Provisional Council of State replies to the Provisional Government

On 6 April 1917 the Provisional Council of State in Warsaw took a position on the Russian Provisional Government’s proclamation to the Poles. After considering it, the Council unanimously adopted a statement in which it welcomed Russia’s recognition of Polish independence, but firmly rejected the conditions set by Petrograd. Russia, however, had no authority whatever in Warsaw: since 1915 the Kingdom of Poland had been occupied by German and Austro-Hungarian troops. The Council’s statement was then published by the press, among others by the Kraków daily Czas (PL) of 14 April.

The Council began by recalling that the war had placed the Polish question before the whole world, and that the “sacrificial participation of the Legions” had expressed the nation’s age-old aspirations. The first to understand the need to create a Polish state, it wrote, had been the Central Powers, and the Act of 5 November had brought an independent state into being, although it had not defined its borders. Now the Russian government too granted Poland independence, recognising that “washing away the bloody stain of bondage” was a historical necessity. “But the new Russian authority offers the Poles lands that are not subject to its rule, leaves the determination of the borders of the Polish State to the constituent assembly, and moreover provides for a military union of the two states,” the statement reads. Any compulsory, imposed conditions, in the Council’s view, limited the essence of independence and were incompatible with the honour of a free nation.

The most important passage concerned the eastern lands. The Council welcomed the “flash of freedom” among the peoples of the Russian state and noted with satisfaction that the new government had recognised the principle of Polish independence. It stressed, however, that the age-old Polish-Russian dispute over the vast lands lying between ethnographic Poland and Russia, which had belonged to Poland for centuries, had not been settled. Its resolution could not be left to the arbitrary decision of the Russian constituent assembly. The fate of those lands was to depend on the state interests of independent Poland, taking into account the will of the peoples living there. The Council also set out its aims briefly: a constitutional monarchy, a strong government, a large army. It wished to maintain good neighbourly relations with Russia, but objected to “suggesting the idea” of war with the Central Powers, whose monarchs had guaranteed Poland’s independence. It ended with a call for peace: the independent Polish state, announced by Berlin and Vienna and now recognised by Russia, was to become the basis for opening peace negotiations.

This tone followed from the Council’s position. Its members were exclusively activists (PL), aligned with the Central Powers, and its powers were limited by the occupation authorities. Among its members was also Józef Piłsudski, head of military affairs in its Executive Department, who was clashing ever more sharply with the Germans over the shape of a Polish army. The Warsaw passivists (PL), who sympathised with the Entente, replied differently. In a declaration of 18 April the parties grouped in the Inter-Party Political Circle (PL) joyfully welcomed the overthrow of Tsarism and Russia’s assurance of independence. They too, however, held that the free conclusion of alliances was an attribute of an independent state. They recalled, moreover, that half a year earlier the Central Powers had come out with the slogan of an independent Poland, and in January President Wilson had done so.

Historians assess the statement of 6 April differently. Some stress that the Council received the Russian declaration with satisfaction, others that it played it down because Russia no longer ruled the lands of the Kingdom. Both readings find support in the text. The same day the United States declared war on Germany, and the prospect of an Entente victory was becoming ever more real. In the following months the dispute with the occupiers over a Polish army grew, until in the summer of 1917 it led to the oath crisis and the dissolution of the Council itself.