The Dictator and His Daughter (c. 1934)

On the morning of November 10, 1918, the overnight train from Berlin arrived in Warsaw station. One of its passengers was Josef Pilsudski. For twenty-six years he had been striving for the liberation of Poland from the Russian Empire, and its re-creation as an independent state and culture. Now, at the end of that train journey, he not only found himself at long last in a free Poland but surrounded by ever-growing crowds that saw him as the leader of the new nation. 

Pilsudski did become the leader and defender of that nation, and in 1922 ceded dictatorial powers to democratically elected representatives. Yet just four years later this avowed champion of democracy, pluralism, and federalism seized power in a coup, and ruled Poland as a dictator to his death in 1935. He imprisoned his enemies, suppressed the press, ignored the legislature, and turned old friends against him. ”So much did his style of rule change,” writes my guest Joshua Zimmerman, “that he is often portrayed as if he were two entirely different men…Poland’s greatest champion for freedom and independence…abandoned the principle of democracy as freedom bound by the rule of law.” 

Joshua Zimmerman is is Eli and Diana Zborowski Chair in Holocaust Studies and East European Jewish History and Professor of History at Yeshiva University. Two of his previous books include The Polish Underground and the Jews: 1939-1945, and Poles, Jews and the Politics of Nationality: The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Tsarist Russia, 1892-1914. Given that, it was as close to inevitable as a historian could allow that his most recent book would be Josef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland.

For Further Investigation

Joshua Zimmerman recommends, for further reading about Pilsudski, Waclaw Jedrzejewicz, Pilsudski. A Life for Poland (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1981) and Antony Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland (1972)

You might also consult Norman Davies, God's Playground: A History of Poland. Volume II relates the story from 1795 to the present.

The Jozef Pilsudski Institute of America

George Washington had his seasoning; Josef Pilsudski has mustard.

Earlier podcasts that recall some of the themes in this conversation are my discussion with David Bell in Episode 176 about his book Men on Horseback: Charisma and Power in the Age of Revolutions. While it ends long before Pilsudski's life, he also was a man on horseback. Also my conversation with Rick Hernandez way back in Episode 65 on the first year of the Russian Revolution.