Europe Since 1918

by Herbert Adams Gibbons

In November, 1918, General Pilsudski, a Lithuanian Pole, who had been a prominent Socialist leader, an officer in the Austrian army in the early part of the war, and the creator of the Polish Legion, was released from a German prison, where he had been placed in 1917. He returned to Warsaw and resumed the command of the Legion, which had secretly retained and developed its organization after Pilsudski’s arrest. Holding the military force, it was in Pilsudski’s power to constitute a government. He became the head of the state at the end of 1918, and had the good sense to consent to the appointment of Paderewski as premier, with the idea that the celebrated pianist, best known of all Poles in Europe and America, would be the ideal man to head the delegation to the Peace Conference. But at home Pilsudski was very frank in expressing his belief that after the peace negotiations were over only a Socialist Government, with a program of constructive democratic reform, could retain authority in the state. The country was facing a Bolshevist invasion, however, and the Paris negotiators needed united support. So internal politics was kept in the background until after the Treaty of Versailles and its supplementary treaty, resurrecting Poland, were signed.

Reconstituted Poland received very liberal frontiers on the west at the expense of Germany, with a corridor to the Baltic Sea, thus cutting off East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Danzig was made a free city under the protection of the League of Nations, despite its purely German population; but it was to be included in the Polish customs frontiers, and its foreign relations were to be under Polish control. Later plebiscites were to determine whether Upper Silesia and two districts of West Prussia should remain with Germany or be handed over to Poland. The Treaty of St.-Germain gave western Galicia to Poland, and the Entente Powers agreed that eastern Galicia should have autonomy for twenty-five years, under the protection of Poland, after which its inhabitants were to decide their destiny by a plebiscite. The Poles had expected to obtain a clear title to eastern Galicia, considering of no importance the fact that they were hardly more than 10 per cent of its population of over three millions. The outcry raised by the nationalists at Warsaw over eastern Galicia forced Paderewski to resign the premiership. His stormy year in politics had accomplished much for Poland, but he himself was thoroughly discredited. He had not shown himself as good a land-grabber as his compatriots had hoped. Paderewski is back at the piano!

During the Peace Conference, and before Poland had an official status, she found herself engaged in three wars. She was fighting at the same time with the Czechoslovaks over the coke and coal of Teschen, with the Ukrainians over eastern Galicia, and with the Bolshevists over border-lands in a vast region whose political future could not be decided. The Entente Powers, wanting to maintain relations with reactionary Russian elements, had avoided fixing a Russo-Polish frontier. Any line they drew would have offended the anti-Bolshevists and the Poles alike!

The war with the Czechoslovaks was too ridiculous to last long. Both states were in the embryo. Their future was being debated at Paris. They were compelled to listen to reason, sign an armistice, and submit the dispute to the Supreme Council. Teschen was eventually cut in two, the line running down a street in the town. But the mining district and the railway went to Czechoslovakia. The Poles were assured that they would be compensated at the expense of Germany for this loss, if something one had not yet had can be called that. The Ukrainian war was complicated by the division of the Ukrainians into two parties. The anti-Bolshevists eventually joined forces with the Poles against the Bolshevists; and this mischance of civil war put the Ukrainians of Eastern Galicia at the mercy of Poles.

The war with the Bolshevists dragged on through the winter of 1919–20, largely because the Entente Powers felt that it might be possible to use Poland against Russia in conjunction with the Kolchak and Denikin movements. The Poles launched an offensive at the end of April, 1920, and within two weeks had advanced to Kiev. But the Bolshevists, having disposed of counter-revolutionary movements, were able to concentrate all their forces against Poland. There was a sudden change in the fortune of arms. Poland was invaded, and by the middle of August the Russians had advanced to the suburbs of Warsaw.

In the meantime the Poles had sued for an armistice. Polish plenipotentiaries went to Minsk on August 17, prepared to accept humiliating terms, which included the reduction of the Polish army to fifty thousand, the surrender of all arms and war materials over and above what was necessary for this small army, and the stoppage of war industries. These terms, together with the proposal for the Vistula boundary, had been transmitted to Poland by the intermediary of the British, and seemed reasonable to the British Government, which had never countenanced Poland’s inordinate territorial ambitions.

By the time the Polish peace delegation reached Minsk, the tide of battle had begun to turn. With French staff aid the Polish army made a successful counter-offensive, and the Bolshevists retreated as rapidly as they had advanced. The shoe being now on the other foot, negotiations were transferred to Riga, where on October 12, 1920, a treaty was signed as humiliating to Russia as the one the Bolshevists had intended to make the Poles accept. Ukrainia was associated with Russia in making the peace. Poland tried to avoid dealing with Ukrainia as a Soviet government, but on this point Moscow and Kiev were obdurate. It was a surprise to the world that the Moscow Soviet agreed to cede one hundred and thirty-five thousand square kilometers, which meant the loss of part of White Russia and the cutting off of Russia from Lithuania. Poland secured a corridor to Latvia, which enabled her to begin immediately a frontier dispute with that little state. Russia renounced intervention in negotiations between Lithuania and Poland, which left Lithuania at the mercy of her larger neighbor. The cessions in the northwest, when taken into consideration with the creation of the Baltic Republics, made still more difficult the trade communication of Russia with Germany and the rest of western Europe. In the south Poland established a common frontier with Rumania at a sacrifice on the part of Soviet Ukrainia both of a large part of Volhynia province, with a purely Ukrainian population of more than a million, and also of the claim to a union with Eastern Galicia, with three million more Ukrainians.

The cessions of territory secured by Poland under the terms of the Treaty of Riga were hailed in Warsaw and Paris as a great triumph. But when we take the Treaty of Riga and the Treaty of Versailles together it is not hard to come to the conclusion that the wild extravagance of Poland’s eastern and western boundaries, the result of the unwise abuse of temporary power, will come to be regarded as a source of fatal weakness. Add the later decisions of the Entente Powers in regard to Upper Silesia and Eastern Galicia, and we have the problem of a new country, hardly more than half of whose inhabitants are Poles, a country of thirty millions, wedged in between Russia and Germany, at the expense of both of whom Poland has been constituted and put in possession of railways and oil-wells and coal-mines and industries. Is it possible to suppose that Russia and Germany are rendered so permanently and completely powerless that Poland is going to enjoy the peaceful possession of what she has stolen and of what others have stolen for her?

Since the Treaty of Riga, Poland, with the backing of France, has scored three more notable territorial successes, each of which has added more alien inhabitants to the already alarmingly conglomerate electorate of the new state. In each case the decision in favor of Poland has been the result of strong-arm methods. Previous decisions, solemnly made, have been reversed when the Poles have used force.

Eastern Galicia declared its independence at the end of 1918, after the collapse of Austria-Hungary. Under the old Austrian rule its inhabitants, Ukrainians, had struggled long and successfully against the Poles and were just getting control of the country when the World War broke out. Although the cities contain mostly Poles and Jews, the province is overwhelmingly Ukrainian. The Poles have about 10 per cent and the Jews 15 per cent. In May, 1919, the Poles invaded Eastern Galicia, and in July secured from the Supreme Council the authorization to occupy the country—two months after it had been done! It was arranged that Poland should hold Eastern Galicia for twenty-five years as an autonomous province, and that there should be a plebiscite in 1944.