Who Was J. Piłsudski Going to Balance Between and Did He Balance in Fact in 1926–1935

Abstract

The monograph “Piłsudski between Stalin and Hitler” by the Polish researcher K. Rak published in 2021 cannot but interest specialists in the history of international relations in the interwar period, not least because of its analysis of tripartite rather than bilateral relations, its chronological scope (1924–1935), the wealth of source material from German, Polish and Russian archives, and the extensive bibliography, including works in Russian. Our critical analysis does not purport to show the diversity of the issues raised or addressed in the book. Our task is a different one: to provide an insight into the state of Polish historiography, first and foremost, of such landmark events in international relations of the interwar period as the 1925 Locarno Treaties, the 1932 Soviet-Polish Non-Aggression Pact, the 1934 Polish-German declaration of non-aggression, and the Polish policy of balancing. Yet Rak's book is not a historiographical one, but is purely research-oriented, containing many new and intriguing facts, observations, assertions and hypotheses, which can be debated, but cannot be dismissed. While demonstrating an innovative approach to the analysis of a number of issues, Ruck is not always free of stereotypes, especially when it comes to matters such as the threat to Poland posed by the 1922 Soviet-German Treaty of Rapallo, the explanation of Polish longstanding reluctance to respond to the Soviet proposal for a non-aggression treaty, the substitution of scholarly evidence for these stereotypes, yet his conclusions are well grounded, though not always incontrovertible.