POLITICAL MURDER AND THE VICTORY OF ETHNIC NATIONALISM IN INTERWAR POLAND by Paul Brykczynski A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (History) in the University of Michigan 2013 Doctoral Committee: Professor Brian Porter-Szűcs, Chair Professor Ronald G. Suny Professor Geneviéve Zubrzycki Professor Robert Blobaum, University of West Virginia DEDICATION In memory of my Grandfather, Andrzej Pieczyński, who never talked about patriotism but whose life bore witness to its most beautiful traditions and who, among many other things, taught me both to love the modern history of Poland and to think about it critically. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In a project such as this, there are innumerable people to thank. While I know that this list will never be comprehensive, I will nevertheless do my best to acknowledge at least some of those without whom this work would not have been possible. Most important, there will never be a way to adequately thank my wife and best friend, Andrea, for standing by me 150% through this long and often difficult journey. Working on a PhD certainly has its ups and downs and, without Andrea, I would not have made it through the latter. Her faith in my work and in the path I had chosen never wavered, even when mine occasionally did. With that kind of support, one can accomplish anything one set one’s mind to. An enormous thank you must go to my parents, Mikołaj and Ewa Brykczyński. Despite being uprooted from their culture by the travails of political emigration, they somehow found the strength to raise me with the traditions of the Central European Intelligentsia—that is to say in an environment where books were read, ideas were discussed, and intellectual curiosity was valued and encouraged. Perhaps even more importantly, my whole life I knew that I would have their support and any help I needed, no matter what happened or which path I chose to walk. iii Having grown up as a first generation immigrant without an extended family in North America, I must also thank my life-long friends, who have become my family, and whose support I have relied on for almost two decades. Along with my brother, Andrew Brykczynski, and sister, Małgorzata Popiołek, I must especially mention Daniel Avramov, Adrian Wang, Clifford Farr, Stephen Kawaguchi, and Tristan Nixon. My supervisor and intellectual mentor, Prof. Brian Porter-Szűcs, whose scholarship first inspired me to study Polish history by showing how it can engage themes of universal importance, guided this project from beginning to end in a truly exemplary manner. At the beginning of my studies at the University of Michigan, Prof. Porter-Szűcs provided the structure I needed and, through teaching and example, introduced me to all the critical aspects of academic life. Later, he afforded me an extraordinary degree of trust and freedom, yet was always there the very second I needed his advice. His comments on my work always cut to the very heart of issues I had been struggling to articulate; they have shaped this dissertation, and my development as a scholar, in innumerable ways. I can only wish that every advisor-advisee relationship functioned the way ours did. A very special thank you goes to my intellectual guide and weight lifting buddy, Prof. Ronald Grigor Suny. For the relatively low price of teaching him how to box, Prof. Suny taught me a great many things about history, politics, and life. His friendship got me through some tough moments, especially at the beginning of my studies at Michigan, and his home was always open to me when I lived in Toronto and could only visit Ann Arbor iv for brief spells. He even managed to break down my Polish prejudices and, where many others have failed, succeeded in impressing upon me the true importance of Marx. Prof. Geneviéve Zubrzycki solidified my understanding of nationalism, greatly helped shape the theoretical underpinnings of this project, and was a constant source of advice and support. Prof. Robert Blobaum of the University of West Virginia, liberally shared his great expertise on early 20th century Poland over the last three years. I must also thank Prof. Juan Cole, who supervised my secondary field in Middle Eastern History, Prof. Geoff Eley, who guided me towards my first serious academic publication, as well as Prof. Greg Dowd and Prof. Sueann Caulfield, who introduced me to thinking like a historian. Many faculty members at the University of Toronto also had a great impact on my development as a scholar and, thus, on this work. I cannot overemphasize the extraordinary personal and intellectual debt I owe to Prof. Clifford Orwin, who first made me fall in love with ideas and who taught me how to read critically. Although the subject matter of my inquiry has changed, my approach to reading has in many fundamental ways remained the same. I must also say a special thank you to Prof. Piotr Wróbel, who supported my work in Polish history for almost ten years, and whose advice influenced many aspects of this work. Prof. Lorraine Pangle, now of the University of Texas, was the first person to take an interest in my work and contributed greatly to launching my academic career. v I must also thank my intellectual comrades in graduate programs at the University of Michigan, the University of Toronto, and other institutions. While some graduate students do not like to “talk shop,” I have been privileged to know people who not only became friends, but who cared about ideas and were eager to discuss them. In particular, I have to thank Richard Antaramian, Gabriel Bartlett, Eleanor Bray-Collins, Victor Gomez, Daniel Kupfert Heller, Alicja Kusiak-Brownstein, Anshuman Pandey, Reuven Shlozberg, Jennifer Wallner, and Steve White. And a very special thank you goes out to Josh Mound who, aside from initiating me into the intricacies of American political life and humoring my divagations about Polish history, let me crash at his place during numerous trips to Ann Arbor. A special thank you goes out to the administrative staff at the University of Michigan, especially Kathleen King, Lorna Alstsetter, and Diana Denney. The three of them have saved me an innumerable number of times from a wide variety of administrative disasters, all of them entirely of my own making. Their kind words and warm smiles could always be counted on during my visits to Ann Arbor. I also received a great amount of help and support from my family in Poland. I have to thank my aunts and uncles Jerzy Brykczyński, Małgorzata Brykczyńska, Adam Pieczyński, and Justyna Pochanke, as well as my grandmother Zofia Pieczyńska, who generously and unconditionally opened their homes to me during extended research trips to Warsaw. My aunt Katarzyna Raczkowska, of the Warsaw National Library, single- handedly introduced me to the Polish library and archive systems. My sister, Małgorzata vi Popiołek, a PhD student in Art History at the Technische Universität Berlin, was extraordinarily helpful with the research for this project. A very special mention must also be made of my late uncle Marek Pieczyński, the very first person to hear about and voice support for my idea to write about the murder of Gabriel Narutowicz. A true embodiment of the Central European intellectual, he generously shared not only his personal experience from the interwar years but his extraordinary knowledge of Polish history, literature, and of the human soul. He was the first one to introduce me to many books, such as those of Stanisław Brzozowski and Bernard Singer, which would play a critical role in this project. This work would not have been what it is without him and I can only hope that he would have recognized some of his intellectual and spiritual influence in its pages. While in Warsaw, I have also benefitted from the generous hospitality and great conversations about history, politics, culture, and life with Magda Krawczyk, and the whole Krawczyk clan, Jan Brykczyński, Monika Pieczyńska, Agnieszka Milbrandt, and Jarosław Szczepański. Another thank you must go to all those who read and commented upon sections of this work. Aside from my committee and my family, I must also mention Richard Antaramian, as well as Zev Friedman and Matti Friedman, whose generous comments on my work not only helped to improve it but also convinced me that it may yet find a readership beyond the academe. vii Finally, this work would not have been possible without the generous support of the University of Michigan and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which generously provided the funding for my research and graduate studies. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii LIST OF FIGURES xii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS xiii ABSTRACT xiv CHAPTER I. Introduction 1 II. Polish Nationalism(s) during the Long Nineteenth Century 27 Civic Nationalism and the Legacy of the Commonwealth 28 Socialism, Romanticism, and Józef Piłsudski 34 Ethnic Nationalism and the National Democrats 40 The Imagined Community and the Masses 47 III. Contingent Events and the Evolution of Ethnic Nationalism: The National Democrats 1905-1922 57 Political Anti-Semitism and the Revolution of 1905 58 The Duma Elections and the “Jewish Envoy from Warsaw” 67 ix The Boycott 77 Ethnic Hatred and Contingent Events 82 IV. The Intellectual Underpinnings of Polish Civic Nationalism 1905-1918 91 Piłsudczyks, Socialists, and the Patriotic Left 92 The “National Realism” of Stanisław Brzozowski 98 Adam Skwarczyński and the “Progressive” Justification of Patriotism 108 V. Civic Nationalism and Its Contradictions: The Piłsudczyks 1918-1922 119 National Independence and the Piłsudczyks 120 The “Nationalities Question” 139 The “Jewish Question” 151 The Contradictions of the Civic Nation 162 VI.