ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
East Central Europe between the Two World Wars. Joseph Rothschild
Читать онлайн.Название East Central Europe between the Two World Wars
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780295803647
Автор произведения Joseph Rothschild
Серия A History of East Central Europe (HECE)
Издательство Ingram
From his seizure of power in 1926 until his death in 1935, Piłsudski had sought to honor the nonexclusivist traditions of the old commonwealth in its age of glory. His epigoni, however, not only encouraged economic discrimination against Jews, including boycotts which occasionally degenerated into quasi-pogroms, but also tolerated explicitly political anti-Semitic violence, especially at the hands of nationalistic university students. Here the supposedly “strong” government of 1936-39 showed itself suspiciously weak in failing to curb or apprehend the culprits. While it refrained from racially anti-Semitic legislation, this regime did indulge in administrative policies intended to weaken and damage the Jews’ role in the economy and the free professions, even to a degree that was irrational from the perspective of Poland’s own interests. Experienced Jewish entrepreneurs, who often employed Poles and extended credit to them, were taxed into oblivion on behalf of clumsy and unprofitable state monopolies. In a country desperately short of physicians, engineers, and other professionals, Jews were virtually excluded from such academic studies. Their proportion of the entire university student body was reduced through a numerus clausus from 20.4 percent in the academic year 1928-29 to 9.9 percent in 1937-38; the latter percentage was about the same as the Jewish proportion of the entire population but far under the Jewish proportion of the urban population, which classically furnishes the academic youth. Within the university walls, the rightist student body was allowed to impose ghetto benches and other humiliations, including frequent beatings, on their Jewish classmates.
The economic and social context partly explains, but does not justify, this malevolence. Poland’s slow recovery from the depression threw Polish workers, craftsmen, peasants, entrepreneurs, and intelligentsia into severe competition with the highly visible Jews for the limited supply of employment, credit, entrepreneurial, and professional opportunities. There was real, if misplaced, anxiety lest the Poles become a nation of peasants, proletarians, and officials while the Jews flooded commerce and the free professions. Nevertheless, thoughtful members of the Polish elite became concerned that the specifically anti-Semitic violence might eventually degenerate into a broader rightist assault on all political rivals and, indeed, on public order per se. As war clouds darkened the horizon in 1938-39, even some government leaders indicated misgiving lest anti-Jewish excesses identify Poland with, and undermine her vis-à-vis, Nazi Germany.
Interwar Poland’s German minority, being economically prosperous and socially well-balanced, and enjoying more political support from the Weimar Republic—and later in a different way from Nazi Germany—than the other minorities were given by any external power, complained primarily about educational discrimination. Especially in Silesia was it subject to a vigorous effort at cultural polonization. The manner in which land reform, industrial investment, and bureaucratic recruitment were administered also aggrieved the Germans, many of whom emigrated to Germany. In the 1930s, those who remained divided politically into Nazi (the majority), bourgeois-nationalist, Catholic, and Socialist groups. As the Polish government was then cultivating good relations with Berlin under the rubric of their joint Non-Aggression Statement of January 26, 1934, it did not support the Catholic and Socialist parties against the pressure of the Nazi-controlled one. By the same token, the latter cooperated with the Polish government rather than with other minority parties and, being unable to win parliamentary representation under new and restrictive electoral laws of 1935, it thereafter accepted two appointive senatorial seats from the hands of the Polish president.
The poor and heavily illiterate Belorussians were regarded by the Polish authorities as having the lowest degree of political consciousness of all the state’s minorities. At the beginning of the interwar era, when the still embryonic Belorussian nationalist awakening was expected to develop primarily into a sense of differentiation from Russia, the Polish Left and the Piłsudskists had even nursed it along. By the second half of the 1920s, however, this potential accommodation had soured as the Belorussian peasants became offended by the economic hegemony of old Polish landlord-families and the physical intrusion of new Polish colonists (osadnicy) into their territory. In 1931, 37 percent of the arable land in the Belorussian areas of Poland was owned by Poles, and the region’s extensive timber resources were also exploited in a predatory manner. Many Belorussians now became enamoured of the supposedly better political and economic lot of their conationals in the Soviet Union’s Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Their fascination with the neighboring Communist model, in turn, alarmed the Polish authorities, who attempted to repress politically this Belorussian nationalist movement that now appeared even more concerned about differentiating itself from Poland than from Russia. Yet even this Polish repression of the late 1920s was still intermittent and inconsistent; though severe against explicit political expressions of Belorussian “subversiveness” and brutal in the villages, it left the central Belorussian cultural institutions in Wilno unmolested. In the 1930s, finally, the repression was extended to cultural expressions as well; Belorussian schools were polonized or closed, and the youth given the unhappy choice of studying in Polish or remaining illiterate. As is generally the case in such circumstances, Belorussian nationalism was only strengthened and rendered yet more subversive by the efforts to destroy it. By the time of Poland’s destruction in September, 1939, the loyalties of its Belorussian citizens were divided between aspirations for independence and hopes for unification with their Soviet Belorussian brethren.
The Ukrainians were the largest national group in interwar Europe to whom the doctrines of political self-determination and unification had not yet been applied. They were then divided between the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, not as dispersed minorities, but as compact local majorities in the regions of their settlement. The fraction of the Ukrainian nation that was assigned to interwar Poland was overwhelmingly agricultural. But even in the midst of a solidly Ukrainian rural countryside, the populations of the southeastern towns consisted of Polish officials and garrisons, and of Polish and Jewish professionals and merchants. The land-hungry Ukrainian peasants craved the estates owned by Polish landlords. Thus, the Ukrainian problem in interwar Poland was social, economic, and cultural as well as political—a complex which the Polish Right, preferring to dismiss Ukrainian nationalism as either immature or a German machination, declined to acknowledge.
The Ukrainians were aggrieved and alienated by linguistic pressure and cultural polonization, economic exploitation and Polish colonization, as well as by restrictions on their access to higher education and public careers, and their gerrymandered underrepresentation in the legislature. In the 1930s, Polish-Ukrainian relations sporadically degenerated into quasi-guerrilla warfare, characterized on the one side by assassinations of Polish politicians, officials, and colonists, and on the other by dragonnade-like military brutalization and “pacification” of Ukrainian villages. But as interwar Poland was not a police-state, the conscience of the Polish intelligentsia restrained the political authorities from stripping the minorities of their rights altogether. Thus, through all the vicious cycle of provocation and revenge, the Ukrainians managed to develop an active intelligentsia and a lively cooperative movement, which functioned as a school of politico-administrative self-education as well as a bulwark of economic self-defense. They also succeeded in easing pressure to transform their ecclesiastical institutions into funnels of polonization. Though Poland’s Eastern Orthodox (i.e., Ukrainian, Belorussian, Russian) dioceses did assert their autocephalous organization with respect to the Moscow Patriarchate in the early 1920s at the urging of the Polish authorities, they resisted heavy pressure in the late 1930s to polonize their sermons, prayerbooks, and calendars. The Uniate Church functioned even more emphatically as an explicit expression of Ukrainian national consciousness in interwar Poland.
In the mid-1930s, as Stalin moved to destroy Ukrainian national culture and imposed the hated kolkhozi on the Ukrainian peasantry in the Soviet Union, and as Warsaw achieved diplomatic détentes with both Berlin and Moscow, the Ukrainian nationalist movement in Poland was for the time being deprived of the patronage of any major state. This would