Józef Piłsudski

Józef Piłsudski (born December 5, 1867, Żułów, Poland, Russian Empire [now in Lithuania]—died May 12, 1935, Warsaw, Poland) was a Polish revolutionary and statesman, the first chief of state (1918–22) of the newly independent Poland established in November 1918. After leading a coup d’état in 1926, he rejected an offer of the presidency but remained politically influential while serving as minister of defense until 1935.

Early life and political activities

Piłsudski was the second son of an impoverished Polish nobleman. His mother, née Maria Billewicz, inspired him with hatred for the Russian imperial regime, which was treating the Poles with great harshness after their insurrection of 1863. On leaving the secondary school in Wilno (modern Vilnius), Piłsudski studied medicine at Kharkov in 1885 but was suspended as politically suspect in 1886. Returning to Wilno, he consorted with young socialists. Piłsudski was arrested in March 1887 on a false charge of plotting the assassination of the tsar Alexander III and was banished to eastern Siberia for five years.

Piłsudski returned in 1892, determined to organize an insurrection and to work for the reestablishment of Poland’s independence. He joined the newly founded Polish Socialist Party (PPS), of which he soon became a leader. He started a clandestine newspaper, Robotnik (“The Worker”), in Wilno. In July 1899 he married, in a Protestant church, the beautiful Maria Juszkiewicz, the divorced wife of a Polish civil engineer, and moved to Łódź, where he continued to edit and print his paper.

In February 1900 he was incarcerated by the Russians in the Warsaw citadel. He feigned insanity so successfully that he was transferred to a military hospital in St. Petersburg, from which he escaped in May 1901. He took refuge in Kraków in Austrian Poland, but in April 1902 he was back in Russian Poland looking after the party organization.

When the Russo-Japanese War broke out in February 1904, Piłsudski went to Tokyo to solicit Japanese assistance for an insurrection in Poland. He had been preceded by Roman Dmowski, his rival in the nationalist movement, who had told the Japanese that Piłsudski’s plan was impracticable. The two Polish leaders agreed to disagree. Piłsudski returned clandestinely to Russian Poland to help direct the revolutionary movement that was spreading throughout the empire. After the Russian revolution was put down late in 1905, a split occurred within the PPS: the left wing, which proposed to delete from the party’s program the stipulation that its main aim was an independent Poland, broke with Piłsudski’s group, which insisted on that stipulation.

Attempts to organize a Polish army

Aware of the Russian Empire’s structural weakness and foreseeing a European war, Piłsudski concluded that it was imperative to organize the nucleus of a future Polish army. In 1908 he formed a secret Union of Military Action—financed with a sum of money stolen from a Russian mail train by an armed band led by Piłsudski himself. In 1910, with the help of the Austrian military authorities, he was able to convert his secret union into a legal Union of Riflemen, actually a school for Polish officers. At a meeting of Polish sympathizers in Paris in 1914, he declared that war was imminent and that

the problem of the independence of Poland will be definitely solved only if Russia is beaten by Austria-Hungary and Germany, and Germany vanquished by France, Great Britain and the United States; it is our duty to bring that about.

World War I justified Piłsudski’s prediction. Until 1916 the three brigades of the Polish Legion, technically under Austro-Hungarian command, distinguished themselves against the Russians. On November 5, 1916, Germany and Austria-Hungary, short of manpower, proclaimed the independence of Poland, hoping that Polish divisions could be deployed on the Eastern Front so that German divisions could be moved to the west. Piłsudski, appointed head of the military department of the newly created Polish council of state, accepted the idea of a Polish army on condition that it be part of a sovereign Polish state. His position was unexpectedly reinforced by the Russian Revolution of March 1917. The German government, however, refused to bind itself as to Poland’s future, demanding instead that the existing Polish units should swear “fidelity in arms with the German and Austrian forces.” Piłsudski, refusing to comply, was arrested in July 1917 and imprisoned in Magdeburg.

An independent Poland

Released after the German collapse in the west, Piłsudski arrived in Warsaw on November 10, 1918, as a national hero. Four days later he was unanimously accepted as head of state and commander in chief of the Polish army. From that moment he ceased to be the man of a party, though his main support came from the left and from the centre; the right saw its leader in Dmowski, who had been heading the Polish National Committee in Paris and was now appointed by Piłsudski to be Poland’s first delegate at the peace conference, together with Ignacy Paderewski.

Piłsudski devoted himself to protecting Poland against the Russian Red Army, which was trying to fight its way into Germany in order to consolidate the revolution there. He led the Polish forces far to the east, occupying large areas that had belonged to Poland before the 18th-century partitions. He envisioned a federal state comprising Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians, whereas Dmowski argued that these areas should simply be incorporated within a unitary Poland. In 1920 a counteroffensive by the Red Army forced the Poles to retreat westward almost to the suburbs of Warsaw, but Piłsudski, made marshal of Poland on March 19, conceived and directed a maneuver that in August brought victory to Poland.

After the adoption of a democratic constitution and a new general election, Piłsudski transmitted his powers on December 14, 1922, to his friend Gabriel Narutowicz, the newly elected president of the republic, who two days later was assassinated. Stanisław Wojciechowski, another of Piłsudski’s old colleagues, was next elected president, the marshal agreeing to serve as chief of the general staff. When a right-wing government assumed power, Piłsudski resigned gradually from the functions he held and in 1923 went into retirement at Sulejówek, near Warsaw, with his second wife, née Aleksandra Szczerbińska, and his two daughters.

Piłsudski became disillusioned with the working of the parliamentary system. On May 12, 1926, during a time of political crisis and economic depression, he marched on Warsaw at the head of a few regiments, causing the government, including President Wojciechowski, to resign two days later. The parliament elected Piłsudski president of the republic on May 31, but he refused the honour, and another of his old friends, Ignacy Mościcki, was elected instead. In the new government Piłsudski assumed the Ministry of Defense, which he held until his death. During the ensuing years he was the major influence behind the scenes in Poland, especially in the field of foreign policy.