The background of Bereza Kartuska prison (not a justification)With an area of about 150,000 square miles (389,000 square km) and more than 27 million inhabitants (more than 35 million by 1939),
interwar Poland was
the sixth largest country in Europe. Devastated by the years of hostilities, the state had to be reconstructed of three parts with different political, economic, and judicial systems and traditions.
More than three-fifths of the population was dependent on agriculture that was badly in need of structural change: agrarian reform and redistribution of land that would relieve the demographic pressure (e.g., hidden unemployment) and modernization of production that could alleviate the disparity between agrarian and industrial prices (“the price scissors”). Industrialization was essential, but local capital was insufficient, and foreign investors did not always operate in Poland’s interests.
Nonetheless,
the Polish economy made important strides in the mid-1920s through the reforms of
Władysław Grabski.
The Great Depression of the 1930s had
a crippling effect on Poland’s economy, but it began to recover under the guidance of
Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski, whose earlier achievements included
the building of a new port and town of Gdynia.
Władysław Dominik Grabski (7 July 1874 – 1 March 1938), National Democratic politician, economist and historian. He was the main author of the currency reform in the Second Polish Republic and served as Prime Minister of Poland in 1920 and from 1923–1925. He was responsible for the creation of the Bank of Poland and implementing the Polish currency. Grabski’s cabinet became the longest standing cabinet in the interwar Poland.
Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski (30 December 1888 in Kraków – 22 August 1974 in Kraków) was a Polish politician and economist, Deputy Prime Minister of Poland, government minister and manager of the Second Polish Republic. (
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugeniusz_Kwiatkowski )
Pressing political problems, such as
the issue of minorities, exacerbated economic difficulties.
Ukrainians (some
16 percent of the total population, according to estimates),
Jews (about
10 percent),
Belarusians (about
6 percent), and
Germans (about
3 percent) lived in a state that, although
multiethnic, was based on
a single-nation ideology.
The Ukrainians never fully accepted Polish rule, and
Ukrainian extremists engaged in terrorism to which the Poles responded with brutal “
pacifications.” In the case of
the large and
unassimilated Jewish population, concentrated in certain areas and professions,
anti-Semitism was rampant, especially
in the 1930s, though
Poland never introduced anti-Jewish legislation.
In 1934 Stepan Bandera was arrested in Lwów (in Ukrainian, Lviv) by Polish authorities and was tried twice: for involvement in the assassination of the Polish minister of internal affairs, Bronisław Pieracki; and at a general trial of Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists executives. He was convicted of terrorism and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Today he is seen as a hero of Ukraine in Ukraine. Bandera created the Ukrainian Nationalist organizations OUN and the UPA. Interwar politicsInterwar politics centred to a large extent on
the search for a constitutional model that would reconcile traditional Polish strivings for liberty with the need for a strong government.
Piłsudski gave up his provisional powers to
a Sejm elected in January 1919 but continued as
the head of state under a provisional “
Little Constitution.”
The Sejm quickly became an arena of interparty strife, with
the right grouped around the National Democrats, the left grouped around the PPS (=Polish
Socialist Party) and
radical Populists, and
the centre represented mainly by
the Polish Peasant Party. The illegal
Communist Party, formed in
1918, was of
marginal importance.
The constitution of 1921 made
the parliament supreme
vis-à-vis the executive. The proportional system of universal suffrage (which included women) necessitated coalition cabinets, and, except at times of national crisis,
the left and the right hardly cooperated. In
1922 a
nationalist fanatic assassinated t
he first president of the republic,
Gabriel Narutowicz, an event that underscored the extent of blind partisanship.
President Gabriel Narutowicz with Marshal Józef Piłsudski (left), Warsaw, 1922, days before Narutowicz was assassinated.In
May 1926 Piłsudski (who had held the title of
marshal since
1920) came out of his three-year retirement. Demanding
moral and
political cleansing (
sanacja), he staged
an armed demonstration intended
to force President Stanisław Wojciechowski to dismiss the government.
Fighting in Warsaw ensued and ended in victory for Piłsudski. His candidate,
Ignacy Mościcki, became president and remained in office until
World War II.
Piłsudski rejected
fascism and
totalitarianism but promoted
an authoritarian regime in which
his former legionnaires played a key role. Worshiped by his supporters and hated by his opponents,
he became a father figure for large segments of the population. The pro-Piłsudski Non-Party Bloc of Cooperation with the Government (BBWR) became his political instrument, used at first against the opposition rightist National Democrats. In
1930 Piłsudski responded to
the challenge of the centre-left opposition (
Centrolew) by ordering
the arrest and trial of its leaders, including three-time
premier Witos. The brutal
Brześć affair (named for the fortress in which the politicians involved were imprisoned) was seen as
a blot on the Piłsudski regime, even though the sentences were light and some of the accused were permitted to emigrate.
"
The Centrolew (Center-Left) was a coalition of several Polish political parties (Polish People's Party "Wyzwolenie", Polish People's Party "Piast", National Workers' Party, Polish Socialist Party, Stronnictwo Chłopskie and Polskie Stronnictwo Chrześcijańskiej Demokracji) after the 1928 Sejm elections. The coalition was directed against Józef Piłsudski and the Sanation government."
Centrolew rally in Warsaw, 15 September 1930To counter
the Centrolew, prior to
the 1930 Sejm elections,
Centrolew politicians were subjected to
repressions (
most famously, imprisonment in the Brest Fortress, and the subsequent Brest trials).
The Centrolew was defeated in the elections and broke up as a coalition.
Ignacy Daszyński, Polish socialist and former Prime Minister of the first Polish government (Second Polish Republic) and Wincenty Witos leader of the Polish People's Party "Piast". Both were aligned to Centrolew.Following
the 1930 elections, the
BBWR had
a majority in the Sejm. In
April 1935 it was able to push through
a new constitution, which placed the president above all other branches of government.
An electoral law undercut the political parties that boycotted the 1935 parliamentary elections.
In May Piłsudski died,
leaving the country as a dictatorship without a dictator. His legend could not be bequeathed.
A decomposition of the sanacja regime ensued. Attempts to pass on
Piłsudski’s mantle to the new commander in chief,
Marshal Edward Śmigły-Rydz, were unsuccessful, as was the artificial creation of a governmental party—
the Camp of National Unity.
The peasant parties (now united); the increasingly chauvinist
National Party (as
the National Democrats were by then known), with
its fascist splinter party, the
National Radical Camp; and
the socialists all opposed the regime and achieved success in municipal elections. Socioeconomic tension was translated into
peasant strikes in the countryside and
riots in towns.
Rydz-Smigly receiving the title of Marshal of Poland from Ignacy Moscicki, Warsaw, Poland, 10 Nov 1936Political and
socioeconomic difficulties contrasted with
the richness of intellectual,
artistic, and
scholarly life of the period. Twenty years of independence had given the Poles a new confidence that proved essential in the trials of
World War II. Poland’s international position between an inimical and
revisionist Germany (which constantly denounced the “
corridor” separating it from
East Prussia) and
the Soviet Union was dangerous from the start.
The tasks of Polish diplomacy during the interwar period were exceedingly difficult. The only option was
to remain neutral in regard to its
two giant neighbours while concluding
alliances (in
1921) with
France and
Romania. An alliance with
Czechoslovakia, which might have strengthened both countries, foundered on basic differences of approach to international relations, particularly when
Colonel Józef Beck became
Piłsudski’s foreign minister in
1932.
Józef Beck (October 4, 1894 in Warsaw – June 5, 1944 in Stăneşti, Romania), Polish foreign minister November 2, 1932 – September 20, 1939In
1932 Poland succeeded in signing a nonaggression pact with
Soviet Russia, and in
1934 it made
a declaration of nonaggression with Nazi Germany. The enmity of the Nazis for the Soviets seemed to preclude a rapprochement (such as the Russo-German agreement at Rapallo, Italy, in 1922).
Poland maintained its
alliance with France (
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Polish_alliance_(1921) ), though
the treaties of Locarno (
1925) and subsequent
Franco-German cooperation diminished the value of the alliance.
Warsaw vainly sought to encourage
Paris—through defiant gestures in
Danzig and vague war-prevention overtures—to adopt a strong line against
Nazi Germany. But the French did not react forcibly even to
the German remilitarization of the Rhineland (1936).
Dziennik Ustaw 1932 nr 115 pos. 951. Official full text of Soviet-Polish Non-Aggression pact (Both:Polish and Russian).Poland continued its policy of balance, but, in profiting from the German action against
Czechoslovakia by gaining the disputed part of
Cieszyn (
October 1938), it gave the impression of being in collusion with
Adolf Hitler. However, when confronted with German demands for an extraterritorial road through the “
corridor” and the annexation of
Danzig, as well as with an invitation to join
the Anti-Comintern Pact,
Beck knew that
his country’s independence was at stake. Accepting British Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain’s guarantee of
March 1939 and turning it into
a full-fledged alliance with Britain,
Warsaw rejected German demands. On
September 1,
1939,
Hitler, having
secured Soviet cooperation through the German-Soviet (
Molotov-Ribbentrop)
Nonaggression Pact a week earlier, launched
an all-out attack against Poland.
The Polish Corridor in 1923–1939
