Map 2. Poland
· Chapter Two ·
POLAND
1
THE Polish Commonwealth, before its decline in the second half of the seventeenth century, had been one of the major European powers, second only to France in population and to Russia in territory. When her fortunes thereafter waned, she lacked the asset of a peripheral geographic position such as had permitted Spain and Sweden, for example, to withdraw into hard and relatively immune shells once their bids for expansion had been defeated. Poland’s location being more central and pivotal, she was doomed to obliteration as a state in the second half of the eighteenth century, rather than the gentler lot of a mere reduction in power and size.
Before its partition at the hands of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, this Polish Commonwealth had been a multiethnic state governed through quasi-federalistic and decentralistic constitutional arrangements by a nobility of Polish and polonized Lithuanian, Belorussian, Ukrainian, German, and even Tatar, Armenian, and apostate-Jewish stock. Its political principles had required neither linguistic nor ethnic uniformity: Latin was the language of state functions, and caste rather than race was the criterion of access into the ruling establishment. Indeed, even religious uniformity was not highly valued until the last century preceding the partitions. Thus, at a time when the rest of Europe had been convulsed by the post-Reformation religious wars and persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Poland had enjoyed the widest degree of religious toleration and freedom of any state on the continent. Such latitudinarianism, while morally admirable and culturally interesting, may well have been a political hindrance in an age when language and religion were the mortar and bricks of nation-building.
Political life in the restored Polish state after 1918 was heavily colored by a craving to avoid repeating the errors that had weakened the old commonwealth; there was, however, no unanimity in identifying those errors. Did historic Poland’s mistake lie, for example, in having first tolerated wide religious dissent in an age when nationalism was closely tied to a specific religion, or in later having alienated her Eastern Orthodox and Protestant subjects through Roman Catholic exclusivism? Politically, had Poland been originally too generous, or subsequently too restrictive, toward her non-Polish populations? Was it a misjudgment to have contested the rise of Muscovy, or to have failed to smother her when she was still vulnerable? Did the Poles blunder in refusing to elect a Habsburg to their throne, which would have identified that dynasty’s interests with the fate of their commonwealth? Or did they err in saving Vienna from the Ottomans, which simply rescued and revived one of their own later partitioners? Interwar political and ideological stances were heavily influenced by the virtually universal Polish awareness of such historical problems and of their ambiguity. By and large, the parties of the Right and Center interpreted Polish history as validating their preference for an ethnically and religiously homogeneous modern society with a centralistic state apparatus and a foreign policy particularly alert to the assertedly primary threat of German eastward expansionism. The Left and the Piłsudskist movement, supported in part by the ethnic minorities, read that same history as a prescription for pluralism and federalism and as a lesson that Poland’s main external foe was Russia.
In the century and a quarter between independent Poland’s annihilation in 1795 and her restoration in 1918, the former gentry-nation had transformed itself into the Polish społeczeństwo, a term conventionally but inadequately translated as “society.” Społeczeństwo signified, in fact, the more complex notion of the organized, politicized, albeit still stateless, community of all Poles, led now by an intelligentsia that preserved, at the same time as it modified, the values and the style of the old szlachta, or gentry. Indeed, the new intelligentsia was not only psychologically strongly anchored to the former szlachta, but also heavily descended from it, as that class had protected itself from the degeneration that might otherwise have followed the loss of statehood by transforming itself into the leading fraction of the intelligentsia. Bourgeois and peasant sons who also entered the intelligentsia assimilated to its gentry-derived norms. Thus, whereas among the neighboring Czechs the native medieval nobility had vanished and a new bourgeoisie allied with a prospering peasantry furnished the political leadership, among the Poles the ancient szlachta lived on through the newly ascendant intelligentsia.
Though Polish economic and political patterns were to develop along different lines in the three partitioning empires among whom the nineteenth-century społeczeństwo was divided, the fact that the intelligentsia preserved a uniform code of values and style and a network of social connections across the partition-borders was to prove immensely important. It sustained Polish historical and political consciousness during the era of subjugation, and it also facilitated the eventual political reintegration, which proceeded more rapidly than the economic reintegration, of the several parts of the restored, independent state after 1918. The intelligentsia then not only mastered the state apparatus, but effectively controlled all political parties no matter how contrasting their programs. It was thus a sociological, rather than an organizational, entity. Not deliberately dictatorial, the intelligentsia simply took for granted its supposedly unique qualification for public affairs. The independence movement had allied it with the peasantry and proletariat in 1918, but thereafter the intelligentsia blocked, deflected, and captured the claims of the other classes to power and, though a numerical minority, charged itself with the task of reunifying the reborn Polish state and presiding over its subsequent development. Not until the mid-1930s did the peasants and workers challenge and repudiate this political and psychological domination on the part of the intelligentsia, which was by now heavily bureaucratized, over the state and over their own movements.
2
During the long era of the partitions, the three separated segments of the Polish nation had developed different political and economic patterns. The Poles of Prussia had achieved a high level of economic development during the nineteenth century, which in Poznania and Pomerania was based on a prosperous agriculture and an ancillary processing industry, and in Silesia on mining and heavy industry. They had also reached a high level of national consciousness. Though economically integrated into the German imperial market, they had resisted political assimilation and in the process had developed a remarkable degree of national solidarity that transcended class lines. In restored Poland their social stance was more “bourgeois-capitalistic” and their economic patterns often healthier than the socialist, or peasantist, or aristocratic ones prevailing in the generally poorer areas that had been recovered from the Austrian and Russian empires. In the ex-Prussian western regions both the peasantry and the bourgeoisie were economically enterprising and innovative. In the southern and eastern regions, the peasantry was generally more primitive, and the Polish middle class was heavily composed of members of the professions and of bureaucrats, allowing the specifically economic bourgeoisie to remain preponderantly Jewish. Even the landscape reflected these differences; in the ex-German areas frequent small towns which were the loci of agricultural marketing and processing industries and collieries and foundries dotted the countryside, while in much of the rest of Poland the endless vista of fields, forests, and villages interspersed with an occasional city, which functioned mainly as an administrative and garrison center, prevailed.
Politically, these western Poles manifested a strong regional identity combined with a somewhat contemptuous and resentful pride toward their compatriots. Though passionately anti-German, they regarded themselves as the sole bearers in restored Poland of such positive, “Prussian,” cultural virtues as industriousness, efficiency, perseverance, and punctuality. Convinced that they alone worked hard and effectively, these westerners came to feel themselves exploited by the southern and eastern Poles, whom they viewed as economic parasites and political schemers. Their view was somewhat analogous to the one that the Transylvanian Romanians took of their Regateni brethren in interwar Romania. There, too, intense nationalism was combined with resentment of the allegedly slovenly “Levantine” style of their