Józef Piłsudski

Józef Piłsudski was the revolutionary turned soldier who led Poland back to independence in 1918 and dominated its politics until his death in 1935. As Chief of State he commanded the armies that fixed the new state's borders, including the defence of Warsaw against the Red Army in 1920; later, after seizing power in a coup, he ruled in an increasingly authoritarian way. Poles widely regard him as a founder of the modern state, though parts of his record remain controversial.

Piłsudski was born on 5 December 1867 at his family's manor of Zułów, in what was then the Russian Empire and is now Lithuania. His family were impoverished Polish-Lithuanian nobility who kept alive the memory of the partitions of Poland; his father had fought in the 1863 uprising against Russia. In 1887, while a student, he was arrested over a plot against Tsar Alexander III in which his brother Bronisław was involved, and he spent five years in exile in Siberia.

Returning in 1892, he joined the new Polish Socialist Party and soon became one of its leaders, arguing that socialism should serve the cause of Polish independence. He edited the underground paper Robotnik until his arrest in 1900, then escaped in 1901 by feigning mental illness. From 1904 he built armed fighting squads that attacked Russian officials, and in 1908 he took part in a raid on a Russian mail train near Vilnius that netted over 200,000 roubles for his secret military organisation.

When World War I broke out in 1914, Piłsudski led his riflemen into Russian Poland and formed the Polish Legions, which fought alongside Austria-Hungary against Russia. In 1917, as the Central Powers faltered, he refused to let his men swear loyalty to the German emperor and was imprisoned at Magdeburg, which greatly raised his standing at home. He was released on 8 November 1918.

On 11 November 1918, now Poland's Independence Day, he took command of Polish forces in Warsaw, and days later became Provisional Chief of State. He hoped to build a federation of the lands between the Baltic and Black Seas, but it found little support. Instead, Poland fought a series of border wars, the largest being the Polish–Soviet War. After Polish and Ukrainian forces took Kiev in May 1920, a Soviet counter-offensive reached the outskirts of Warsaw. In August 1920 Piłsudski's plan for a counter-attack from the south produced a decisive victory, often called the Miracle on the Vistula, although other commanders, notably Tadeusz Rozwadowski, also shaped the strategy. The Treaty of Riga in 1921 ended the war.

In December 1922 he handed over to President Gabriel Narutowicz, who was murdered days later by a right-wing fanatic, a shock that deepened Piłsudski's doubts about parliamentary democracy. He withdrew from public life in 1923. In May 1926, amid economic crisis and unstable governments, he took power in an armed coup in which several hundred people died.

Piłsudski refused the presidency and held the post of minister of military affairs for the rest of his life, twice serving as prime minister. His Sanation regime curbed parliament and the parties; in 1930 opposition leaders were arrested and tried, and in 1934 a camp for political prisoners opened at Bereza Kartuska, where some inmates were brutally treated. At the same time he opposed the antisemitic policies of his nationalist rivals and judged citizens by loyalty to the state rather than ethnicity, and many Polish Jews saw him as a protector. Abroad he kept the French alliance and signed non-aggression pacts with the Soviet Union in 1932 and with Adolf Hitler's Germany in 1934.

Piłsudski died of liver cancer in Warsaw on 12 May 1935. He was buried in Wawel Cathedral in Kraków, while his heart was placed in his mother's grave in Vilnius.

Our 1920 map shows the reborn Poland during his war with Soviet Russia, and the 1930 map shows the Second Polish Republic at the height of his rule.