Poland полностью

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.