Józef Piłsudski

Józef Piłsudski

1867–1935 ○ Died of illness in Warsaw

The soldier-politician who began as a socialist, became Head of State of reborn Poland, broke the Red Army's westward drive at Warsaw in 1920, and later ruled through a coup-built authoritarian regime

To be defeated and not to yield, that is victory; to be victorious and to rest on one's laurels, that is defeat.

Born into a Polish noble family near Wilno, he served five years of Siberian exile for implication in the 1887 plot to assassinate Alexander III, the same affair for which Lenin's brother Aleksandr Ulyanov was hanged. As a leader of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) he published its organ Robotnik and led its Combat Organization in the revolution of 1905, but socialism became for him ever more a means to independence. In the First World War he raised the Polish Legions on Austria's side to fight Russia, and in November 1918 became Head of State of reborn Poland. Pursuing a federation of Lithuania, Belorussia and Ukraine that would push Russia back, he drove on Kiev in 1920, was thrown back to the gates of Warsaw, then broke Tukhachevsky's Western Front with the August counterstroke and secured the Riga border. He withdrew from politics in 1923, returned in the May coup of 1926, ruled Poland as the strongman of the Sanacja regime until his death, and concluded a non-aggression pact with the USSR in 1932. He died of illness in May 1935. In Soviet propaganda and interrogation files he lived on as the incarnation of Polish reaction and the founder of the 'Polish Military Organization,' appearing as late as the founding narrative of the Polish Operation of 1937.