The rebirth of Poland <\/p>\n
With the outbreak of World War I,<\/a> two major political trends emerged among the Poles. J\u00f3zef Pi\u0142sudski<\/a>, distancing himself from socialist politics, became a military leader and commander of a brigade that fought on the Austrian side. His cooperation with the Central Powers<\/a> was tactical<\/a>, part of his pursuit of the goal of complete independence. Expecting a collapse of the three partitioners, he prepared for a Polish fait accompli. In 1915 the Germans and the Austrians<\/a> drove out the Russians from Congress Poland<\/a>, and on November 5, 1916, they issued the Two Emperors\u2019 Manifesto<\/a> proclaiming the creation of the Polish kingdom. Its status and borders remained undefined, but the document internationalized the Polish question. Pi\u0142sudski, who refused to raise Polish troops without binding political commitments from the Central Powers, came into conflict with them and in 1917 was imprisoned in Magdeburg, Germany<\/a>.<\/p>\n Roman Dmowski\u2019s<\/a> alternative<\/a> policy of linking the Polish cause with the Franco-Russian alliance appeared promising when the first formal offer of Polish autonomy<\/a> and unification came from the Russian<\/a> commander in chief, Grand Duke Nicholas<\/a>, on August 14, 1914. Subsequent moves by the Russian government, however, revealed the hollowness of such promises. Russian concessions<\/a> to the Poles, culminating in the tsar\u2019s<\/a> Christmas Day 1916 order, were made only in reaction to the Central Powers\u2019 initiatives<\/a> and victories.<\/p>\n The chances of Polish independence increased radically in 1917 when the United States<\/a> entered the war and two revolutions<\/a> shook Russia<\/a>. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson<\/a>, to whom the great Polish patriot and pianist Ignacy Paderewski<\/a> had gained access through Colonel Edward M. House<\/a>, already spoke of a united and autonomous<\/a> Poland in a January 1917 address. The Russian Provisional Government<\/a>, somewhat ambiguously, and the Petrograd (St. Petersburg) Soviet of Workers\u2019 and Soldiers\u2019 Deputies, more explicitly, declared their recognition of Poland\u2019s right to independence in March 1917.<\/p>\n At the Brest-Litovsk conference<\/a> (December 22, 1917\u2013March 3, 1918), the Bolsheviks<\/a> denounced the Central Powers\u2019 handling of the Polish question. On January 8, 1918, Wilson\u2019s Fourteen Points<\/a> appeared. Point 13 declared that an independent Polish state should be erected, to be composed of indisputably Polish inhabitants and with a secure access to the sea. The Inter-Allied conference (June 1918) endorsed<\/a> Polish independence, thus crowning the efforts of Dmowski<\/a>, who had promoted the Polish cause in the West since 1915. In August 1917 he had set up a Polish National Committee<\/a> in Paris, which the French viewed as a quasi-government. Under its aegis a Polish army composed mainly of volunteers from the United States was placed under the command of General J\u00f3zef Haller.<\/p>\n With the end of the war on November 11, 1918, Pi\u0142sudski, released by the German revolutionaries, returned to Warsaw. The German-appointed Regency Council handed over its powers to him, and Pi\u0142sudski successfully negotiated a German evacuation of the kingdom. A leftist government in Lublin<\/a> headed by Daszy\u0144ski resigned in his favour, but Dmowski\u2019s Polish National Committee, representing the Polish political right, did not. The danger of two rival governments was avoided through the mediation of Paderewski. Under a compromise implemented<\/a> in January 1919, Pi\u0142sudski remained chief of state<\/a> and commander in chief; Paderewski, who became premier and foreign minister, and Dmowski represented Poland at the Paris Peace Conference<\/a>.<\/p>\n At that stage the Polish government controlled only Congress Poland and western Galicia<\/a>. In the east the Ukrainians, having proclaimed their own republic, battled the Poles. Farther east the Poles clashed with the Bolsheviks<\/a>, who were advancing into Belarusian and Lithuanian lands. A Polish uprising in Poznania led to a partial seizure of the province, but the fate of Prussian<\/a> Poland lay in the hands of the peacemakers, who had also the last word about the territorial settlement.<\/p>\n From the Treaty of Versailles to the Treaty of Riga <\/p>\n The Polish program at the Paris Peace Conference<\/a> was affected by the Pi\u0142sudski-Dmowski dualism. Pi\u0142sudski\u2019s approach was \u201cfederalist,\u201d Dmowski\u2019s \u201cincorporationist.\u201d The former strove to establish a bloc of states corresponding to prepartition Poland, but he was flexible on the issue of the borders of those states. The latter postulated a centralized Polish state, with its eastern border determined by the Second Partition but also including Upper Silesia<\/a> and parts of East Prussia<\/a> transferred from Germany in the west. France favoured strengthening Poland at Germany\u2019s expense, but Britain opposed that approach. Wilson occupied a middle position.<\/p>\n Katowice; Silesian uprisings<\/a>French tanks and soldiers in the streets of Katowice (Kattowitz), Upper Silesia, during one of the Silesian uprisings, 1919\u201321.(more)<\/p>\n The borders drawn under the Treaty of Versailles<\/a> (June 1919) roughly corresponded to Polish-German frontiers before the partitions, except that Gda\u0144sk<\/a> became the free city of Danzig, and plebiscites<\/a> were held in parts of East Prussia and Upper Silesia to determine which nation these regions wished to join. The East Prussian plebiscite<\/a> of July 1920 (at the height of the Russo-Polish War<\/a>) was won by Germany. In the Silesian plebiscite of March 1921\u2014preceded and followed by three Polish uprisings\u2014682 communes voted for Poland and 792 for Germany. The region was formally divided in October 1921.<\/p>\n The drawing of the southern border under the Treaty of Saint-Germain<\/a> (September 1919) was preceded by an armed Czech<\/a>-Polish clash in January 1919 in the duchy of Cieszyn<\/a>. In July 1920 the area was divided, leaving a sizable Polish minority in Czechoslovakia. As for the embattled eastern Galicia, the Allies<\/a> authorized a Polish administration and military occupation in 1919. Final recognition of Polish sovereignty<\/a> came only in 1923, the delay<\/a> being due to the Russian situation.<\/p>\n An armed struggle between the Bolsheviks and Poland<\/a> resulted from Russian attempts to carry the revolution westward and from Pi\u0142sudski\u2019s federalist policy. The Great Powers failed to pursue either an all-out intervention against the Bolsheviks or a policy of peace. An Allied proposal for a temporary border between Bolshevik Russia and Poland (called the Curzon Line<\/a>) was unacceptable to either side. Except for an alliance in April 1920 with the Ukrainian<\/a> leader Symon Petlyura<\/a>, whose troops accompanied the Poles as they captured Kiev<\/a> in May, Poland fought in isolation. An offensive by the Red Army<\/a> drove the Poles back to the outskirts of Warsaw<\/a>, but Pi\u0142sudski\u2019s counterattack on August 16 (the \u201cMiracle of the Vistula\u201d) saved the country<\/a> from catastrophe<\/a>. In the compromise Peace of Riga<\/a> (March 1921), the Bolsheviks abandoned their plans to communize Poland, but the Poles had to abandon their federalist concepts. The new border, which corresponded roughly to the 1793 frontier, cut across mixed Ukrainian and Belarusian territories. In the north it included Wilno, captured by General Lucjan \u017beligowski, a move that opened a chasm between Lithuania<\/a> and Poland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The rebirth of Poland With the outbreak of World War I, two major political trends emerged among the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1484,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[516,974,1340,977,9],"class_list":{"0":"post-2974","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-poland","8":"tag-article","9":"tag-britannica","10":"tag-encyclopeadia","11":"tag-encyclopedia","12":"tag-poland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2974\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}