Zarząd Cywilny Ziem Wschodnich : (19 lutego 1919 - 9 września 1920)

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Antroji Lenkijos Respublika; Juzefas Pilsudskis; Rytinių teritorijų civilinė administracija (1919-1920); Rytų politika; The Second Republic of Poland; Jozef Pilsudski; The Civilian; Administration of the Eastern Territories (CAET); Eastern policy; Lithuania; Baltarusija (Belarus).

ENThis work is an attempt to present a certain aspect of Józef Pilsudski’s eastern policy during his time as leader of Poland. An aspect which has hitherto been somewhat overlooked in the extensive literature about this problem. Three of the people in senior positions in the CAET left their testimony behind. Journals of the Civilian Commissioner Ludwik Kolankowski and General Commissioner Jerzy Osmolowski exist. Michał S. Kossakowski, the General Commissioner’s representative in Warsaw and Osmolowski’s acting second in command, is the author of an extensive and priceless diary. After I read their records of the events, I decided not to base my work on them. I assumed that the time and place when the records were made, not to mention the personalities of the authors, undoubtedly influenced the content. Thus I took up the effort to reconstruct the events from chancellery documents that were created during the 1918-1920 period in question in Paris, Warsaw and in Vilnius and the territory of the ex-Grand Duchy of Lithuania. This was largely facilitated by the fact that I managed to reach an extensive collection of CAET documents in the Department of Old Prints and Manuscripts of the Public Library of the Capital City of Warsaw. This institution came to life in 1907 and until 1928 functioned as the National Library. The collection consists of rather haphazard though very interesting documents from the Personal Office of General Commissioner Jerzy Osmolowski, which were evacuated hurriedly from the Borderlands in 1920. It also includes no less fascinating letters and fragments of memos, reports etc. It seems that between 1920 and 1939 those archival documents were in Osmolowski’s possession. In the autumn of 1939, like many other people, he passed his documents to the Public Library. It is worth noting that he had been its patron before the war as well.The collection, taken abroad during the war, came back to the library in Koszykowa Street, where in order to protect it, it was not documented or made accessible to anyone. The librarians assumed, rightly, that a collection that no-one knows about cannot be taken to pieces or transported elsewhere. The intentional disarray of the archival material, made incomplete by fate and people, discouraged queries, which would undoubtedly take up much time and would not necessarily be successful. By the end of the eighties, in a new political reality and under new management, the collection was somewhat arranged by the employees of the Department of Old Prints and Manuscripts. I was the first Polish historian to browse the entire content of more than 24 thousand double sided cards. To get to know the era better, I also used the reports of the Borderland Guard, official correspondence, memos, private correspondence, official government publications, and finally newspapers. To find the elements that created the environment CAET functioned in, apart from the query in the Department of Old Prints and Manuscripts of the Public Library of the Capital City of Warsaw and in the collection of Manuscripts at the National Library in Warsaw, I took up supporting queries in three Warsaw archives (those being the Archives of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Central Military Archives and the Archives of Modem Records) and in five Lithuanian Archives (the Manuscripts Department and the Rare Books Department at the library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, the Manuscripts Department of the Lithuanian National Library, the Lithuanian Archives of Old Documents, the Lithuanian Archives of New Documents and the Manuscripts Department of the Library of the Vilnius University).The work comprises of 500 pages, including extensive footnotes on resources. It also contains large annexes, which are the basis for the calculation that I use for my argumentation in the main text. The text has been separated into 9 main chapters. [From the publication]