Polish youth in the thirties

Abstract

In a country which had regained independence after 123 years of subjection and partition among its three powerful neighbours, there was bound to be intense national feeling. In Poland on ii November I918 young men were disarming the Germans who had been occupying the country and were closely involved in the organization of the state and the army. Europe was undergoing a series of revolutionary upheavals. The wave which swept through Russia, Germany, and Hungary did not bypass Poland, but there was no revolution there because the country was dominated by the national problem, and because Jozef Pilsudski, enjoying the appeal of a socialist, came to power and endeavoured to maintain a balance between the Right and the Left. Then came the war of I92o-2I with Soviet Russia, which again took precedence over other considerations. Pilsudski was guided all his life by the idea of Poland's independence and greatness. This he envisaged in the form of a federation of Poland and the countries immediately to the east. With this in mind he ordered the march on Kiev, but in the end had to use his troops to defend Warsaw. Poland's fate once more hung in the balance, and national problems increasingly preoccupied Polish society. The elections of December I922 resulted in a victory for the nationalist right wing in Poland, and Pilsudski withdrew from political life; but his young followers, who had supported the national independence policy of the Polish Socialist Party (PP S) and the Polish legions of the first world war, remained in the army. Those who now looked to him were the left-wing parties, the socialists and some members of the Peasant Party. In May I926, when Pilsudski carried out a coup d'etat against the right-wing regime, he at first also enjoyed the support of the communists. The coup d'etat of May I926 was to a certain extent an expression of revolt by the younger generation of military men grouped around Pilsudski and the young radical intelligentsia against the