1 1 71-27,1+89 JANUS, Glenn Alfred, 1940- THE POLISH KOLO, THE RUSSIAN DUMA, AND THE QUESTION OF POLISH AUTONOMY. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1971 History, m o d e m , University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor. Michigan THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN'MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED THE POLISH KO&O, THE RUSSIAN DUT.Ll, AND THE QUESTION OF POLISH AUTONOMY DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for .the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Glenn Alfred Janus, B.A., I*'i.A. The Ohio State University 1971 Approved by Advisor Department of History PLEASE NOTE: Some pages have indistinct print. Filmed as received. UNIVERSITY MICROFILMS. TABLE OF CONTENTS " INTRODUCTION Chapter I. THE RISE OF THE E N D E C J A ................... 9 II. CONGRESS POLAND AND THE I9O5 REVOLUTION . 35 III. THE POLISH KOLO IN THE FIRST DUMA: THE TACTICS OF A "FREE HAND" ........ 55 The Elections to the First Duma The Organization and Tactics of the Polish ‘ Kolo The Polish Kolo and the Autonomy Question The Polish Kolo and the Agrarian Ques üion Summary IV. THE POLISH KOLO IN THE SECOND DUMA: THE "THIRD A G E N T " ......................... Ill The Elections to the Second Duma The Tactics of the Polish Kolo The Polish Kolo and the Agrarian Question The Polish Kolo and the Autonomy Question The School Bill, the Budget, and the Dissolution of the Duma Summary V. THE POLISH KOLO IN THE THIRD DUMA; THE TACTICS OF C O N C I L I A T I O N .............. 1?3 The Elections to the Third Duma The Shift to the Right The Polish Kolo and the Neo-Slav Movement The Failure of Conciliation VI. CONCLUSION.................................. 236 APPENDIX.............................................. 243 BIBLIOGRAPHY.............. '.......................... 246 u INTRODUCTION The Polish parliamentary clubs that emerged in each of the partitioning powers — Austria, Germany, and Russia — during the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries played a significant role in the struggle for Polish national rights. Although the numerical strength, influence, social composition, political views, and tactics of the Polish clubs (Kola Polskie) in Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg differed considerably, each strove to defend and promote the interests of the Polish nation. But the degree to which these clubs succeeded in attaining their objectives was contingent upon the internal political conditions and the political structure of the partitioning empires. The Polish Kolo in Vienna was by far the most successful in the struggle for national rights; Polish politicians in the Reichsrat exerted considerable influence and as early as 1867, they obtained broad autonomy for Polish Galicia. In Berlin and St. Petersburg, however, the Polish Kola were far less influential and successful. Parliamentary systems of government had existed in Austria and Germany for many decades prior to the establish­ ment of a constitutional system in Tsarist Russia during the 1905 Revolution. Although the Russian Duma was not 1 2 a real parliament in the western European sense, Roman Dmowski and the National Democratic Party in Congress Poland welcomed the establishment of the Duma with considerable enthusiasm.^ Dmowski and the Endecja viewed the Duma as an instrument whereby the Poles in Russia could acquire autonomy on the Galician model through constitutional and legal means. When the Polish deputies in the first Duma organized a Ko3ro Polskie in 1 9 0 6, their primary aim was to win autonomy for the Congress Kingdom. The purpose of this paper is to examine the struggle for autonomy by the Ko3to in the Russian Duma and to account for the failure of the Kolo to achieve this objective. From the opening of the first Duma in I9 0 6, until the beginning of the third session of the third Duma late in I9 0 9, the autonomy issue dominated the politics of the Kol’o. But by the end of 19091 the Endecja, whose deputies were a majority in the Kol'o, had abandoned the struggle for autonomy and adopted a policy of conciliatory and "constructive work" within the framework of the existing political system. From this time until the outbreak of World War I, the crucial issues facing the Kolo centered around the anti-Polish legislation initiated by the Stolypin ministry, chiefly the western zemstvos, the Chelm question, and the introduction of urban self-government into the Congress Kingdom. The 1 The more common term Endecja is generally used when referring to the Polish National Democratic Party and. movement (Demokrac.ia Narodowa). For the sake of convenience, the abbreviated and colloquial form will be used throughout this paper. failure of the Koto on the autonomy issue can be attributed to the shortsighted and anti-Polish policies of the Tsarist government, the nationalistic and conservative views of the Russian political parties, and the fact that the Russian constitutional system prevented the Duma from functioning as an independent legislative body and permitted the Tsarist regime to rule in an arbitrary fashion. A second reason for this study is to evaluate the impact of Polish politics in the Duma on the Russian con­ stitutional system. The Polish Kolro emerged as a powerful political force in the second Duma where the creation of a stable bloc of center parties and the passage of legislative measures depended chiefly upon Polish support and votes. The Kolo attempted to exploit these favorable political conditions in order to obtain concessions from the govern­ ment and the Russian parties on the autonomy question. These tactics failed completely and the consequences were disastrous not only for the Poles, but for the Russian constitutional system as well. The Poles were a contrib­ uting factor in the dissolution of the second Duma and the promulgation of a new electoral law in I9 0 7, The latter drastically reduced the Polish representation in the Duma and ensured the election of an overwhelmingly conservative and nationalistic Duma, thereby eliminating the Poles as a factor in Russian politics and removing the possibility of any concessions on the autonomy question. As a frame of reference, this study will focus upon the tactics of the Polish Kolo in the Duma. In the evolution of its tactics, the Kolo had to consider both the attitude of the Tsarist government and the reaction of the Russian political^parties to the question of Polish autonomy. In addition, the international situation as well as political conditions and public opinion in Poland had a direct bearing on the tactics of the Kolo. Finally, there existed a direct relationship between the ideology and program of the Endecja and the politics of the Kolo. While the Kolo claimed to represent all of Polish society, most of its members belonged to the Endecja; consequently, the Kolo and its politics reflected the views of this party. The first chapter of this paper attempts to describe the rise of the Endecja and the chief ideological principles upon which the party based its program. The published and unpublished source materials on the Polish Kolo are diverse and widely scattered. This study has utilized Polish and Russian primary sources available in the United States and in Poland, Among the published documents available, the most important are Gosudarstvennaia duma; stenograficheskie otchetv (State DumaI Stenographic Reports). These documents contain the speeches of the deputies and government ministers, the votes on the various legislative bills, and in brief they provide a documentary account of the activities of the Duma. The Index to the Stenographic Reports also provides a useful listing of the Duma parties and factions and background information on the deputies. The published works of Polish and Russian politicians of this period, also, constitute a valuable collection of primary source materials. Among the most important are the writings of the Endecja politicians and the deputies in the Polish Koioj Roman Dmowski, who served as president of the Polish Kolo in the second and third DumasÎ Jan Stecki; and Wladyslaw Grabski. The unpublished documents of Jan Stecki and Stanislaw Kozicki, both important political figures in the Endecja, were essential for this study. The Stecki papers are located at the Biblioteka Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego (Library of the Catholic University of Lublin) and the Kozicki papers are at the Biblioteka Jagiellonska (Jagiellonian Library) in Krakôw. Although Aleksander Lednicki was not a deputy in the Kolo, his unpublished papers were essential for the chapter on the first Duma; the Lednicki papers are located at the Archiwa Polskie j Akademii Nauk (Archives of the Polish Academy of Science) in Warsaw. The works of Russian politicians give relatively little information on the Kolo, but they do provide general information on the Russian political parties and the actual functioning of the Duma and for these reasons they were quite useful. A final but important category of source materials were the Polish and Russian newspapers for this period. Among the Polish newspapers utilized in this study were Gazeta Polska (The Polish Gazette), the official paper of the Endecja, and Slowo (The Word), the influential and conservative Warsaw paper of the Party of Realnolitik. The Russian newspaper Rech (Speech). which was the official organ of the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party, provides excellent coverage of the Kolo and the Duma, Unfortunately, the archives of the Polish Kolo, which are essential for a definitive study of this subject, are not available. Prior to the Russian revolution in 1917t the archives of the Kolo were kept in St. Petersburg. During the revolutionary upheaval, the Polish deputy Jan Haruszewicz deposited the archives in the Roman Catholic Ecclesiastical Academy in the Russian capital. At the present time, there is no available information on the location of these archives or if they are still in existence.