The quarrel proved profoundly divisive and many responsible persons otherwise well disposed toward Piłsudski, including some of his Socialist admirers, were disturbed by his insistence on an organization of the military that appeared to them to confuse the necessary apoliticism of the army with its impermissible exemption from parliamentary accountability, and hence to be incompatible with the political and constitutional principles of democracy. On the other hand, the Right-Center’s determination, signaled by Witos as he formed his last cabinet in May, 1926, to frustrate Piłsudski’s return to active service and to purge his former Legionnaires out of the army clearly provoked the opposite results.
International developments during 1925 and 1926 starkly emphasized Poland’s vulnerabilities and thus also facilitated Piłsudski’s coup by undermining the prestige of the party-dominated parliamentary system. Warsaw’s inability to raise substantial Western loans during the economic crisis of 1923-26 testified to Germany’s success in weakening international confidence in Poland. The multilateral Locarno Treaties of October 16, 1925, which acknowledged Germany’s insistence on a differentiation between the legal and political validity of her western borders and that of her eastern frontiers, were also a defeat for Poland. Not only did Locarno legitimate by implication, as it were, Germany’s anti-Polish territorial revisionism, but it also exposed the unreliability of Poland’s French ally, then striving for an independent understanding of her own with Germany, and it emphasized Britain’s indifference to Poland’s security interests vis-à-vis Germany. Moreover, Germany’s rapprochement with France and Britain at Locarno did not prevent her continued cooperation with Russia to Poland’s detriment. Indeed, half a year after Locarno, these two historic enemies of Poland reaffirmed their Rapallo rapprochement of April 16, 1922, with the Berlin Treaty of April 24, 1926. Though overtly only a nonaggression and neutrality agreement, this pact nevertheless appeared in fact to confirm Poland’s isolation. It thus contributed to the general sense of political malaise in Poland, to the increasing suspicion of prevailing policies, personalities, and institutions as bankrupt, and hence to the widespread readiness that was born of hope and despair to look to Piłsudski for salvation.
10
Though Piłsudski won his coup d’état after three days of street fighting in Warsaw between May 12 and 14, 1926, and thus achieved political control of the Polish state, the episode was a personal psychological disaster for him. He had anticipated that the entire army would rally to him, its creator and victorious former chief, and that this cohesion of the military would morally oblige the politicians to yield without fighting. Instead, the army had split between those units, usually commanded by his fellow Legion veterans, that followed him and those that, from political or legal motives, remained loyal to the constitutional Right-Center government. Piłsudski, in fact, owed his victory in large part to the refusal of the Socialist-affiliated railroad workers to transport troop reinforcements to Warsaw for his enemies—a political debt that chagrined him and that he never acknowledged. He was also helped by the judicious decision of the Witos government to yield after three days, even though it still held a number of strong military and political cards in the country at large, lest full-scale civil war invite German and/or Russian intervention or related insurrection by the ethnic minorities.2 That he, the restorer of the Polish state, the father of its army, the protagonist of a strong presidency, should lead a revolt against the state authorities, sunder the unity of the army, and overthrow a constitutional president—for Wojciechowski refused to legitimate the coup by remaining in office—were facts that would haunt Piłsudski for the remaining nine years of his life. This was not merely a case of a remorseful personal conscience, but of a violated political model. Piłsudski liked to see himself as the educator of the Polish people to civic virtue, away from the antistate attitudes inherited from the era of partition, and he now had set a pedagogically ominous example. Convinced that this regeneration of the nation required his own control, or at least supervision, of her state apparatus, he wanted categorical and ultimate power—but he had wanted it legally and consensually. The fact that his coup was bitterly contested had exposed as vain Piłsudski’s hope to be accepted as a suprapolitical guardian of the national interest, as the olympian nemesis of all transgressors and malefactors. To the politicians of the Right and the Center and to their sympathizers in the officer corps, he remained a partisan, unacceptable figure, who might seize and hold power but could not harmonize the nation to a collective, cathartic effort at rededication.
This contradiction between his preferred self-image and his actual role accounts for the inconsistent cat-and-mouse game that Piłsudski was henceforth to play with the country’s established constitutional, parliamentary, and political institutions. He permitted all of these institutions to survive and formally honored them, yet also sought to manipulate and eviscerate them. The result was a peculiar lockstep of intimidating, undermining, and cajoling the parliament and political parties that he had inherited and that he habitually blamed for the nation’s ills. Piłsudski would not establish an overt dictatorship, yet he could not tolerate authentically autonomous loci of power. Thus his style came to require splintered parties, a submissive legislature, and an obedient president. Yet he remained pathetically aware of the contradiction between this campaign of emasculating the nation’s institutions of government and his desire to educate that nation to political maturity. This awareness accounts for the tortured quality, the combined brutality and hesitancy, of Piłsudski’s reluctant yet inevitable vendetta against parties, legislature, and constitution over the next years.
11
These contradictions in Piłsudski’s perception of his proper role in Poland’s political life quickly surfaced with his assumption of power. He began his nine years of hegemony by declining the presidency, now vacated by the upright and embittered Wojciechowski, and arranging for the election to that office of the electrochemist Professor Ignacy Mościcki, a choice intended to symbolize a new technocratic approach to Poland’s problems in place of the allegedly obsolete, and slovenly partisan, political habits of the past. Simultaneously, he did not follow through with the universally expected new parliamentary elections, fearing a leftist victory at a time when there was as yet no organized Piłsudskist political party. He shrewdly permitted the 1922-27 legislature, with its now chastened Right and Center majority, which had analogous reasons to fear early elections, to live out its term, simultaneously extracting from it a series of constitutional amendments to strengthen the authority of the executive.
Piłsudski was capitalizing on a dual trend within a Polish society deeply riven by six years of economic and political turmoil: (a) the masses still viewed him as a man of the Left and hence looked to him for salvation, and (b) the vested interests needed him as an alternative to social revolution. Piłsudski’s manifest unwillingness to be identified with any party’s ideology, his vividly signaled preference for supposedly apolitical, technocratic approaches to the nation’s problems, his early flattery of the surviving aristocracy as the alleged bearer of state-service traditions stemming from the golden age of the old commonwealth, his self-congratulation on the morrow of his coup for having made a political revolution without socially revolutionary consequences, but also his colorful denunciations of injustice and exploitation, were designed to satisfy all expectations, no matter how contradictory. These approaches also enabled him to keep a free hand for himself, and, most subtly, to isolate the National Democrats by peeling away their erstwhile, and somewhat reluctant, aristocratic and peasantist allies.
Assigning himself to the two offices of war minister and inspector general of the armed forces, Piłsudski identified his own considerable personal popularity with the genuinely revered army, regarded by the public not only as the nation’s defence against rapacious neighbors, but also as a model of proper administration. The other cabinet portfolios, including the premiership, in the