East Central Europe between the Two World Wars. Joseph Rothschild

stance of the surviving upper aristocracy, who were fearful of the Left’s espousal of land reform and alienated by the Right’s raucous chauvinism and bourgeois political outlook. Though they had served the governments of the partitioning empires until 1918, though they declined thereafter to adapt themselves to the rules of the parliamentary game in independent Poland, and though the peasant and worker masses would in any event have used the power of universal suffrage to exclude them from government, they were nevertheless viewed and wooed by Piłsudski as the bearers of an allegedly suprapartisan tradition of public service, that went back to the days of the old commonwealth. He felt that this tradition was desperately needed by a Poland deeply lacerated by the incessant strife of parties and factions. Soon after seizing power in May, 1926, to stem the apparent disintegration of the body-politic, Piłsudski arranged a rapprochement with this aristocracy that supposedly embodied the state and whose political ideology was conservative rather than rightist in the integral-nationalist sense. By then exasperated with all political parties, whom he held collectively responsible for the travails of the state, Piłsudski was undeterred by the consideration that this move implied and signaled an early break with the Left which had hitherto been his ally.

      4

      Interwar Poland’s foreign and domestic stances were to a large extent determined by the historic vision of Józef Piłsudski—and by the Right’s deliberate frustration of that vision. Piłsudski’s moral authority in interwar Polish politics derived from his successful leadership of the political and military struggle, before and during World War I, to achieve the resurrection of an independent Poland. Then, as chief of state and commander in chief of the armed forces in the immediate postwar years 1918-22, he sought through military efforts to carve out for the restored state the wide eastern frontiers and, in consequence, the multiethnic population that had characterized the old commonwealth before its partition. This program implied a federalistic constitutional structure.

      The Right, meanwhile, which before the war had been less concerned with independent statehood than with the economic and cultural strengthening of Polish society was concentrating its diplomatic efforts on persuading the Allied statesmen at the Paris Peace Conference, who recognized the Rightist leader Dmowski as head of the Polish delegation, to grant Poland generous frontiers vis-à-vis Germany. Simultaneously, the Right was using its domestic political power to achieve the adoption of a highly centralistic constitution on March 17, 1921, which implied that the proportion of the state’s non-Polish population would be small enough to be effectively assimilated.

      Between Piłsudski’s and Dmowski’s visions, Polish policy fell between two stools. The former, though not entirely successful in his endeavor to recover all the Lithuanian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian lands that had been lost by the old commonwealth to Muscovy, nevertheless did manage, thanks to Russia’s momentary postwar and postrevolutionary prostration, to incorporate into Poland extensive eastern territories of a non-Polish ethnic complexion. Simultaneously, the centralistic constitution and generally chauvinistic stance of Dmowski’s adherents alienated these large minorities, rendering them unabsorbable even on a political level. Cultural assimilation, which might have been possible a half century earlier, was now out of the question. Russia, meanwhile, was wounded without being permanently crippled by these territorial losses to Poland. Since Germany’s enmity was inevitable—being utterly unreconciled to having been obliged to yield to interwar Poland a “corridor” to the Baltic Sea through Pomerania, as well as the rich industrial region of Silesia—it seems, in retrospect, unwise for Poland to have gratuitously saddled herself, in addition, with Russian resentment and with an unsolvable ethnic-minority problem—a triple complex which entailed an acrobatic and basically hopeless foreign policy. At the time, however, in the first euphoric years of independence, the gravity of this problem was not appreciated, as most Polish—and most European—political leaders entertained exaggerated impressions of the extent to which Russia had been weakened—supposedly permanently—by war and revolution. Furthermore, in justice to Piłsudski, one might now well share his skepticism that even a generously treated Russia would have reciprocated in kind once her leaders were persuaded that their interests indicated otherwise.

      5

      The ethnic, social, and demographic difficulties confronting the restored Poland are suggested by the results of her two censuses of September 30, 1921, and December 9, 1931. Spokesmen for the ethnic minorities criticised the categories and the actual tabulations as being skewed. Indeed, the official distinction between “Ukrainian” and “Ruthenian” (in 1931) as well as between “Belorussian” and “local” (tutejsi) nationality (in 1921 and 1931) appears to have been an artificial, dubious, and politically motivated Polish attempt to reduce the statistical visibility of the Ukrainians and the Belorussians. However, on balance, the census returns can be used with profit. It should be noted that in 1921 ethnicity was defined by the respondent’s national identification, whereas a decade later it was inferred from his native tongue (jȩzyk ojczysty), “in which he conventionally thinks and communicates with his family.” This change may have figured in the sharp drop in the number of Germans recorded between the two censuses, though emigration also played a role here. A less significant variation is that the 1921 census included in its various subcategories the barracked military personnel, whereas the 1931 census did not. In the latter year they numbered 191,473. Furthermore, as the frontiers were not finally delimited until 1922, the population statistics for Silesia and the Wilno (Vilnius, Vilna) region were interpolated into the 1921 census from 1919 data. Thereafter, the area of interwar Poland from 1922 up to her peremptory incorporation of Czechoslovakia’s fraction of Silesia (the Teschen, or Cieszyn, or Těšín district) at the time of the latter country’s “Munich” travail and truncation in September-October, 1938 (see Chapter 3, section 11), was 388,634 square kilometers. Within that territory resided a highly heterogeneous population (see tables 1 and 2).¹

      It may be useful at this point to indicate a number of internal correlations as well as problems within these official data. The Polish population was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic with only a very small Protestant minority. The Lithuanians were even more exclusively Roman Catholic, but four-fifths of the Germans were Protestant. The bulk of Jews-by-religion also regarded themselves as Jews-by-nationality and spoke Yiddish or Hebrew, yet a significant minority indicated Polish as their native tongue and identified correspondingly in national terms. While the other three major minorities were concentrated geographically—Germans in the west, Belorussians and Ukrainians in the east—the Jews were concentrated in a different but equally vivid sense. Four-fifths of them were urban, and in 1931 they furnished 25.2 percent of the inhabitants of the twelve largest cities with populations of over a hundred thousand, though only 9.8 percent of the general population. (This concentration would be even more strikingly illustrated if the four large cities of ex-Prussian western Poland, which had few Jews, were subtracted, and Jewish urban proportions were then recalculated for Galicia, the Kongresówka, and the kresy together.)

TABLE 1

      POPULATION BY ETHNICITY

TABLE 2

      POPULATION BY RELIGION

TABLE 3

      AVERAGE ANNUAL RATE OF POPULATION INCREASE (IN PERCENTAGES)

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Region	1921-31	1931-39
Central Provinces	1.7	1.2
Eastern Provinces	3.0	1.4
Western Provinces	1.0	1.1