Though the BBWR could win elections and thus enable Piłsudski to retain legal control of the state apparatus, it proved in a deeper sense a political failure due to Piłsudski’s political misanthropy. On the morrow of the 1926 coup, he could have exploited the collective national catharsis to rally the Polish people around himself, activate them politically, elicit rededication, demand sacrifices, and accomplish much. But, distrusting the spontaneity of the masses, he chose to do the opposite. He imposed political passivity on the nation and reserved the responsibility of governing to himself, to the technocratic elite recruited by Bartel, and to his own immediate coterie of “colonels.” The function of the BBWR was to insulate the regime from antagonistic social and ideological pulls and pressures, not to draw the nation into political activism. Though a number of “new” recruits were accepted and were promoted quite high up in the sanacja hierarchy, the regime managed tragically to isolate itself. Piłsudski and his entourage succeeded in asserting their monopoly over the state apparatus and its power structure, but they lost control and leadership over Polish society to the allegedly corrosive political parties.
The achievements of his regime, which were undeniable despite their immolation in the 1939 catastrophe, were a series of structural and diplomatic reclamations achieved within and by the state apparatus. Among them were: the postcoup constitutional amendments that strengthened the executive; the revival of military morale; the professionalization of the civil bureaucracy; the reintegration of all preponderantly Polish-populated areas, including the once disaffected western regions, into one political system; the balancing of budgets; and the raising of Poland’s international prestige and self-confidence. But no fundamental social problem was solved or even seriously tackled in Piłsudski’s lifetime.
Given his reluctance to take the nation into genuine confidence and political partnership, Piłsudski might have done better to establish an explicit dictatorship on the morrow of the coup rather than lead the country through a demoralizing pseudo-parliamentary charade. This dictatorship need not have been “leftist” to achieve some positive “revolutionary” corrections. However, such a solution was precluded both by Piłsudski’s own scruples, fears, and hopes, and by a general national craving to demonstrate that the reborn Poland was, despite the coup, sufficiently mature to emulate successfully the Western model of constitutional parliamentary government. Hence, the coup fell between two stools. It was a potentially revolutionary action whose revolutionary potential was immediately denied and repressed by its instigator, abetted by the “responsible” political and economic interests.
12
This semiparliamentary style of government which Piłsudski launched on the morrow of his coup in 1926 was to prove a failure by 1930. The elections of March, 1928, whose politico-historical function was to proclaim the nation’s judgment on Piłsudski’s seizure and subsequent utilization of power as well as on the earlier period of legislative and party hegemony that had largely elicited his coup, gave Piłsudski an inconclusive victory. True, the BBWR and its satellites emerged as by far the largest constellation, but it failed to achieve an absolute legislative majority. Furthermore, to Piłsudski’s intense irritation, the parties of the Left also gained by riding—illegitimately, in his view—on Piłsudski’s coattails as a prewar Socialist. On the other hand, nemesis struck specifically the Right and Center parties of the Witos coalition, and not all the “old” parties across the entire pre-BBWR political spectrum, as Piłsudski had hoped. The results thus indicated considerably stronger public approval of the coup itself than of Piłsudski’s subsequent efforts to restructure the pattern and style of Polish political life to his own mold. Moreover, in the context of the incipient mutual alienation of the Piłsudski camp and the parliamentary Left, the failure of either to win a clear and unequivocal majority was ominous, despite their parallel successes relative to the Right and the Center. The capacity of the Polish political system either to accommodate itself, or to offer effective resistance, to the Piłsudski experiment was thrown into doubt.
Heightening this uncertainty were the polymorphous nature and the disparate constituency of the Piłsudski camp. It indeed enjoyed some support in almost every sector of the society, but most of the workers, peasants, petite bourgeoisie, Roman Catholic clergy, and ethnic minorities had remained outside it. Would the backing of the conservative stratum, on the one hand, and of the technical intelligentsia, on the other (assuming, for the moment, their reliability), prove sufficient to compensate for the soft and spotty support of the intermediate social classes in a country finding itself in the socioeconomic transitional stage that characterized interwar Poland? In the context of Piłsudski’s reluctance to institute an explicit dictatorship as the capstone to his coup, and his entourage’s technocratic, managerial outlook, and given his decision, instead, to try to rule through and within the established constitutional and parliamentary machinery, the prospects for an affirmative answer to this question were rendered doubtful by the inconclusive outcome of the 1928 elections.
The statistical results are given in table 10. Turnout was 78.3 percent of eligible voters in the Sejm elections of March 4, and 63.9 percent in those for the Senate a week later, on March 11. This time the Ukrainians of eastern Galicia joined those of the former Russian Empire in participating. The disproportionate rise in invalid votes, many of which were intended for the Communists, over 1922 indicates the political “engagement” of the bureaucracy. This “engagement” did not yet amount to terror; nevertheless there was modest chicanery involved in the elections of 1928.
TABLE 10
PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS, MARCH, 1928
Though now reduced and isolated, Dmowski’s National Democrats quickly consolidated their forces and strengthened their ideological militancy; they were destined to reemerge in the later 1930s as the Piłsudski camp’s most dynamic ideological adversary. In the meantime, the National Democrats in this new legislature were soon joined in their current hostility to the Piłsudskist regime, albeit from different ideological perspectives, by centrist, leftist, and National Minority opposition. All objected to the regime’s conservative socioeconomic policies, or to its cavalier contempt for legislative prerogatives, or to its occasional violations of civil legality. The Sejm majority could only frustrate the government, lacking as it did sufficient cohesion to replace it, and soon became locked in a futile struggle with Bartel.
This situation eventually provoked the exasperated Piłsudski into inaugurating the tougher “colonels” regime in September, 1930, which action was accompanied by the brutal beating and inhumane incarceration of a number of opposition leaders and the quite vigorous application of police pressure in the new elections of November, 1930. Though superficially these tactics of intimidation proved successful—the BBWR now received absolute parliamentary majorities—Piłsudski paid a heavy price for his recourse to atrocities that, unlike his coup four years earlier, were almost universally condemned as a gratuitious abuse of power, not a necessary or purgative seizure of it. Already rapidly losing the nationalistic youth to Dmowski’s Right-Radical nostrums, Piłsudski had now repelled the influential intelligentsia of virtually all political hues, sacrificed the support of many of his prestigious conservative allies, driven an ultimate chasm between himself and his earlier Socialist and Left-peasantist partners, and even shaken the