Wincenty Witos: the peasant who led Poland's Government of National Defense

Few politicians of the Second Polish Republic came from as far below as Wincenty Witos. Born into a poor peasant family in a Galician village, he rose through village and regional politics to the parliaments of Lwów and Vienna, chaired the first Polish authority in Kraków in October 1918 and in the summer of 1920 led the coalition Government of National Defense during the decisive weeks of the Polish-Soviet War. Six years later his third government fell to Józef Piłsudski's coup. He was jailed in the Brest fortress, convicted, driven into exile, held by the Germans and courted by the communists, and he died in Kraków on 31 October 1945.²

Early life in Wierzchosławice

Witos was born on 21 January 1874 in Wierzchosławice, a village near Tarnów in the Austrian province of Galicia, into a poor peasant family. He had little formal schooling, and through stubbornness and self-education he rose, in the words of a 2023 Sejm resolution, to the highest honors in the peasant movement and the state.³

His political education came from reading. In his late teens he discovered the peasant press, and he soon wrote for the peasant weekly Przyjaciel Ludu (The People's Friend) himself. Reading and learning on his own remained a habit for the rest of his life.⁴

The Galician peasant movement and PSL "Piast"

Witos grew up with the Galician peasant movement. He joined the People's Party (Stronnictwo Ludowe) as a young man, and he began as a correspondent of the peasant press and an organizer in his home commune.⁵

His career followed the classic path of a peasant activist. In 1908 he became wójt (head) of the rural commune of Wierzchosławice, a post he kept for more than two decades, even as a national politician, and the same year he was elected to the Galician Diet in Lwów. In 1911 he won a seat in the Austrian parliament, the Reichsrat in Vienna.⁶

After the party split in 1913, Witos became one of the leaders of the new Polish People's Party "Piast" (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe "Piast", PSL "Piast"), and for years he was its most prominent figure. He chaired it without a break from the recovery of independence until the peasant parties merged in 1931.⁷

World War I and the Polish Liquidation Commission

When war broke out in 1914, Witos and his party first put their hopes in Austria-Hungary, like Piłsudski, and supported the Polish Legions through the Supreme National Committee in Kraków. Over the following years he moved away from the Habsburg option and closer to National Democracy, the camp that backed the Entente.⁸ › Roman Dmowski

In February 1918, when the Central Powers handed the Chełm region and part of Podlasie to the Ukrainian People's Republic in the treaty of Brest, Witos called it the "fourth partition of Poland".⁹

As Austria-Hungary collapsed, Polish deputies set up the Polish Liquidation Commission (Polska Komisja Likwidacyjna) in Kraków on 28 October 1918, in effect a Polish regional government for western Galicia, and Witos became its chairman. The commission worked to keep the whole of Galicia for the future Polish state, including the east, where the Ukrainian national movement had its own plans and took up arms in Lwów.¹⁰ › The Polish-Ukrainian War, 1918 to 1919

The commission also faced a revolt on the left. In the Tarnobrzeg area radical agitators, among them the priest Eugeniusz Okoń, led peasants in seizing and dividing manor land. Witos opposed the communists and the radicals around Okoń, and the commission moved against them.¹¹

From Kraków to Warsaw, 1918 to 1919

Witos was offered a post in the first national government, the socialist Provisional People's Government of Ignacy Daszyński in Lublin, and he turned it down. Łazuga notes that he kept his distance from the socialists and was wary of Daszyński.¹²

In 1919 he entered the Legislative Sejm as leader of PSL "Piast", one of the most important parliamentary groups.¹³

The Government of National Defense, July 1920

In the summer of 1920 the Red Army, after turning back Piłsudski's Kiev offensive, advanced on Warsaw. On 1 July 1920 the Sejm passed an act creating the Council of State Defense (Rada Obrony Państwa), chaired by the head of state, with the marshal of the Sejm, the prime minister, ten deputies chosen by the Sejm, three ministers and three representatives of the army, to decide quickly on all matters of war and peace.¹⁴

The Sejm also turned to the peasants, who formed most of the army. On 15 July 1920 it unanimously passed the act on the implementation of land reform. The act gave priority in buying parceled land to war invalids and soldiers of the Polish army, especially volunteers and those with long service at the front, while those who refused to serve or seized land on their own lost that right.¹⁵

The new government was formed on 24 July 1920. Witos became prime minister and the socialist leader Ignacy Daszyński deputy prime minister, in a broad coalition of the parliamentary parties, and Leopold Skulski took the interior ministry. In his exposé to the Sejm the same day Witos named the program in a few words: defense of the state, an end to the war and a just and lasting peace.¹⁶

The choice had a symbolic side. Against a Red Army that claimed to bring liberation to the workers and peasants of Poland stood a government led by a peasant, at the head of an army raised mostly from the villages.¹⁷

What did the Government of National Defense do?

Its first task was to win the countryside for the war. On 30 July 1920 Witos issued an appeal to the peasants, "Brothers Peasants in All Polish Lands", printed, according to Janusz Szczepański, in several million copies. "Whoever of you is fit to bear arms, to the front!" it said. "Today the greatest duty of every Pole is service in defense of the Fatherland."¹⁸

He followed it with appeals to the nation and to the army. Committees for the Defense of the State were set up in counties and communes, deputies of all parties held rallies in the villages, and General Józef Haller's Volunteer Army took in volunteers.¹⁹ › Józef Haller

Further age groups were called up, and the Council of State Defense issued a stream of emergency regulations for the war effort.²⁰

The villages did not respond as one. Reports reaching Warsaw spoke of peasants avoiding the draft, sheltering deserters and listening to communist agitation. Janusz Szczepański concludes that only the formation of the Witos government clearly strengthened the villages' commitment to the defense of the state.²¹

Witos and Piłsudski in August 1920

The crisis came in August, as the Red Army approached the capital. The authorities prepared the evacuation of offices and civilians, and the Council of State Defense set up a central evacuation committee, but Witos refused to leave the threatened capital.²²

According to Marcin Bukała, around 10 or 11 August, fearing the outcome of the fighting, Piłsudski handed Witos a written resignation as head of state, and Witos returned it to him once the danger had passed.²³

During the Battle of Warsaw the prime minister went out to the front and visited the troops near Radzymin.²⁴

On 12 October 1920 Polish and Soviet delegates signed the armistice and preliminary peace at Riga, and the fighting soon stopped. Jacek Goclon argues that the Witos government, through its members in the peace delegation, had a real influence on the terms later fixed in the Treaty of Riga.²⁵

For his leadership of the Government of National Defense, Piłsudski later awarded Witos the Order of the White Eagle.²⁶

Prime minister again: 1923 and May 1926

Witos's second government was formed at the end of May 1923 after a coalition pact between PSL "Piast", the National Democrats and the Christian Democrats, and it soon earned the somewhat pejorative nickname "Chjeno-Piast". It faced runaway inflation and a wave of strikes, and on 6 November 1923 demonstrators and troops fought bloody clashes in Kraków. The cabinet resigned in December 1923.²⁷

On 10 May 1926 President Stanisław Wojciechowski appointed Witos prime minister for the third time, at the head of the same center-right coalition. The left and Piłsudski's supporters attacked the cabinet at once and accused Witos of aiming at a right-wing dictatorship. On 12 May Piłsudski marched on Warsaw at the head of loyal troops, and after the fighting Witos's government resigned to stop the bloodshed and prevent a civil war.²⁸ › Józef Piłsudski

The two men's ideas were not as far apart as the coup suggests. Witos himself argued that the constitution gave the Sejm too much power and called for a stronger president, and in August 1926 his party backed the government's constitutional amendment that strengthened the executive. For Witos this was a reform within parliamentary democracy, while Piłsudski, in Tomasz Bereza's reading, treated it as a stage on the way to authoritarian rule.²⁹

Centrolew, Brest and the trial

In 1929 Witos was one of the founders and leaders of the Centrolew, an alliance of center and left parties in defense of parliamentary government, and he was among the main speakers at its congress in June 1930, which demanded the end of Piłsudski's dictatorship.³⁰

In September 1930, after the Sejm had been dissolved, Witos and other leaders of the Centrolew were arrested and taken to the military prison in the Brest fortress, where they were beaten and humiliated.³¹

Eleven politicians were charged with preparing to overthrow the government by force, and their trial, known in Poland as the Brest trial, opened before the District Court in Warsaw in October 1931.³²

Witos answered the charges in a speech that became famous for one line: he had headed the government overthrown by a coup, so "someone else made the coup", yet he was the one in the dock.³³

In January 1932 the court sentenced Witos to a year and a half in prison. In July 1933 the Court of Appeal in Warsaw upheld the verdict.³⁴

Exile in Czechoslovakia, 1933 to 1939

Rather than go to prison, Witos crossed the border illegally at the end of September 1933 and went into political exile in Czechoslovakia, where he could count on the help of the Czechoslovak Agrarian Party. He remained the formal leader of the united People's Party (Stronnictwo Ludowe), which elected him in his absence, and he kept in touch with other exiles, among them Wojciech Korfanty.³⁵ › Wojciech Korfanty

He took part in the talks with Władysław Sikorski and Ignacy Paderewski on a broad anti-Sanacja front, which came to little. At home, peasants at a rally in Nowosielce in 1936 called for his return, and in 1937 a wave of peasant strikes swept the country.³⁶

When German troops occupied the Czech lands in March 1939, the Germans tried to make contact with him, counting on a coup in Poland that would put him at the head of a government. Witos returned to Poland at the end of March 1939.³⁷

In the spring and summer of 1939 he told the peasants that they were to serve the state "whatever the government".³⁸

Under German occupation

His wife Katarzyna died at the end of August 1939, and he buried her in Wierzchosławice as the war began. In September 1939 he was arrested by the Germans and held in prisons in Jarosław, Rzeszów and elsewhere.³⁹

The occupiers tried to win him over. Mateusz Szpytma writes that in Berlin they sounded him out about heading a puppet Polish government, and Witos refused to form any collaborationist government.⁴⁰

In March 1941 he was released and allowed to return to Wierzchosławice, where he lived until the end of the occupation under the watch of the Gestapo.⁴¹

1945: the communists' offer and his death

For the communist authorities installed by Moscow, Witos was too important to ignore. In the spring of 1945 an NKVD group took him from his home to Warsaw, where he was pressed to cooperate with the Provisional Government, and he refused repeatedly.⁴²

Without his agreement he was named deputy chairman of the State National Council (KRN), Bolesław Bierut's body, and he took no part in its work. He lent his authority instead to the new Polish People's Party (PSL), formed in 1945 in opposition to the communists, and he stood at its head.⁴³

In poor health, he spent his last months largely in hospital and died in Kraków on 31 October 1945. On 3 November the funeral cortege left Kraków for Wierzchosławice, where about 100,000 people attended the burial.⁴⁴

Memoirs, museum and the 2023 acquittal

Witos left extensive memoirs. Moje wspomnienia (My Memoirs) first appeared in Paris in the 1960s, in three volumes published by the émigré Kultura. Arkadiusz Kołodziejczyk calls them a first-rate, if subjective, source for the history of the Galician village, the peasant movement and the Second Republic.⁴⁵

His memory was kept alive by peasant activists. Thanks to the efforts of Stanisław Mierzwa and the Witos family, the museum in Wierzchosławice was established in 1971. It comprises the family house of 1814, where Witos was born, and the farm he built himself, and today it is a branch of the Museum of the Tarnów Land.⁴⁶

The Brest verdict stood for ninety years. In 2020, at the request of the Polish People's Party, the Commissioner for Human Rights, Adam Bodnar, filed a cassation, and in May 2023 the Supreme Court acquitted Witos and the other nine convicted politicians, finding that their activity in the Centrolew had been lawful political opposition.⁴⁷

The state now honors him as one of its founders. A 2017 act of the Sejm placed him among the fathers of Polish independence, and for the 150th anniversary of his birth both the Sejm and the Senate declared 2024 the Year of Wincenty Witos.⁴⁸

Historians still argue over the man. Waldemar Łazuga sees not only a tribune of the people but also a shrewd parliamentary tactician, a man of "small Machiavellianisms" in the lobbies. Both readings meet in 1920, when a self-taught farmer from Wierzchosławice became the face of a nation defending its independence.⁴⁹