulation, underemployment, underconsumption, and inequality and fragmentation of land distribution. Admittedly even a radical land reform and redistribution could not have satisfied the landhunger of the fecund peasant population in the absence of simultaneous and rapid industrialization. Yet even a moderate reform was inhibited by political considerations, which included an awareness that in the kresy and eastern Galicia land reform would benefit Belorussian and Ukrainian peasants at the expense of Polish landlords. In the end, Poland opted for a minimal reform that, next to Hungary’s, was the least extensive of any in interwar East Europe. The maximum beyond which large owners were obligated to sell their excess land was generously set at 180 hectares (444.8 acres), except in the eastern regions where it was extended to 300 hectares (741.3 acres). Furthermore, estates “that were devoted to highly specialized or unusually productive agricultural enterprises of national importance”—a definition so vague as to be open to the most subjective interpretations—were exempt from this ceiling. Thus, it is hardly surprising that the total amount of land transferred during the entire interwar era from large estates to peasants—2,654,800 hectares—was but 20 percent of all land in holdings larger than fifty hectares, or 40 percent of all agricultural land in such holdings of over fifty hectares. If these calculations are augmented by the 595,300 hectares received by peasants in exchange for the surrender of usufructs, then the total land distribution to peasants still comes to only 23 percent of all the land and 54 percent of agricultural land in holdings larger than fifty hectares.
Peasants also benefited from the consolidation of 5,423,300 hectares of hitherto fragmented strips into unified farms; but this land had already been in peasant ownership, albeit irrationally organized. However, renewed parcelization through inheritance within the prolific peasantry negated the effects of such officially sponsored consolidations. Similarly, the 548,700 hectares that were realized for agriculture through drainage and other reclamations were not transferred out of large estates. Due to the minimalistic nature of the reform, the structure of land ownership remained highly inegalitarian.3
Contrary to conventional expectations, the productivity of large estates was not significantly greater than that of small plots since the latifundists had little incentive to replace cheap and plentiful peasant labor with modern agronomic technology. There was, however, great regional variation in productivity, with western and central Poland boasting substantially higher yields per hectare than the southern and eastern areas. Yet the national average remained considerably below that of Europe in general and even of Central Europe. Interwar Polish agriculture suffered from lack of capital, and was hampered by primitive market transportation, poor processing facilities, inadequate use of fertilizer (virtually none was used in the east), low technical competence on the peasant’s part, and uneconomic but politically sustained distribution of ownership. But the most devastating hindrance was the lack of that external and essential deus ex machina: rapid industrialization to syphon off its surplus population. Estimates of the proportion of interwar Poland’s agricultural population that was surplus even at the prevailingly low levels of agronomic technology vary from a fourth to a half,4 but even the lower estimate indicates economic pathology.
More interesting, but also more difficult to evaluate, is interwar Poland’s industrial performance. Here one begins with the observation that except for coal, timber, and the largely untapped water-power potential, she was rather poorly endowed in natural resources, especially metals. Furthermore, the industries with which she entered the interwar era were (a) geared to what were now, after 1918, unfriendly foreign markets in Russia and Germany, and (b) heavily destroyed and looted between 1914 and 1918. They required not only extensive physical reconstruction, but also commercial reintegration into either the internal Polish market, which was weak, or new and different foreign markets, which tended to close themselves off, especially in the general world flight into autarky during the depression.
It would be possible but superfluous to illustrate statistically the painful blows inflicted on the Polish economy by the depression. Foreign capital was withdrawn, production declined, unemployment soared, and the peasant’s purchasing-power vanished. Poland’s recovery from the depression was initially slowed by Piłsudski’s cleaving—from mixed motives of state-prestige, fear of repeating the politically fatal inflationary trauma of 1923-26, and simple economic philistinism—to the gold standard long after other countries had abandoned it. This unfortunate monetary policy imposed an unnecessarily prolonged stagnation of production upon the Polish economy.
After Piłsudski’s death, however, the administrative technocrats whom Bartel had earlier recruited were joined by economic technocrats whom the “colonels” now sponsored. Etatism replaced orthodoxy as the economic ideology of the regime, vast investments for “social overhead” and direct production were sunk into state-owned enterprises, and industrialization proceeded apace in the last three interwar years before the Nazi assault and occupation interrupted these promising developments. The experience of this abbreviated period of state capitalism in the late 1930s served as a useful exercise from which helpful experience was accumulated for the rapid industrialization of the post-1945 era.
While impressive, this belated spurt of industrialization was running a hare-and-tortoise race against the older, remorseless, population growth. The employment opportunities it opened up scarcely made a dent in the vast army of rural paupers. It came too late to stem an erosion of living standards over the span of the decade as a whole—and Polish living standards were already among the lowest in Europe to begin with. Finally, despite the patriotic and nationalistic rhetoric with which it was promoted, it failed to rescue the post-Piłsudski “colonels” from their political isolation.
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This political isolation of the regime deepened throughout the 1930s. The flawed—because “pressured”—elections of 1930 had given the BBWR a legislative majority adequate to pass the sanacja camp’s ordinary legislation, but not the two-thirds majority required to amend the constitution. Such amendments to strengthen the executive still further were deemed essential by Piłsudski, who regarded the more modest postcoup revisions of August, 1926, as inadequate. Declining to decree a new constitution by fiat—he always showed greater-respect for the letter than the spirit of legality—Piłsudski had his paladins maneuver a new constitution through the legislature by utilizing an extended series of parliamentary tricks and formal casuistries. This exercise in sharp practices was politically and morally at least as demoralizing as straightforward dictation would have been.
Coming into formal effect on April 23, 1935, the new constitution provided for a massive extension of presidential powers, including the suspensive veto, the dissolution of the legislature, the dismissal of the cabinet and of individual ministers, the authority to issue ordinances with the force of law, the appointment of a third of the senators, and the nomination of one of two possible candidates to succeed the incumbent president in peacetime and the direct appointment of his own successor in wartime. Not unsuited to the Poland of that day, it was to become a partial model for Gaullist France’s charter of 1958. Piłsudski’s new constitution was immediately devitalized by his death on May 12, 1935, and by his “colonel”-heirs’ supplementing it with electoral ordinances of July 8 that were blatantly designed to ensure that the regime would always win, thus humiliating the electorate. It was one of the many ironies of interwar Poland’s history that both its constitutions were drafted with Piłsudski specifically in mind: that of 1921 to cripple the presidency which the Right feared he would occupy; that of 1935 to extend this office to suit his style and authority. In each case the drafters miscalculated: in the first, he declined to serve; in the second, he died, and this legacy was transmitted to inadequate heirs.
In
