Polish sociologist (1858–1916)
Zygmunt Balicki (30 December 1858 in Lublin – 12 September 1916 in Saint Petersburg) was a Polish sociologist, publicist and one of the first leading thinkers of the modern Polish nationalism in the late 19th century under the foreign Partitions of Poland. Balicki developed his original political thought inspired by the ideals of Aleksander Świętochowski from the movement of Positivism which was marked by the attempts at trying to stop the wholesale Russification and Germanization of the Poles ever since the Polish language was banned in reprisal for the January Uprising. Balicki was a key protagonist in the National Democratic campaign of antisemitic agitation.
Life.
Zygmunt Balicki was born on 30 December 1858 in Lublin. His father was Seweryn Tomasz Balicki, and his mother was Karolina Balicka, née Gruszczyńska. The Balickis (Ostoja coat of arms) were an impoverished family of landowners who cultivated patriotic traditions. Zygmunt's grandfather, Józef Balicki, was a cavalryman in the Napoleonic guard. Seweryn Balicki was a clerk in the Lublin governorate administration.
In 1876, with his matriculation examination, Zygmunt graduated from the Male Middle School in Lublin, which was a typical example of the Russification policy of the partitioning government.
After his matriculation examination, Zygmunt took up law studies at St. Petersburg University. At the same time, he attended classes at the St. Petersburg Academy of Painting. Already then, his extraordinary drawing skills became apparent.
During his studies in St. Petersburg, he established contacts with Russian and Polish revolutionary circles. In the case of the former, they were people connected with "Narodnoya Volya". The latter was the "Community of Polish Socialists" in St. Petersburg, which Zygmunt joined with his brother Tadeusz in 1879.
In 1880, after completing his studies in the Russian capital Zygmunt. returned to Warsaw, where he took up a position of a court trainee at the local District Court. There was also a second purpose for his stay in Warsaw. He was commissioned by the Petersburg authorities of the Commune of Polish Socialists to create its structures in the Polish capital.
Already during his studies Balicki became known as a talented organiser. "He was a man of extensive knowledge, great talents and a good speaker, as well as being very handsome and shapely. He also enjoyed the great confidence of his colleagues and was widely liked by his female colleagues. (Hłasko).
There was a discussion within the Polish Socialist Commune on the fundamental issue of whether it was possible to reconcile the programme of the fight for Poland's independence with socialist postulates. Balicki was an ardent advocate of the "independence programme", i.e. focusing the efforts to regain national sovereignty on the broadest possible social base (not excluding the "class of the owners"), and postponing the implementation of the social programme until after the reconstruction of the Polish state.
In February 1881, the tsarist police broke up the Warsaw organization of the Polish Socialist Commune. Zygmunt managed to avoid arrest. He found refuge in Lwów and he continued his political activity in Galicia. He started to cooperate with socialist sympathizers among students of the Lwów universities (University and Polytechnic) as well as the Agricultural Academy in Dublany. He published his first political articles in the socialist biweekly "Praca" [Work] published in the capital of Galicia.
His activity in this field was so dynamic that already in 1882 he was called "one of the leaders of Lwów socialism". (Ignacy Daszyński). This did not escape the attention of the Austrian police, who at the end of 1882 carried out numerous arrests of Lwów socialist activists.
On 10 May 1883 Balicki was sentenced to four months' imprisonment in a trial brought before the National Criminal Court in Lwów against the entire Galician socialist organisation. After serving his sentence, he - formally a subject of the Russian Tsar - was threatened with extradition to the Russian authorities. He awaited his fate in police custody in Lwów. His escape abroad, that was being organised by local socialists, did not succeed.
Eventually, however, the governor of Galicia, Count Alfred Potocki, decided not to extradite Balicki. The decision was replaced by deportation from the Austrian partition and the entire Austro-Hungarian monarchy. By the end of 1883, Balicki left Galicia for Switzerland.
This thirteen-year-long stay in the Helvetian country (initially in Zurich, and later in Geneva) was a time of Balicki's intense political and scientific activity.
He came to Switzerland as a socialist. In Geneva, he became acquainted with the doyen of Polish ("independence") socialism, Bolesław Limanowski. This is how he became active in the Socialist Association "Polish Folk" [Lud Polski], founded in 1881 by Limanowski in Paris.
Parallel to this, Balicki developed his scientific interests in Switzerland. At that time he was focused on completely new fields of knowledge of the era: sociology and social psychology.
In 1896, on the basis of his dissertation "L'Etat, comme organisation coercitive de la societe politique (The State as a coercive organisation of the political society), Balicki obtained a doctorate in law at the University of Geneva. Even before his doctorate, he published treatises on sociology of politics in the international scientific press. In 1895 the "Revue internationale de sociologie" [International Journal of Sociology] published his article "L'organisation spontanee de la societe civile" [Spontaneous organisation of civil society].
A measure of Balicki's recognition as a scientist was his appointment as a correspondent member of the Institut International de Sociologie (International Sociological Institute) in Paris after completing his doctoral degree.
At the beginning of his stay in Switzerland, the question of his membership in freemasonry was widely discussed among his friends and political associates. B. did not deny his membership in one of the Geneva freemasonry lodges. He treated it - as Władysław Jabłonowski reported later - purely pro forma, as a condition for faster acquisition of Swiss citizenship. This in turn was a prerequisite for carrying out scientific activity crowned with a doctorate.
Balicki obtained Swiss citizenship in 1891. At the beginning of this year, on 3 January 1891, he married the thirteen years younger Gabriela Ivanovska, who was studying botany at the Geneva University.
Balicki's material existence in Switzerland was difficult. In this respect it was no different from his "Polish years". He had no permanent employment and earned his living as a casual labourer. His talent as a draughtsman allowed him to earn money, for example, as the author of illustrations for the well-known "Atlas of normal human anatomy", published in 1891 by Professor Zygmunt Laskowski, dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the local university.
The beginning of a political breakthrough in his life was the acquaintance in Switzerland in 1886 with Colonel Zygmunt Miłkowski (literary pseudonym Teodor Tomasz Jeż), a veteran of the January Uprising associated with the democratic wing of Polish emigration. Balicki fully accepted Miłkowski's programme presented in his 1887 booklet "On Active Defence and the National Treasury", around which the Polish League led by Miłkowski was established.
By 1888 at the latest, Balicki was already a member of this organisation. In August 1888, he took part in the convention of the Polish League members in Hilfikon near Zurich, where he co-authored the statute of the organisation. It was thanks to him that Balicki Limanowski joined the Polish League at that time.
His stay in Switzerland did not mean that Balicki broke off his contacts with Poland. In 1886, on the instructions of Miłkowski, he went to Cracow and Warsaw, where he studied the possibilities of political organization of Polish academic youth. During these meetings, Balicki proposed the idea of creating a unified secret organization for all Polish students, both those studying at universities in the divided Poland and those studying outside the Polish territory.
This idea materialized on 14 January 1887 with the establishment of the secret Union of Polish Youth ("Zet") in Krakow. Balicki.'s participation in the establishment of "Zet" was one of his greatest achievements as a political activist. A year after the establishment of the organization, Balicki, as a representative of the Polish League Centralization, led to the formal association of "Zet" with the League.
Although the Union of Polish Youth was "an agglomerate of the most contradictory elements". (Stefan Żeromski), it can be treated as a real forge of cadres of the national-democratic camp. The most important points of "Zet's" political programme were "the independence of Poland and the liberation and nationalisation of the people". (Kozicki).
The organisational structure of "Zet" based on three degrees of initiation ("colleagues", "comrades", "brothers") was the work of Balicki Considering the fact that he joined freemasonry, it was assumed that the structure of secrecy present in Masonic lodges was the prototype.
The strengthening of Balicki's ties with the Polish League and his involvement in the establishment and expansion of "Zet" went hand in hand with his political activity in other fields. In December 1891, he was one of the founders of the Union of Polish Exiles, which referred to the tradition of the Polish Democratic Society in exile.
In 1892 Balicki joined the Foreign Union of Polish Socialists (ZZSP), the parent organisation of the Polish Socialist Party. In the ZZSP, he held the post of treasurer. When in 1894 the convention of the ZZSP decided that it was impossible for its members to belong to other political organisations, Balicki decided to leave its ranks. He thus severed his last organisational links with the socialist movement.
However, this was not only a matter of form. In 1895, in a farewell article published in the socialist "Przedświt", Balicki explained that the reason for his parting with socialism was ideological. He addressed his polemic to the pro-independence direction represented by the PPS, which was dominant in the Polish socialist movement. He accused it of underestimating the significance of the "right to parallelism", which - as he stressed - meant the necessity to combine the struggle for social goals with the struggle for socialism. - meant the necessity to combine the struggle for social and national goals. Balicki also found unacceptable the view fixed in the PPS about the natural leadership of workers in the fight for national liberation.
At the same time, Balicki rejected the thesis formulated by Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz - the main creator of the political thought of the independence trend in Polish socialism - that the struggle for independence favoured socialism, as the yoke of the partitioning power made it impossible to quickly achieve a socialist system. "What if it did? If a foreign government ensured all political freedoms except national ones, would it cease to be a yoke, would the author [Kelles - Krauz] then sell the personal and public dignity of the proletariat and the independence of Poland for thirty pieces of silver with a party stamp?".
When Balicki wrote these words he already belonged to the National League, which was established in 1893 on the initiative of Roman Dmowski, who made domestic activists connected with Miłkowski's organisation independent from the Swiss centralisation of the Polish League. Dmowski's right hand in this undertaking was Balicki himself.
A detailed project of the "Polish League reform" was worked out by Balicki and submitted to Dmowski in Switzerland in the summer of 1892. All the rules of conspiracy were observed. The plan of action regarding the establishment of a new organisation was written down by Balicki in "chemical ink on the reverse side of the album with views of Versailles that Dmowski took home". (Kozicki).
The National League was founded on 1 April 1893 in Warsaw, and during its first years of existence it operated on the basis of a statute authored by Balicki He did not join the highest authorities of the National League until August 1897. The second Congress of the National League General Council held in Budapest elected him a member of the Central Committee of the organization.
Since the establishment of the National League, which coincided with his severance of ties with the socialist movement, Balicki became increasingly involved in the organisational and programmatic development of the nascent All-Polish movement.
An expression of this activity was his participation as a representative of the National League in the 11th session of the Polish National Alliance (ZNP), the largest Polish organization in the United States, held in Cleveland in September 1895. The result of the ZNP deliberations was the establishment of cooperation between the National Treasury in Rapperswil and the National Treasury in Milwaukee. On the initiative of Balicki on 19 September 1895, the "Act of Incorporation of the National League in the United States" was signed in Chicago.
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