This was partly due to the human fabric of the country. The peacemakers of 1918 had attempted to create nation-states in Central Europe, but the communities embraced by the Commonwealth were so interwoven that merely contracting its frontiers did not produce a homogeneous Polish state. The Republic was about half the size of the Commonwealth in 1772, yet in 1920 only 69 per cent of the population of 27 million were Poles: 17 per cent were Belarusians or Ukrainians, nearly 10 were Jews, and 2.5 were Germans.
The Polish ‘nation’ of the Commonwealth had been open to all nationalities, but when Poland was resurrected as a nation-state in 1918, it could only be based on the linguistic, cultural and religious tradition of the dominant group. Minorities were not actively discriminated against, but it was difficult for a member of one of them to gain high office in the army or the civil service. This was partly because many came from poor backgrounds and backward parts of the country, and it was easier, for cultural reasons, for a member of the German or Jewish minority than for a Ukrainian.
The Ukrainians who inhabited the east and south-east of the country were treated as second-class citizens by local administrators and police, and with suspicion by the central authorities. After 1926 Piłsudski launched a programme of local cultural autonomy in the hope of engaging the loyalty of the population to the Polish state. But this was undermined by the Soviets, who launched crossborder raids which targeted Poles and Ukrainians loyal to Poland.
In 1930 a Ukrainian nationalist organisation, Orhanizatsiia Ukrainskykh Natsionalistiv (OUN), founded in Vienna in 1929 and funded from Germany, began a campaign of terrorism and sabotage. Meaning to polarise attitudes, it concentrated on murdering Ukrainians who sought accommodation within Poland and Poles sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause. The authorities responded with a brutal ten-week pacification during which troops combed the area, burning down restive villages and publicly flogging real or suspected terrorists. In June 1934 an OUN activist assassinated the Minister of the Interior, Colonel Bronisław Pieracki, in Warsaw. The government responded by setting up an ‘isolation camp’ for subversive and undesirable elements at Bereza Kartuska near Brześć.
The extremists were undermined by an agreement in the same year between the government and the principal Ukrainian party (UNDO), whose original hostility to the Polish state had been tempered by Stalin’s genocidal activities across the border in Soviet-occupied Ukraine. Calm returned to the countryside until 1939, when many of the extremists would re-emerge as a German fifth column. Meanwhile, the camp at Bereza Kartuska filled up with other enemies of the regime.
Relations with the German minority were more decorous but no more cordial. The
Up to 1772 the Commonwealth had sheltered some four-fifths of the world’s Jews, who fitted more or less comfortably into its political, economic and cultural framework. This symbiosis disintegrated when, under the new conditions created by foreign rule, the Jews came into direct economic competition with the
Numerous Jews assimilated into Polish society, but the community as a whole did not identify with Polish aspirations. While many were active in the PPS and fought in Piłsudski’s Legions, many more supported the Bund. Most were hostile to the National Democratic movement, which openly proclaimed that those not prepared to assimilate completely should be encouraged to emigrate, and whose members often gave vent to anti-Semitic feelings.