Józef Piłsudski: the marshal who restored Poland

For more than a century Poland had been wiped from the map. Józef Piłsudski spent his life trying to bring it back, as a Siberian exile, an underground socialist, a train robber, commandant of the Legions and, in November 1918, the head of a reborn state. Two years later he directed the counterattack at Warsaw that stopped the Red Army. He also overthrew the government of the state he had helped create, and he is judged very differently to this day.²

Early life: Zułów, Wilno and Siberia

Piłsudski was born on 5 December 1867 at Zułów, near Wilno (Vilnius), in the lands of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania under Russian rule, into a family of the Lithuanian nobility. His mother, Maria née Billewicz, brought him up on Polish history and literature and on the memory of the uprising of 1863 that the tsarist regime had crushed. After a fire destroyed the family manor (in 1875 according to the Józef Piłsudski Museum, in 1874 according to the Lithuanian national encyclopedia), the family moved to Wilno, where Józef went to the Russian secondary school and, with his brother Bronisław, helped found a secret self-education circle, "Spójnia".³

He began to study medicine at Kharkov in 1885. In 1887 he was exiled to Siberia for five years over a plot by Russian revolutionaries to kill Tsar Alexander III, in which he had become involved; he came back in 1892.⁴

Rise: the conspirator

Back in Lithuania, he joined the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) in its first years, took the underground name "Wiktor" and edited its clandestine paper Robotnik ("The Worker"). In 1900, after the paper had moved to Łódź, the police arrested him there and locked him in the Warsaw Citadel. He feigned mental illness, was moved to a psychiatric hospital in Saint Petersburg and escaped from it in 1901.⁵

During the Russo-Japanese War he went to Tokyo in 1904 to offer Japan cooperation against Russia. The Lithuanian national encyclopedia says the Japanese were not interested in his plans; according to 1914-1918-online, the PPS still received Japanese money and equipment. In 1906, after the failure of the revolution of 1905, the PPS split and he led its Revolutionary Faction, which put independence first. In 1908 he led the raid on a Russian mail train at Bezdany, near Wilno, which brought in more than 200,000 rubles for the independence underground. His followers had founded the secret Union of Active Struggle in Lwów, and from 1910, with Austrian backing, the Riflemen's Associations in Galicia trained the cadres of a future Polish army; in December 1912 he was made chief commandant of all the Polish military organizations in Galicia.⁶

Campaigns

The Legions, 1914 to 1917

In a lecture in Paris on 21 February 1914, as Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszowski, later his adjutant, remembered it, Piłsudski warned that storms could come in Europe in which Poles would have to claim their rights by action, and that without a good, efficient and disciplined organization they would not be able to seize such a moment. On 6 August 1914 his First Cadre Company crossed from Galicia into Russian Poland. He commanded the 1st Regiment and then the First Brigade of the Polish Legions, which fought under Austro-Hungarian command against Russia; in July 1916 the Legions fought their heaviest battle at Kostiuchnówka in Volhynia.⁷

When Germany and Austria-Hungary proclaimed a Kingdom of Poland on 5 November 1916, Piłsudski joined its Provisional Council of State as head of the military commission, but demanded a real Polish government. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 he forbade the Legionnaires to swear the oath of allegiance to the German and Austro-Hungarian emperors. In July 1917 the Germans arrested him and held him in Magdeburg, and most of the Legionnaires were interned. Prison made him a national hero.⁸

Independence, 1918

Released from Magdeburg, Piłsudski arrived in Warsaw by special train from Berlin on 10 November 1918. The next day, the day of the Armistice, the Regency Council handed him military authority and the supreme command of the Polish army, and on 14 November it dissolved itself and placed its authority in his hands, to be passed on to a national government. Poland celebrates 11 November as its Independence Day; the whole road to it is told in our guide to Polish independence, 1914 to 1921. On 20 February 1919 the newly elected Legislative Sejm entrusted him with continuing as Chief of State.⁹ › The Battles That Won Polish Independence, 1914 to 1921

The war with Soviet Russia, 1919 to 1920

The new state had to fight for its borders on every side, and above all against the Red Army. Piłsudski wanted to bind Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine to Poland in a federation against Russia, while his rival Roman Dmowski wanted a Polish national state that would incorporate the eastern borderlands. Lithuania's leaders rejected the federation; the Lithuanian national encyclopedia notes that Piłsudski ignored Lithuania's act of independence of 16 February 1918. On 19 March 1920, his name day, he accepted the rank of Marshal of Poland, which, the IPN notes, the army's General Verification Commission had asked him to take "as a token of honor and homage to the Commander-in-Chief"; the baton was handed over on 14 November 1920 in Warsaw's Castle Square. In April 1920, allied with Symon Petliura's Ukrainian People's Republic, he launched the Kiev offensive.¹⁰

The Soviet counteroffensive that summer drove the Poles back to the outskirts of Warsaw. Who made the battle plan is still debated: dzieje.pl, the portal of the Polish History Museum, says the Chief of the General Staff, General Tadeusz Rozwadowski, worked it out on Piłsudski's general concept, while the Józef Piłsudski Museum credits the plan to Piłsudski himself. The bridgehead before Warsaw held while a strike group gathered on the Wieprz to the south, and on 16 August that group, led by Piłsudski, struck the flank and rear of Tukhachevsky's armies. dzieje.pl adds that he had taken command of the new Central Front on 6 August, that the strike first hit the Soviet Mozyr Group and that on 19 August he ordered the pursuit. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine adds that the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic played a major part in the counteroffensive. The Battle of Warsaw turned into a rout, and after the victory on the Niemen in September the Polish-Soviet War ended with the Treaty of Riga, signed on 18 March 1921. In October 1920 Piłsudski had General Lucjan Żeligowski stage a "mutiny" and take Wilno from Lithuania; the Lithuanian national encyclopedia sees in it the source of the Polish-Lithuanian conflict.¹¹

Retirement and the May Coup

On 14 December 1922, at the Belweder, Piłsudski handed his powers as Chief of State to the first elected president, Gabriel Narutowicz; two days later Narutowicz was assassinated. In 1923 the marshal withdrew from public life to a villa at Sulejówek near Warsaw, where he wrote a series of political and military memoirs. Western diplomats, Marek Mikołajczyk and Olga Morozowa found, saw this less as a political retirement than as a demonstration, and expected him to return to power when it suited him.¹²

Disillusioned with parliamentary politics, on 12 May 1926 he marched on Warsaw at the head of loyal regiments to force out the new government of Wincenty Witos. After three days of fighting President Stanisław Wojciechowski and Witos's government resigned. The National Assembly elected Piłsudski president, but he refused and had his candidate Ignacy Mościcki chosen instead. In every government after the coup he kept the Ministry of Military Affairs, which he held until his death, and he was prime minister from 1926 to 1928 and again in 1930.¹³

Character and command style

To his Legionnaires he was simply the Commandant, a title that stayed with him for life. Western diplomats and officers who dealt with him between 1918 and 1922, Mikołajczyk and Morozowa show from their reports, stressed his strong personality, his popularity and his genuine authority, and found him hard and unpleasant in talks but also kind and charming; they also criticized his way of governing, doubted his military competence and noted his strong leaning toward deciding alone. After 1926 he ruled formally only as a minister; according to the German Historical Museum, he called his regime a "moral dictatorship".¹⁴

His rule grew harsher. In 1930 he had leaders of the opposition, among them Wincenty Witos, arrested and held in the fortress of Brześć, where they were brutally treated, and then put on trial. In the same year he sent the army into eastern Galicia: the Józef Piłsudski Museum describes it as putting down a Ukrainian terrorist rebellion, the Encyclopedia of Ukraine as the "Pacification of Galicia". In 1934, after a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists assassinated the interior minister Bronisław Pieracki, a detention camp was opened at Bereza Kartuska. In foreign policy he signed non-aggression pacts with the Soviet Union in 1932 and with Germany in 1934.¹⁵

Death and legacy

Piłsudski died of cancer at the Belweder in Warsaw on 12 May 1935. dzieje.pl gives the diagnosis of the Viennese specialist Karel Wenckebach as an inoperable malignant tumor of the liver; Mariusz Żuławnik, writing for the IPN, gives it as stomach cancer that had spread to the liver. He was buried in the crypts of Wawel Cathedral, among the kings of Poland. By his own wish his heart was taken to Wilno, and on 12 May 1936 it was laid, together with the coffin of his mother, in a tomb under a black granite slab at the Rasos military cemetery, among the graves of soldiers who had died fighting for the city in 1919 and 1920. The tomb is known as the Mausoleum of the Mother and the Son's Heart.¹⁶

In Poland he remains the man who rebuilt the state and won its war, and also the man who overthrew its elected government. Its neighbors remember other things too: Lithuanians the seizure of Wilno, Ukrainians the policy of his regime in Galicia and Volhynia. His home at Sulejówek, where he lived in retirement, is now the Józef Piłsudski Museum.¹⁷ › Battle of Warsaw, 1920