Jozef Pilsudski Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
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| Term of Office: | November 14, 1918, to December 9, 1922 |
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| Successor: | Gabriel Narutowicz |
| Date of Birth: | December 5, 1867 |
| Place of Birth: | Zułów;, in today's Lithuania |
| First Lady: | Maria Piłsudska; |
| Profession: | statesman and commander |
| Political Party: | Polish Socialist Party |
Józef Piłsudski (December 5, 1867 – May 12, 1935) was a Polish revolutionary and statesman, first chief of state (1918-22) of renascent Poland, and founder of her armed forces.
Born in the village of Zułów (Zalavas, in today's Lithuania) into an impoverished Polish noble family, he attended school in Wilno (in Lithuanian, Vilnius). In 1885 he studied medicine at Kharkov, in Ukraine, but was suspended in 1886 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 sentenced to fifteen years at hard labor.
Józef, after his release in 1892, joined the Polish Socialist Party. He began publishing an underground socialist newspaper, Robotnik (“The Worker”). In February 1900 he was imprisoned in the Warsaw Citadel but, after feigning mental illness, in May 1901 managed to escape from a mental hospital in St. Petersburg, Russia.
On the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) Pilsudski traveled to Japan, where he unsuccessfully attempted to obtain that country's assistance for an insurrection 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 breaking up the Russian empire into its ethnic constituents--a goal that he later continued to pursue and that would be partly achieved in 1991 with the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Pilsudski 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 Vilnius 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, Pilsudski presciently declared that in the imminent war, for Poland to regain her independence, Russia must be beaten by the Central Powers (Austria-Hungary and Germany), and the Central 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 Pilsudski's Polish Legion fought with distinction against Russia at the side of the Central Powers. On November 5, 1916, the latter 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. Pilsudski, 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, Pilsudski 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 Pilsudski was appointed Commander in Chief, and on November 14 Chief of State (Naczelnik Panstwa), of a renascent Polish state.
Pilsudski aspired to create a federal union (federation of Międzymorze;) of Poland with Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, in emulation of the pre-partition Polish-Lithuanian-Ruthenian Commonwealth that had served its constituent populations well for four centuries until the partitions. This plan was to be dashed by the outcome of the Russo-Polish War of 1919-20.
In April 1920, Marshal Pilsudski (as his rank had been since that March) signed an alliance with Ukraine's Simon Petlura, to conduct joint war against Soviet Russia. The Polish and Ukrainian armies, under Pilsudski's command, launched a successful attack against the Russian forces in Ukraine. By May 7, having done remarkably little fighting, they had captured Kiev.
The Soviets launched an attack from Belarus and counter-attacked in Ukraine, advancing into Poland in a drive toward Germany in order to consolidate the revolution underway there. It was Pilsudski's risky, unconventional strategy at the Battle of Warsaw (August 1920) that halted the Russian advance. The Marshal's Polish detractors, however, chose to ironically call his victory "the Miracle at the Wisla [i.e., Vistula River]," and sought to ascribe the winning strategy to General Maxime Weygand of the French military mission to Poland. (A junior member of that mission, Charles de Gaulle, adopted some lessons from Pilsudski's career, for his own strikingly similar one.)
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The Treaty of Riga (1921), closing the Russo-Polish War, gave the bulk of Belarus and Ukraine to Russia and so marked an end to Pilsudski's federalist dream.
After the Polish constitution adopted in March 1921 severely limited the powers of the presidency, Pilsudski refused to run for the office. In December 1922 he transmitted his powers to his friend, the newly elected president, Gabriel Narutowicz. Two days later, Narutowicz was shot to death by a mentally deranged, right-wing, antisemitic painter and art critic who had originally wanted to kill Pilsudski. When a right-wing government subsequently came to power, in May 1923 Pilsudski disgustedly resigned as chief of the general staff and went into retirement outside Warsaw.
Three years later, in May 1926, he returned to power in a military coup d'etat, aided by socialist railwaymen who sidetracked government troop transports. He initiated Sanacja government (1926-39)--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 were for the most part limited to those of minister of defence and inspector-general of the armed forces.
Pilsudski, 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, Pilsudski 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, Pilsudski was compelled to sign a nonaggression agreement with Germany in January 1934. (He had already done so with the Soviet Union in 1932.)
Later, Hitler repeatedly suggested a German-Polish alliance against the Soviets, but Pilsudski ignored the proposal. He sought time for Poland to prepare to fight when the necessity arose.
Pilsudski was interested less in the trappings than in the reality of power, to be exercised for the security and welfare of his imperiled 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 streetcar as far as the stop called Independence [i.e., Independence Square, in downtown Warsaw] and gotten off."
By 1935 Pilsudski had, unbeknown to the public, been for several years in declining health. So much the greater was the shock at the passing of the man of whom Joseph Conrad had said: "He was the only great man to emerge on the scene during the [First World] war."
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| Preceded by: - | Second Republic President of Poland (Chief of State) (1918 - 1922) | Succeeded by: Gabriel Narutowicz |
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