Interwar Poland – The Most Successful Disappointment
The story of interwar Poland can be told in two discrete narratives: as a resounding success, or a deep disappointment. The question is largely whether the author decides to approach it from the lofty plans made at Baden-Baden, or from a more clear-eyed look at the realities of the time. Compared to what the country was meant to become – the peaceful shared home of its different religious and ethnic group, prosperous and harmonious – the reality of a bickering, often violent community of mutual loathing mired in persistent poverty must seem anticlimactic. Many outside observers, especially Americans who had taken a close interest in the heroic tale of the Polish revolt, found themselves repelled by the spectacle. Poland, conventional wisdom had it, was beyond saving.
More recent histories have tried to do justice to the achievements of a country that faced the future under a crushing burden. At the end of the war, Poland was devastated by years of brutal fighting. Russian troops had systematically destroyed anything they could not carry off during the punitive occupation of 1906/07. Up to 80% of the population had been displaced at least once, and millions still lived in refugee camps. Property rights across the countryside needed to be settled, public administration was almost nonexistent except in the form of the ubiquitous army, and the government under a foreign and unloved king faced these challenges groaning under a debt burden of billions owed almost entirely to Germany. What other than lawlessness, conflict and abject subordination could be expected?
By those lights, the fact that Poland managed a functioning government headed by the twin stars of King Karol Stepan and Chancellor Field Marshal Pilsudski verged on a miracle. The two men, though very different in outlook, temperament and education, came to work together better than anyone had expected. When the first Sejm election returned a narrow plurality for the Congress party, the king decided to place his trust in Pilsudski and instructed him to form a government based on the wartime centre-left coalition that lasted through three terms, only ending with the 1925 victory of the clerical conservative Polish National Party. This period of relative stability allowed the country to build a stable public administration that was entrenched enough to deploy its own gravity when Dmovski's partisans sought to purge it of former Socialists and Jews. Though it would be unrealistic to expect absence of corruption in a country as wide, poor and ill-governed as Poland, the habit of obedience to rules generally prevailed and no 'spoils' system ever developed.
The effective administration of the country depended heavily on structures laid down during the war, often by violent, unscrupulous and highly competitive people. King Karol Stepan's ability to work with people like Dzerzhinski, head of the NSB, while integrating them into a government system that made use of their fiefdoms has been called his greatest historic achievement. It defanged both the Combat Organisation of the officially defunct Socialist Party and the extreme wing of the Catholic Nationalist movement by giving them a place at the table. None of this prevented violent clashes in the streets or epic rows in the Sejm, but it stopped the country from a descent into all-out civil war that was certainly a possibility in the years between 1908 and 1913.
The greatest disappointment to a watching world was the almost immediate breakdown of the envisioned interethnic harmony the Adenauer plan was meant to ensure. The Jewish community, under pressure from Polish nationalists and clerical agitators, embraced a strongly defensive stance as millions of Jewish refugees from Russia swelled its numbers. Great Rabbi Landauer, their unofficial spokesperson, stated in no uncertain terms that the military forces raised during the war would see their primary duty in securing and defending their coreligionists from any threat. Pogroms and attacks occurred with depressing regularity in areas where Jews lived in isolation, but rarely in the towns and cities where they were numerous enough to form militias and operate courts. The resulting alienation from the majority allowed the Jews of Poland to become resilient, prosperous and safe, but it would be a heavy burden on the country in decades to come.
The Ruthenian and Russian minorities, denied the opportunity to develop effective institutions, became the target of discrimination, violence and occasional bouts of ethnic cleansing. Numbers from the years of slapdash postwar administration are notoriously unreliable, but anything up to 700,000 people may have been expelled from the country in its first decade. Many families were forced to leave at a later date, individually, by threats of violence and sabotage from their Polish neighbours. Many, unwilling to face the prospect of settling in tyrannical and misgoverned Russia, moved into the cities that managed to keep the promise of a multi-ethnic and multi-religious state somewhat better.
Economically, Poland fell short of the hopes many of its citizens had. Its natural resources remained in the hands of a small landowning class despite the best efforts of the Socialist politicians who had led the uprising and much of what the country exported was used to pay wartime debts. Currency controls and import limitations remained in force until the early 1920s. Manufacturing, though successful especially in the more urbanised west, always remained an annex to the industrial behemoth next door, dependent on German capital, expertise and customers. Any effort to support the country's army of half a million men on this economic base had to fall short of expectations. Despite cutting many social programmes and even direly needed infrastructure spending in favour of defense against the threat of Russian revenge, the Polish army struggled to match the modern equipment and high state of training its German allies demanded. During the Second war, the gap between its frontline divisions and the far less favoured reserve formations many of which lacked artillery, machine guns and motor transport would prove a major obstacle to operations.