EIGHTEEN
Nation-Building

The commander of the Paris Commune in its final stages was the Polish émigré Jarosław Dąbrowski, who had been the first military leader of the 1863 rising. As French government troops closed in on the communards, he rallied a group of sailors and led them in a heroic but suicidal attack. In another part of the city, another Polish émigré, Florian Trawiński, was surreptitiously draining paraffin from the barrels placed all over the Louvre by the Commune for the purpose of burning it down. Dąbrowski’s body lay in state at the Hôtel de Ville before being buried with full honours, and to this day he has streets named after him in every Polish town. Trawiński was subsequently appointed a director of the Louvre, awarded the Légion d’Honneur and ended up as Secrétaire Général des Musées de France.

By then, few in Poland would have felt any hesitation in deciding which of these two acts was of greater value. The self-evident pointlessness of all the revolutionary effort of 1848 and the failure of the 1863 insurrection provided powerful arguments to those opposed to armed struggle, and by that time a strong reaction had set in against romantic gesture and useless sacrifice.

This was underpinned intellectually from the mid-1860s by a group of historians at Kraków’s Jagiellon University who suggested that the Commonwealth’s downfall had not been a martyrdom of the innocent, but the deserved collapse of a state which had ceased to function because of the blindness of its citizens and the inefficiency of its political institutions. They saw the tradition of insurrection in the same light. It followed from this that the road to independence lay not through insurrection but through selfimprovement and societal progress.

This was not a new thought. In 1841, Karol Marcinkowski, a returned political émigré, set up a Society for Scientific Assistance in Poznań whose purpose was to provide grants for young Poles to go and study at the best universities of Germany. Two years later he established the Poznań Bazaar, a managerial school. He preached self-improvement and education to all classes, stressing that everyone could make a difference to their predicament.

Under the influence of people such as Marcinkowski, and with the active participation of parish clergy, the Polish inhabitants of Poznania had implemented a programme of ‘organic work’ through which to carry on the struggle for national survival; they would stand up to the Germans by keeping their houses cleaner, tending their livestock and crops with greater care, working harder and educating themselves and their children. But it was not until the latter part of the century that such ideas achieved the status of theory.

The works of Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill and Charles Darwin appeared to many to hold special relevance to the situation in Poland, and under their influence the Romantic concept of the nation as spirit gradually gave way to one of the nation as an organism. The high priest of this Positivist Movement (as it became known) was Aleksander Świętochowski, fittingly not a poet but a journalist. Throughout the 1880s he edited the Warsaw weekly Prawda (Truth), one of a range of periodicals which spawned a horde of essayists and publicists who criticised old habits of thought, questioned sacred values, and dwelt on the material aspects of everyday life. The ingredients of the new literature were to be, according to the writer Eliza Orzeszkowa, ‘a burgher, a banker, a factory-owner, a merchant, tails and top hats, machines, surgeons’ instruments, locomotives’. Next to the periodical, the principal pulpit for these views was the stage.

The dramatic works of Mickiewicz, Słowacki and Krasiński were not written for the stage, since there had been no theatre in which they could be performed. As they were taken up with ethical or political argument and relied heavily on symbolism, they took a fantastical, disembodied form unique in European drama. The new theatres which did spring up in the 1860s, in Poznań, Lwów, Kraków and later Warsaw, encouraged a more realistic dramatic tradition and dwelt on everyday matters.

The novel and the short story were not far behind. It was Eliza Orzeszkowa (1841-1910) who broke the tradition of the Romantic historical novel and developed it as an instrument of social investigation and ethical polemic. She was a spirited woman from Lithuania who had taken an active part in the 1863 insurrection before settling down to a life of writing. An ardent feminist, she was also concerned with breaking down the barriers of social constraint in the interests of other groups caught in the trap of poverty or prejudice, most notably the Jews. Another woman, Gabriela Zapolska (1857-1921), wrote novels and plays which dwelt more specifically on the exploitation of women by society. The most talented woman writer of the period was Maria Konopnicka (1842-1910), who separated from her husband after ten years of marriage in order to devote herself to writing.

The frequent imprisonment or exile of the menfolk in a family left women in positions of responsibility for its survival, and their participation in conspiratorial and even guerrilla activity tended to place them on an equal footing with men. As a result, they were voicing views and demands on the subject of sexual equality and freedom that were not heard in England or France until the next century.

One of the most formative writers where young men were concerned was the Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916). Ostensibly a Positivist dedicated to the diagnosis and cure of social ills, Sienkiewicz also displayed a Romantic nationalism not entirely in keeping with the current ideology. He indulged this by writing a trilogy—With Fire and Sword, The Deluge and Pan Wolodyjowski—a historical adventure covering the Cossack Mutiny, the Swedish Wars and the Turkish war of the mid-seventeenth century, written to comfort and to boost the morale of the Poles. It met with huge success and heavily influenced how the Poles of the next generations would see themselves and their national destiny.

A more typical figure and the best Polish novelist of the nineteenth century was Aleksander Głowacki (1847-1912), who wrote under the pen name of Bolesław Prus. He was a member of the minor szlachta, but his penniless father was a functionary and his education was cut short for lack of money. He was wounded during the insurrection of 1863 and spent some time in prison after it. As a young man he had been fascinated by mathematics and the natural sciences, which he had studied at Warsaw’s Main School before being obliged to earn his living as a contributor of humorous pieces to periodicals. He went on to write two of the greatest novels in the Polish canon, exploring the major questions, existential as well as national, facing Polish society with a degree of scepticism that inspired reflection.

Positivism and the programme of organic work which accompanied it produced impressive results. Everything from hygiene to education was affected. People with brains were encouraged to use them to pursue specific goals rather than waste them on planning hopeless risings. It is largely thanks to this that Poland did not disappear from the intellectual map of Europe along with its frontiers.

Compared with other European nations, the Poles contributed little to the scientific advances of the nineteenth century. Ignacy Łukasiewicz succeeded in distilling crude oil in Galicia and built the first kerosene lamp in 1853; Zygmunt Wróblewski and Karol Olszewski of the Jagiellon University were the first to achieve the liquefaction of oxygen; in 1898 Maria Skłodowska-Curie discovered Polonium and went on to pioneer research into radiation; the organic chemist Jakub Natanson, the biochemist Marceli Nencki and others added in various ways to the sum of human knowledge. Science was a politically neutral sphere.

The arts, on the other hand, were profoundly marked by their subjection to the national cause or to that of social progress. When disaster overtook the Commonwealth, artists began to render not the present but the past, often in idealised form. This gave rise to a tradition of patriotic genre painting—lancers on picket duty, Husaria at the charge and other scenes which implied the glories of the past. After the death of the Romantic poets, this function of painting took on extra significance. It was indulged with greater abandon by artists such as Artur Grottger (1837-67), who covered the 1863 insurrection in a series of symbolic scenes, and Jan Matejko (1838-93), best known for monumental canvases of great moments in Polish history which embalmed for all time the myths and heroes of a bygone age. Others concentrated on subjects, such as peasants or Jews, which raised social and national issues. This set them apart not only from the Romantic historicists, but also from those who swam in the mainstream of European art and embraced trends such as Impressionism.

Every generation contributed new writers, some of whom, such as the novelist Stefan Żeromski (1864-1925), carried the political debate forward, scouring every aspect of life and evaluating everything from the historical past to social institutions, philanthropic initiatives and cooperative ventures. Another, Władysław Reymont (1867-1925), the son of a village organist, was in turn a tailor’s apprentice, a monk, a clerk and several other things before he became a writer and won the Nobel Prize. His Promised Land (1899), a Zola-esque novel set in the rapidly expanding industrial centre of Łódź, provides his verdict on the Positivist faith in regeneration through material progress:

Villages were abandoned, forests were felled, the earth was deprived of its treasures, rivers dried up, people were born—all for that ‘Promised Land’, for that polyp which sucked them in, crushed and chewed up people and things, the sky and the earth, giving in exchange useless millions to a few and hunger and hard work to the masses.

These writers would be followed by waves of others adhering to new literary and stylistic canons. But whatever angle they came at it from, they all contributed to a sustained process of nationbuilding, if only by bringing together and enlarging a thinking readership that spanned not only the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires, but also western Europe, the United States and South America. And this readership could ill afford to waste time on past glories or sophisticated new trends, as the question of what kind of a Polish world they wanted to recreate was taking on real urgency.

What most of them understood by the term ‘Poland’ was the territory of the Commonwealth and the community of peoples it embraced. But while much effort had gone into bringing the other orphan peoples of the Commonwealth into the cause, with some success, as the 1863 insurrection had demonstrated, these were now being drawn in other directions by new national movements.

The Lithuanians were a case in point. They had their own language, their own culture and a long history, but in the thirteenth century their rulers had extended their sway over vast areas of Belorussia and Ukraine to create a Grand Duchy of Lithuania in which the ethnic Lithuanians were a minority. That minority diminished as Lithuanian lords embraced first Russian and then Polish culture: the last grand duke who spoke Lithuanian died in the year Columbus discovered the new world.

A Lithuanian national revival began in the first half of the nineteenth century, and although its supporters made common cause with Polish patriots at first, there was an inherent conflict. The failure of the 1863 insurrection, which demonstrated to them that there was nothing to be gained from alliance with the Poles, marked a parting of the ways. In its search for distinctiveness, Lithuanian nationalism began to define itself against Poland and Polish culture, and particularly against the inclusive culture of the Commonwealth.

It also, perversely, laid claim to the heritage of the whole Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the majority of whose population was Belarusian or Ukrainian, and whose elites were overwhelmingly Polish. This brought it into conflict not only with the Polish inhabitants, but also with the budding Belarusian nationalist movement, which also laid claim to the whole Grand Duchy. The city of Wilno, now Russian Vilna, was a microcosm of the problem: its population was overwhelmingly Polish and only 2 per cent spoke Lithuanian, yet it was claimed, on historical grounds, by the Lithuanians as well as the Belarusians, who brushed aside Polish claims, and ignored the fact that one-third of its population was Jewish.

Similar problems bedeviled the nascent Ukrainian national movement, which was in competition with both Polish and Russian influences, both of which exerted cultural and religious magnetic fields. Its claim to the legacy of Kievan Rus was disputed by Russian nationalists, who dismissed Ukrainian as a dialect of Russian. The majority of the surviving leading families descended from Kievan times had associated with Poland centuries before, depriving the national movement of its natural leaders.

The birth of modern Ukrainian nationalism was also marked by a visceral anti-Semitism whose roots can be traced to the end of the sixteenth century, when large numbers of Jews settled in the area, mainly as agents of Polish estates, innkeepers and traders. This would be compounded in the last decade of the nineteenth century by manipulation on the part of tsarist authorities eager to channel Ukrainian energies into anti-Semitic pogroms.

The Jews were the one orphan people of the Commonwealth who had no national pretensions. Russia, which had not previously admitted Jews, designated the old Polish frontier of 1772 as an easternmost pale beyond which those she had acquired by the partition could not settle or even travel. Although they transferred their loyalty promptly, and showed it by remaining faithful to the Tsar throughout the French invasion of 1812, the Jews were heavily discriminated against. Nicholas I brought in further restrictions and subjected them to military service, often with forced conversion to Orthodox Christianity. His successor Alexander II (1855-81) relaxed many of their disabilities, and allowed them to move around the whole of Russia freely. But following his assassination the Jews were blamed for everything from Russia’s failures to carrying out ritual murders of Christian children, and became victims of officially sanctioned pogroms. In 1882 they were confined to the pale of settlement once more and were subjected to further restrictions. Hundreds of thousands of the poorest Jews, who could not fit into the area of the pale, moved westwards into Poland. Most of these ‘Litwaks’, as they were known, were destitute. They were as unwelcome to their brethren in Poland as they were to the Poles, and they nourished a new anti-Semitism.

This, and the rise of a modern Darwinian strain of nationalism among the other peoples of the former Commonwealth, placed Polish patriots on the horns of a dilemma, suggesting as they did that not only the model of the Commonwealth but even an updated state-based multiculturalism were unworkable. The best way forward appeared to be to follow other European states in taking the ethnic core and the language as the bases of the nation. But this meant rejecting the inclusiveness and toleration of the Commonwealth in favour of an exclusive ethnocentric conformism that would lead inevitably to intolerance and the need to somehow remove the foreign bodies within such a nation. It was this dilemma that would shape the political countenance of the new Polish nation.

The first political parties of modern Poland sprang from the peasant cooperatives and self-help groups which burgeoned in Galicia in the 1870s. The earliest were the Peasant Party (1893), the People’s Party (1895) and the Polish People’s Party (1903). The workers of the cities had also organised themselves into unions and in 1882 a socialist workers’ party, Proletariat, was founded by Ludwik Waryński. This suffered a setback in 1884, when the Russian police arrested the leadership. Waryński was sentenced to sixteen years’ hard labour, four of his colleagues were hanged, others were imprisoned or exiled. The remnants of the party were brought together by Stanisław Mendelson and transformed in 1892 into the Polish Socialist Party (PPS).

In the following year another group of socialists led by Róża Luksemburg and Julian Marchlewski founded the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP), which rejected nationalism. This soon began to disintegrate, but was revived in 1900 by Feliks Dzierźyński, who added Lithuania to the name (SDKPiL). Although it grew to an impressive size, this party would play a greater part on the Russian than the Polish political scene (‘Bloody Feliks’ became the first head of the Cheka, forebear of the NKVD and KGB). The PPS on the other hand quickly gained in influence in all three partitions.

In 1894 it started publishing a clandestine organ, The Worker. Its editor, Józef Piłsudski (1867-1935), was a gifted conspirator whose early life reads like a novel. He had spent five years in Siberia for helping to supply Lenin’s brother Alexander Ulyanov with explosives for a bomb which was thrown at the Tsar in 1887. He was twice sprung from Russian jails by colleagues. After escaping in 1900 from a prison hospital in St Petersburg, where he had got himself transferred by faking madness, he dodged from Tallin to Riga, thence to Kiev (where he managed to compile and publish an edition of The Worker) and Lwów, then to London, from where he entered Russia again on forged papers. He was deft at moving the presses of The Worker from one hiding place to another, and he also made it interesting reading, with the result that by 1899 the illegal paper had a circulation of 100,000. Since he used it as a platform for his own views, it helped him to win the leadership of the PPS.

Polish socialism was heavily marked by the national issue. The first manifesto of the PPS proclaimed the goal of an independent Poland within its 1772 frontiers, as a homeland to all the nations living within them. It was in effect a call for the restoration of the Commonwealth, and therefore of Polish hegemony, which was to ignore the nationalist aspirations of many Lithuanians, Belarusians and Ukrainians.

It was also to ignore the five million Jews living within the area, who, thanks to the mass migrations from the Western Gubernias, now made up 14.6 per cent of the population of the Kingdom. Many did not even speak Polish. They had no reason to hanker after Polish independence, and they joined the Zionist movement founded in Basel in 1897 or, more often, the Jewish Socialist Union, the Bund, founded the same year in Wilno, which in 1898 allied itself with the Russian Social Democratic Party, turning its back on the PPS and the cause of Polish independence.

There was no conservative political organisation to balance all these movements, since most conservatives acquiesced in the status quo and refrained from subversive politics. The socialist and peasant parties were challenged by an entirely new element in Polish political life. The Polish League, founded in Geneva in 1887, was renamed the National League ten years later, and eventually became the National Democratic Party. Neither conservative nor revolutionary, it rejected passive acquiescence and castigated the Positivists, but believed in realistic resistance. Its membership included the bourgeoisie, the déclassé szlachta and some sections of the peasantry. It was less aristocratic than the PPS and less romantic in its outlook. It was dominated by Roman Dmowski (1864-1939), whose political philosophy was practical, logical and implacable.

In 1903 he published Thoughts of a Modern Pole, in which he criticised traditional Polish values, arguing against such concepts as multiculturalism and toleration, and for a more ethnically based concept of the nation. He favoured a ‘healthy national egoism’ which could embrace all those prepared to sign up to the project and assimilate. Minorities, whether based on religion or ethnic differences, should be regarded as alien bodies within the nation.

In the National League Dmowski intended to create an all-Polish pressure group, an underground political apparatus which could unite like-minded people into a disciplined and ideologically homogeneous force. In 1899 the League founded a Society for National Education, and it gradually extended its influence over cultural associations and other political groupings, including peasant parties and factory workers’ unions. His methods were as unlike those of Piłsudski as his outlook.

Piłsudski, at heart an heir to the Democrats, had always believed in active subversion, and in 1904 he set up terrorist commandos known as Bojówki to carry out acts of sabotage and diversion. The outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war in the same year was a bugle call to him. The humiliating defeats suffered by Russia delighted the Poles, but also made them anxious, as thousands of young Polish conscripts were being killed in the East. Piłsudski went to Tokyo with a series of proposals. He suggested the creation of a Polish Legion out of Russian prisoners of Polish origin, and offered the Japanese a guerrilla war in Poland to tie down Russian troops. In return, he wanted the Japanese to demand the establishment of an independent Poland at the peace negotiations. The Japanese were wary of getting involved.

On 13 October 1904 the PPS organised a massive demonstration in Warsaw. When the police shot at the crowd, Piłsudski’s armed squads returned fire. The fighting squads of the PPS then launched a campaign of attacks on tsarist officials. While hostilities escalated in the Kingdom, Russia itself heaved with unrest. In the new year, in the wake of the bloody clashes on the streets of St Petersburg, the PPS proclaimed a general strike which lasted for two months and involved some 400,000 workers all over the Kingdom, despite severe retaliatory measures by tsarist troops.

In May 1905 the Russian fleet was disastrously defeated by the Japanese at Tsushima, bringing discontent to a head, and the crew of the battleship Potemkin mutinied on the Black Sea. In June barricades went up in Łódź and workers held off troops and police for three days. In October the Tsar issued a manifesto promising the Kingdom a constitution, but during the demonstration held to celebrate, troops opened fire on the crowds, and on 11 November a state of siege was declared. In December revolution broke out in Moscow and on 22 December the PPS called for a rising of all the workers in the Kingdom.

Events in Poland were dominated by a struggle for control between the Socialists and the National Democrats. During the June 1905 unrest in Łódź, when the PPS had called for action and the National Democrat-controlled Workers’ Union had opposed it, there were clashes between the two and even bloodshed. When the Imperial Manifesto turned the Russian Empire into a constitutional monarchy and announced elections to the Russian parliament, the Duma, the National Democrats were keen to take advantage, while the PPS boycotted the elections on the grounds that they endorsed Russian government in Poland.

At the first elections to the Duma the National Democrats gained thirty-four seats out of a total of fifty-five which went to Poles (who held around 10 per cent of the whole). Dmowski assumed that this would carry some weight, but he was mistaken. In the first twelve months of the new order, 2,010 people were killed by the army and police, and over a period of three years the governor of Warsaw, Georgii Skallon, signed over 1,000 ‘political’ death sentences. Dmowski’s attempts at bargaining with the government came to nothing, while opponents in Poland denounced him for selling out. Nevertheless, he continued building up the Polish lobby in the Duma. In Germany, Russia and the Polish Question (1908) he argued that Germany was the greater threat to Poland and that Poland must side with Russia in any conflict between the two.

The PPS found itself in trouble when the dust had settled after the events of 1905. It had failed to bring about armed insurrection and was left protesting out in the cold. It was riven with dissension and in 1907 split into two different camps. Piłsudski managed to keep control of the larger, and his thinking prevailed. This too was becoming dominated by the approaching war, and it was diametrically opposed to Dmowski’s.

Piłsudski had established a paramilitary training school in Kraków, and by the summer of 1906, some 750 people were operating all over the Kingdom in five-man squads. During that year they killed or wounded nearly 1,000 Tsarist officials and officers, and carried out raids on prisons, tax offices and mail trains, the most spectacular being the hold-up at Bezdany of the train carrying the Kingdom’s taxes to Russia in September 1908. In the same year the Bojówki were replaced by the Union of Active Struggle, an apolitical Polish ‘army’ founded by three members of the PPS: Kazimierz Sosnkowski, Marian Kukiel and Władysław Sikorski. With the unofficial approval of the Austrian authorities, sporting clubs sprang up all over Galicia, followed by Riflemen’s Unions in Kraków and Lwów. In 1912 Piłsudski reorganised these on military lines, and by June 1914 he had nearly 12,000 men ready to take the field. When war broke out he took up arms in the Polish cause. On 2 August 1914 one of his cavalry patrols marched into the Kingdom, followed four days later by a battalion of riflemen. They briefly occupied the town of Kielce in the name of Poland before being forced to withdraw by Russian troops.

On 27 August the Austrians agreed to recognise Piłsudski’s force and organised it in two Polish Legions with their own uniforms and colours under the command of Austrian army officers of Polish nationality. These quickly grew to a strength of 20,000 men and over the next two years created something of a legend. Officers were addressed as ‘citizen’, and the almost mystically revered and loved Piłsudski was simply ‘the Commander’. Piłsudski was careful to emphasise that they were not Austrian troops, nor even allies of the Central Powers.

All three powers were keen to engage the sympathy of the Poles in general, and desperate to ensure the loyalty of their own Polish subjects in particular (between 1914 and 1918 millions of Poles were drafted by all three, and some 450,000 died and 900,000 were wounded fighting in the Russian, Prussian and Austrian armies). A proclamation by the Russian Grand Duke Nicholas on 15 August 1914 promised autonomy for the Kingdom, to which captured parts of Galicia and Poznania would be joined, but the details were left vague. Dmowski pressed for the formation of a Polish army in Russia, but the authorities were reticent.

By August 1915 the whole area of the Kingdom had fallen to the Germans, but they were undecided as to its future. Various schemes were passed back and forth between Berlin and Vienna, culminating in a proclamation by the two emperors on 5 November 1916, which promised to set up a semi-autonomous Kingdom of Poland made up of areas conquered from Russia. The Germans needed cannon fodder, and the main purpose of the proposed kingdom was to provide the vehicle for the recruitment of an army, the Polnische Wehrmacht. They soon realised that they could not do without Piłsudski.

Piłsudski had already achieved much of what he had set out to do, by demonstrating that Poland represented a military as well as a moral force, and had no intention of being used to further German plans. He agreed to join the Council of State of the new kingdom as head of the military department, but insisted on explicit guarantees that its forces would not be German ‘colonial troops’ as he put it, and would never be used against the British or the French. The Germans were not prepared to accept this, so Piłsudski resigned. In July 1917 he was arrested. Of the Polish units already raised,most refused to swear the required oath and were disbanded. The men swelled the ranks of the Polish Military Organisation (POW), an underground network set up across the entire area of the Commonwealth by Piłsudski in the previous two years, a silent army which awaited his signal.

Dmowski had left Poland in 1915 and concentrated his efforts on promoting the Polish cause in France and Britain. A number of his colleagues had been engaged in this from the beginning, most notably the writer Henryk Sienkiewicz until his death in 1916, and the pianist and composer Ignacy Jan Paderewski, who had been remarkably successful in the United States. It was largely as a result of his agitation that President Woodrow Wilson made his declaration to the US Senate on 22 January 1917 that ‘Statesmen everywhere are agreed that there should be a united, independent, and autonomous Poland.’

In June 1917 France sanctioned the formation of an allied Polish army on French soil. In September France recognised Dmowski’s National Committee in Paris as a provisional government of the future Poland. Britain, Italy and America followed suit. Thus by the autumn of 1917 there was a Polish government and a Polish army recognised as co-belligerents, if not formal allies, of the Entente, as the Western allies were generally known.

They could only do this because their ally Russia had been shaken by revolution, and Alexander Kerensky’s government had agreed to the principle of an independent Poland. But October brought the Bolsheviks to power. The Russian front collapsed, and the German army was able to occupy the whole area of the Commonwealth. In March 1918 the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, sanctioning this state of affairs.

As a protest against this new peace, General Haller led the Second Brigade of the Legions, the last Polish unit fighting for Austria, across the front to join up with Polish units which had left the disintegrating Russian army. Over the next two years units such as these bobbed about on the swell of the Russian Civil War in a desperate effort to maintain their fighting potential for the day they could be used in the Polish cause. They were often defeated or disbanded, and sometimes forced to serve ‘White’ Russian generals at the behest of the Entente. General Haller made his way to Paris and took command of the Polish army being formed there.

The German Kingdom of Poland still had no king, and was ruled by a Regency Council made up of Poles. But even as revolution toppled first the Habsburg and then the Hohenzollern thrones, the Germans and Austrians did not desist from their imperial machinations. The Germans had for some time been fostering the formation of a small ethnic Lithuanian state as a German satellite. They were also encouraging Belorussian nationalists to form a state of their own. Austria was contemplating a Habsburg Kingdom of Ukraine. On 1 November 1918 Ukrainian flags were hoisted on the public buildings of Lwów and regiments of the Austrian army recruited in Ukraine took over the city. Piłsudski’s POW units and the mainly Polish inhabitants fought back and regained control, but they were besieged within a small area. The newly established Lithuania claimed Wilno and areas of the former Grand Duchy, which brought it into conflict with Belorussian nationalists.

On 7 November 1918 the socialist Ignacy Daszyński proclaimed a provisional Polish government in Lublin. On 10 November, the day before the Armistice in the west, Piłsudski was freed from his German jail and arrived in Warsaw. He was met at the station by Zdzisław Lubomirski and Archbishop Aleksander Kakowski, who handed over to him the powers of the Regency Council. All over the country his POW and ex-legionaries disarmed German troops and took control. Piłsudski proclaimed to the world that ‘The Polish state has arisen from the will of the whole nation.’

The leaders of the Entente were not best pleased. They had assumed that it was up to them to grant independence to Poland. They had a provisional government in Paris ready to be installed, and they mistrusted Piłsudski. And if he had triumphed in Poland, the final shape and status of the resurrected state would depend largely on the peace negotiations about to open in Paris and the willingness of the Entente to supply everything from the food the country so badly needed to arms with which to defend itself. A compromise was quickly reached, and Paderewski arrived in Poland to take his place as Prime Minister in a coalition government, with Piłsudski as head of state and commander-in-chief.

Elections were held in January 1919 in the area of the former Congress Kingdom and Galicia, and as they could not take place in the former German provinces on account of fighting between Poles and Germans, eighteen deputies to the last imperial Reichstag were given seats in the 340-strong Polish Sejm. Six months later, elections were held there too, along with other areas, bringing the Sejm up to a strength of 432. This embarked on the laborious process of putting in place a state administration, leaving Piłsudski and Paderewski to deal with the country’s frontiers, none of which had yet been fixed.

Poland’s frontier with Germany depended entirely on the decisions reached by the Entente, and these were subject to every consideration except that of Polish reasons of state. It was only in Silesia, where an uprising against the Germans by the population proved effective, that the Poles were able to break this rule. Prussia and Pomerania were awarded to Germany, and Gdańsk was left as a free city under League of Nations administration, linked to Poland by a thin corridor through German territory. In the south-west, the new Czecho-Slovak state invaded the coal-rich area around Cieszyn (Teschen), in which Poles outnumbered Czechs by more than two to one, with the unofficial sanction of France. Poland’s frontiers with Russia, on the other hand, depended not on words uttered at Paris, but on actions in the field.

Piłsudski was convinced that a small, ethnically defined Poland would not survive long beside a Russia which possessed Belorussia and Ukraine. He also felt a strong emotional and ideological attachment to the principles of the Commonwealth, and meant to adapt them to the circumstances by creating a federal union of Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine.

But the dialogue with the Lithuanians and the Ukrainians began only after shots had been exchanged. It proved impossible to reach agreement with the Lithuanians, who were suspicious of Poland. There was more common ground with the Ukrainians, and negotiations started after the fighting over Lwów had ceased. But no solution to the problems of Ukraine, Belorussia and Lithuania could be adopted without reference to events in Russia.

In August 1918 the Bolsheviks had declared all the treaties of partition null and void—which did not mean that they were willing to see Poland reborn within its 1772 frontiers. Throughout 1918 and 1919 they were too busy fending off White offensives to bother much about the Polish frontier. Piłsudski too was worried by the successes of the Whites. Their leader, General Denikin, made it clear that he envisaged only one Russia—great and indivisible. Piłsudski certainly did not wish to see him established in Moscow with Allied backing, for then not only Poland’s eastern frontier but her sovereign status would be dependent on deals made between Moscow and Paris. Piłsudski therefore refrained from any military activity against the Bolsheviks which might help the Whites, and even made a secret pact with Lenin, in spite of urgent appeals from London and Paris that he should support Denikin.

When the Whites had been defeated, in the winter of 1919, the Bolsheviks began to prepare for exporting the revolution through Poland to Germany. Piłsudski decided that this was the moment to implement his own plans. The Bolsheviks had already flooded into Ukraine, ousting the nationalist forces of Ataman Symon Petliura from Kiev. Petliura was forced to fall back westwards, and to seek Polish protection. Piłsudski signed an alliance with him, and in April 1920 he launched an offensive into Ukraine. On 7 May Polish and Ukrainian forces marched into Kiev.

Piłsudski hoped that Petliura would raise a Ukrainian army capable of holding the area. This would permit Polish troops to be transferred north, to face an alarming Russian concentration there. Progress was slow and Petliura’s army grew to little more than 30,000 before the Russian attack came in the north. Polish forces in the area managed to contain it along the Berezina, but on 5 June the Cavalry Army of Budionny broke through to the south of Kiev, precipitating a chaotic Polish-Ukrainian withdrawal. On 4 July the five Russian army groups in the north launched a second offensive, and over the next six weeks the two Russian prongs, under Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Aleksandr Yegorov, advanced inexorably into Poland.

The Bolsheviks announced the overthrow of the bourgeois order and successfully agitated among workers all over Europe to block supplies being shipped to Poland. Western governments were unhelpful. The British Prime Minister Lloyd George’s attitude was

that ‘The Poles have quarrelled with all their neighbours and they are a menace to the peace of Europe.’ On 12 August the Red Army reached the defences of Warsaw and the city’s fall seemed imminent. But on 15 August Piłsudski launched a daring flank attack which all but annihilated Tukhachevsky’s forces. After another Polish victory on the Niemen, the Russian front collapsed. Polish troops reoccupied large areas of Belorussia, Podolia and Volhynia before an armistice was signed on 16 October.

Pressure from the Entente and the fact that the Ukrainian national movement had proved too weak forced Piłsudski to abandon his federalist dreams. The peace negotiations which followed, in the Latvian capital Riga, were conducted by the peasant leader Jan Dąbski and Stanisław Grabski, a National Democrat, neither of whom was interested in reviving the Commonwealth.

The result was a compromise. The Poland that emerged occupied an area of 388,600 square kilometres and included large Belorussian, Ukrainian, German and Jewish minorities, but excluded over two million ethnic Poles who were left outside its boundaries. So was the city of Wilno, but Piłsudski could not countenance this, and he sanctioned a supposedly mutinous military operation by one of his generals, who seized the city for Poland.

Poland was an independent state once more, the sixth largest in Europe by population. Welcoming its return to the map of Europe, the Polish-born English novelist Joseph Conrad singled out what he saw as his nation’s greatest achievement during a century of captivity: ‘Under a destructive pressure, of which Western Europe can have no notion, applied by forces that were not only crushing but corrupting, we have preserved our sanity.’