The collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917 and the near simultaneous collapses of the Prussian and Austrian Empires in 1918 produced a sudden outpouring of nationalist sentiment among nations and peoples that had lived more or less peacefully (if not always happily) under foreign rule for a century or more. One product of this great, war's-end movement was, as we have seen, Poland. But Poland was not alone. Bolshevism, remnants of the Junkers—the old Prusso-Baltic nobility—and Germany's terroristic freikorps threatened smaller, less internationally recognized, less thoroughly militarized states even more than they threatened Poland. To the myriad smaller nationalities that had once been part of the great, multiethnic empires, moreover, Poland was at least as great a threat as Prussian militarism or Russian Bolshevism. The imperial systems of Central and Eastern Europe had often favored minorities. At the very least, they had kept more numerous (and thus more politically unreliable) ethnic rivals from gaining any overwhelming dominance in public life. Now, those restraints were gone, and no equivalent, Western European restraints, such as the embryonic League of Nations, were yet in place. The Poles were, moreover, after rather more than independence and self-determination. They wanted an empire of their own, with all territories that had ever been ruled by Poland, including Lithuania and the Ukraine, again under Polish control. The Poles seemed bent on restoring all the old inequalities but, this time, with themselves the main beneficiaries.
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