Józef Piłsudski

• 1. Introduction

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  Józef Piłsudski was 40 degrees below zero on the first night of his imprisonment in Siberia. That single night nearly killed him, and the health problems it caused would follow him for the rest of his life. What makes that fact remarkable is that Piłsudski was only sent to Siberia because his brother Bronisław had plotted to assassinate a tsar, and Piłsudski happened to be connected to the same group of Vilnius socialists. From that frozen cell to the corridors of Warsaw's Belweder Palace, Piłsudski's life traces an improbable arc: from a sickly exile to the man who rebuilt Poland after 123 years of partition and then repelled a Soviet army that had declared its intention to march on Paris and London.

  The questions his life raises are still contested. Was he a liberator or a dictator? A military genius or a glorified gambler who got lucky at Warsaw? A defender of minorities or an authoritarian who imprisoned his opponents at a place called Bereza Kartuska? The answers are not simple, and they reveal something essential about how nations are made and unmade.

• 2. The Making of a Revolutionary

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  The Piłsudski family manor at Zułowo had been under Russian Imperial rule since 1795, the same year Poland was partitioned out of existence. That geography shaped Józef from childhood. His mother Maria, from the wealthy Billewicz family, introduced him and his brothers Bronisław, Adam, and Jan to Polish history and literature at a time when the Imperial authorities actively suppressed both.

  His father, also named Józef, had fought in the January 1863 Uprising against Russia. The family resented the Russification policies of the Empire, and young Józef profoundly disliked attending Russian Orthodox Church services. He left school carrying an aversion to the Russian tsar, its empire, and its culture that would define his politics for the next four decades.

  At Kharkov University in 1885, he became involved with Narodnaya Volya, a Russian Narodnik revolutionary movement, and was suspended for participating in student demonstrations. The University of Dorpat rejected him after being informed of his political affiliations. On the 22nd of March 1887, Tsarist authorities arrested him on charges of plotting to assassinate Tsar Alexander III. His main connection to the plot was through Bronisław. He was sentenced to five years in Siberia, first at Kirensk on the Lena River, then at Tunka.

  In Siberia, local officials ruled that as a Polish noble, Piłsudski was not entitled to the standard 10-ruble pension received by other exiles. He tutored local children in mathematics and languages instead, speaking French, German, Lithuanian, Russian, and Polish. He would later add English. The exile introduced him to the Sybiraks, communities of people forcibly displaced to the region, and gave him a lasting sense of how the Russian Empire used geography as a weapon.

• 3. Underground Organizer

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  Back in Poland in 1892, Piłsudski settled at Adomavas Manor near Teneniai and in 1893 joined the Polish Socialist Party. By 1894 he was editing an underground newspaper called Robotnik, meaning The Worker, and also serving as one of its chief writers and a typesetter. The printing press was hidden in the apartment he shared with his wife, Maria Juszkiewiczowa, first in Vilnius and then in Łódź.

  The marriage, according to his biographer Wacław Jędrzejewicz, was less romantic than pragmatic. Russian law protected a wife from prosecution for the illegal activities of her husband, and a pretext of regular family life made the couple less suspicious to authorities.

  In February 1900, Russian authorities found the Robotnik printing press in Łódź and imprisoned Piłsudski at the Warsaw Citadel. In May 1901, he feigned mental illness and escaped from a hospital in Saint Petersburg with the help of a Polish physician, Władysław Mazurkiewicz. He fled to Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary, and eventually reached Leytonstone in London, staying with Leon Wasilewski and his family.

  By 1895, Piłsudski had become a PPS leader, arguing that socialist doctrine was less important than nationalist goals and that the two ideologies should be merged because the combination offered the greatest chance of restoring Polish independence. On the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in the summer of 1904, he traveled to Tokyo to seek Japan's assistance for an uprising in Poland, meeting with Yamagata Aritomo. His arch-rival Roman Dmowski also traveled to Japan to argue against the plan, and the Japanese government remained skeptical; Piłsudski received help purchasing weapons and ammunition for the PPS but Japan declined his proposal for a Polish Legion drawn from Poles captured from the Russian Army.

• 4. Building a Secret Army

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  In 1906, with the connivance of Austrian authorities, Piłsudski founded a military school in Kraków to train paramilitary units. That year alone, his 800-strong paramilitaries, operating in five-man teams across Congress Poland, killed 336 Russian officials. In subsequent years, the numbers of their casualties declined but the paramilitaries' membership grew to around 2,000 by 1908.

  On the night of the 26th to the 27th of September 1908, Piłsudski personally took part in the Bezdany raid near Vilnius, robbing a Russian mail train carrying tax revenues from Warsaw to Saint Petersburg. The funds totaled 200,812 rubles, a sum the source describes as a fortune that equaled the paramilitaries' entire income for the two preceding years. The money financed Piłsudski's secret military organization.

  Also in 1908, he transformed his paramilitary units into the Union of Active Struggle, headed by three associates: Władysław Sikorski, Marian Kukiel, and Kazimierz Sosnkowski. Their main purpose was officer training for a future Polish Army. By 1910, two legal paramilitary organizations were operating in the Austrian partition of Poland, one in Lwów and one in Kraków, under cover as sporting clubs and eventually as the Riflemen's Association. By 1914, the Riflemen's Association had grown to 12,000 men.

  Piłsudski's prediction, made in 1914 during a Paris lecture, turned out to be strikingly accurate: for Poland to regain independence, Russia would need to be beaten by the Central Powers and the Central Powers would in turn need to be beaten by France, Britain, and the United States. Both halves of that prediction came true.

• 5. War, Imprisonment, and Return

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  On the 3rd of August 1914, in Kraków, Piłsudski formed the First Cadre Company from members of the Riflemen's Association and Polish Rifle Squads. A cavalry unit under Władysław Belina-Prażmowski crossed the Russian border that same day, before Austria-Hungary had even formally declared war on Russia, which happened on the 6th of August. Piłsudski's strategy was to break through to Warsaw and spark a nationwide revolution, backing his orders with a fictitious "National Government in Warsaw" to give his actions the appearance of legitimacy.

  On the 27th of August 1914, he established the Polish Legions within the Austro-Hungarian Army and took personal command of their 1st Brigade. He decreed that Legions' personnel were to be addressed using the French Revolution-inspired term "Citizen" (Obywatel), and he was referred to simply as "the Commandant." After the Battle of Kostiuchnówka in mid-1916, in which the Polish Legions delayed a Russian offensive at a cost of over 2,000 casualties, Piłsudski demanded that the Central Powers guarantee Polish independence, backing the demand with his own threatened resignation and that of many of the Legions' officers.

  On the 5th of November 1916, the Central Powers proclaimed Polish independence, hoping to recruit more Polish troops for the Eastern Front. The arrangement did not last. After refusing to let Polish soldiers swear loyalty to Kaiser Wilhelm II in the July 1917 "Oath crisis," Piłsudski was arrested and imprisoned at Magdeburg by the Germans. The Polish units were disbanded. His imprisonment, however, greatly enhanced his reputation among Poles, many of whom began to see him as a leader willing to stand against all the partitioning powers.

  On the 8th of November 1918, three days before the Armistice, Piłsudski and Colonel Kazimierz Sosnkowski were released by the Germans from Magdeburg and placed on a train bound for Warsaw, the collapsing German government hoping Piłsudski would create a force friendly to them. He had other intentions.

• 6. The Battle of Warsaw

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  Poland regained independence on the 11th of November 1918, and over the following months, more than 400,000 German troops peacefully departed Polish territories, leaving their weapons behind. The country Piłsudski inherited was fractured: nine legal systems, five currencies, and 66 types of rail systems with 165 models of locomotives all needed to be unified. A British diplomat visiting Warsaw in January 1919 reported having nowhere seen anything like the evidence of extreme poverty and wretchedness that met the eye at almost every turn.

  Warfare on all borders followed. The Polish-Soviet War escalated into a crisis by the summer of 1920, when Soviet commander Mikhail Tukhachevsky issued an order of the day calling for a march "over the corpse of White Poland" toward Berlin, and Soviet theoretician Nikolai Bukharin wrote in Pravda of carrying the campaign "straight to London and Paris." On August 12, with Soviet forces closing on Warsaw, Piłsudski tendered his resignation to Prime Minister Wincenty Witos, offering to be the scapegoat if the military solution failed. Witos refused.

  Piłsudski's battle plan called for Polish forces to withdraw across the Vistula and hold bridgeheads while around 20,000 of the most battle-hardened Polish troops, assembled as a Reserve Army, struck north through a weak point between the Soviet Western and Southwestern Fronts. High-ranking army officers criticized the plan as "amateurish," noting Piłsudski's lack of formal military education. When the Soviets acquired a copy of the plan, Tukhachevsky dismissed it as a ruse.

  Days later, the Soviets were defeated at the Battle of Warsaw. National Democrat Sejm deputy Stanisław Stroński coined the phrase "Miracle at the Vistula" to express his disapproval of what he called Piłsudski's "Ukrainian adventure." The phrase was adopted as praise by Piłsudski's admirers, unaware of Stroński's ironic intent. The Treaty of Riga in March 1921, which ended the war by partitioning Belarus and Ukraine between Poland and Russia, was called by Piłsudski himself "an act of cowardice."

• 7. The Coup and the Sanation State

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  On the 14th of December 1922, Piłsudski officially transferred the office of Chief of State to his friend Gabriel Narutowicz at the Belweder Palace. Two days later, Narutowicz was shot dead by a right-wing painter and art critic named Eligiusz Niewiadomski, who had originally wanted to kill Piłsudski but had been turned against Narutowicz by National Democrat propaganda. The assassination convinced Piłsudski that Poland could not function as a democracy and that strong leadership was necessary.

  He resigned from active politics in 1923 and withdrew to his country manor at Sulejówek, outside Warsaw, a property presented to him by his former soldiers. There he wrote political and military memoirs, including Rok 1920, meaning The Year 1920. As the economy deteriorated under hyperinflation and successive governments resigned in disarray, his allies repeatedly called him back.

  On the 12th to the 14th of May 1926, Piłsudski returned to power in the May Coup, supported by the Polish Socialist Party, Liberation, the Peasant Party, and the Communist Party of Poland. He had hoped for a bloodless takeover, but the government refused to surrender; 215 soldiers and 164 civilians were killed, and over 900 persons were wounded. When the Sejm subsequently elected him president, he refused the office because its powers were too limited and had his old friend Ignacy Mościcki elected instead.

  His Sanation government, whose name could be understood as "moral purification," sought to reduce parliamentary corruption and incompetence through authoritarian methods. On the 2nd of August 1926, constitutional amendments curtailed the Sejm's powers. By the 1930s, the policies grew harsher: the 1934 establishment of Bereza Kartuska Prison for political prisoners, and the Brest trials of opponents on the eve of the 1930 parliamentary election, were internationally condemned and damaged Poland's reputation. His treatment of the Jewish minority stood as a partial exception to this authoritarian trend; widely recognized for opposing the National Democrats' antisemitic policies, Piłsudski extended his "state-assimilation" policy to Polish Jews, and many Jews viewed him as their only protection against antisemitic currents in the country.

• 8. Death and Enduring Presence

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  On the 12th of May 1935, Piłsudski died of liver cancer at Warsaw's Belweder Palace. The public had not known he had been in declining health for several years. Celebrations of his life began spontaneously within half an hour of the announcement of his death.

  The final funeral procession in Kraków on the 18th of May drew an estimated 300,000 participants and official representatives from 16 foreign states, constituting the largest public funeral in Poland's history. Among the international messages of condolence were those from Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, King Victor Emmanuel III, Japan's Emperor Hirohito, and Britain's King George V. In Berlin, Hitler attended a Holy Mass for Piłsudski, which the source identifies as the only time Hitler attended a Mass as leader of the Third Reich.

  Piłsudski had willed his brain for study to Stefan Batory University; separate funeral ceremonies were held for its burial. His heart was interred in his mother's grave at the Rasos Cemetery in Vilnius. His body was initially placed at St. Leonard's Crypt in Kraków's Wawel Cathedral, but in 1937, at the decision of Archbishop Adam Sapieha, a long-standing adversary, the remains were transferred to the Crypt under the Silver Bells. The resulting controversy, known as the "Wawel conflict," produced protests and calls for Sapieha's removal that lasted years.

  For a decade after World War II, Poland's Communist government either ignored Piłsudski or condemned him alongside the entire interwar Second Polish Republic. After de-Stalinization and the Polish October in 1956, historiography gradually shifted toward a more balanced assessment. After the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, he was publicly rehabilitated as a national hero. On the 12th of May 1995, the sixtieth anniversary of his death, Poland's Sejm adopted a resolution declaring that Piłsudski had entered Polish history forever as the founder of its independence and the leader who fended off a foreign assault that threatened all of Europe. In 2020, his manor house in Sulejówek opened as a museum as part of commemorations of the one hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Warsaw.