Thus, the November, 1930, elections were a success only in terms of numbers for the regime. The turnout was 74.8 percent of those eligible in the balloting on November 16 for the Sejm, and 63.4 percent on November 23 for the Senate. A joint opposition list was run by five Center and Left parties, among whom the three peasant groups were soon to merge into the united Peasant Party on March 15, 1931 (see section 3). The results are shown in table 11.
TABLE 11
PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS, NOVEMBER, 1930
13
The depression was now to strike Poland with devastating rigor and superimpose additional socioeconomic problems upon her chronic political ones. In the economic realm, restored Poland had been seriously handicapped by the heritage of over a century’s separation of her several regions and their diverse development, followed by the catastrophic devastation during World War I. Trade among the divided parts of Poland had been minimal before the recovery of independence; afterward their economic integration lagged behind their political and administrative integration and, indeed, was not really completed by 1939. Galicia and the kresy remained far poorer, less industrialized, and crippled by more primitive agricultural patterns than pertained in western Poland and the Kongresówka.
The first years of recovered independence had been economically darkened, as described earlier, by chronic dislocations, inflation, unemployment, and turmoil, which cumulatively undermined the then reigning parliamentary-party system and facilitated Piłsudski’s bid for power. On the morrow of his coup, the Polish economy was suddenly blessed with a windfall. A lengthy British coal miners’ strike from May to December, 1926, gave a massive and lasting spurt to Polish coal exports; this was sufficient to pull the entire industrial economy into a few years of prosperity. Agricultural prices and exports were also relatively high between 1926 and 1929. These favorable indicators, in turn, attracted foreign capital, enabling Poland to stablize her złoty and to outflank Germany’s tariff war and credit boycott. The Piłsudski-Bartel regime was thus initially the political beneficiary of an economic revival flowing from a happy conjunction of international developments with its own technocratic, yet fiscally conservative, policies; the whole was lubricated by the general impression of strength and confidence that Piłsudski projected.
Alas, during the 1930s the Piłsudski-”colonel” regime faced dimmer economic vistas, which exposed the precarious and dependent quality of the preceding recovery. The currency had indeed been stabilized, but mass purchasing power remained deficient; the budgets had indeed been balanced, but at too low a level. With the onset of the world agricultural crisis at the turn of the decade, the international prices for Polish agricultural commodities fell so drastically, that any increases in their production and export were thereafter utterly swallowed up by the decline in their value. Misery and near-starvation now stalked the Polish countryside.
As an overwhelmingly agricultural country, Poland experienced the depression most painfully in that economic sector, which was plagued by acute overpopulation, underemployment, underconsumption, and inequality and fragmentation of land distribution. Admittedly even a radical land reform and redistribution could not have satisfied the landhunger of the fecund peasant population in the absence of simultaneous and rapid industrialization. Yet even a moderate reform was inhibited by political considerations, which included an awareness that in the kresy and eastern Galicia land reform would benefit Belorussian and Ukrainian peasants at the expense of Polish landlords. In the end, Poland opted for a minimal reform that, next to Hungary’s, was the least extensive of any in interwar East Europe. The maximum beyond which large owners were obligated to sell their excess land was generously set at 180 hectares (444.8 acres), except in the eastern regions where it was extended to 300 hectares (741.3 acres). Furthermore, estates “that were devoted to highly specialized or unusually productive agricultural enterprises of national importance”—a definition so vague as to be open to the most subjective interpretations—were exempt from this ceiling. Thus, it is hardly surprising that the total amount of land transferred during the entire interwar era from large estates to peasants—2,654,800 hectares—was but 20 percent of all land in holdings larger than fifty hectares, or 40 percent of all agricultural land in such holdings of over fifty hectares. If these calculations are augmented by the 595,300 hectares received by peasants in exchange for the surrender of usufructs, then the total land distribution to peasants still comes to only 23 percent of all the land and 54 percent of agricultural land in holdings larger than fifty hectares.
Peasants also benefited from the consolidation of 5,423,300 hectares of hitherto fragmented strips into unified farms; but this land had already been in peasant ownership, albeit irrationally organized. However, renewed parcelization through inheritance within the prolific peasantry negated the effects of such officially sponsored consolidations. Similarly, the 548,700 hectares that were realized for agriculture through drainage and other reclamations were not transferred out of large estates. Due to the minimalistic nature of the reform, the structure of land ownership remained highly inegalitarian.3
Contrary to conventional expectations, the productivity of large estates was not significantly greater than that of small plots since the latifundists had little incentive to replace cheap and plentiful peasant labor with modern agronomic technology. There was, however, great regional variation in productivity, with western and central Poland boasting substantially higher yields per hectare than the southern and eastern areas. Yet the national average remained considerably below that of Europe in general and even of Central Europe. Interwar Polish agriculture suffered from lack of capital, and was hampered by primitive market transportation, poor processing facilities, inadequate use of fertilizer (virtually none was used in the east), low technical competence on the peasant’s part, and uneconomic but politically sustained distribution of ownership. But the most devastating hindrance was the lack of that external and essential deus ex machina: rapid industrialization to syphon off its surplus population. Estimates of the proportion of interwar Poland’s agricultural population that was surplus even at the prevailingly low levels of agronomic technology vary from a fourth to a half,4 but even the lower estimate indicates economic pathology.
More interesting, but also more difficult to evaluate, is interwar Poland’s industrial performance. Here one begins with the observation that except for coal, timber, and the largely untapped water-power potential, she was rather poorly endowed in natural resources, especially metals. Furthermore, the industries with which she entered the interwar era were (a) geared to what were now, after 1918, unfriendly foreign markets in Russia and Germany, and (b) heavily destroyed and looted between 1914 and 1918. They required not only extensive physical reconstruction, but also commercial reintegration into either the internal Polish market, which was weak, or new and different foreign markets, which tended to close themselves off, especially in the general world flight into autarky during the depression.
It would be possible but superfluous to illustrate statistically the painful blows inflicted on the Polish economy by the depression. Foreign capital was withdrawn, production declined, unemployment soared, and the peasant’s purchasing-power vanished. Poland’s recovery from the depression was initially slowed by Piłsudski’s cleaving—from mixed motives of state-prestige, fear of repeating the politically fatal inflationary trauma of 1923-26, and simple economic philistinism—to the gold standard long after other countries had abandoned it. This unfortunate monetary policy imposed an unnecessarily prolonged stagnation of production upon the Polish economy.
After Piłsudski’s death, however, the administrative technocrats whom Bartel had earlier recruited were joined by economic technocrats whom the “colonels” now sponsored. Etatism replaced orthodoxy as the economic ideology of the regime, vast investments for “social overhead” and direct production were sunk into state-owned enterprises, and industrialization proceeded apace in