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.’
NINETEEN
Suspicion of central authority had been a constant of Polish political life from the earliest times. During the period of partition, it had morphed into more or less active and patriotically motivated civil disobedience and subversion aimed at the occupying authorities. With the recovery of independence in 1918, the state had to be accommodated among the most sacred elements of a Pole’s life, and this did not come naturally. For too long virtue had lain in opposition. This marked the attitude of the peasant to the policeman as much as it did that of the general to his government.
Creating the structures of the new state was not going to be easy. A hundred years of living within one or other of three entirely different cultures had marked mentalities and behaviour. Those brought up in a Prussian mould found it difficult to work with those of more urbane Habsburg habits, let alone with those schooled in the Byzantine inefficiency of the tsarist bureaucracy. The same was true of those who had any experience of parliamentary practice: whether they had sat in the Russian Duma or the German Reichstag they had generally blocked and opposed. This augured ill for the political life of the new Polish state.
The provisional Sejm which assembled on 10 February 1919 was dominated by parties of the right under Wojciech Korfanty, with the centre taken by peasant parties led by Wincenty Witos’ Polish People’s Party (PSL Piast) and the left by three socialist parties. The largest party had less than a quarter of the seats, and the very first sessions led to further splintering, but this was not as dangerous as it might have been, as the Sejm had conferred extensive executive powers on Piłsudski for the duration of the war, and its most important task was to prepare a constitution for the new state.
The constitution adopted on 17 March 1921 was based on that of the French Third Republic: it consisted of a Sejm of 444 deputies elected by universal suffrage of both sexes and proportional representation, a Senate of 111 seats, and a president elected by both chambers for a term of seven years.