Steczkowski government

On 4 April 1918 the Regency Council appointed Jan Kanty Steczkowski prime minister (president of ministers) of the Kingdom of Poland, and at the same time minister of the treasury. The appointments of the new cabinet were announced the same day in Monitor Polski. This ended the caretaker government (PL) of Antoni Ponikowski, which since 27 February had been handling current business after Jan Kucharzewski resigned in protest against the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Ukraine.

The new prime minister did not come from the Kingdom. He was born in 1862 in Dąbrowa Tarnowska, was a lawyer and banker in Lviv, from 1913 director of the Galician National Bank, and in May 1917 Emperor Karl made him a hereditary member of the Austrian House of Lords. A conservative, he had advised on financial matters as early as the Provisional Council of State, and in Kucharzewski’s government he was minister of the treasury and organised that ministry. According to his biography in the Polski Słownik Biograficzny, the regents entrusted him with forming a cabinet immediately after the February resignation. In March Steczkowski travelled to Berlin and Vienna for talks, where among other things he pressed for a solution of the Polish question through a personal union of the Kingdom with the Habsburg monarchy. The Germans firmly opposed this. He waited to accept office definitively until the German side denied reports of a Ukrainian commissioner who, under the Brest agreements, was to set up a Ukrainian administration in Podlachia.

The cabinet consisted of: Ponikowski as minister of religious denominations and public education, Jan Stecki as minister of the interior, Józef Higersberger (PL) as minister of justice, Stanisław Dzierzbicki (PL) as minister of agriculture and crown estates, and Jan Zagleniczny (PL) as minister of industry and trade. The physician Witold Chodźko took over the ministry of public health, social welfare and labour protection, which was just being created. The decree establishing it was also dated 4 April, although the ministry formally came into being only in mid-May. The post of minister of food supply remained vacant. The same day the regents appointed Janusz Radziwiłł director of the Department of Political Affairs. The Kingdom had no ministry of foreign affairs of its own, because the occupying powers still did not allow it to conduct an independent foreign policy.

The Steczkowski government’s main task was to build the state within the limits left to it by the occupation. It organised the foundations of the fiscal apparatus and prepared draft financial laws. It sought to expand the Polish Armed Force, a small formation raised under German command. It tried to develop schooling and local self-government, and announced social legislation, the parcelling out of state estates and credits for rebuilding war damage. Its policy assumed that the Central Powers would win the war and that an understanding had to be reached with Berlin. Despite its efforts, therefore, the cabinet failed to win the support of the passivists (PL), the groups that did not believe the occupiers’ promises and pinned their hopes on the Entente. Five days after the appointment, elections were held to the Council of State (PL), in which the passivists won a clear majority of the elected seats.

The cabinet lasted five months. As early as 29 April Steczkowski sent the governments of the Central Powers a secret note demanding a swift and final settlement of the Polish question. He proposed a military alliance and a commercial treaty, and agreed to a border with Ukraine “corresponding to strategic necessities” and to the loss of the four northern districts of the Suwałki governorate in return for compensation east of the Narew and the Biebrza. Berlin ignored it. When in August the Berliner Tageblatt revealed the contents of the note, there was an outcry in the Kingdom, and on 5 September the prime minister had to resign. He continued to head the ministry of the treasury until October.