While impressive, this belated spurt of industrialization was running a hare-and-tortoise race against the older, remorseless, population growth. The employment opportunities it opened up scarcely made a dent in the vast army of rural paupers. It came too late to stem an erosion of living standards over the span of the decade as a whole—and Polish living standards were already among the lowest in Europe to begin with. Finally, despite the patriotic and nationalistic rhetoric with which it was promoted, it failed to rescue the post-Piłsudski “colonels” from their political isolation.
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This political isolation of the regime deepened throughout the 1930s. The flawed—because “pressured”—elections of 1930 had given the BBWR a legislative majority adequate to pass the sanacja camp’s ordinary legislation, but not the two-thirds majority required to amend the constitution. Such amendments to strengthen the executive still further were deemed essential by Piłsudski, who regarded the more modest postcoup revisions of August, 1926, as inadequate. Declining to decree a new constitution by fiat—he always showed greater-respect for the letter than the spirit of legality—Piłsudski had his paladins maneuver a new constitution through the legislature by utilizing an extended series of parliamentary tricks and formal casuistries. This exercise in sharp practices was politically and morally at least as demoralizing as straightforward dictation would have been.
Coming into formal effect on April 23, 1935, the new constitution provided for a massive extension of presidential powers, including the suspensive veto, the dissolution of the legislature, the dismissal of the cabinet and of individual ministers, the authority to issue ordinances with the force of law, the appointment of a third of the senators, and the nomination of one of two possible candidates to succeed the incumbent president in peacetime and the direct appointment of his own successor in wartime. Not unsuited to the Poland of that day, it was to become a partial model for Gaullist France’s charter of 1958. Piłsudski’s new constitution was immediately devitalized by his death on May 12, 1935, and by his “colonel”-heirs’ supplementing it with electoral ordinances of July 8 that were blatantly designed to ensure that the regime would always win, thus humiliating the electorate. It was one of the many ironies of interwar Poland’s history that both its constitutions were drafted with Piłsudski specifically in mind: that of 1921 to cripple the presidency which the Right feared he would occupy; that of 1935 to extend this office to suit his style and authority. In each case the drafters miscalculated: in the first, he declined to serve; in the second, he died, and this legacy was transmitted to inadequate heirs.
In protest against the manifest intent of the new electoral regulations to produce a rubber-stamp legislature through a transparently rigged system of screening and selecting candidates, the Polish opposition parties boycotted the elections of September 8 and 15, 1935. Even the government’s own publications conceded that only 45.9 and 62.4 percent respectively of the eligible Sejm and Senate electorates had participated in this “plebiscite of silence,” and the opposition claimed that these official figures were exaggerated. Interestingly, the turnout was higher in the kresy and in Silesia, i.e., in the areas of Belorussian, Ukrainian, and German population concentration, than in the country as a whole. Perhaps these ethnic minorities were indifferent to an internal Polish quarrel among antagonists who were by now almost equally unfriendly to the minorities’ interests; perhaps they were more vulnerable to official intimidation or seduction. In any event, the Germans, Jews, and Ukrainians (but not the Belorussians) appear to have made quiet arrangements with the regime to assure themselves at least some representation. The new legislature was nevertheless totally dominated by the BBWR, which furnished 153 of the statutory 208 Sejm deputies under the new constitution, and 45 of the 64 elected Senators. The latter were elected indirectly by a narrowly limited group of supposedly distinguished citizens (holders of advanced degrees, of certain decorations, of local office, and of important positions in officially recognized professional, economic, and cultural organizations) under the recent electoral ordinances. Thanks, presumably, to previous arrangements, the ethnic minorities then received presidential appointments to a few of the 32 remaining Senate seats as a minimal redress of their electoral underrepresentation and as a reward for their participation.
That the regime’s intention had been to destroy the political parties and produce a nonpolitical parliament was confirmed when its own BBWR was dissolved on October 30, 1935, avowedly to demonstrate that henceforth there was no longer any need for “an organization of a political character intervening between the legislature and the country.” The naiveté of this attitude was soon exposed, as the locus of political struggle simply moved out of the halls of parliament into the streets and villages—to the regime’s thorough disadvantage—and as the sanacja camp, deluded by its formally consolidated grip on the state apparatus, henceforth indulged in the luxury of internal quarrels, which Piłsudski’s authority had hitherto prevented.
The first of these two developments, the shift in the locus of political conflict, was an aspect and a consequence of a general radicalization within all political camps. This radicalization, in turn, was in part a response to the depression and specifically to the regime’s initially slow and helpless reaction to the depression, in part an expression of increasing interethnic tensions, and in part a repudiation by the peasantry and proletariat of the hitherto unchallenged hegemony of the intelligentsia. Openly fascistic trends came to the fore within the rightist camp led by the National Democrats; peasants engaged in desperate food-delivery strikes against the cities and forced the hitherto moderate political leadership of their centrist movement to move sharply leftward; the underground Communists made gains among indigent peasants, unemployed workers, the younger intelligentsia, and the Belorussians; to avoid being outflanked, the Socialists sponsored a series of massive strikes; as for the ethnic minorities, Ukrainian extremists resorted to assassinations, the bulk of the Germans turned Nazi, and ever more Jews opted for Zionism; finally, the regime itself became more radical in both its economic (étatist) and its political responses. Radicalization was truly universal, but all camps, including those of the opposition, remained mutually divided. Indeed, their very radicalization widened the gaps among them.
Piłsudski’s heirs were split as to the proper course and content of the more radical policies that they agreed were needed. Distressed by the isolation of their state apparatus from the nation’s most energetic social forces, they quarreled over the correct direction in which to steer in order to close this gap. The virtually byzantine intricacy of their internal divisions and maneuvers over this crucial and charged issue can be simplified—hopefully without distortion—by dividing their camp into three lobbies. The first was the generally older generation of Piłsudski’s original comrades from the prewar underground struggles against Tsarist Russia, who recommended a reconciliation with the Socialist movement of which Piłsudski had been a founder and early leader at the turn of the century. The second was a more daring coterie who pushed for a swing toward the Right in order to tap for the regime the impressive energies of the by-now partly fascistic Polish youth; in other words, to trump the National Democrats by adopting their ideology and constituency. The third was the technocrats and protagonists of an “organized economy” who believed that sheer physical modernization would prove both necessary and sufficient to solve the country’s and the regime’s problems. These three lobbies were led, respectively, by Piłsudski’s closest personal friend, Colonel Walery Sławek, by Colonel Adam Koc, and by President Ignacy Mościcki. The chief of the armed forces, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, oscillated between the second and the third, finally opting for the latter. By the outbreak of World War II this third group had blocked the first two but had not yet achieved its own conclusive victory. In retrospect, one doubts whether its sheer technocratic gambit could have succeeded without an accompanying dynamic political ideology of leftist or rightist variety: rapid industrialization always entails social mobilization.
Thus, by the late 1930s, the strategy of isolation with which Piłsudski had hoped politically to cripple the Right on the morrow of his coup had been turned against his own camp. Piłsudski’s personal charisma and authority had obscured this trend during his own lifetime, but now his epigoni were left stranded by the sanacja’s ideological