Józef Piłsudski (pronounced: ['juzef piw'sutski], December 5, 1867 – May 12, 1935) was a Polish revolutionary and statesman, field marshal, first chief of state (1918-1922) and dictator (1926-1935) of renascent Poland, and founder of her armed forces. He is regarded by much of modern Poland as a national hero.
Biography
Piłsudski's early life
Born in the village of Zułów, Russia (today Zalavas, Lithuania) into an impoverished Polish szlachta family, Piłsudski attended school in Wilno, Russia (today Vilnius, Lithuania). As a boy, he was introduced by his mother to Polish literature and history, suppressed by the Russian authorities[1]. As a young man, he was compelled to attend Eastern Orthodox Church services, which as a Roman Catholic he found deeply distasteful[2]. In 1885 he studied medicine at Kharkov (modern Kharkiv), in Ukraine, but in 1886 he was suspended as politically suspect. In March 1887 he was arrested by Tsarist authorities on a false charge of plotting to assassinate Tsar Alexander III and was exiled for five years to eastern Siberia. His elder brother, Bronisław Piłsudski, who had been friends with friends of Vladimir Lenin's brother, was similarly sentenced to hard labor (katorga) in eastern Siberia, for fifteen years.
Józef, after his release in 1892, joined the Polish Socialist Party. Initially he sided with the Socialists' more radical wing, but despite the ostensible internationalism of the Socialist movement he always remained a Polish nationalist[3]. He began publishing an underground socialist newspaper, Robotnik (The Worker). In February 1900 he was imprisoned at the Warsaw Citadel but, after feigning mental illness, in May 1901 he managed to escape from a mental hospital at St. Petersburg, Russia. During his time as an underground organizer, Piłsudski married a fellow Socialist organizer, but his marriage ended in acrimony when Piłsudski had an affair with a younger female Socialist[4].
In 1904 Piłsudski founded an armed organization, the "Bojówki" ("Combat Teams"), to wage a campaign of assassinations, bombings, and sabotage against the Russian authorities[5]. On October 13, 1904, Piłsudski and the PPS organized a demonstration in Warsaw that was fired upon by Russian troops[6].
On the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) Piłsudski traveled to Japan, where he unsuccessfully attempted to obtain that country's assistance for an uprising in Poland. He offered to supply Japan with intelligence in support of her war with Russia and proposed a plan (never implemented) to create a legion from Poles, conscripted into the Russian army, who had been captured by Japan. He also suggested a "Promethean" project (named for the Greek titan Prometheus, who had been tortured by Zeus while chained to a rock in the Caucasus) directed at liberating ethnic communities occupied by the Russian Empire — a goal that he later continued to pursue and that would be partly achieved only in 1991 with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Nothing came of Piłsudski's visit to Japan.
During the Russian Revolution of 1905, Piłsudski played a leading role in events in Congress Poland. In early 1905, he ordered the PPS to launch a general strike there[7]. It involved some 400,000 workers, and lasted two months before it was broken by the Russian authorities[8]. In June 1905, Piłsudski ordered an uprising in Łódź. During the "June Days," as the Łódź uprising came to be known, armed clashes broke out between gunmen loyal to Piłsudski's PPS and those loyal to Roman Dmowski's National Democratic Party[9]. On December 22, 1905, Piłsudski called for all Polish workers to rise up; his call was widely ignored[10]. Unlike the Endeks, Piłsudski ordered the PPS to boycott the elections to the First Duma[11]. The decision to boycott the elections and to try to win Polish independence through uprisings, caused much tension within the PPS, and in 1907 a fraction of the party split off in protest of Piłsudski's leadership[12].
In 1906 Piłsudski, with the connivance and support of the Austrian authorities, founded a military school in Kraków for the training of Bojówki (Combat Teams)[13]. In 1906 alone, the 750-strong "Combat Teams," operating in five-man units in Congress Poland, killed or wounded some 1,000 Russian officials[14]. In September 1908, the "Combat Teams" robbed a train carrying tax revenues from Warsaw to St. Petersburg[15].
In 1908, Piłsudski renamed the "Combat Teams" to "Związek Walki Czynnej" (Association for Active Struggle), headed by three of his associates, Władysław Sikorski, Marian Kukiel, and Kazimierz Sosnkowski[16]. With the permission of Austrian authorities, Piłsudski founded a series of "sporting clubs," followed by a Riflemen's Association that served as cover for training a Polish military force that grew by 1914 to 12,000 men[17]. In 1914, Piłsudski declared that "only the sword now carries any weight in the balance for the destiny of a nation"[18].
First World War
Piłsudski anticipated a coming European war and the need to organize the nucleus of a future Polish army that could help win Poland's independence from the three empires that had partitioned her out of political existence in the late 18th century. With the aid of funds that he had personally "expropriated" from a Russian mail train in a raid at Bezdany near Vilna in April 1908, that same year he formed a secret military organization. Two years later, with help from the Austrian military authorities, he converted the organization into a legal "Riflemen's Association" which trained Polish military officers.
At a meeting in Paris in 1914, Piłsudski presciently declared that in the imminent war, for Poland to regain her independence, Russia must be beaten by the Central Powers (the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires), and the latter powers must in their turn be beaten by France, Britain and the United States.
Upon the outbreak of World War I, and into 1917, Brigadier General Piłsudski's Polish Legion fought with distinction against Russia at the side of the Central Powers.
Within the Legions, Piłsudski decreed that personnel were to be addressed by the French-Revolution-inspired "Citizen," and he himself was referred to as "the Commandant" ("Komendant")[19]. The Commandant was much loved by his men[20].
On November 5, 1916, the Central Powers proclaimed the "independence" of Poland, hoping that as a result Polish troops would be sent to the eastern front against Russia, relieving German forces to bolster the Western front. Piłsudski agreed to serve in the "Kingdom of Poland" created by the Central Powers, but insisted that his men not be treated as "German colonial troops" and only be used to fight Russia[21]. Piłsudski, however, then serving as minister of war in the newly created Polish Regency government, opposed the demand that the Polish units swear loyalty to Germany and Austria. Consequently in July 1917 he was arrested and imprisoned at Magdeburg, Germany.
On November 8, 1918, Piłsudski and his comrade, Colonel Kazimierz Sosnkowski, were released and soon — like Vladimir Lenin before them — placed on a private train, bound for their national capital.
On November 11, in Warsaw, Piłsudski was appointed Commander in Chief, and on November 14 Chief of State (Naczelnik Państwa), of renascent Poland. Though Piłsudski was very popular with much of the Polish public, his reputation as a loner (the result of many years' underground work), of a man who distrusted almost everyone, led to strained relations with other Polish politicians[22].
The day after his arrival in Warsaw, he met with old colleagues from underground days, who addressed him socialist-style as "Comrade" ("Towarzysz"). Piłsudski told them: "Gentlemen, we all took a ride on the same red streetcar, but while I got off at the stop named 'Polish Independence,' you wanted to travel on to the station named 'Socialism.' Happy traveling — but please call me 'Mister'!"[23].
At the end of World War One, two separate governments claimed to be the legitimate government of Poland: Piłsudski's in Warsaw, and Roman Dmowski's in Paris[24]. To ensure that Poland had a single government and to avert civil war, the world-famed pianist and composer Ignacy Jan Paderewski met with Dmowski and Piłsudski and persuaded them to join forces, with Piłsudski acting as provisional president and supreme commander-in-chief while Dmowski and Paderewski represented Poland at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919[25].
In the days immediately after the war, Piłsudski attempted to build a government in a shattered country. Much of former Russian Poland had been destroyed in World War I, and systematic looting by the Germans had reduced the region's wealth by at least 10%[26]. A British diplomat who visited Warsaw in January 1919 reported: "I have nowhere seen anything like the evidences of extreme poverty and wretchedness that meet one's eye at almost every turn"[27]. In addition, Piłsudski had to transform the different systems of law, economics, and bureaucracy in the former German, Austrian and Russian sectors of Poland into one; there were nine different legal systems, five currencies, 165 models of locomotives, and 66 types of rail systems, which all had to be consolidated[28].
Piłsudski drove himself hard, working all day and, on a regimen of tea and chain-smoked cigarettes, all night[29]. He maintained a Spartan life-style, eating plain meals alone at an inexpensive restaurant, and became increasingly pale and thin[30].
Piłsudski often clashed with Dmowski, at variance with the latter's vision of the Poles as the dominant nationality in reborn Poland, and irked by Dmowski's attempt to send the Blue Army back to Poland through Danzig, Germany (modern Gdańsk, Poland)[31].
Speaking of Poland's future frontiers, Piłsudski said: "All that we can gain in the west depends on the Entente — on the extent to which it may wish to squeeze Germany," while in the east "there are doors that open and close, and it depends on who forces them open and how far"[32].
Polish-Soviet War
Piłsudski aspired to create a federation (to be called Międzymorze, "Between-Seas," stretching once again from the Baltic to the Black Sea), of Poland with Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, in emulation of the pre-partition Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Commonwealth had given mutual protection to its constituent peoples against the Teutonic Order, the Mongols, the Russians, the Turks, the Swedes and other predatory neighbors until the partitions of the late 18th century. Piłsudski's plan was, however, to be dashed by the outcome of the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921.
In April 1920, Marshal Piłsudski (as his rank had been since that March) signed an alliance with Ukraine's Symon Petliura, to conduct joint war against the Russian SFSR. The Polish and Ukrainian armies, under Piłsudski's command, launched a successful offensive against the Russian forces in Ukraine. On May 7, with remarkably little fighting, they captured Kiev.
The Soviets launched their own offensive from Belarus and counter-attacked in Ukraine, advancing into Poland in a drive toward Germany in order to consolidate the communist revolution underway there. It was Piłsudski's risky, unconventional strategy at the Battle of Warsaw (August 1920) that would halt the Soviet advance.
The Red Army openly announced its plans for invading Western Europe in 1920. The words of the official march of the Red Army proclaimed: “We’re getting Warsaw, give us Berlin!” Soviet communist theorist Nicholas Bukharin, in the newspaper Pravda, declares a more decisive slogan: “Immediately to the walls of Paris and London!” (S. Cohen. Bukharin. New York. 1980. p. 106).
Piłsudski's plan was for Polish forces to withdraw across the Vistula River and defend the bridgeheads at Warsaw and the Wieprz River, while some 25% of available divisions concentrated to the south for a strategic counter-offensive.
Next Piłsudski's plan required that two armies under General Józef Haller facing Soviet frontal attack on Warsaw from the east, hold their entrenched positions at all costs. At the same time, an army under General Władysław Sikorski was to strike north from behind Warsaw, thus cutting off the Soviet forces attempting to envelope Warsaw from that direction. The most important role, however, was assigned to a relatively small (approximately 20,000-man), newly assembled "Reserve Army" (known also as the "Strike Group" — Grupa Uderzeniowa), commanded personally by Piłsudski, comprising the most determined, battle-hardened Polish units. Their task was to spearhead a lightning northern offensive, from the Vistula-Wieprz River triangle south of Warsaw, through a weak spot identified by Polish intelligence between the Soviet Western and Southwestern Fronts. That offensive would separate the Soviet Western Front from its reserves and disorganize its movements. Eventually, the gap between Sikorski's army and the "Strike Group" would close near the East Prussian border, resulting in the destruction of the encircled Soviet forces.
At the time, Piłsudski's plan was strongly criticized, and only the desperate situation of the Polish forces persuaded other army commanders to go along with it. Although based on fairly reliable intelligence, including intercepted Soviet radio communications, the plan was termed "amateurish" by many high-ranking army officers and military experts, who were quick to point out Piłsudski's lack of a formal military education. When a copy of the plan accidentally fell into the Soviets' hands, they thought it a ruse and disregarded it. Days later, they paid dearly for their mistake.
The Marshal's Polish detractors chose to ironically call his ensuing victory "the Miracle at the Vistula," and sought to ascribe the winning strategy to General Maxime Weygand of the French military mission to Poland. Later, a junior member of that mission, Charles de Gaulle, would adopt some lessons from Piłsudski's career, for his own strikingly similar one.
The Treaty of Riga (1921), closing the Polish-Soviet War, gave the bulk of Belarus and Ukraine to Russia and so marked an end to Piłsudski's federalist dream.
Rise to Power: the Benevolent Dictator, the Great Leader
After the Polish constitution adopted in March 1921 (March Constitution) severely limited the powers of the presidency in the new democratic Second Polish Republic, Piłsudski refused to run for the office. In December 1922 he turned over his powers to his friend, the newly elected president, Gabriel Narutowicz. Five days later, after his inauguration, Narutowicz was shot dead by a mentally deranged, right-wing, anti-Semitic painter and art critic, Eligiusz Niewiadomski, who had originally wanted to kill Piłsudski. When a right-wing government subsequently came to power, in May 1923 Piłsudski disgustedly resigned as chief of the general staff and went into retirement outside Warsaw.
Three years later, May 12-14 1926, he returned to power in a military coup d'etat (the May Coup), aided by socialist railwaymen whose strike paralysed communications and prevented government reinforcements from reaching Warsaw. He initiated the Sanacja government (1926-1939) — conducted at times by authoritarian means — directed at restoring moral "health" to public life. Although till his death in 1935 he played a preponderant role in Poland's government, his formal offices — apart from two stints as prime minister in 1926-28 and 1930 — were for the most part limited to those of minister of defence and inspector-general of the armed forces. The adoption of a new Polish constitution in April 1935, tailored by Piłsudski's supporters to his specifications — providing for a strong presidency — came too late for Piłsudski to seek that office; but the April Constitution would serve Poland up to the outbreak of World War II and would carry its Government in Exile through to the end of the war and beyond.
Piłsudski, as de Gaulle was later to do in France, sought to maintain his country's independence on the international scene. When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in January 1933, some such as the British historian Sir Lewis Namier argued, Piłsudski sounded out Poland's ally, France, regarding the possibility of joint military action against Germany, which had been openly rearming in violation of the Versailles Treaty. When France declined, Piłsudski was compelled to sign a non-aggression pact with Germany in January 1934. (He had already done so with the Soviet Union in 1932.)
However, this argument that the German-Polish non-aggression pact had been forced on Piłsudski by French refusal to wage a "preventive war" on Nazi Germany has been disputed by many other historians who point out that there is no evidence in either the French or Polish diplomatic archives that such an offer was made. It is true that in late October 1933 rumours of Polish "preventive war" proposal were reported in Paris. The source of these rumours were the Polish Embassy, which informed French reporters that Poland had proposed a "preventive war" to France and Belgium. By this time, Poland and Germany were already secretly negotiating the non-aggression pact. It has been argued that Piłsudski had the Polish Embassy start rumours of a "preventive war" being considered as a way of pressuring the Germans, who were demanding that the Poles abrogate the Franco-Polish alliance of 1921. As it was, the non-aggression pact specifically excluded the Franco-Polish alliance. It has been argued that Piłsudski's reasons for seeking a non-aggression pact with Germany was due to his concerns over the Maginot Line. Up to 1929, French plans in the event of war with Germany called for an French offensive onto the North German plain in conjunction with offensives from Poland and Czechoslovakia. The building of the Maginot Line, which was started in 1929, strongly indicated that henceforward, in the event of war with Germany, the French Army would maintain a strictly defensive position, and that France’s eastern allies were going to be on their own. Thus, from Piłsudski's viewpoint, in light of France's military plans, a non-aggression pact with Germany was the best option under the circumstances.
He was acutely aware of the shakiness of the non-aggression pacts, remarking sarcastically: "The question remains, which of the stools will we fall off first." Ably assisted by his protege, Minister of Foreign Affairs Józef Beck, he sought support for Poland in alliances with western powers--France and Britain--and with friendly, if less powerful, neighbours: Romania and Hungary.
Hitler repeatedly suggested a German-Polish alliance against the Soviets, but Piłsudski declined the proposal, instead seeking time for Poland to prepare to fight when the necessity arose.
Piłsudski was interested less in the trappings than in the reality of power, to be exercised for the security and welfare of his imperilled country. He made a point of drawing no financial profit from public office. As to the socialism that had helped him to power, he famously remarked that he "had taken the red street tram as far as the stop called Independence and got off".[33][34]
Piłsudski had given Poland something akin to what Henryk Sienkiewicz's Onufry Zagłoba had mused about: a Polish Oliver Cromwell. As such, the Marshal had inevitably drawn both intense loyalty and intense vilification.
By 1935, unbeknownst to the public, Piłsudski had been in declining health for several years. He died of liver cancer on May 12, 1935, at the Belvedere Palace in Warsaw. His body was placed in the Royal Crypts of Wawel Cathedral, in Kraków, but his heart was interred in Vilnius, in his mother's grave. The great Polish writer Joseph Conrad had said of him, "He was the only great man to emerge on the scene during the [First World] war."
Tribute
- As the most brilliant of Polish military commanders of 20th century, Piłsudski was a patron of several military units. Among them was the 1st Legions Infantry Division and one of the Polish Air Force squadrons during the Second World War, the No. 305 "Land of Greater Poland" Squadron.
Endnotes
- ^ MacMillan, Margaret, Paris 1919, p. 208.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Ibid page 209.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Zamoyski, Adam The Polish Way, London:John Murray, 1987 page 330.
- ^ Ibid page 332.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Ibid page 332.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Ibid page 333.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ MacMillan, Margaret Paris 1919 page 209.
- ^ Ibid page 208.
- ^ Ibid page 210.
- ^ Ibid pages 213-214.
- ^ Ibid page 210.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Ibid pages 211 & 214.
- ^ Ibid page 211.
- ^ In late 1918, when asked by his fellow socialists for political support, Piłsudski replied "Comrades, I took the red tram of socialism to the stop named Independence, but that's where I got off. You may keep going to the final stop, if you can, but from now on let's address each other 'Sir'!".
- ^ Translation of quote from the Government of Poland's biography of Piłsudski.
References
- Template:En icon Adam Zamoyski (1987). The Polish Way. London: John Murray. p. 422. ISBN 0531150690.
- Template:En icon "Józef Piłsudski (1867 - 1935)". Poland.gov. Retrieved April 23.
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suggested) (help) - Template:Pl icon "Józef Piłsudski (1867 - 1935)". Poland.gov. Retrieved February 2.
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suggested) (help) - Template:Ru icon/Template:Uk icon "Figures of the 20th century. Józef Piłsudski: The Chief who Created Himself a State", Zerkalo Nedeli (the Mirror Weekly), Kiev, February 3 - 9, 2001, in Russian and in Ukrainian.
Quotes
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat."
See also
External links
- Jozef Pilsudski Institute of America
- Józef Piłsudski his life and times
- Biography of Józef Piłsudski
- Dariusz Baliszewski, Ostatnia wojna marszałka, Tygodnik "Wprost", Nr 1148 (28 listopada 2004), Polish, retrieved on 24 March 2005
- Josef Piłsudski's biographical sketch
- Bibuła, book by Józef Piłsudski
References
- Jeremy Keenan, The Pole: the Heroic Life of Jozef Pilsudski, Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd, 2004, ISBN 0715632108.
- Wacław Jędrzejewicz, Pilsudski: a Life for Poland, Hippocrene Books, 1982, ISBN 0882546333.
- Joseph Rothschild, Pilsudski's Coup D'Etat, Columbia University Press, 1967, ISBN 0231029845.
- Andrzej Garlicki, Jozef Pilsudski, 1867-1935, Scolar Press, 1995, ISBN 1859280188.
- Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919, New York, Random House, 2002.