Dictator of the
Month: February, 2007Dictator of the
Month: February, 2007
| Józef
Klemens Piłsudski
Take me to the picture gallery Fact Sheet Name: Józef
Klemens Piłsudski
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Biography
Piłsudski's
early life Born
in the village of Zułów (Zalavas, in today's Lithuania) into an
impoverished Polish szlachta (noble) family, he attended school in Wilno.
In 1885 he studied medicine at Kharkiv, 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 similarly sentenced to hard labor (katorga)
in eastern Siberia, for fifteen years. 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) Piłsudski
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. 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 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, Piłsudski declared that in the imminent
war, for Poland to regain her independence, Russia must be beaten by the
Central Powers (Austria-Hungary and German Empire), 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 Piłsudski'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. 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 Piłsudski was appointed Commander in Chief, and on November 14
Chief of State (Naczelnik Panstwa), of a renascent Polish state. Polish-Soviet
War Piłsudski
aspired to create a federation (to be called Międzymorze--"Tween-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 that had served its constituent populations
well for four centuries. 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 Soviet Russia. The Polish and Ukrainian armies, under Piłsudski's
command, launched a successful offensive against the Russian forces in
Ukraine. By May 7, having done remarkably little fighting, they had
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. 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
counteroffensive. Next
Piłsudzki'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 would 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. Piłsudski's
plan was strongly criticized at the time, and only the desperate situation
of the Polish forces persuaded other army commanders to go along with it.
Although based on fairly reliable information provided by Polish
intelligence and 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. Furthermore, when a copy of the plan
accidentally fell into Soviet hands, it was thought to be a ruse and
ignored. Only days later, the Soviets would pay dearly for their mistake. 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 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. 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 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, in May 1926, he returned to power in a military coup d'etat (the
May Coup), aided by socialist railwaymen who sidetracked government troop
transports. He initiated 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 defense 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 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, 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 nonaggression pact
with Germany in January 1934. (He had already done so with the Soviet
Union in 1932.) He was acutely aware of the shakiness of the nonaggression
pacts, remarking sarcastically: "The question remains, which of the
stools will we fall off first." Ably assisted by his protege,
Minister of Foreign Affairs Jozef Beck, he sought support for Poland in
alliances with western powers--France and Great Britain--and with friendly,
if less powerful, neighbors: Romania and Hungary. Hitler
repeatedly suggested a German-Polish alliance against the Soviets, but Piłsudski
ignored the proposal. He sought 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 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
and gotten off." Pilsudski
had given Poland something akin to what Henryk Sienkiewicz's pan Zagłoba
had mused about: a Polish Oliver Cromwell. As such, the Marshal had
inevitably drawn both intense loyalty and intense vilification. By
1935 Piłsudski had, unbeknownst to the public, been for several years
in declining health. So much the greater was the shock at the passing of
the man about whom Joseph Conrad had said: "He was the only great man
to emerge on the scene during the [First World] war." This article is from www.wikipedia.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jozef_Pilsudski and is subject to the GNU-FDL license for free documentation List of authors: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=J%C3%B3zef_Pi%C5%82sudski&action=history
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