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World War I
After World War I and the collapse of the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, Poland became an independent republic. However, Poland's geographical position between Germany and Russia had meant much fighting and terrific human and material losses for the Poles between 1914 and 1918.
War and the Polish Lands
The war split the ranks of the three partitioning empires, pitting Russia as defender of Serbia and ally of Britain and France against the leading members of the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. This circumstance afforded the Poles political leverage as both sides offered pledges of concessions and future autonomy in exchange for Polish loyalty and army recruits. The Austrians wanted to incorporate Congress Poland into their territory of Galicia, so they allowed nationalist organizations to form there. The Russians recognized the Polish right to autonomy and allowed formation of the Polish National Committee, which supported the Russian side. In 1916, attempting to increase Polish support for the Central Powers, the German and Austrian emperors declared a new Kingdom of Poland. The new Kingdom included only a small part of the old Commonwealth, however.
As the war settled into a long stalemate, the issue of Polish self-rule gained greater urgency. Roman Dmowski spent the war years in Western Europe, hoping to persuade the Allies to unify the Polish lands under Russian rule as an initial step toward liberation. In the meantime, Pilsudski had correctly predicted that the war would ruin all three of the partitioners, a conclusion most people thought highly unlikely before 1918. Pilsudski therefore formed Polish Legions to assist the Central Powers in defeating Russia as the first step toward full independence for Poland.
Much of the heavy fighting on the war's Eastern Front took place on the territory of the former Polish state. In 1914 Russian forces advanced very close to Krakow before being beaten back. The next spring, heavy fighting occurred around Gorlice and Przemysl, to the east of Krakow in Galicia. By the end of 1915, the Germans had occupied the entire Russian sector, including Warsaw. In 1916 another Russian offensive in Galicia exacerbated the already desperate situation of civilians in the war zone; about 1 million Polish refugees fled eastward behind Russian lines during the war. Although the Russian offensive of 1916 caught the Germans and Austrians by surprise, poor communications and logistics prevented the Russians from taking full advantage of their situation.
A total of 2 million Polish troops fought with the armies of the three occupying powers, and 450,000 died. Several hundred thousand Polish civilians were moved to labor camps in Germany. The scorched-earth retreat strategies of both sides left much of the war zone uninhabitable.
Recovery of Statehood
In 1917 two separate events decisively changed the character of the war and set it on a course toward the rebirth of Poland. The United States entered the conflict on the Allied side, while a process of revolutionary upheaval in Russia weakened her and then removed the Russians from the Eastern Front, finally bringing the Bolsheviks to power in that country. After the last Russian advance into Galicia failed in mid-1917, the Germans went on the offensive again; the army of revolutionary Russia ceased to be a factor, and Russia was forced to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in which she ceded all formerly Polish lands to the Central Powers. After peace in the East was assured, Germany and Austria-Hungary started a policy of creating a "Mitteleuropa" ("Central Europe") and on November 5, 1917, proclaimed a puppet Kingdom of Poland.
The defection of Russia from the Allied coalition gave free rein to the calls of Woodrow Wilson, the American president, to transform the war into a crusade to spread democracy and liberate the Poles and other peoples from the suzerainty of the Central Powers. The thirteenth of his Fourteen Points adopted the resurrection of Poland as one of the main aims of World War I. Polish opinion crystallized in support of the Allied cause.
Józef Piłsudski became a popular hero when Berlin jailed him for insubordination. The Allies broke the resistance of the Central Powers by autumn 1918, as the Habsburg monarchy disintegrated and the German imperial government collapsed. In October 1918, Polish authorities took over Galicia and Cieszyn Silesia. In November 1918, Piłsudski was released from internment in Germany by the revolutionaries and returned to Warsaw. Upon his arrival, on November 11, 1918 the Regency Council of the Kingdom of Poland ceded all responsibilities to him and Piłsudski took control over the newly created state as its provisional Chief of State. Soon all the local governments that had been created in the last months of the war pledged allegiance to the central government in Warsaw. Independent Poland, which had been absent from the map of Europe for 123 years, was reborn.
The newly created state initially consisted of former Congress Poland, western Galicia (with Lwów besieged by the Ukrainians) and part of Cieszyn Silesia.
Interwar Poland
Pilsudski's first task was to reunite the Polish regions that had
assumed various economic and political identities since the partition
in the late eighteenth century, and especially since the advent of
political parties. Pilsudski took immediate steps to consolidate the Polish regions under a single government with its own currency and
army, but the borders of the Second Polish Republic were not
established until 1922. Between 1921 and 1939, Poland
achieved significant economic growth despite world economic crisis.
The Polish political scene remained chaotic and shifting, however,
especially after Pilsudski's death in 1935.
Formative Years, (1918-1921)
From its inception, the Second Polish Republic struggled to secure and
maintain its existence in difficult circumstances. The extraordinary
complications of defining frontiers preoccupied the state in its
infancy. To the southwest, Warsaw encountered boundary disputes with
Czechoslovakia over Austrian Silesia. More ominously, an embittered Germany begrudged any territorial loss to its new eastern neighbor. December 27 1918 Great Poland Uprising liberated Greater Poland. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles settled the German-Polish borders in the Baltic region. The port city of Gdansk, a city predominantly German but as economically vital to Poland as it had been in the sixteenth century, was declared a free city. Allied arbitration divided the ethnically mixed and highly coveted industrial and mining district of Silesia between Germany and Poland, with Poland receiving the more industrialized eastern section in 1922, after series of 3 Silesian Uprisings.
The German-Polish borders were so complicated that only close collaboration between the two countries could let the situation persist (1930 km., compared to the 430 km. of the present-day Oder-Neisse line).
The unification of the former Prussian provinces lasted for many years. Until 1923, these provinces were ruled by a separate administration.
Military force proved the determinant of Poland's frontiers in the
east (see also Polish-Soviet war), a theater rendered chaotic by the repercussions of the Russian revolutions and civil war. Pilsudski envisioned a new federation with Lithuania and Polish domination of western Ukraine, centered at Kyiv, forming a Polish-led East European confederation to block Russian imperialism. Lenin, leader of the new communist government of Russia, saw Poland as the bridge over which communism would pass into the labor class of a disorganized postwar Germany. When, Pilsudski carried out a military thrust into Ukraine in 1920, he was met by a Red Army counterattack that drove into Polish territory almost to Warsaw. Although many observers marked Poland for extinction and
Bolshevization, Pilsudski halted the Soviet advance before Warsaw and
resumed the offensive. The Poles were not able to exploit their new
advantage fully, however; they signed a compromise peace treaty at
Riga in early 1921 that split disputed territory in Belarus and Ukraine between Poland and the Soviet Union. The treaty avoided ceding historically Polish territory back to the Russians, and granted Poland significant portions of western Ukraine and Belarus. These acquisitions were recognized by international agreement, on the condition of the granting of local autonomy. In 1922 Poland also officially annexed Central Lithuania after elections won by the Polish majority.
From Democracy to Authoritarian government
Reborn Poland faced a host of daunting challenges: extensive war damage, a ravaged economy, a population one-third composed of wary national minorities, and a need to reintegrate the three zones kept forcibly apart during the era of partition. Under these trying conditions, the experiment with democracy faltered. Formal political life began in 1921 with adoption of a constitution that designed Poland as a republic modeled after the French example, vesting most authority in the legislature. The postwar parliamentary system proved unstable and erratic. In 1922 disputes with political foes caused Pilsudski to resign his posts as chief of state and commander of the armed forces, but in 1926 he assumed power in a coup that followed four years of ineffectual government. For the next decade, Pilsudski dominated Polish affairs as strongman of a generally popular centrist regime. Military in character, the government of Pilsudski mixed democratic and dictatorial elements while pursuing sanacja, or national cleansing. In 1935 a new Polish Constitution was passed, but soon afterwards Piłsudski died and his protégé successors drifted toward open authoritarianism.
In many respects, the Second Republic fell short of the high expectations of 1918. As happened elsewhere in Central Europe, the attempt to implant democracy did not succeed. Minority peoples became increasingly alienated, due in part to the failure of the Polish government to fulfill treaty obligations of minority autonomy. Anti-semitism rose palpably in the general population. Nevertheless, interwar Poland could justifiably claim some noteworthy accomplishments: economic advances, the revival of Polish education and culture after decades of official curbs, and, above all, reaffirmation of the Polish nationhood that had been disputed so long.
Despite its defects, the Second Republic retained a strong hold on later generations of Poles as a genuinely independent and authentic expression of Polish national aspirations.
Poland's International Situation
In foreign policy, the republic allied itself with France (February 1921) as a defence against both Germany and Soviet Russia, but in January 1934 concluded a non-aggression pact with Germany's new Nazi government, subsequently rejecting (September 27) French proposals for an Eastern European security pact directed against Germany, partly because the proposed treaty involved no guarantee of Poland's eastern frontier with the Soviet Union.
By far the gravest menace to Poland's longevity came from abroad, not
from internal weaknesses. The center of Poland's postwar foreign
policy was a political and military alliance with France, which
guaranteed Poland's independence and territorial integrity. Although
Poland attempted to join the Little Entente, the French-sponsored
alliance of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia, Czechoslovak suspicions of Polish territorial ambitions prevented Polish membership. Beginning in 1926, Pilsudski's main foreign policy aim was balancing Poland's still powerful neighbors, the Soviet Union and Germany. Pilsudski assumed that both powers wished to regain the Polish territory lost in World War I. Therefore, his approach was to avoid Polish dependence on either power. Above all, Pilsudski sought to avoid taking positions that might cause the two countries to take concerted action against Poland. Accordingly, Poland signed nonaggression pacts with both countries in the early 1930s. After Pilsudski's death, his foreign minister Jozef Beck continued this policy.
The failure to establish planned alliances in Eastern Europe meant
great reliance on the French, whose enthusiasm for intervention in the
region waned markedly after World War I. The Locarno Pact, signed in 1926 by the major West European powers with the aim of guaranteeing peace in the region, contained no guarantee of Poland's western border. Over the next ten years, substantial friction arose between Poland and France over Polish refusal to compromise with the Germans and French refusal to resist Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the early 1930s. The Polish nonaggression treaties with Germany and the Soviet Union resulted from this bilateral deterioration of confidence.
The Polish predicament worsened in the 1930s with the advent of
Hitler's openly expansionist Nazi regime in Germany and the obvious
waning of France's resolve to defend its East European allies.
Pilsudski retained the French connection but had progressively less
faith in its usefulness. As the decade drew to an end, Poland's policy
of equilibrium between potential enemies was failing. Complete Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in early 1939 encircled Poland on three
sides (East Prussia to the northeast had remained German). Hitler's
next move was obvious. By 1939 Hitler had shattered the continental
balance of power by a concerted campaign of armed diplomatic extortion
that brought most of Central Europe into his grasp.
As western appeasement of Germany culminating in the German takeover of neighbouring Czechoslovakia (March 1939) left Poland increasingly vulnerable, the Nazi regime proposed Poland to join Axis. Immediate measures were for territorial concessions to join East Prussia to the rest of Germany, demanding an extraterritorial highway through the middle of Polish territory, but also the return of Danzig, separated from Germany in 1920 as a Free City in a customs union with Poland. However, all concession had to be paid back in conquered terriotories of Lithuania and Ukraine.
After Polish refusal to cede the territories demanded, Germany invaded on September 1, 1939.
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