Provisional Government proclamation to the Poles

On 30 March 1917 (17 March by the Julian calendar) the official gazette of the Russian Provisional Government published a proclamation beginning with the word “Poles”. Russia, which for a century and a half had ruled the greater part of the Polish lands, for the first time officially recognised the Poles’ right to an independent state, formed “from all the lands inhabited by a majority of the Polish people”. This state was, however, to be joined to Russia by a “free military alliance”, and the changes to Russia’s borders needed to create it were to be approved by the Russian Constituent Assembly. The proclamation was the most important act on the Polish question since the manifesto of the two emperors of November 1916, and the answer to it from the new, post-revolutionary Russia.

Two dates

The government adopted the text a day earlier. At a session that began on 29 March (16 March Old Style) at 10 p.m., the Foreign Minister Pavel Milyukov presented the draft proclamation, and the ministers present, with the Prime Minister, Prince Georgy Lvov, decided to issue it. The next day it appeared in the Vestnik Vremennogo Pravitelstva, signed by all members of the government. This is why Polish accounts date the proclamation to 29 or 30 March: the first is the day it was adopted, the second the day it was published.

The government did not act in a vacuum. Three days earlier, on 27 March, the Petrograd Soviet had recognised in a short appeal Poland’s right to complete independence, without any conditions. Since mid-March the ministers had shared power with the Soviet, and its appeal put pressure on them. According to some Russian historians it directly influenced the government’s decision. They also had to take account of Allied opinion. In January the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, had spoken out in the Senate for a united and independent Poland, and Polish politicians in Petrograd had acquaintances in the new government. The Moscow lawyer Aleksander Lednicki (PL), a deputy to the First Duma, had been one of the founders of the Kadet party, from which several ministers, Milyukov at their head, came, and in 1916 he belonged to the Petrograd Circle of Friends of Polish Independence. After the February Revolution Polish circles in Russia were waiting for a clear declaration. Authorship of the text is attributed to Milyukov, the leader of the Kadets and at the same time an advocate of Russia annexing Constantinople and the Straits.

What the proclamation promised

The proclamation began with a reckoning with the past. Russia’s old state order, “the source of our and your enslavement and division”, had been overthrown for ever, and free Russia, in the person of the Provisional Government, “hastens with a fraternal greeting”. The old authorities had given the Poles “hypocritical promises”, which they could have kept but did not want to. The Central Powers had exploited their mistakes to occupy and devastate the country, and had given the Poles “illusory state rights”, and not even to the whole nation, but only to one part of Poland, temporarily occupied by the enemy. With this price they had wanted to buy the blood of a nation that had never fought in defence of despotism. “Nor will the Polish army now go to fight for the cause of oppressing freedom, for the division of its fatherland, under the command of its age-old enemy,” the government assured.

The most important passage read: “Faithful to its agreements with its allies, faithful to the common plan with them of struggle against militant Germanism, the Provisional Government regards the creation of an independent Polish state, formed from all the lands inhabited by a majority of the Polish people, as a sure guarantee of lasting peace in the future renewed Europe. Joined to Russia by a free military alliance, the Polish state will be a firm bulwark against the pressure of the Central Powers on the Slavs.” Poland’s system of government was to be determined by the liberated and united Polish nation itself, through a constituent assembly convened in the Polish capital and elected by universal suffrage. The government expressed the hope that the peoples bound to Poland by centuries of common life would at the same time receive lasting guarantees of their civil and national existence.

Russia kept the last word on the borders for itself. The All-Russian Constituent Assembly was “finally to seal the new fraternal union” and to consent to those changes to the territory of the Russian state that were needed to create a free Poland from all three of its now divided parts. The proclamation ended with a call to the Poles to accept the “fraternal hand” of free Russia, and with the old slogan: “Forward to the struggle, shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand, for our freedom and yours.”

The Act of 5 November and the March proclamation

The comparison with the manifesto of the emperors of Germany and Austria-Hungary suggested itself, especially as the proclamation referred directly to the German “illusory state rights”. The Act of 5 November had announced a “self-governing” rather than an independent state, without a king, government or borders, and only from lands taken from Russia. The March proclamation spoke plainly of independence and of uniting all three partitions, and therefore also the Polish lands in Germany and Austria-Hungary. Russia was thereby renouncing what tsarist diplomacy had regarded as self-evident. As late as December 1916 Tsar Nicholas II had written of a free Poland, but everyone understood that he meant a Poland under his sceptre.

The reservations were, however, serious. The military alliance with Russia was called “free”, but it was a condition written in advance into the founding act of the new state. The formula of lands “inhabited by a majority of the Polish people” left out the lands of the old Commonwealth in the east in which the Poles were not a majority, and handed the decision on the borders to the Russian constituent assembly. Both proclamations also shared a weakness: they concerned lands their authors did not control. Since 1915 the Kingdom of Poland had been occupied by German and Austro-Hungarian troops, and Russia’s promise could only be fulfilled after an Entente victory.

The Liquidation Commission

The words were followed by the first practical decisions. In the same days the Provisional Government set up the Liquidation Commission for the Affairs of the Kingdom of Poland (PL), headed by Lednicki. Accounts give various dates for its creation, from the end of March. The commission was to wind up the remnants of the Russian administration of the Kingdom, which had been evacuated into the interior of Russia in 1915, prepare material for property settlements between Poland and Russia, and look after Polish property, refugees and prisoners of war. It included Polish Duma deputies, representatives of Polish organisations in Russia and officials of Russian ministries. Its chairman had the powers of a minister. In practice the commission became the first official representation of Polish interests with the Russian government, although it was soon divided by disputes between Lednicki’s supporters and the National Democrats.

Reactions

According to estimates there were then about three million Poles in Russia: refugees from 1915, workers, officials and soldiers of the Russian army. In their circles the proclamation was greeted with enthusiasm. For the politicians who since the beginning of the war had tied the Polish cause to Russia and the Entente, it was proof that this road led to the goal. The leader of this camp, Roman Dmowski, was then working in London. In March, even before the proclamation was issued, he had presented to the British Foreign Office a memorandum on rebuilding a strong Poland from all three partitions as a barrier against Germany. As long as Russia treated the Polish question as its internal affair, the Allies avoided raising it. The March proclamation removed this restriction.

The governments of Britain, France and Italy welcomed the declaration and said so in notes to the Russian foreign ministry. According to historians, however, London and Paris viewed with reserve the military alliance that limited the sovereignty of the future Poland. For many months the Western powers, anxious to preserve unity with Russia, did not go beyond its March formula in their political declarations.

In occupied Warsaw the proclamation meant that both sides in the war were promising the Poles a state, and that Russia was promising more than the occupiers. The Provisional Council of State, set up by the occupiers, replied only on 6 April. It declared that the proclamation had not settled the age-old Polish–Russian dispute over the vast lands lying between ethnographic Poland and Russia, and firmly rejected the idea that it should be settled unilaterally by a Russian constituent assembly. The fate of these lands was to depend on the interests of an independent Poland and on the will of the peoples living there. Historians judge the tone of this reply differently: according to some the Council welcomed the Russian declaration itself, according to others it played it down, since Russia no longer ruled the lands of the Kingdom. For Józef Piłsudski, a member of the Council, the revolution in Russia and the Russian declaration meant even more. According to his biographers he concluded that tsarist Russia, the main adversary in his calculations so far, had ceased to threaten the Polish cause, and he increasingly saw the main obstacle in Germany, which wanted a Polish army without a Polish government. In the summer of 1917 this led to his break with the occupiers.

Significance

The Provisional Government’s proclamation did not give the Poles a single soldier, office or kilometre of land. It nevertheless had enormous political significance. The power that since the partitions had insisted most stubbornly that the Polish question was its internal affair had itself recognised Poland’s right to independence. The Polish question became a matter for the whole coalition, and the Western Allies could from then on speak openly of an independent Poland without offending Russia. The dispute over the eastern borders, foreshadowed in the proclamation, returned in full force after the war. Russia itself ceased within a year to be an ally of the Entente, but its March declaration could no longer be withdrawn.