Jozef Pilsudski

Founding Father of Modern Poland

Joshua D. Zimmerman

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780674984271
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674275850
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

The story of the enigmatic Jozef Pilsudski, the founding father of modern Poland: a brilliant military leader and high-minded statesman who betrayed his own democratic vision by seizing power in a military coup.

In the story of modern Poland, no one stands taller than Jozef Pilsudski. From the age of sixteen he devoted his life to reestablishing the Polish state that had ceased to exist in 1795. Ahead of World War I, he created a clandestine military corps to fight Russia, which held most Polish territory. After the war, his dream of an independent Poland realized, he took the helm of its newly democratic political order. When he died in 1935, he was buried alongside Polish kings.

Yet Pilsudski was a complicated figure. Passionately devoted to the idea of democracy, he ceded power on constitutional terms, only to retake it a few years later in a coup when he believed his opponents aimed to dismantle the democratic system. Joshua Zimmerman's authoritative biography examines a national hero in the thick of a changing Europe, and the legacy that still divides supporters and detractors. The Poland that Pilsudski envisioned was modern, democratic, and pluralistic. Domestically, he championed equality for Jews. Internationally, he positioned Poland as a bulwark against Bolshevism. But in 1926 he seized power violently, then ruled as a strongman for nearly a decade, imprisoning opponents and eroding legislative power.

In Zimmerman's telling, Pilsudski's faith in the young democracy was shattered after its first elected president was assassinated. Unnerved by Poles brutally turning on one another, the father of the nation came to doubt his fellow citizens' democratic commitments and thereby betrayed his own. It is a legacy that dogs today's Poland, caught on the tortured edge between self-government and authoritarianism.

CHAPTER 1

Childhood and Adolescence

This brother of mine has insane luck. Everything good comes to him and he always puts himself at the center of things. He talks a lot (but does very little). Foolishly believed, everyone raves about him.

—DIARY OF SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD BRONISŁAW PILSUDSKI ABOUT FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD JOZEF, VILNA, FEBRUARY 8, 1883

Jozef Klemens Pilsudski was born December 5, 1867, in Zułów, a village thirty-eight miles northeast of Vilna, to a Polish-Lithuanian landed-gentry family. He was the fourth child and second son of Józef Wincenty Piotr Pilsudski (1833–1902) and Maria Billewicz (1842–1884). His ancestors had been prominent in the region for centuries. The family name first appeared in 1539 when Bartłomiej Giniatowicz, a district administrator (starosta), adopted the surname after the local village, Piłsudy, northeast of Kaunas. Pilsudski’s parents were first cousins once removed, the two families having become linked by marriage in the eighteenth century and ultimately passing down sizable properties to their children, including Pilsudski’s grandfather Piotr Kazimierz.¹

In the early 1830s, Piotr’s grandfather met Countess Teodora Butler, of Scottish descent, and they married in 1833. That same year Teodora gave birth to Pilsudski’s father in Rapszany, twenty miles northeast of Kowno. From an early age, Józef Wincenty showed leadership qualities as well as intellectual and artistic promise. By his late teens, he had become a gifted pianist and composer. Pilsudski’s older brother, Bronisław, described their father as a man “with a broad, encyclopedic intellect but one who was unfit for practical work.”² Pilsudski’s wife, Alexandra, described her father-in-law as an elegant and handsome man “of considerable mental gifts, cultured, extremely well-read, a brilliant pianist and a talented composer.”³

The Pilsudski and Billewicz sides of the family were different in character and disposition. An eminent sociologist who knew the Pilsudski family, Ludwik Krzywicki, commented that the Billewicz side was frugal and cautious whereas the Pilsudski branch was impulsive and reckless with money. The Pilsudskis, Krzywicki remarked, “believed in the idea that pennies in a piggybank are there to be spent.”⁴ Pilsudski’s father in many ways embodied the family traits.

Pilsudski’s mother, on the other hand, was pragmatic and well organized. She was born in 1842 to Antoni and Helena Billewicz in Adamowo, a village in Tenenie county in Kaunas province. The Billewiczes were one of the area’s oldest and most distinguished noble families.⁵ Wealthier than the Pilsudskis, Maria’s family lived on the estate owned by her grandfather, Kacper Billewicz. She grew up as an only child after her younger brother, Adam, died in infancy. When Maria was merely four years old, in 1846, a second tragedy struck the family when her mother died of tuberculosis. Maria’s father remarried and gave over care of his daughter to her kind and generous grandfather. Fearing he was unable to provide the proper care, Kacper arranged for Maria to live with a nearby family, whose daughter, Celina, provided a much-needed playmate. Celina would remain Maria’s close and loyal friend for the rest of her life.⁶

Maria’s grandfather had been an influential judge who retired as head of the Vilna district court. He took a great interest in Maria’s upbringing, providing excellent teachers and making sure she was well cared for. But his wealth and influence could not change the poor health Maria was born with. At age six she fell ill with inflammation of the pelvic joint, a condition that led to chronic pain and caused irregular growth, resulting in one leg being shorter than the other. While treatment by a specialist in Berlin improved her condition, the disability remained with her for the rest of her life. Maria’s health problems motivated Kacper to give his granddaughter the best education possible. He employed highly regarded teachers who were “as strong and as relentless as possible so as to overcome the weakness of her body.”⁷ Kacper’s love and care “was nevertheless mixed,” one historian observed, “with a certain educational method: strict, rigid, sometimes ruthless, but with the goal of developing and deepening [Maria’s] will, toughness, sense of self-respect, integrity, and courage in life.”⁸ At the age of nine, Maria came into extraordinary wealth, inheriting several hundred thousand rubles and three estates totaling thirty thousand acres of land. The first was in Suginty (Lithuanian: Suginicai), fifty-three miles north of Vilna, the second in Adamowo, and the third in Zułów, Jozef Pilsudski’s birthplace.⁹

Maria Billewicz and Józef Wincenty Pilsudski were married on April 23, 1863, in Adamowo. The wedding took place in the shadow of the Polish insurrection that had begun three months earlier. Although he did not engage in direct combat, Józef Wincenty wholeheartedly threw his support behind the rebellion, serving as commissioner in the Lithuanian county of Rapszany, his birthplace, for the Provisional National Government in Warsaw.¹⁰ The 1863 Polish insurrection had begun when the clandestine Central National Committee in Warsaw announced the creation of a Provisional National Government on January 22, 1863, calling upon the peoples of Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine to support its demand for territorial separation from Russia. Fighting broke out between the poorly trained and ill-equipped Polish insurgents concentrated in the Kingdom of Poland as well as in Lithuania, in an armed rebellion that lasted more than a year and spread significantly beyond the kingdom, particularly into the northwestern provinces of tsarist Russia. During the uprising, the Polish insurgent army ranged from twenty thousand to thirty thousand men, with a total of two hundred thousand fighters taking part over the course of the uprising.¹¹

In December 1863 Romuald Traugutt suspended the National Government and began ruling by decree. But the uprising began to wane without hoped-for foreign intervention from France or Britain. In April 1864 Traugutt was captured and the rebellion collapsed.¹² As losses were tallied and mass arrests took place, it became clear the Poles had a national catastrophe on their hands: 10,000 insurgents fell in battle, 669 insurrectionary leaders were rounded up and summarily executed, and 26,500 Poles were sent in chains to Siberia—16,000 from the Kingdom of Poland and 10,500 from Lithuania—many of whom never returned. In Lithuania—where the Pilsudski family lived—two hundred battles took place followed by the confiscation of eighteen hundred Polish estates.¹³

Pilsudski’s parents, Maria and Józef, ca. 1863.

Early Childhood in the Countryside

At the beginning of 1864, as the tide of insurrection turned inexorably in favor of the Russians, Józef Wincenty and Maria fled their home under cover of night to evade arrest. They traveled two hundred miles eastward to Maria’s country estate in Zułów, far enough away to elude notice. In the second half of 1864, Maria gave birth to their first child, Helena, named after her late mother. Helena was followed by Zofia in 1865, Bronisław in 1866, and Jozef Klemens in 1867. During the remaining time they lived in Zułów, Maria and Józef Wincenty welcomed three more children: Adam in 1869, Kazimierz in 1871, and Maria in 1873.¹⁴

Meanwhile, Pilsudski’s father combined family wealth with broad ambition and an advanced education. He had graduated from the Agricultural Academy of Horki in eastern Belarus and frequently contributed articles to the Warsaw-based periodical on agriculture, Gazeta Rolnicza (Agricultural Gazette). In Zułów he embarked on a plan to develop advanced agriculture and industries in the area. Within a few years he had established the region’s first yeast, turpentine, and brick factories.¹⁵ He lacked managerial skills and business acumen, though, and none of his investments became profitable. He “had the irresponsibility that so often accompanies the artistic temperament,” Alexandra, Pilsudski’s second wife, later commented.¹⁶ The result was that a succession of ill-conceived farming projects led the family to near financial ruin. Pilsudski’s great aunt Zofia Billewicz-Zubowowa, who used to teach the children mathematics, described Józef Wincenty as a “schemer” of poorly thought-out projects, unable to implement projects effectively in the rural setting of Zułów.¹⁷

Józef Wincenty’s dream of bringing advanced agriculture and industry to the Zułów region was nonetheless genuine. Pilsudski’s father was a visionary with many ideas, including the development of a breeding farm and bringing the land under cultivation. Yet he also envisioned the transformation of Zułów into an industrial center, purchasing agricultural machinery from abroad. The paucity of skilled labor in a rural county, however, meant that such equipment went practically unused. Krzywicki noted that the local worker in the Zułów region “was uncouth. He was accustomed to using a plow and a wooden harrow but was incapable of working with a metal harrow of any variety.”¹⁸ Józef Wincenty’s machinery therefore fell into disuse and disrepair, gradually becoming merely rust-covered scrap iron. Pilsudski’s father attempted to recover his losses by founding a distillery. But he proved equally unfit to run that business even though the soil in Zułów was ideal for potato crops. A pattern emerged whereby Pilsudski’s father chased after every new idea before completing existing projects. Józef Wincenty had extraordinary plans for Zułów and was always busy with the affairs of the estate, “taking up each new project enthusiastically but soon dropping it to begin another. He made none of them pay off and little by little got deep and deeper into debt.”¹⁹ Reflecting on his father, Pilsudski remarked that he “was an extraordinarily learned agronomist … but for whatever reason—God only knows—he was not able to run the large Zułów estate. He [simply] was not an administrator.”²⁰

Despite his father’s problems, Jozef Pilsudski’s early childhood was by all accounts idyllic. Located along the Mera River, the Zułów estate was surrounded by forests, fields, and meadows. The manor, built of larch wood and set on the banks of a stream, consisted of twelve bedrooms that housed the Pilsudski family, domestic servants, Maria’s childhood friend Celina, and relatives. Rows of tall chestnut trees and fragrant lime trees stood alongside the house. The front had a circular lawn with a glass-roofed porch flanked by lilac bushes and a Madonna over the door.²¹ Pilsudski would later write, “I ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Note on Polish Pronunciation
• List of Maps
• Introduction
• 1. Childhood and Adolescence
• 2. Exile and Romance
• 3. Socialist Leader and Conspirator
• 4. Into the International Arena
• 5. Party Leadership and Arrest
• 6. An Extraordinary Escape and a New Home in Austrian Galicia
• 7. Creating a Party Platform
• 8. From a Tokyo Mission to the Union of Active Struggle
• 9. Building an Armed Force for Independence
• 10. The Polish Legions and the Beginnings of World War I
• 11. An Emerging National Leader
• 12. The Father of Independent Poland
• 13. Statesman and Diplomat
• 14. The State Builder
• 15. From the First Years of Peace to the 1926 Coup
• 16. The Path to Authoritarian Rule
• 17. Poland in a Changing World
• 18. Pilsudski’s Last Year
• Epilogue
• Pilsudski Family Trees
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Illustration Credits
• Index