Temporary Commission of Confederated Independence Parties is founded

On 10 November 1912, in Vienna, representatives of the Polish pro-independence parties of Galicia and the Kingdom of Poland formed the Temporary Commission of Confederated Independence Parties. The founding meeting was chaired by Włodzimierz Tetmajer, a painter and a People’s Party deputy to the Vienna parliament. The Commission was to be the joint representation of these parties, to control the rifle organisations and to raise money for an army. Its aim was a single one: when the powers went to war with Russia, to start an armed rising in the Kingdom. It came at a tense moment. The First Balkan War had been under way for a month, and Austria-Hungary and Russia were eyeing each other with growing hostility.

The Zakopane meeting

The way to the agreement was opened by a meeting of supporters of armed struggle, then called “irredentists”, held in Zakopane on 25 and 26 August 1912 with people from the PPS, the Galician Social Democrats and the People’s Party. On the initiative of Józef Piłsudski it set up the Polish Military Treasury (PL), which, chaired by the veteran socialist Bolesław Limanowski (PL), was to raise money for the rifle organisations. The opening speech was given by Władysław Studnicki. “The Bosnian crisis did not end in war, but it did not end in peace either. War is in the air, we must be ready,” he said. In his view the rifle organisations were to provide “the officer corps for our future armed action against Russia”. The Commission itself, however, was set up only in November, in Vienna.

A confederation of parties

According to the Commission’s appeal of December 1912, its members from the Kingdom were the Polish Socialist Party (that is, Piłsudski’s Revolutionary Faction), the National Workers’ Union (PL), the National Peasant Union (PL) and the Union of Independence Intelligentsia (PL), and from Galicia the Polish Social Democratic Party, the Polish Progressive Party (PL) and the Polish People’s Party (PL). The Social Democrats were brought into the agreement by Ignacy Daszyński, against the wishes of some of his party comrades, and the party’s left later attacked him for cooperating with nationalists. Those who took part in the Commission’s work included Leon Wasilewski, Walery Sławek, Witold Jodko-Narkiewicz, Marian Kukiel and Władysław Sikorski, who handled military affairs on behalf of the Progressive Party.

On 1 December 1912 the Commission entrusted Piłsudski with the post of commander-in-chief of the Polish military forces. The Polish Military Treasury, the Riflemen’s Association with the Kraków “Strzelec”, and the Polish Rifle Squads were placed under it. In May 1913 the riflemen’s Headquarters was replaced by the Commission’s Military Department, with Piłsudski as military commandant.

“Whoever wants to be free”

In its December appeal the Commission wrote that the threat of war had “stirred and roused to their depths all the instincts and feelings of the masses of the Polish nation”, and that when war broke out the most terrible fate awaited the Poles: those conscripted into the Russian army would be driven against Poles in the Austrian and German armies “to mutual slaughter”. The parties declared armed struggle against “rapacious Russian tsardom” to be “the nearest, the only possible aim of the armed organisation of the Polish people”. “The liberation of the Kingdom of Poland from Russian bondage – that is our task in a war of the powers against Russia,” the appeal proclaimed, and it ended with the call: “Whoever wants to be free must fight for that freedom himself!” Poles were urged to form organisations preparing for the struggle and to contribute to the Military Treasury.

The Balkan war did not then turn into a war of the powers, but the Commission survived. From 30 November 1913 it was called the Commission of Confederated Independence Parties. In August 1914 its place was taken by the Supreme National Committee.