Second Polish Republic

The Second Polish Republic, officially the Republic of Poland, was the Polish state that existed between 7 October 1918 and 6 October 1939, founded in the last stage of the Great War. It was taken in 1939 on the eve of its twenty-first anniversary, invaded by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and the Slovak Republic at the opening of the European war, and its government went into exile in Paris and then London. After the regional wars, above all the victorious war against Soviet Russia, the borders were fixed in 1922: Czechoslovakia, Germany, the Free City of Danzig, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania and the Soviet Union stood around it, and the Polish Corridor at Gdynia gave it the Baltic Sea. In 1938 it was the sixth country of Europe, with 25.7 million people in 1921 and 35.1 million in 1939, almost a third of them minorities. Jozef Pilsudski, who returned with a coup in 1926, ruled to 1935, and an authoritarian constitution followed in that spring.