Jozef Pilsudski

Józef Piłsudski recreated the Polish state after 123 years and then took it over by force. Born in 1867 near Vilnius into an impoverished Polish-Lithuanian noble family under Russian rule, he grew up in a household where Polish history and the failed rising of 1863 were constant subjects. He was arrested in 1887 over a plot against Tsar Alexander III in which his brother was involved, and spent five years in Siberian exile. He joined the Polish Socialist Party, edited its underground paper, and was arrested again; he feigned insanity convincingly enough to be moved to a hospital and escaped. In 1908 he personally led a train robbery at Bezdany that funded his organisation. His analysis was that Poland could only be restored if all three partitioning powers were defeated, so he formed paramilitary units in Austrian Galicia and, when war came, fought for the Central Powers against Russia — then refused an oath of loyalty to them in 1917 and was imprisoned at Magdeburg. Germany released him in November 1918 and he returned to Warsaw as the empires collapsed, becoming head of state of a country that had to be assembled from three legal systems, four currencies and several gauges of railway. He then fought the Soviet advance. In August 1920, with the Red Army at the Vistula, he executed a counter-attack from the south that split it — the battle of Warsaw, which stopped the westward spread of the revolution. He retired in 1923, and in May 1926 marched on Warsaw in a coup that killed several hundred, governing behind the scenes until his death in 1935.

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