The preconditions were not promising. The Polish political parties were legendary for their infighting. A deep fissure ran between the ethnic nationalism of the National Democrats predominant in Russian Poland, whose chauvinism and anti-Semitism were notorious, and the more progressive nationalism of Austrian and German Poland, whose leading figurehead was the renegade socialist Jozef Pilsudski.43 Their bitter disagreements spilled over into an adventurist foreign policy that led Poland to wage no fewer than six wars between 1918 and 1920, including attacks on the Baltic states, the Ukraine
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