Poland полностью

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.