legislature through a transparently rigged system of screening and selecting candidates, the Polish opposition parties boycotted the elections of September 8 and 15, 1935. Even the government’s own publications conceded that only 45.9 and 62.4 percent respectively of the eligible Sejm and Senate electorates had participated in this “plebiscite of silence,” and the opposition claimed that these official figures were exaggerated. Interestingly, the turnout was higher in the kresy and in Silesia, i.e., in the areas of Belorussian, Ukrainian, and German population concentration, than in the country as a whole. Perhaps these ethnic minorities were indifferent to an internal Polish quarrel among antagonists who were by now almost equally unfriendly to the minorities’ interests; perhaps they were more vulnerable to official intimidation or seduction. In any event, the Germans, Jews, and Ukrainians (but not the Belorussians) appear to have made quiet arrangements with the regime to assure themselves at least some representation. The new legislature was nevertheless totally dominated by the BBWR, which furnished 153 of the statutory 208 Sejm deputies under the new constitution, and 45 of the 64 elected Senators. The latter were elected indirectly by a narrowly limited group of supposedly distinguished citizens (holders of advanced degrees, of certain decorations, of local office, and of important positions in officially recognized professional, economic, and cultural organizations) under the recent electoral ordinances. Thanks, presumably, to previous arrangements, the ethnic minorities then received presidential appointments to a few of the 32 remaining Senate seats as a minimal redress of their electoral underrepresentation and as a reward for their participation.
That the regime’s intention had been to destroy the political parties and produce a nonpolitical parliament was confirmed when its own BBWR was dissolved on October 30, 1935, avowedly to demonstrate that henceforth there was no longer any need for “an organization of a political character intervening between the legislature and the country.” The naiveté of this attitude was soon exposed, as the locus of political struggle simply moved out of the halls of parliament into the streets and villages—to the regime’s thorough disadvantage—and as the sanacja camp, deluded by its formally consolidated grip on the state apparatus, henceforth indulged in the luxury of internal quarrels, which Piłsudski’s authority had hitherto prevented.
The first of these two developments, the shift in the locus of political conflict, was an aspect and a consequence of a general radicalization within all political camps. This radicalization, in turn, was in part a response to the depression and specifically to the regime’s initially slow and helpless reaction to the depression, in part an expression of increasing interethnic tensions, and in part a repudiation by the peasantry and proletariat of the hitherto unchallenged hegemony of the intelligentsia. Openly fascistic trends came to the fore within the rightist camp led by the National Democrats; peasants engaged in desperate food-delivery strikes against the cities and forced the hitherto moderate political leadership of their centrist movement to move sharply leftward; the underground Communists made gains among indigent peasants, unemployed workers, the younger intelligentsia, and the Belorussians; to avoid being outflanked, the Socialists sponsored a series of massive strikes; as for the ethnic minorities, Ukrainian extremists resorted to assassinations, the bulk of the Germans turned Nazi, and ever more Jews opted for Zionism; finally, the regime itself became more radical in both its economic (étatist) and its political responses. Radicalization was truly universal, but all camps, including those of the opposition, remained mutually divided. Indeed, their very radicalization widened the gaps among them.
Piłsudski’s heirs were split as to the proper course and content of the more radical policies that they agreed were needed. Distressed by the isolation of their state apparatus from the nation’s most energetic social forces, they quarreled over the correct direction in which to steer in order to close this gap. The virtually byzantine intricacy of their internal divisions and maneuvers over this crucial and charged issue can be simplified—hopefully without distortion—by dividing their camp into three lobbies. The first was the generally older generation of Piłsudski’s original comrades from the prewar underground struggles against Tsarist Russia, who recommended a reconciliation with the Socialist movement of which Piłsudski had been a founder and early leader at the turn of the century. The second was a more daring coterie who pushed for a swing toward the Right in order to tap for the regime the impressive energies of the by-now partly fascistic Polish youth; in other words, to trump the National Democrats by adopting their ideology and constituency. The third was the technocrats and protagonists of an “organized economy” who believed that sheer physical modernization would prove both necessary and sufficient to solve the country’s and the regime’s problems. These three lobbies were led, respectively, by Piłsudski’s closest personal friend, Colonel Walery Sławek, by Colonel Adam Koc, and by President Ignacy Mościcki. The chief of the armed forces, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, oscillated between the second and the third, finally opting for the latter. By the outbreak of World War II this third group had blocked the first two but had not yet achieved its own conclusive victory. In retrospect, one doubts whether its sheer technocratic gambit could have succeeded without an accompanying dynamic political ideology of leftist or rightist variety: rapid industrialization always entails social mobilization.
Thus, by the late 1930s, the strategy of isolation with which Piłsudski had hoped politically to cripple the Right on the morrow of his coup had been turned against his own camp. Piłsudski’s personal charisma and authority had obscured this trend during his own lifetime, but now his epigoni were left stranded by the sanacja’s ideological poverty and lack of social bases. Hence, at the end they were reduced to the “blackmail of patriotism,” to trying to smother the opposition parties’ boycott by transforming the last parliamentary elections of November 6 and 13, 1938, into a plebiscite of endorsement of the recent annexation of the Cieszyn region from Czechoslovakia (see Chapter 3, section 11). As a result of this demagogic appeal to national pride, 67.1 percent and 70.0 percent, respectively, of the Sejm and Senate electorates voted. This time the regime’s lists took 166 of the 208 Sejm seats and almost all the 64 elective Senate positions, and it also used the occasion to purge out of the legislature those of its own cadre who wished a reconciliation with the Left. That these results did not truly reflect public opinion was exposed by the stunning successes of the Socialists and the Right in the subsequent municipal-council elections of December 18, 1938. In short, as interwar Poland entered its last year, the regime’s “ownership” of the state was counterbalanced, and indeed outweighed, by the various opposition parties’ ideological saturation of the society and their political leadership of its classes.
With the sharpening of the German danger in 1939, the government undertook conciliatory gestures toward its domestic foes. Its awareness of the strength of public feeling undoubtedly influenced its stubborn resistance to Hilter’s pressure. Per contra, the challenge of the semifascist Right, which was the most dynamic of the opposition parties, was handicapped by the fact that the regime was already nationalistic, militaristic, and authoritarian. But it was not totalitarian. Though badgered, the opposition parties operated legally, except for the Communists who were obliged to resort to the subterfuge of “fronts”; though harassed, the trade unions and press remained independent and active; outspoken enemies of the regime continued to teach at the universities and to publish their criticisms; the autonomy of the judiciary from the administration was preserved; and the administration, while rigid, was technically competent. Interwar Poland’s faults and weaknesses were many, and serious: the imprudent imbalance between frontiers and institutions, the alienation of the ethnic minorities, rural overpopulation and industrial backwardness, the political decline from the original semidemocracy to Piłsudski’s semidictatorship and then to his heirs’ spasmodic authoritarianism. But in no way did they justify her neighbors’ decision to inflict a fifth partition on her in September, 1939. With their heroic resistance in that campaign and under the next years of occupation, the Polish people demonstrated that they had overcome the most demoralizing error of the old commonwealth in its last century of decadence: the lack of a readiness to make personal or partisan sacrifices for the sake of the nation as a whole. In World War II Poland, in again fighting for her own freedom, was again fighting for Europe’s.
1. All statistics are
