Second Polish Republic

• 1. Introduction

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  The Second Polish Republic lasted exactly twenty-one years, and it was taken on the eve of its own anniversary. On the 7th of October 1918, a new Polish state declared itself to the world after more than a century of being carved up among three empires. Then, on the 6th of October 1939, organised resistance ended at the Battle of Kock, and that state was gone.

  What happened in between is one of the stranger stories in modern European history. A country rebuilt from scratch, stitching together the ruins of three different legal systems, five different currencies, and an industrial map that had been deliberately drawn to prevent its cities from talking to each other. Warsaw and Kraków had no direct railway connection until 1934.

  By 1939, the population had grown from 25.7 million to an estimated 35.1 million. Almost a third of those people came from minority groups. Poland held the second largest Jewish population in the world, with roughly one-fifth of all the world's Jews living within its borders. It was home to Ukrainians, Belarusians, Germans, Lithuanians, and Czechs. It was a country that had not existed for 123 years and then suddenly had to govern everyone at once.

  How did it pull itself together? Who ran it, and what did they want? How did it treat the people who were not ethnically Polish? And how exactly did it end?

• 2. Born From Collapse

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  On Sunday, the 10th of November 1918, at seven in the morning, Józef Piłsudski stepped off a train in Warsaw. He had spent the previous sixteen months as a prisoner inside a German fortress in Magdeburg. Colonel Kazimierz Sosnkowski was with him, and Regent Zdzisław Lubomirski and Colonel Adam Koc were waiting on the platform to receive them.

  One day later, Piłsudski was appointed Commander in Chief of the Polish Armed Forces. By the 14th of November, the Regency Council had dissolved itself entirely and transferred all authority to him as Chief of State. It took less than a week for the man who had just been released from prison to become the effective leader of a reborn nation.

  The ground had been shifting before he even arrived. On the 7th of October, the Regency Council had already announced its intention to restore Polish independence, more than a month before Germany surrendered. On the 6th of November, a provisional socialist government had been proclaimed in Lublin. Over one hundred workers' councils had sprung up across Polish territories. The form of the new state was genuinely contested before Piłsudski gave it shape.

  The borders were another matter. From 1918 to 1921, the Polish Army fought a series of conflicts on almost every side: a war against Ukraine over Lwów that began on the 1st of November 1918, the Greater Poland uprising against Germany, the Polish-Lithuanian War, and, most critically, the Polish-Soviet War, which ended in a decisive Polish victory in 1921. The Kingdom of Italy became the first European country to recognise Poland's renewed sovereignty, in 1918. The League of Nations formally recognised the eastern borders in 1922.

• 3. Piłsudski's Republic

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  Between 1919 and 1926, the Second Polish Republic was a parliamentary democracy with a president who held limited powers. The Parliament elected the president, and he could only dissolve the lower house, the Sejm, with the Senate's consent. Women gained the right to vote on the 28th of November 1918, by decree of General Piłsudski himself, making Poland one of the first countries in the world to grant women's suffrage.

  The political landscape was fractious. The major parties ranged from the Polish Socialist Party to the National Democrats to various Peasant Parties, as well as political groups representing ethnic minorities, including the General Jewish Labour Bund and the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance. Governments changed frequently. Peasant leader Wincenty Witos served as Prime Minister three times. Accusations of corruption and a coup attempt in 1919 made the political class increasingly unpopular.

  After the Polish-Soviet War, Piłsudski stepped back. He lived modestly and wrote historical books for a living. Then, in May 1926, he seized power through a military coup. His stated goal was to cure Polish politics of excessive partisanship; his government took the name Sanacja, from the Latin word for healing.

  The 1928 elections were still judged free and fair, though the pro-Piłsudski Nonpartisan Bloc won them. The next three elections, in 1930, 1935, and 1938, were not. Opposition activists were sent to Bereza Kartuska prison. An authoritarian constitution was approved in spring 1935, and Piłsudski died shortly after it passed. The men who governed the final years of the Republic were Foreign Minister Józef Beck, President Ignacy Mościcki, and Commander-in-Chief Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły. Politicians forced out of the country founded an opposition movement called Front Morges in 1936.

• 4. A Nation of Many Nations

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  The 1931 Polish Census found that 69% of the population identified as Polish. The remaining 31% included Ukrainians at 14%, Jews at around 10%, Belarusians at 3%, Germans at 2%, and others, among them Lithuanians, Czechs, Armenians, Russians, and Romani people.

  In matters of religion, the breakdown was similarly plural. In 1921, roughly 62.5% of people were Roman Catholics. Eastern Rite Catholics made up about 11.8%. Orthodox Christians accounted for about 10.95%, and the Jewish population stood at about 10.8%, with Protestants making up about 3.7%.

  By 1931, Poland held the second largest Jewish population in the world. Though Polish Jews had been among the strongest supporters of Piłsudski, the years after his death in 1935 saw an organised turn against them. The National Democracy movement passed resolutions in 1937 declaring that removing Jews from social, economic, and cultural life was their main aim and duty. The government body that displaced Piłsudski's allies, the Camp of National Unity (OZON), drafted legislation in 1938 that resembled anti-Jewish laws then operating in Germany, Hungary, and Romania. According to historian William W. Hagen, by 1939 Polish Jews faced conditions comparable to those under Nazi rule.

  Ukrainians faced a different kind of suppression. The government refused to grant them territorial autonomy, restricted the use of the Ukrainian language in official settings, and enforced the term "Ruthenian" as a way of denying a distinct Ukrainian identity. After 1935, the policy shifted toward ethnic assimilation through polonisation and pressure to convert to Roman Catholicism.

  In 1928-1930, the Sejm had included a Ukrainian-Belarusian Club with twenty-six Ukrainian and four Belarusian members. That representation coexisted with repression, and the tension was never resolved before the Republic ended.

• 5. Building an Economy From Pieces

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  In 1924, Prime Minister Władysław Grabski, who simultaneously held the post of Economic Minister, introduced the złoty as Poland's single common currency, replacing a system where five different currencies circulated within the same borders. Poland became the only country in Europe to control hyperinflation of that scale without foreign loans or outside aid.

  The task before the new state was formidable. The regions that formed Poland had belonged to different empires for more than a century, and those empires had deliberately kept them economically separate. Cities that should have had direct rail links did not. Poland A, the western half, operated at something close to a Western European standard. Poland B, the east, remained largely undeveloped, with chronic rural unemployment and, in some areas such as the Hutsul-inhabited counties, permanent starvation.

  Foreign investment was a lifeline but also a dependency: 45.4% of Polish equity capital was controlled by foreign corporations. After the Great Depression struck, the Polish economy collapsed and did not begin to recover until Ignacy Mościcki's government introduced more direct intervention, increasing public spending and tax revenues.

  The recovery rested on three large infrastructure projects led by economist Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski. First was the seaport of Gdynia, which allowed Poland to route coal exports around Gdańsk, which was under German pressure to boycott Polish trade. Second was the Polish Coal Trunk-Line, a 500-kilometre rail connection linking Upper Silesia to Gdynia. Third was the Central Industrial Region, a new industrial district built in the centre of the country. A brand-new steel city called Stalowa Wola was built in a forest in 1937-1938. Polish Radio had ten broadcasting stations operating by the end of the interwar period, with an eleventh planned for autumn 1939. Polish engineers began developing television services in 1935; by early 1939, four working TV sets had been built, and a regular service was scheduled to begin by 1940.

• 6. Science, Letters, and the Stage

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  In 1919, the Polish government made education compulsory for all children aged 7 to 14. When the Republic began, one-third of the adult population could not read or write; in some eastern and rural areas, illiteracy ran to 38%. By 1937, the overall figure had dropped to 18%, and by 1939, over 90% of children were attending school.

  Before 1918, Poland had three universities. The interwar years added three more: the Catholic University of Lublin in 1918, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań in 1919, and Wilno University, which joined the Republic in 1922 after the annexation of the Republic of Central Lithuania. By 1939, roughly 50,000 students were enrolled in higher education. Women made up 28% of university students, the second highest share in Europe.

  Polish science in this period was concentrated in several world-renowned schools. The Lwów School of Mathematics, the Kraków School of Mathematics, and the Warsaw School of Mathematics together formed one of the most distinguished mathematical traditions of the twentieth century. Rudolf Weigl invented a vaccine against typhus. Bronisław Malinowski was counted among the most important anthropologists of his era. The Lwów-Warsaw school of logic and philosophy produced philosophers of international standing.

  Literature in the 1920s was dominated by poetry. Two camps defined the scene: the Skamanderites, including Julian Tuwim, Jan Lechoń, Antoni Słonimski, and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz; and the Futurists, including Bruno Jasieński and Aleksander Wat. Novelists such as Bruno Schultz and Witold Gombrowicz published their first major works in the interwar years.

  Theatre drew five million people to different shows in 1936 alone, across 103 theatres and around 100 folk theatres. Composer Karol Szymanowski and pianist Artur Rubinstein carried Polish music into international concert halls. Singer Jan Kiepura performed across Europe. Painter Jacek Malczewski and sculptor Xawery Dunikowski shaped the visual culture of the period.

• 7. The End at Kock

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  One week after Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Germany and Slovakia attacked Poland on the 1st of September 1939. Warsaw fell to German forces on the 28th of September after a twenty-day siege. On the 17th of September, Soviet forces invaded from the east. Open organised resistance ended on the 6th of October 1939 at the Battle of Kock.

  Polish war plans, designated Plan West and Plan East, failed almost immediately. Polish losses against German forces came to around 70,000 killed and missing, with approximately 420,000 taken prisoner. Against the Red Army, Poland suffered between 6,000 and 7,000 casualties and missing, with 250,000 taken prisoner. The Polish Army, despite being outmatched, inflicted real damage: around 20,000 German soldiers killed or missing, 674 German tanks and armoured vehicles destroyed or badly damaged, and 230 German aircraft shot down.

  A persistent myth grew from a single skirmish near Krojanty on the 1st of September 1939, where two squadrons of the Polish 18th Lancers armed with sabres surprised and routed a German infantry formation. Italian journalists, reporting German propaganda, transformed this into a story of cavalry charging tanks. The Lancers were not attacking tanks. They were caught in the open by German armoured cars as they withdrew, and twenty troopers were killed. The original version, once established, proved difficult to correct.

  Poland did not formally surrender. The government-in-exile, established in Paris and later in London after the fall of France in 1940, operated continuously until 1990. That year, the last president in exile, Ryszard Kaczorowski, handed the presidential insignia to the newly elected President Lech Wałęsa, drawing a direct line of continuity from the Second Republic to the Third.