Reborn after 123 years of partition, interwar Poland lasted just under 21 years
After more than a century carved up between Austria, Prussia and Russia, Poland reappeared as an independent state in late 1918. The Second Polish Republic fought border wars, swung from parliamentary democracy to authoritarian rule, and was overrun in 1939 on the eve of its twenty-first birthday.
Its official life ran from 7 October 1918 to 6 October 1939. As World War I collapsed the empires that had partitioned Poland, rival authorities sprang up: more than 100 workers' councils, a socialist Republic of Tarnobrzeg, and Ignacy Daszyński's provisional government in Lublin. On 10 November 1918 Józef Piłsudski, freed after 16 months in a German prison at Magdeburg, arrived by train in Warsaw, and the next day the Regency Council named him commander in chief. The Treaty of Versailles confirmed Poland's rebirth in June 1919.
Borders took longer. The new army fought a series of wars from 1918 to 1921, the most important being the victorious war against Soviet Russia, and the eastern frontier was settled in 1922 with League of Nations recognition. Poland then bordered Germany, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, the Soviet Union and the Free City of Danzig, reaching the Baltic through the narrow Polish Corridor around Gdynia. Warsaw, Kraków, Poznań, Wilno and Lwów grew into major cultural centres with respected universities.
Politics was turbulent. From 1919 to 1926 the country was a parliamentary democracy with a weak president and frequently changing governments. In May 1926 Piłsudski seized power in a coup, promising to cure the nation of partisan squabbling; his regime became known as Sanacja, meaning healing. The 1928 election was still seen as fair, but those of 1930, 1935 and 1938 were manipulated, and opposition activists were sent to Bereza Kartuska prison. Piłsudski died in 1935, soon after an authoritarian constitution was approved.
Polish Jews had been among Piłsudski's strongest backers, but after his death the ruling camp openly discriminated against Jewish citizens, and to a lesser degree Ukrainians and Belarusians, limiting access to professions and business. Conscription applied to men at 21, and the peacetime army counted 270,000 active soldiers with 700,000 reservists. In 1939 Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Slovakia invaded, opening the European war, and a government-in-exile formed in Paris, later moving to London.
Source: Second Polish Republic
