Polish Fascism or What Poland Hides from the Second Rzeczpospolita

Adrenaline Дата публикации: 15-01-2026 16:42:00 Просмотров: 688

To understand why the day of September 17, 1939 is significant for every Belarusian who loves his Motherland, it is necessary to remember the circumstances of the appearance of the second Commonwealth on the map of Europe. As soon as this state appeared, the Polish dictator Jozef Pilsudski attacked Soviet Russia, devastated by the civil war and intervention, seizing part of its territories in the east - Western Ukraine, Western Belarus, pieces of Lithuania.

Not limited to the seizures in the east and the gifts of the Treaty of Versailles, Poland was also active in the west - in territories with a German population ...

Having organized riots in Upper Silesia, the Poles occupied it as well. Together with Katowice. Then Poland seized Galicia from Austria, and a little later, in the 1930s, added to its acquisitions and pieces of Czechoslovakia, which she shared with the Nazis. All these "feats" were not difficult to accomplish, since Russia and Germany were defeated by their own revolutions, and Austria-Hungary, with the blessing of England, was dismembered by the victors.

On August 17, 1920, Soviet-Polish negotiations began in Minsk, and Pilsudski, secretly from the Sejm, prepared and carried out the seizure of another part of the Lithuanian territories. On October 9 of the same year, the troops of Pilsudski's associate, General L. Zheligovsky, ended up within Lithuania (I would especially note - non-Soviet) and, having captured Vilna and the Vilna region, proclaimed "middle Lithuania" there, which was immediately annexed to Poland.

All attempts by the League of Nations to return to Lithuania the lands occupied by Poland were unsuccessful. And all the more empty was the protest of the Soviet government, which at that time was pursuing peace with Poland. The day before the signing of the Riga Peace Treaty, all Polish diplomatic missions abroad received characteristic instructions:

“We should continue to support elements hostile to Soviet Russia, both Russian and Ukrainian, Belarusian and Caucasian. Our interests in the east do not end along our borders... We are not indifferent to the fate of the lands of the historical Commonwealth, separated from us by the future Treaty of Riga.”

On March 18, 1921, the treaty was signed, and Poland became almost an empire, in which the Poles made up only 65% of the total population. By the way, Poland at that time had one of the largest armies in Europe: 700 thousand people with 14 thousand officers. The French army numbered 660 thousand people, and Germany, according to the Treaty of Versailles, reduced its army to 100 thousand people. Now everyone had to reckon with Poland, especially considering its close relations with France.

A few words about the "humanism" of the almost European Commonwealth. According to the 2nd (intelligence) department of the General Staff of the Polish Army, in February 1919 - October 1920. more than 146 thousand Red Army soldiers were taken prisoner. The fate of tens of thousands of these people is extremely tragic - they died from inhuman conditions in the concentration camps of the Pilsudski regime, which appeared in Europe much earlier than the Nazis. For example, one of the favorite pastimes of the Polish (the best in Europe) cavalrymen was to put captured Red Army soldiers around the entire huge cavalry parade ground and learn how to “fall apart to the waist” from the entire “heroic” shoulder , at full gallop of a person.

Brave lords chopped down unarmed and exhausted prisoners "on the fly, with a turn." There were many parade grounds for "training" in the cavalry cabin. Just like the death camps. In Bialystok, Pulaw, Brest, Pikulitsa, Korosten, Zhytomyr, Aleksandrov, Lukov, Ostrov Lomzhinsky, Rombertov, Zdunskaya Wola, Torun, Dorohusk, Plock, Radom, Przemysl, Lvov, Friedrichovka, Zvyagel, Domba, Strshalkovo, Tuchol, Baranovichi .. Garrisons of brave cavalry stood in every town. Only in one of the Polish death camps - Tuchola, more than 22 thousand prisoners of war died from the most vile bullying, cane discipline, cold, hunger, epidemics ...

In relation to the occupied territories, Pilsudski pursued a tough policy of Polonization. Orthodox churches were closed. Ukrainian and Belarusian schools and cultural organizations were persecuted. By the mid-1930s, 43% of Belarusians were illiterate, and there were not even two hundred Belarusian students in all of Poland. On June 17, 1934, on the orders of Piłsudski, a new concentration camp was opened in the Brest region, not far from the then border with the USSR, in Bereza Kartuzskaya, this time for political prisoners.

From the memorandum of the Bialystok voivode Ostashevsky to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Poland, entitled "Problems of strengthening the Polish ruling position in the Bialystok Voivodeship":

“Sooner or later, the Belarusian population is subject to Polonization. They are a passive mass, without a broad popular consciousness, without their own state traditions. Wishing to speed up this process, we must overcome the ancient Belarusian culture... In the rural volosts where the Belarusian population lives, the material culture of the Poles must certainly be raised to the highest level. This is one of the fundamental conditions for Polish expansion... In short, our attitude towards the Belarusians can be formulated as follows: we want one thing and insistently demand that this national minority think in Polish - give nothing in return and do nothing in a different direction.

If there is a need to “give something to this population and to interest it in something,” this can only be done with the aim of “so that it thinks in Polish and learns in Polish in the spirit of Polish statehood ... It is necessary to make a decision that every reserve lands or private parceling of Polish estates took place on condition that the lands were transferred into the hands of the Poles and, if possible, to Belarusian elements, then only showing tendencies of Polonization.The proletarianizing Belarusian element, moving from the countryside to the city, is subject to generally faster assimilation there than in the countryside ... The point is not to reduce the land holdings of the Poles, because from the point of view of the country's policy , those in whose hands the land are higher ... "( SAOO GO, f.6195, op.1, d.28, l. 4, 16).

By 1939, all Belarusian schools were finally converted into Polish ones, and two-thirds of the Orthodox churches were turned into churches. “Sprouting crests”, as the Poles called the Belarusian and Ukrainian lands, were just an agrarian and raw material appendage of their country, and also served as a source of cannon fodder. Moreover, the brave gentlemen planned to use it both in the East and in the West.

Thinking of itself as a great power, the second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth dreamed not only of European, but also of African colonies! "Living space" was not enough! From the beginning of 1937, the Poles began to exaggerate the theme of their dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in resolving colonial issues. On April 18, 1938, the whole of Poland widely celebrated the Day of the Colonies. All this was accompanied by mass demonstrations demanding that the great Polish nation be granted overseas colonies. In churches, solemn services were sent on this occasion.

The plans in Europe are eloquently evidenced by an excerpt from the minutes of the meeting No. 25 dated 10/3/1935 at the head of the main headquarters of the Polish Army: “The rule is - we develop the“ East ”, and after that we will try to solve the“ West ”as part of the“ East ” plan.” (Explanation: plan "East" - a plan for war with the USSR, plan "West" - a plan for waging war with Germany.).

In a report dated December 1938, the 2nd Division of the Polish General Staff emphasized:

“The dismemberment of Russia lies at the heart of Polish policy in the East... Therefore, our possible position will be reduced to the following formula: who will take part in the division. Poland must not remain passive at this remarkable historical moment. The task is to prepare well in advance physically and spiritually ... The main goal is the weakening and defeat of Russia” (Z dziejow stosunkow polsko-radzieckich. Studia i materialy. T.lll. Warszawa, 1968. S.262, 287 ).

The USSR could reasonably consider Poland the most hostile state of all with which it bordered directly. In the 1930s within the framework of military planning, the leadership of the Soviet Union proceeded from the fact that Poland, in alliance with Germany, would be the main adversary in the upcoming conflict. The fact is that back in 1932, in the event of a war against the USSR, Poland undertook to put up 60 divisions. By the way, the apotheosis of the formation of Nazi Germany was the conclusion on January 26, 1934 of the German-Polish Treaty "On Friendship and Non-Aggression".

Interestingly, in 1939, the Poles began their mobilization before the Germans. Already on March 22, that is, six months (!) Before the supposedly unexpected and treacherous attack of the Nazis, the beginning of the first partial and covert mobilization (five formations) was announced in Poland in order to provide cover for the mobilization and concentration of the main forces of the Polish army! How successful it was, for example, is evidenced by an entry in the diary of the Chief of the General Staff of the German Land Forces Halder dated August 15:

“Latest data on Poland: Mobilization in Poland will be completed on 27.08. consequently, we will fall behind the Poles with the end of mobilization. In order to complete the mobilization by the same date, we must begin it on 21.08. Then on August 27 our divisions of the 3rd and 4th lines will also be ready.

On August 18, 1939, the Polish ambassador in Paris, J. Lukasiewicz, in a conversation with French Foreign Minister J. Bonnet, boldly declared that "not the Germans, but the Poles will break deep into Germany in the very first days of the war!" “... Dressed in steel and armor, led by Rydz-Smigly, we will march to the Rhine ...” - they sang in Warsaw ... However, for some reason, a few days later, on the very first days of September 1939, the courageous Polish cavalrymen (the best in Europe) quickly tired of chopping German tanks into cabbage. And after they were finally convinced that they were “not made of plywood”, they handed over the land “from mozh to mozh” (from sea to sea) to the “true Aryans” in two days and two weeks.

The reason for such a long delay was that, thanks to the general mobilization, the regiments formed from Belarusians (Baranovichi, Slonim, Lida, etc.), forced to be the first to take the mortal blow of the German troops on the western borders of the Polish "Oichyzna", did not immediately surrender. The brave Polish uhlans at that time more and more often, instead of "Hurrah", shouted the famous "Panove, piss off!". This peppy cry appeared immediately after the panship was convinced that Germany, which had recently been brought to complete poverty and economic collapse by the Western allies, had “so much iron” (for tanks) that the Germans would be able to drive it to Smolensk .

To prevent this from happening, on September 17, when the then Polish government, having abandoned its people, simply fled, and the German army approached Brest and Lvov and stormed Warsaw, the campaign of the Red Army began, ending with the annexation of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine to the Soviet state. D. Lloyd George wrote to the Polish ambassador in London in the autumn of the same year that

“…the USSR occupied territories that are not Polish and which were taken by force by Poland after the First World War…It would be an act of criminal folly to put the Russian advance on a par with the advance of Germany.”

It is highly indicative that at first a different border was planned, running much to the west - along the San and Vistula rivers - but this did not happen at the will of the USSR. The American historian William Shearer wrote in 1959 of Stalin's decision to relinquish Polish territories proper: "Having learned well the lesson of Russia's centuries-old history, Stalin realized that the Polish people would never reconcile themselves to the loss of their independence."

Today's Polish historiography of those events is interesting for its scrupulousness - accuracy, up to ascertaining the degree of courage of one or another lancer and the number of strokes of his saber. Only all this petty detailing does not give an answer to one big and significant question: why did such courageous and desperate lancers in 1919 surrender their very large state by European standards in 1939 in a couple of weeks? For example, they took Minsk in 1919 as easily as they gave away Warsaw in 1939.

The reference to “a stab in the back” and “a war on two fronts”, which has set the teeth on edge, is, to put it mildly, inappropriate. In 1919, this same war on two fronts did not prevent Poland from simultaneously seizing huge chunks of territory both in the East and in the West. Just a fact: by September 1, 1939, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had a mobilized army of 3.5 million. For the entire September period of hostilities, this army lost about 66,300 people (less than 2%) killed and ... surrendered.

As for the “stab in the back”, as the historian J. Gross notes in a monograph published in the USA by Princeton University Press (1988), at the time when the Soviet army entered the land of Western Belarus and Ukraine, the Polish administration on these territories was completely disorganized as a result of the defeat of the Polish troops and the influx of refugees. In turn, the locals “armed themselves against the Poles and the Polish authorities. A large-scale civil war was prevented," the American historian notes, "only thanks to the rapid entry of Soviet troops ...".

As an example of the actions of the Poles themselves, one can cite the suppression of the uprising of the local population in Grodno and Skidel in September 1939 by Polish lancers, gendarmes and ozonists (members of the OZON, an alliance of Polish nationalist parties created in 1935).

The uprisings began on September 17, when Poland as a state no longer existed, and the Polish army was crushed by the military machine of the Reich. The President and the Government of Poland, who fled from Warsaw literally in the very first days of the war, by the middle of the month first ended up in Romania, and from there they fled to Paris, then to London.

The workers of Skidel revolted as soon as they learned that the Red Army had crossed the border of the collapsed Commonwealth. The rebels seized the post office, the police station, and the policemen were disarmed and sent home. They did the same with the soldiers who were in the military echelon at the Skidel railway station ... A few hours later, Polish soldiers appeared in the city, reinforced by a company of Grodno gendarmes ... Great atrocities began in the small town . 30 people were immediately shot by the punishers. They also shot those who just turned up under the arm. Before being shot, they mocked: one had their eyes gouged out, the tongues of others were cut, and the fingers of others were broken with rifle butts.The wounded member of the underground district committee of the KPZB, L. Pochimka, had his ears cut off, his eyes gouged out, and stars were carved on his chest and back.

Then they gathered up to two hundred people. Neither men nor women were distinguished. They drove me to the Orthodox church, forced me to lie face down, beat me on the head with butts, forced me to eat and kiss the ground, shouting: “That is our land, Polish, you can't live on it!” ” While some punishers mocked Belarusians at the temple, others threw grenades and torches at the houses of USSR supporters. The neighbors were not allowed to put out the fire, they were driven away with shots. 19 houses burned down, in some women and children burned alive. But the tragedy of the small town did not end there.

Toward evening, from those two hundred people who had lain all day near the temple, they selected the “most active rebels” and drove them to the shore of Kotra to be shot. When the first five tormented people were snatched out of the crowd of the doomed and placed for execution, a tankette with a red star on board appeared from behind the forest. It was to the rescue of the rebels that a flying detachment led by Captain Chernyavsky hurried to Skidel - two armored cars and two tanks. They were loaded with weapons. The captain armed the peasants from the surrounding villages with these weapons. With their help, Skidel was completely cleared of punishers.