Poland regains independence

Poland came back onto the map in November 1918. On November 11, the day the armistice ended the fighting in the west, Jozef Pilsudski, a veteran socialist and soldier who had just been released from a German prison, took command of Polish forces in Warsaw, and within days became head of state. Poles had been ruled by Russia, Prussia and Austria since the last partition in 1795, a gap of 123 years, and in that time Polish identity had survived through language, the Catholic Church, literature and repeated uprisings.¹²⁴

The empires that had divided Poland fell apart in World War I. Russia, hit by revolution in 1917, left the war and renounced the partition, Austria-Hungary dissolved in 1918, and Germany lost the war and its Kaiser. The Western powers had also declared support for an independent Poland, and Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points included it, with access to the sea. Polish politicians such as Roman Dmowski and the pianist-statesman Ignacy Paderewski lobbied the Allies, and Polish troops fought on several sides during the war.³

Independence did not mean peace or settled borders. The new state fought wars over its frontiers with Ukrainians, Czechs and Lithuanians, and above all the Polish-Soviet War of 1919 to 1921, when Pilsudski's army stopped the Red Army outside Warsaw in August 1920. The Treaty of Versailles gave Poland a corridor to the Baltic Sea, and later a mix of Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, German and Jewish populations lived inside its borders. The Second Polish Republic lasted only twenty years before Germany and the Soviet Union invaded in 1939.²³