In Galicia, the Austrian share of partitioned Poland, the Poles were overwhelmingly agricultural and the Jews controlled most of what little commerce and industry existed. Politically, the Polish nobility and intelligentsia had been favored by the Habsburgs, both locally and in Vienna. Hence, in the first years of the restored Polish state, only this region was capable of supplying a large reservoir of trained civil servants, until Polish universities began to graduate a steady flow of new bureaucrats and managers in the mid-1920s. But though politically, administratively, and culturally privileged, Galicia was economically poor and demographically overpopulated relative to the primitive level of its agronomic technology. Since the turn of the century, the hitherto exclusive political hegemony of its conservative Polish gentry had come under sustained challenge by peasantist, socialist, and Ukrainian nationalist movements.
The area that reverted to restored Poland from Russian rule consisted of two quite different parts: (a) the Kongresówka, created by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 as a political adjunct of the Tsarist Empire with a certain degree of administrative autonomy, which was whittled away in the course of the nineteenth century, and with a solidly Polish population; and (b) the kresy, or eastern borderlands, which had been administered as integral parts of Russia since Poland’s partition and where the Polish ethnic element consisted of a relatively thin upper crust of aristocracy and gentry exercising economic and cultural “stewardship” over a socially and ethnically still “immature” Belorussian and Ukrainian peasantry. Though basically agricultural, the Kongresówka also boasted a fairly highly developed industry, which was second only to ex-German Silesia’s. The kresy, on the other hand, were well-nigh exclusively agricultural and economically backward, with the Jews monopolizing the indispensable minimum of commerce and handicrafts. In both regions the tsarist authorities had consistently sought to weaken the Polish szlachta as punishment for its insurrections of 1830-31 and 1863-64 by such measures as peasant emancipation, cultural russification, and administrative repression. The Poles, in turn, had developed a tenacious and ramified political life—partly conspiratorial and revolutionary and partly pragmatic—characterized by a wide spectrum of ideological hues.
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Independent Poland’s political parties both reflected and in part bridged these regional differences. There was a great multiplicity and duplication of parties, and by 1926 there were twenty-six Polish and thirty-three ethnic minority parties, with thirty-one of the total having achieved legislative representation. Given their number and their propensity to splits, fusions, and general instability of organization, it seems preferable to depict their policies and clientèles in broad, rather than in detailed, strokes, identifying only the largest and most stable parties.
The Polish Right, stemming from the mid-nineteenth century rise of integral nationalism, and politically allied with Roman Catholicism, which it perceived as the protector of Polish nationhood, rejected the multiethnic and federalistic traditions of the old prepartition commonwealth. Insisting that Poles alone be masters in the restored state, it wished to exclude the ethnic minorities—though they numbered over 30 percent of the population—from effective participation in political power. It also wanted, if possible, culturally to polonize all of them except the Jews, whom it viewed as unassimilable and hence to be preferably expatriated. Thus an integral Polish society would be achieved. Basically bourgeois in its appeal, the Right endorsed private enterprise, called for rapid industrialization linked to the polonization of the entire economy, and insisted on constitutional and administrative centralization. Its leading ideologist was Roman Dmowski; its main organizational expression, the National Democratic movement (Narodowa Demokracja). Interwar Poland’s geographically most universal party, the National Democrats were particularly strong in ex-Prussian western Poland, in the Kongresówka, and among the Polish urban islands in the Ukrainian peasant sea of eastern Galicia.
Frequently allied with these National Democrats, though ostensibly preferring to regard themselves as centrist rather than rightist, were the Christian Democrats (Chrześcijańska Demokracja). This party was a more specifically clericalist movement, professing the Christian-social ideology of Rerum Novarum. It was popular with the proletariat and petite bourgeoisie of industrial Silesia.
Further toward the political Center stood the National Labor Party (Narodowa Partia Robotnicza), which was nonsocialist and had strong support among the nationalistic Polish workers of the light industries of Poznania and Pomerania. It enjoyed less solid but still significant popularity with a similar constituency in the Kongresówka.
The most quintessentially centrist party, in terms of its policies as well as its pivotal location on the parliamentary seesaw, was the Piast Peasant Party (Stronnictwo Ludowe “Piast”). Its support came mainly from the Polish peasantry of Galicia. Quite nationalistic, hence intermittently allied with the Right, it was reluctant to promote a truly radical land reform lest Belorussian and Ukrainian peasants in the eastern areas benefit at the expense of the Polish element, and lest the principle of private property be jeopardized. Hence the Piast Party preferred to gratify the expectations of its constituency through such devices as patronage, public works, and other state favors. This required it to strive to be always a government party; indeed, under its dexterous leader Wincenty Witos, Piast was the leading “broker” party that manipulated coalitions during the first years of interwar Poland.
A second peasant party, the Wyzwolenie (Liberation) Party (Stronnictwo Ludowe “Wyzwolenie”), was authentically leftist but politically less effective than Piast. It was sympathetic toward the grievances and aspirations of the ethnic minorities, anticlerical, and committed to radical land reform. Just as the Piast Party was basically Galician, so the Wyzwolenie was also something of a regional party, its home being in the Kongresówka. Not until the depth of the agrarian depression, on March 15, 1931, was a united Peasant Party (Stronnictwo Ludowe) formed through a merger of the Piast, Wyzwolenie, and interim groups that had split away from one or another of these two parent parties in the mid-1920s and were known collectively as the Stronnictwo Chłopskie.
The classic bearers of the ideology of the Polish Left were the Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna) and, originally, the Piłsudskist movement. (At that time the Communists, identified with a historic and contemporary foe of Poland, and obliged by that foe to advocate the cession of Poland’s kresy to the Soviet Union, were viewed suspiciously as a party of the “East” rather than of the “Left” by most Poles.) The Socialists and the Piłsudskists, who had been one movement before World War I and were still closely linked by many ideological, personal, and sentimental ties throughout the 1920s, identified with the old commonwealth’s multiethnic, federalistic, and latitudinarian religious traditions, as well as with the anti-Muscovite insurrections of 1794, 1830-31, and 1863-64 which had been intended to recover an independent Polish state. Hence, not only the proletariat but much of the state-oriented intelligentsia endorsed these two unimpeachably patriotic movements of the Left in interwar Poland. The Socialists enjoyed substantial urban support in all regions except those of ex-Prussian western Poland, while the Piłsudskists did not, until 1927, function as a distinct party, but rather as coteries within several parties, which they sought to win over to Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s policies. Though the Socialists and the Piłsudskists differed over socioeconomic policies and legislative-executive relations, they were initially at one in repudiating the integral nationalism, ethnic chauvinism, and clericalism of the Right.
It follows that the ethnic minorities, who sought to maximize their bargaining power by organizing a quite cohesive parliamentary bloc during the 1920s, long expected more favorable treatment from the Left than from the Right-Center coalition. After 1930, however, the Ukrainians became profoundly alienated from a by-now unresponsive Piłsudski, and toward the end of the decade the Jews were deeply troubled by his heirs’ reluctant, but nonetheless shameful, concessions to popular anti-Semitism.