This study deals with the question of crisis in the Polish Socialists Worker's Party in the Czechoslovak part of the Teschen Silesia in the years 1934 and 1935. In 1934 Poland arranged a pact on non-aggression with the Nazi Germany. The Polish diplomacy then started sharp propagandist campaign against Czechoslovakia, under the pretext of the Czechoslovak persecution of the Polish minority in the Czechoslovak part of Teschen Silesia. This situation put the Polish socialists in the Czechoslovakia before the dilemma, whether keep the loyalty towards their Polish ethnicity, or towards Czechoslovak democracy, because the ruling regime of so-called 'sanacja' in Poland was authoritative and undemocratic. The aim of this study is to show, how Polish socialists deal themselves with this dilemma. At the preparing of this study were mainly used materials from the Land Archives in Opava, the Moravian Land Archives in Brno, the National Archives in Prague, in the Polish institution 'Biblioteka Slaska' (the Silesian Library) in Katowice and from the press of that time.
This essay describes and analyses the development within the Polish Socialist Workers' Party (Polska Socjalistyczna Partia Robotnicza, PSPR) in the Czechoslovak Tesin area in 1936-1938. This party was one of the three political parties that represented interests of the Polish minority in the Tesin area in the interwar period. In 1934-1935, a dispute broke out between the PSPR and other Polish parties. It was inspired by the start of an anti-Czechoslovak campaign in Poland after signing the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Poland and the Nazi Germany. All the parties, however, resumed their collaboration in 1938 and, in September 1938, when a large section of the Tesin area was annexed by Poland, the PSPR supported this move. The essay clarifies the principle that changed the PSPR leaders' standpoints of in those two years. The PSPR party magazine, the weekly Robotnik Slaski (the Silesian Worker) served as a principal source for writing this essay. As regards archival sources, documents from Czechoslovak offices were used most frequently. They concern materials from the police office in Moravian Ostrava which are deposited in the State Regional Archive in Opava and documents from the Brno Land Office deposited in the Moravian Land Archive.
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