The previous article on Polish independence was a hagiography which deliberately missed out a lot of detail. Those omissions – Józef Piłsudski’s flaws, and the Polish independence and socialist movements beyond him – will be explored in this present article.
Left and Right. Pilsudski and Dmowski.
As covered in part one, for around twenty years prior to WW1, Piłsudski was a leader of a paramilitary socialist movement for Polish independence, primarily from Russia, although Poland was also colonised by Austria and Germany at the same time. Upon the outbreak of WW1, Piłsudski led a Polish legion on the Austro-German side in the hope that this would lead to future Polish independence. This strategy which ultimately failed, as it was Polish fighters who served Poland alone (and not any empire which oppressed the Poles) who ultimately secured Polish independence.
Roman Dmowski – another leader of the Polish independence movement, Piłsudski’s right-wing rival – tried to ally Polish forces on the Russian side (i.e. against the Austro-German side), in the hope that this would lead to future Polish autonomy/independence. However, after several months of trying to organise this, Dmowski abandoned the project in early 1915, realising that it was impossible that such a scheme could further the Polish cause. Dmowski would go on to cooperate with Russia’s ally, France, where he founded the Polish National Committee.
One wonders why it took Piłsudski nearly three years to realise what Dmowski understood in less than six months. Namely, that alliances to the imperial superpowers were deadends. The Polish Legion, as part of the Austro-German military organisation, committed fratricide and suffered many casualties, even after the oath crisis. It is difficult to figure out what good came of that alliance.
The contrast in actions between Piłsudski and Dmowski demonstrate the disagreements at the time as to which of the three colonising empires posed the biggest threat and offered the most promising opportunities to Poles. On one hand, there may have been a perception that it was good for the wider Polish movement to hedge its bets and ‘ride two horses’ (the Central Powers and the Allies at the same time). But the relationship between Piłsudski and Dmowski really does seem to have been characterised by mutual disdain, and it seems unlikely that their competing strategies complemented one another.
Following the Oath Crisis in mid-1917, Piłsudski spent the rest of the WW1 in a German prison. But following the German Revolution and the Greater Polish Uprising in later 1918, he was released by German socialists to return to Poland in early 1919 to become president. Despite this, the Polish Socialist Party did not come to power in Poland. The new post-WW1 Anglo-American-French superpowers used their influence (they provided food and arms) to ensure that conservative Dmowski and his followers entered government, despite Dmowski’s uninvolvement in the paramilitary movement which had carried out the Greater Polish Uprising, thereby achieving independence. Dmowski and Piłsudski served in a coalition as prime minister and president. The situation can be termed as an example ‘dual power’ of right and left. That Piłsudski resigned his membership of the Socialist Party and served as an independent may be attributed to the same forces which put Dmowski into power.
There was progress in the newly independent Poland. (political freedom; 1918, eight hour working day and social insurance; 1919, universal suffrage; 1920, health insurance; 1924, unemployment insurance; 1930s, public housing and rising literacy levels. Not to mention the industrialisation, perhaps best demonstrated by the new port city of Gdynia, required as Gdansk was not given back to the Poles, but rather remained a ‘free city state’). All this progress could have gone so much further if it hadn’t had been for Dmowski and the conservative wing of the Polish independence movement.
Gdynia in 1938. The ship was named after Piłsudski.
The pro- and anti-independence factions of the Polish left
The ideological differences in the Polish movement were not only between right and left. For decades prior to WW1 there had been major intra-left ideological differences.
The Polish Socialist Party was founded in 1892. But already in 1893 there was a splinter group, SDKP (Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland), led by Róża Luksemburg. The grounds for the split were opposition to the secessionist politics of the earlier party, on grounds that it would divide the Polish and Russian working-class from each other. On one hand, the Polish Socialist Party’s involvement in the 1905 Russian Revolution makes Luksemburg’s assertions questionable. On the other hand, Piłsudski’s abandonment of socialism when he finally gained power potentially gives retrospective weight to Luksemburg’s positions.
Lenin and most of the Russian socialist movement opposed Luksemburg’s anti-independence position, that is, they supported Polish secession and the break-up of imperial powers. Indeed, this anti-imperialist position of support for a separate Polish state was taken by both the First and Second Internationals. Luksemburg therefore represented a minority of the internationalist movement with respect to the national question. However, it should also be noted that the nascent Second Polish Republic, founded 1918, was opposed by Lenin, who sought to incorporate a hypothetical Soviet Federal Polish Republic into a Soviet Union.
Lenin and Piłsudski were aligned on the national question against Luksemburg. But from 1914 onwards, Lenin and Luksemburg (and the SDKP) were aligned against Piłsudski on the issue of socialists siding with imperialist capitalist powers in search of political opportunity. Lenin and Luksemburg opposed such tactics. As we have seen, Piłsudski utilised this strategy, ultimately unsuccessfully given the Oath Crisis and surrounding events, though Polish independence would come soon after. In doing so, Piłsudski, like many of his counterparts in other countries, betrayed the principals of the Second International and contributed to its collapse.
Following the 1893 schism in the Polish Socialist Party, in 1906 there was a further schism, with around 50% of members falling into either camp. Piłsudski led the Revolutionary Faction, which treated independence as a short-term goal. This was opposed by the Left Faction, who were more or less Luksemburgists (although she had emigrated to Germany several years earlier, where she would go on to be a leader of the 1918 German Revolution). The Left Faction sought to align the Polish and Russian workers’ movements and held that gaining independence was not possible in the short term (a view proven wrong by subsequent history; it was achieved 12 years later, the short/medium term).
In 1918, the Left Faction amalgamated with the SDKP, which itself had expanded in the intervening period, adding ‘and Lithuania’ on the end of the SDKP acronym (SDKiP). The new amalgamated party was the Communist Party of Poland.
Polish-Soviet War. Cinema, and the stories we tell.
Having previously been oppressed by the Tsarist regime, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a welcome development to many Poles. There remained a possibility that Tsarists would regain power and then recolonise the east of the newly independent Poland. For this reason, the Polish state, led by Pilsudski and Dmowski, initially refrained from any anti-Bolshevik activities. However Russian communists attempted to spread their revolution through the bourgeois states of Europe. This was the context of the Polish-Soviet War, 1919-1920. Of course, Lenin had supported Polish independence for many years, but now that his own revolution was succeeding, he sought to ‘strangle Polish independence in its cradle’ to paraphrase Winston Churchill on Bolshevism. This is of course a contradiction to be acknowledged and contemplated.
As part of this revolutionary wave, around 100 worker and peasant councils sprang up across Poland. Often this was not in support of a centralised Soviet Russian regime, but rather proclaiming themselves as miniature soviet republics in solidarity with the working-class everywhere. This was the political milieu of the Communist Party of Poland, established 1918, which opposed the new separate Polish state, and sought to incorporate a hypothetical Polish federal republic into a broader Soviet state, with a view to a future post-state communist utopia. Though the name of the war may not suggest it, there were Poles on both sides of the Polish-Soviet War. Ultimately all the soviets in Poland were co-opted as the nascent Second Polish Republic successfully expanded its territory in the years immediately preceding WW1. “The war of the giants had ended; wars of the pygmies had begun” - Churchill.
The Soviet/Russian defeat in the Polish-Soviet War can be considered as the twilight of the Soviet ‘World Revolution’ ideology, and the rise of Stalin’s ‘Socialism in One Country’ approach. This interpretation features towards the end of Jerzy Hoffman’s movie Warsaw 1920 (released 2011). The bad guys in the film are the filthy communists, not those imperialists who had already colonised Poland, but rather those who would do so starting in 1939. The benefits of Polish nationalism are presented as self-evident contrasted with Stalinism. This is an unusual statement to make. To extrapolate the film’s own logic, had the Soviet side been victorious against the Polish state in that war, Stalinism may not have emerged as a ruling ideology; the Russian and German revolutions would have been bridged; the workers state would have held such vast continual swathes of territory that imperialist powers would have failed in their ‘strangulation of Bolshevism in its cradle’. As pointed out in the series introduction, this strangulation did not kill the Soviet project, but as with many infant survivors of attempted murder, it matured in a deformed way. To some extent, the Second Polish Republic paved the way for Stalinism, albeit unintentionally, probably not seeing the full consequence of their actions.
An abridged version of Warsaw 1920 with English subtitles on YouTube: https://youtu.be/aN73N9EjoM4
Jerzy Hoffman may himself be a Jewish Pole, but his film presents a narrative in which Catholic Poland stopped the invasion of a horde of dirty north Asian atheists. In this narrative, the outnumbered Poles struggled in their fight, but were finally relieved by American air support. In doing so, the Poles and Americans upheld western Christian civilisation (that is, they allowed imperialism and capitalism to continue unbridled, under the auspices of the nascent USA world domination).
This narrative is remarkably similar to another nationalistic Polish film about another war 250 years earlier. In ‘The Day of the Siege: September Eleven, 1683’ the aristocratic winged Polish Hussar cavalry more or less single handedly fight off a horde of dirty Turks and non-Christians. (Coincidently it should be noted that the Polish King Jan III Sobieski in that battle was the maternal great grandfather of Bonnie Prince Charlie). There’s nothing wrong with celebrating the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, but ultimately this only led to the strengthening of other European Catholic empires which were no better or worse. Both films are servile, and historically selective. This story of the Poles saving the world could be told ad nauseum in a variety of different eras. The viewer is supposed to feel pride, overlooking that Poles handed power over to the bigger states, Austrian Habsburgs, the USA. The overexcited ‘in your face’ style of cinematography deliberately discourages any kind of class analysis or critical thinking.
The aftermath of war.
The Second Polish Republic was short-lived, ending in 1939 when annexed by Stalin’s Soviet Union in the east and Hitler’s Nazi Germany in the west. But the fact that Poland only adopted a socialist system of government in 1939 when force to by a foreign power has done a lot of harm to the national psyche. Had socialism been first implemented in Poland by the Polish people themselves, as a federal Soviet state, or otherwise, then the national psyche today would probably be much healthier. It is regrettable that Piłsudski "got off the red tram to socialism at independence square, before the final stop", as he put it.
On reading this account who do you feel affinities with? The Polish Socialist Party or the Luksemburg strand? Personally, I think that both sides had great merit. There is definitely a strong case to be made for democratic and pluralist movements of this kind, as opposed to movements/histories/mythologies – like that depicted in the PL 1 article – which simply revolve around one individual and their loyalists. (I believe there is a lesson there for Scotland!)
Piłsudski continues to be remembered as a hero by Polish ethnic nationalists. But in fact, Piłsudski looked back fondly upon the multi-ethnic character of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth of history, and sought to incorporate Poland into a broader 'Intermarium' federation. It was the rogue Dmowski – he who continually undermined Piłsudski for decades – who was the anti-Semite, something Piłsudski did not partake in.
But we should also remember the unsung forgotten hero - Kazimierz Kelles-Kreuz – a member of the Polish Socialist Party, he combined Piłsudski’s determination for Polish independence with the Marxist idealism of Luksemburg. To read more about him see page 37-80 of Allan Armstrong’s book INTERNATIONALISM FROM BELOW, Volume 3. That is, Chapters 2C and 2D. Freely available at: https://intfrobel.com/e-books/
Paintings by Zdzislaw Beksinski
Sculptures by Igor Mitoraji
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