Lublin government

On the night of 6/7 November 1918 posters with the manifesto of a new authority were put up on the streets of Lublin. It announced the creation of the Provisional People’s Government of the Republic of Poland, headed by the Galician socialist Ignacy Daszyński. The government occupied the building of the former Austro-Hungarian general government, the Lubomirski Palace (PL) on Plac Litewski, and declared itself the authority for the whole of Poland, not just one partition. For the first time since the partitions, a government had been formed on Polish soil that called its state a republic.

Why Lublin

The Habsburg monarchy was falling apart before everyone’s eyes. At the end of October the Austro-Hungarian administration in the Kingdom ceased to function, and the last governor-general in Lublin, General Anton Lipošćak, resigned on 2 November. Poles were taking over power in the towns of the former Austrian occupation zone, as they had a few days earlier in Kraków. In Warsaw, meanwhile, there was confusion. On 4 November the Regency Council dismissed the government of Józef Świeżyński, which the day before had called, without the Council’s consent, for the formation of a national government (an attempt that went down in history as a coup d’état (PL)). Current business was henceforth conducted by the officials’ caretaker government of Władysław Wróblewski (PL).

The pro-independence left did not want to wait for the regents, whom it regarded as a creation of the occupiers. On the night of 1/2 November, at a meeting in the Warsaw flat of Artur Śliwiński, it was decided to form a national government. Lublin was chosen as its seat, already free of Austrian rule and safe thanks to strong units of the Polish Military Organisation (POW). A German garrison was still stationed in Warsaw. By 6 November most of the future ministers were already in Lublin.

Composition and manifesto

The government was made up mainly of members of the Polish Socialist Party, the Galician social democrats and PSL “Wyzwolenie”. Internal affairs were taken on by the peasant-party politician Stanisław Thugutt, labour by the socialist Tomasz Arciszewski, information and propaganda by the writer Wacław Sieroszewski, and communications by Jędrzej Moraczewski. Colonel Edward Rydz-Śmigły, who had led the POW after Piłsudski’s arrest, became minister of war. The first posters also bore the name of the leader of the “Piast” peasant party, Wincenty Witos, but Witos left the night-time session constituting the government on 7/8 November and, after returning to Galicia, announced that he would not sit in it. The full composition was announced only on 8 November.

The manifesto addressed “the Polish People”: peasants, workers and soldiers. It declared that the Polish state, comprising all the lands inhabited by Poles, with its own sea coast, was to be for all time a “Polish People’s Republic”. It announced the immediate dissolution of the Regency Council and the convening, before the year was out, of a Legislative Sejm elected by universal suffrage, with the vote for women. It promised equal rights for all citizens regardless of origin, faith and nationality, freedom of speech, assembly and strikes, the eight-hour working day and secular, free schooling. The most far-reaching reforms, the expropriation of large landed estates and the nationalisation of the mines and part of industry, the government intended to submit to the future Sejm. It was a left-wing programme, but not a Bolshevik one: change was to come by way of law, not revolution.

The first days

POW units helped the government take power in Lublin and in part of the former Austrian occupation zone. The Regency Council’s representatives in Lublin, the commissioner general Juliusz Zdanowski (PL) and General Kajetan Olszewski (PL), were interned, and on 8 November the government announced that it had appointed its own commissioners in more than a dozen districts. It was supported by workers’ councils, among others in the Dąbrowa Basin. The right saw the manifesto as the herald of a social revolution, while the communists of the SDKPiL called it the foundation of a bourgeois state rather than a people’s government.

The Lublin government failed to impose its authority even over the whole of the former Austrian occupation zone. After a few days it gave way to Józef Piłsudski, who had returned from a German prison. It survived, however, in memory as the first attempt to create a unified Polish government, and much of its programme was taken up by the next cabinet. Part of the left still proposes 7 November as the true birthday of the independent state.