Stanislaus Grabski (1871 - 1949)

Born 5 Apr 1871 in Borów n.Bzurą, Borów, Bielawy Łowicz, Łódzkie, Poland

Ancestors

Died 6 May 1949 at age 78 in Sulejówek, Mińsk Mazowiecki, Mazowieckie, Poland

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Biography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Grabski

(note from Christine Gainer Barton: This terrifies me because it mentions an ethnically pure Polish state):

Stanisław Grabski became a political activist early in his life. In 1890 he was the editor of the Workers Gazette in Berlin. In 1892 he co-founded the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) but in 1901 he detached himself from that political movement to become a member of Roman Dmowski's "nationalist" camp (later known as National Democracy).

A member of the National League since 1905, a year later he become one of its leaders. From 1907 he was a member of Dmowski's party, the National-Democratic Party. During World War I Grabski, like Dmowski, supported the idea that Poles should ally with Russia, and later he joined Dmowski's Polish National Committee (Komitet Narodowy Polski) in Paris.

From 1919 to 1925, in newly independent Poland (the Second Polish Republic), he was a deputy to the Sejm (the Polish parliament) from the right-wing National Populist Association (Związek Ludowo-Narodowy).

During the Polish-Soviet War (1919–1921) he strongly opposed the alliance between Poland and the Ukraine (represented by Symon Petlura). He resigned as chair of the parliamentary commission on foreign relations in protest of this alliance.[1] During the negotiations of the Treaty of Riga (1921), where he was a Polish negotiator, he was to a great extent responsible for the disregarding of Ukrainian wishes, with resulting partitioning of Ukraine between Poland and the Soviet Union.[2] This was in contrast to the idea of creation of an independent Ukrainian state, as advocated by one of the architects of the Polish-Ukrainian alliance, Józef Piłsudski.[3][4]

In 1923 and from 1925 to 1926 he was the Minister of Religious Beliefs and Public Education. In that time he further pursued nationalist policies, especially Polonization. He was the architect of the 1924 Lex Grabski, which de facto sought to eliminate the Ukrainian language from Polish schools.[5] These policies resulted in a dramatic increase in Ukrainian private schools and served to alienate Ukrainian youths from Polish authority.[6] In 1926 he was also one of the first Poles to speak on radio, during the Polish Radio inauguration ceremony.[7] He was also one of the principal Polish negotiators for the Concordat of 1925. After Piłsudski's May Coup in 1926 he distanced himself from politics and concentrated on academic research into economics. Before the Second World War, he was a professor at the Lwów University, Dublany Agricultural Academy, and Jagiellonian University.

In the aftermath of the Invasion of Poland of 1939, when the Soviet Union joined the German invasion and took control of Eastern Poland (Kresy), Grabski, like many prominent Polish intellectuals, was arrested by the Soviets and imprisoned. In the aftermath of the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement, he was released and moved to London, where he joined the Polish government in exile. He returned to Poland in 1945. Working closely together with Polish communist Wanda Wasilewska, Grabski (who referred to Stalin as "the greatest realist of all") sought to use Stalin to create a compact and ethnically homogenous Poland and helped to design a program for implementing policies to insure an ethnically pure Polish state. He proposed Polish and Ukrainian resettlement plans to Stalin, and traveled to Lviv in order to urge Poles to leave.[8] He became one of the deputies to the president of the quasi-parliament State National Council, until the new Sejm was elected in the Polish legislative election, 1947. Afterwards he returned to his teaching career, becoming a professor at the University of Warsaw. He died in Sulejówek and was buried at Powązki Cemetery in the family grave of the Grabski family.

Quotes

"We want to base our relationships on love, but there is one kind of love for countrymen and another for aliens. Their percentage among us is definitely too high (...) The foreign element will have to see if it will not be better off elsewhere. Polish land for the Poles!" (1919)[9]

"The transformation of the state territory of the Republic into a Polish national territory is a necessary condition of maintaining our frontiers."[10]

Sources

• Wikipedia