Census of the Eastern Lands of the Second Polish Republicin 1919

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to present the process of organization and the results of thecensus carried out in December 1919 in the Eastern Lands of the Second Polish Republic by the Civil Administration of the Eastern Lands. The main tasks of the Civil Administration of the Eastern Lands included the assessment of the size of war losses as well as building the foundations for the Polish administration system in those territories of historical Lithuania that had become a part of the reborn Polish state. Hence the census in 1919. Its results have been of great importance for both the history of statis-tics and the history of Poland. In the main part, they were incorporated into the first gen-eral census of the Polish population carried out by Statistics Poland(GUS) in September 1921. Additionally, those data made it possible to develop a temporary administrative division of the territories incorporated into the Second Polish Republic in 1921, after sign-ing apeace treaty with Russia. They were also used while forming a development plan for the eastern territories of the reborn Poland.