The Red Tram. I think if you ask anyone with
even a passing knowledge of Polish history for
a quote, that's the one they'll come up with.
It's just it's so perfect. It really is. It has
that that cutting edge to it. Exactly. So the
story goes, it's 1918. Poland is finally miraculously
independent. And Józef Piłsudski, the man of
the hour, runs into some of his old socialist
comrades. Right. The guys he was in the trenches
with, metaphorically speaking. For years. And
they greet him like one of their own. They call
him Comrade, you know, expecting the old solidarity,
the secret handshakes, the whole nine yards.
And he just stops them cold. Just completely
shuts it down. He looks them in the eye and says,
Comrades, I took the red tram of socialism to
the stop called Independence, and that's where
I got off. You may keep on to the final stop
if you wish, but from now on, let's address each
other as Mr. It's such a devastating line. It's
an absolute mic drop. It perfectly encapsulates
the man, doesn't it? Oh, completely. It's sharp.
It's a bit arrogant and it's brutally pragmatic.
All the things that made him who he was. It really
is. Yeah. But OK, before we go ahead and sort
of build our whole understanding of him around
this one quote, we have to do our due diligence
here. Did he actually say it? Because it sounds
almost too perfect, like something a screenwriter
would come up with 50 years later to really hammer
the point home. And that's the million dollar
question. It's debated. Historians have gone
back and forth on the authenticity of that specific
phrasing. So it could be apocryphal? It might
be or, you know, it's been heavily polished over
the years by storytellers. But here's the thing.
Whether he said those exact words or not, the
sentiment is the absolute. 100 % truth of his
life. Okay. It explains the central tension of
his entire career. I mean, you're looking at
a man who used revolutionary methods, socialism,
conspiracy, underground printing presses, even,
you know, banditry. We'll definitely get to the
train robbing. We will. But he saw all of those
things solely as vehicles. They were tools to
get to a specific destination. And that destination
was a sovereign Poland. A sovereign Poland. Once
he arrived, he didn't need the vehicle anymore.
He just... He hopped off the tram. And that destination,
that independent Poland, it wasn't just a political
goal he was chasing. I mean, for most of his
life, it was essentially a fantasy. It was a
ghost. It was a country that only existed in,
what, books and songs and memory? Exactly. You
really have to situate yourself in the reality
of the 19th century to grasp the stakes here.
When Piłsudski was born, 1867, Poland simply
did not exist. It had been erased from the map
of Europe. For... Over a century at that point.
For 123 years, to be precise. It was partitioned
and just swallowed up by its neighbors, the Russian
Empire, the German Empire, or Prussia at the
time, and the Austro -Hungarian Empire. So Paszewski's
mission wasn't to, say, lead an existing nation
or win an election in a functioning democracy.
No, no. It was to conjure a country back into
existence through sheer force of will. It's an
act of creation, not politics. He's often called
the father of the Second Polish Republic. It's
a grand title. The resume? It's messy. It's really
complicated. We're looking at a revolutionary,
a train robber, a self -taught general. A head
of state and eventually. A dictator. A dictator.
The benevolent dictator, some would argue, or
a democratic dictator, which is a term that gets
thrown around. But yes, an authoritarian. He
completely defies easy categorization. You can't
put him in a box. You really can't. He's not
one of the fascists of the 1930s, not in the
same way as Mussolini or Hitler, but he's certainly
not a liberal Democrat from the West. He is something
entirely unique. to that region and that incredibly
chaotic era. So let's map out where we're going
in this deep dive. We need to look at the Siberian
exile, which seems to be the forge where his
character was really made. The crucible, absolutely.
We have to talk about the Japanese adventure,
which is a chapter of history I think very, very
few people know about. It's bizarre. It's one
of those truth is stranger than fiction moments.
And it's absolutely crucial to understanding
his global mindset. Right. And then obviously
the big one. The miracle at the Vistula, where
he arguably saved not just Poland, but maybe
all of Western Europe from a Soviet invasion.
The stakes could not have been higher. And finally,
the coup, the tragic turn, the moment the father
of the nation turned his guns on the very government
he helped create. It really is a tragedy in the
classical sense. To understand the man who led
the coup, you have to understand where he started.
You have to go all the way back to that Siberian
crucible. Let's start there, then. Section one,
the Siberian crucible and the socialist mask.
So you said he was born in 1867. The location
is interesting. Zulav, that's in modern day Lithuania.
Correct. And this is a nuance that confuses a
lot of modern observers, I think. Today, we see
Poland and Lithuania as two distinct separate
nation states. They have their own languages,
their own borders. Right. Two different flags
on the map. But Piłsudski was a creature of the
old Polish -Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was a
single, multi -ethnic state for centuries before
the Partitions. He was born into an impoverished,
noble family, the Piłsudskis. They were a part
of the slachta, the nobility, but they had fallen
on some pretty hard times. So ethnically, culturally,
who did he think he was? Culturally, he was Polish
through and through. But he often described himself
as a Lithuanian of Polish culture. He didn't
see a contradiction there. Not at all. For him,
Lithuania was a regional identity. a homeland
within the greater Polish political and cultural
tradition. It's sort of like how someone in the
18th century might have been a Virginian and
an American. He loved the landscape of Lithuania,
the folklore, the traditions, but his political
soul, his mission, was Polish. And the crucial
part of his upbringing wasn't just the geography,
it was the atmosphere in the home. The source
material really highlights his mother, Maria.
She was the engine of his patriotism. You have
to imagine the pressure they were under. The
Russian authorities were aggressively trying
to russify these territories. What does that
mean in practice? It means the Polish language
was banned in schools. Polish history was banned.
Polish literature was suppressed. If you were
caught teaching it, you could go to prison. So
Maria turned their home into a secret school,
a fortress of Polishness. Wow. At night, she
would read her sons the forbidden poets, Mikiewicz.
suiwaki these epic romantic poems about polish
heroes and past glories she taught them the real
history of the failed uprisings against russia
she instilled this deep almost religious patriotism
in Joseph and his brothers. And an equally deep
hatred of Russia. Oh, a visceral hatred. When
he went to school, the gymnasium in Vilnius,
it was a Russian state institution. He was a
Catholic boy forced to attend Russian Orthodox
services. He was forbidden from speaking Polish
in the hallways with his friends. That must have
been infuriating for a kid like him. He rebelled
in the only way he could. He wasn't a great student
academically, mostly because he refused to engage
with the system. He essentially boycotted his
own education out of protest. He left that school
with a profound, lifelong aversion to the Tsar
and everything the Russian Empire represented.
And that aversion escalates very, very quickly.
In 1887, he's 20 years old. He's studying medicine
at Kharkov University and he gets arrested. The
charge is massive. A plot to assassinate Tsar
Alexander III. Yeah, he didn't start small. He
went straight for the top. But was he actually
the ringleader? Was this young medical student
really plotting to kill the emperor of all Russia?
No. And this is the twist. He was actually quite
peripheral to the whole thing. His older brother,
Bronesa, was the one who was deeply involved
with a group of Russian revolutionaries from
a group called the People's Will. They were planning
the assassination. So Joseph was guilty by association.
Pretty much. He helped with some logistics, maybe
acted as a guide for one of the conspirators
who was visiting Vilnius. He knew what was going
on, but he wasn't the bomb maker. It didn't matter.
The Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, they
didn't really do nuance. Right. Close enough.
Close enough. Bronislaw got a much harsher sentence,
15 years of hard labor. But Joseph was sentenced
to five years of administrative exile in eastern
Siberia. Siberia. I mean, it's the classic trope
of Russian literature. But for Prisutsky, this
wasn't fiction. This was a real physical ordeal.
It was brutal. And there is one specific incident.
during his transport that tells you everything
you need to know about his character. It defines
him. They were at the Irkutsk transit prison,
a temporary stop. And one of the other political
prisoners insulted a guard or failed to follow
some petty order. The details vary. But the guards
decided to make an example of them. They retaliated
collectively. They just started wading into the
political prisoners and beating them. And what
did Pisinski do? Did he try to hide? He did the
opposite. He fought back. He physically resisted
the guards. In the chaos, they smashed him in
the face with a rifle butt or a fist and knocked
out two of his front teeth. So he's 20 years
old in a Siberian prison. His teeth are knocked
out. And he's not done. Even after being beaten,
he doesn't submit. He helps organize a hunger
strike to demand the reinstatement of their rights
as political prisoners. He decides to starve
himself. For a week. It nearly killed him. He
was already weakened. But it worked. The authorities
caved, and they got their privileges back. That's
just unbelievable defiance. But it came at a
huge cost. Later in his exile, he spent a night
in a cell that was 40 degrees below zero. That
kind of cold just gets into your bones. It permanently
damaged his health. He had heart issues and other
ailments for the rest of his life. But psychologically,
it hardened him into diamond. He learned a lesson.
He learned that you could say no to the most
powerful empire on Earth, even if it cost you
your teeth. that defiance was possible. He wasn't
just suffering, though, right? He was learning.
This was a networking opportunity in a strange
way. It was. He met other exiles, the Sybaraks,
as they were called. This was the great unintended
consequence of the Russian exile system. It was
like a forced university for radicals. Russia
was concentrating all its most intelligent, most
committed dissidents in one place. So they shared
ideas. They debated, they argued, they taught
each other. Pisutsky tutored local children in
mathematics and languages to make a little money.
He already spoke French, German, Lithuanian,
and Russian, and he started learning English
there. He went in as a rebellious student and
came out as an intellectual revolutionary. So
he returns from Siberia in 1892. He's 25. He's
hardened. He's educated in the ways of revolution.
And this is where he makes a pivotal choice.
He joins the Polish Socialist Party, the PPS.
Right. And this brings us right back to the red
tram. Why the socialists? He was a nobleman by
birth from the sluchta. Surely he wasn't a doctrinaire
Marxist. That's the key question. And the answer
is almost entirely pragmatic. You have to look
at the political landscape of Poland in the 1890s.
Or the option. The other major Polish parties,
like the National Democrats, led by Roman Drowski,
were advocating for something called organic
work. Which means? It means, let's not fight.
Let's negotiate with the Tsar. Let's build up
our economy, improve education, and maybe, just
maybe, we can get some autonomy within the Russian
Empire. And Piłsudski thought that was a fool's
errand. He thought it was delusional. A surrender.
He wanted total, absolute independence. And the
only group on the political scene crazy enough
to talk about armed insurrection, about violence
against the state, were the socialists. So he
put on the socialist mask. Exactly. He brilliantly
merged the social demands of the workers with
the national demands of the Poles. He realized
that the industrial working class was a massive,
untapped army. If he could mobilize them, he
could use them as a battering ram against the
czar. It was a strategic alliance. For him, it
was. For many in the party, the socialism was
the goal. For him, socialism was the tram. He
starts living the underground life. He's printing
secret newspapers. He becomes the editor, printer,
and often the distributor of Robotnik, which
means the worker. It was a hugely influential
underground paper. And he gets married in 1899
to Maria Jaskiewicza. But reading about it, even
the marriage feels like part of the operation.
It certainly was. Biographers are pretty clear
that while there may have been genuine affection,
it was largely a marriage of convenience for
the cause. How so? Think about it. Having a wife
and a respectable domestic setup was the perfect
cover for an illegal printing press. If you're
a single man living alone, moving heavy equipment
in and out, the police get suspicious. If you're
a married couple, you're invisible. And there
was a legal angle, too, right? Yes. Russian law
at the time made it much harder to prosecute
a wife for her husband's illegal activities.
She provided a layer of legal security for the
operation. It was all part of the conspiracy.
It's like something out of a spy novel. Honey,
please ignore the massive printing press in the
living room. Until the police find it, which
they did. And that brings us to Section 2, the
action hero phase. Because if you think the underground
printing was exciting... What happens next is
straight out of a movie. Okay, so it's 1900.
The Russians raid the apartment in the city of
Yudu. They find the press. The jig is up. Pistutsky
is arrested and thrown into the Warsaw Citadel.
Which is a high -security political prison. A
fortress. It looks like the end of the line for
him. It should have been. A one -way ticket back
to Siberia or worse. It absolutely should have
been. But Pistutsky decides to improvise. He
quickly realizes he can't fight his way out of
the Citadel. It's impossible. So he needs to
get transferred. How do you get transferred out
of a maximum security prison? You decide to feign
insanity. Wow. How do you even begin to do that
convincingly enough to fool Russian prison doctors
who have probably seen it all? It takes incredible
commitment. He stopped eating. He started ranting
incoherently. He would stare at the wall for
hours on end, completely unresponsive. He had
to convince the guards and the doctors that he
was completely certifiably losing his mind. And
they bought it. They bought it. They transfer
him to a mental hospital in St. Petersburg, St.
Nicholas Hospital. Which was less secure. Crucially,
yes. The staff were doctors and nurses, not prison
guards. They were less security -minded. And
most importantly, there was a Polish doctor on
staff, Yordisiel Mazurkiewicz, who was sympathetic
to the cause. The inside man. The inside man.
He helped coordinate the escape. One day, Pasutzki
simply walked out of the hospital, got into a
waiting carriage, and vanished into the city.
He fled to Galicia in the Austrian part of Poland
and then on to London. London was the classic
safe haven for revolutionaries then. But he doesn't
stay there long. And this is the part that really
surprised me. It's 1904. The Russo -Japanese
War breaks out. Right. A huge conventional war
between two major empires thousands of miles
away in Manchuria. And what does Pesitsky do?
He gets on a series of boats and trains and goes
all the way to Tokyo. The enemy of my enemy is
my friend. It is pure, unadulterated real politic.
Basutsky saw the war as a golden opportunity.
Russia was distracted. Its military was stretched
thin. He thought if he could get Japanese funding
and support, he could launch an uprising in Poland
that would cripple Russia's western flank. He's
basically pitching himself to the Japanese imperial
government as a geopolitical asset. That's exactly
what he did. He met with senior figures in their
military and intelligence services. He even proposed
creating a Polish legion. A Polish army fighting
for Japan. Yes. A legion made up of Polish conscripts
who had been forced into the Russian army, sent
to fight in Manchuria, and then captured by the
Japanese. He wanted to turn these prisoners of
war into an army against Russia. The sheer audacity
of that idea is just breathtaking. It's pure
Piłsudski. But he wasn't the only Pole in Tokyo
pitching ideas to the Japanese. No. And this
is where the great rivalry of modern Polish history
plays out. Not in Warsaw, but... in a hotel lobby
in Tokyo. It's incredible. Roman Dramowski was
there, too. Dramowski, the leader of the National
Democrats, Piłsudski's political arch nemesis.
And what was Dramowski's pitch? The exact opposite.
Dramowski was telling the Japanese, do not listen
to this romantic lunatic. An uprising in Poland
right now is doomed to fail. It will just lead
to a massacre of Poles by the Russian army, and
it's a complete waste of your money and resources.
So you have Dramowski, the cautious pragmatist,
versus Piłsudski, the romantic revolutionary.
Who did the Japanese listen to? Well, they mostly
listened to Jarowski's caution. They thought
the idea of a Polish legion was too risky and
complicated, but they liked Busitski. They were
impressed by his intelligence network and his
boldness. So they didn't send him away empty
-handed? No. They gave him a significant amount
of money. About 20 ,000 pounds sterling, which
was a huge sum at the time in exchange for intelligence
on Russian troop movements, railway lines, that
sort of thing. But they rejected the military
alliance. So it was a partial failure. But Pisuzzi
comes back with cash and he realizes that if
Japan won't build him an army, he has to buy
one himself. Correct. But intelligence work doesn't
fund an army. He needs more capital, a lot more.
And this leads directly to the Bizdani raid in
1908. The train robbery. It's often called the
action of the four prime ministers, which is
a bit of a joke among historians. Why? Because
four of the men who participated in the raid,
including Piłsudski himself, would later go on
to become prime ministers of Poland. So the future
leaders of the country were robbing a train.
Yes. Pisutsky and his elite paramilitary group,
the combat organization of the PPS, attacked
a Russian mail train near Vilnius at a small
station called Bizdani. This wasn't just two
guys with pistols, was it? No, this was a full
-blown military operation. They had intelligence.
They used explosives to stop the train. There
was a coordinated firefight with the Russian
soldiers guarding it. It was meticulously planned.
And the loot? They seized 200 ,812 rubles. Can
you contextualize that amount for us? How much
was that really worth? It was an absolute fortune.
It was equivalent to the entire operating budget
of his organization for the previous two years
combined. It was a game changer. So what did
he do with the money? It allowed him to transform
his movement from a small group of conspirators
into a proper paramilitary force. He found the
Union of Active Struggle, the ZWC. He bought
Mauser rifles, ammunition, and most importantly,
he started training the Corps of Professional
Officers. He's building an army for a country
that doesn't exist yet. It still seems delusional.
Until you get to 1914. This Paris lecture that's
mentioned in the source material, it honestly
gave me chills. It's his prophet of war moment.
It's January 1914. He gives a lecture to a group
of Polish activists in Paris. Europe is at peace.
The Belle Epoque is in full swing. Nobody is
seriously expecting a continent -wide war. But
Piłsudski is. He predicts the future with terrifying,
almost psychic accuracy. He lays out the logic,
and I'm paraphrasing here, but he says, for Poland
to be free, our three partitioners must destroy
each other. It has to happen in a specific order.
First, Russia must be beaten by the central powers,
Germany and Austria. Then, after Russia is knocked
out, the central powers must be beaten by the
West France, Britain, and America. That is, that
is exactly what happened in World War I. To the
letter. It sounds like wishing for a double meteor
strike on your enemy's houses. It's an incredibly
unlikely sequence of events. No serious political
analysts believe that would happen. But Piszczewski
saw the structural weaknesses in the European
alliance system. And a few months later, an archduke
is shot in Sarajevo and his prophecy starts to
come true. The world changes forever. Yeah. And
Piszczewski is ready. Section 3. World War I
and the legions. So. The war begins. Piłsudski
has his little army in waiting, the First Cadre
Company, ready to go in Krakow and Austrian Poland.
He decides to invade Russian -occupied Poland.
Right. The strategy is, we march in, the Polish
people will see us as liberators, they'll rise
up en masse, and we'll ride this popular wave
all the way to Warsaw. And it was a total embarrassing
flop. What happened? They marched into the first
sizable town, Kielce. Pazewski expected to be
showered with flowers, hailed as a hero, young
men flocking to join his army. Instead, the residents
locked their doors and closed their window shutters.
Total silence. Were they pro -Russian? No, not
at all. They were terrified. They were pragmatic.
They had seen failed uprisings before, in 1830
and 1863. They knew that if they helped these
few hundred guys in fancy uniforms, the massive
Russian army would be back the next day to brain
their village down and hang them. They were survivors?
Exactly. And the Austrians, who were technically
Piłsudski's patrons at this point, looked at
this tiny force of 150 -odd men and basically
rolled their eyes. They thought, OK, that was
a nice little patriotic display, boys. Now get
integrated into the regular Austro -Hungarian
army as scouts. But Piłsudski manages to salvage
the situation. He negotiates and forms the Polish
Legions, which fight as a distinct Polish unit
alongside the Austrians. And this is where the
legend is really solidified. The cult of the
commandant, they called it. Tell me about the
culture of the legions. It was unique. Initially,
they didn't use formal military titles like general
or captain. They addressed each other as citizen.
Echoing the French Revolution, Piłsudski was
known simply as the commandant. He lived with
his men. He ate the same rations. He shared their
hardships. He wasn't some distant general in
a chateau. He was a father figure. The personal
loyalty they had for him was fanatical. But there's
a fundamental problem here. He's fighting for
Austria and Germany. He is technically fighting
on the side of two of Poland's partitioners.
This was the tightrope he had to walk. He knew
he had to fight Russia first. That was step one
of his prophecy. But by 1917, the world had shifted
dramatically. The Russian Revolution. Exactly.
The first part of his prophecy comes true. The
Russian Revolution happens. The Tsar is toppled.
The Russian army on the Eastern Front completely
collapses and disintegrates. Russia is out of
the war. Step one complete. Now he needs step
two. Germany and Austria must lose to the West.
Precisely. So he needs to switch sides, but he
can't just defect. It would look opportunistic.
He needs a grand gesture. He needs to become
a victim of the central powers. The oath crisis.
The oath crisis of 1917. The Germans, seeing
that Russia is out of the war, decided they want
to fully incorporate the Polish legions into
the German army. They want to create a puppet
Polish state. And to do that, they demand that
all the Polish soldiers swear an oath of loyalty,
not to a future Poland, but to Kaiser Wilhelm
II of Germany. And Piłsudski says no. He flatly
refuses, and he secretly orders his soldiers
in the 1st and 3rd Brigades to refuse as well.
I will not swear an oath of loyalty to a German
emperor. He knows this is going to get him arrested.
He's counting on it. Yeah. It is an absolute
masterstroke of political timing. Think about
it. If he had stayed loyal to Germany and Austria
until the very end of the war in 1918, he would
have been on the losing side. The victors...
France, Britain, America would have seen him
as a German collaborator. A puppet. A puppet.
But by getting himself arrested and thrown into
Magdeburg Fortress in Germany, he washed his
hands clean of any collaboration. He becomes
a martyr. He becomes the ultimate symbol of resistance.
He spends the final year of the war in a German
prison cell, while Germany slowly crumbles and
loses the war on the Western Front. So when the
armistice is signed in November 1918, he emerges
not as a German puppet, but as the one man who
defied everyone. He fought Russia. They need
to fight Austria and Germany. He's the only viable,
credible leader for a new Poland. Section four,
rebuilding a nation from scratch. So it's November
1918. Germany releases him. He arrives in Warsaw
on a train. He proclaims independence on November
11th. But the practical reality he walks into.
The sources describe it as an administrative
nightmare. Nightmare is an understatement. It
was a Frankenstein's monster of a country stitched
together from three dead empires. Remember, for
123 years. These territories were administered
by three completely different bureaucratic systems.
Give us some examples. What did that actually
mean for the task of daily governance? Well,
just take the law. There were nine different
legal systems operating in Poland simultaneously.
Nine? How is that even possible? Well, you had
the Napoleonic Code in the central part of Poland
that Napoleon had once controlled. You had Prussian
law in the West, Austrian civil law in the South,
Russian law in the East, and then variations
within those. It was absolute chaos. And the
currency? Five different official currencies
were circulating. You had German marks, Austrian
crowns, Russian rubles, and a provisional currency
called the Polish mark. And the economy had been
looted by the Germans during their occupation.
Wealth was down 10 percent. There was extreme
poverty and a typhus epidemic was raging. But
the train example is my favorite. It's the perfect
metaphor. It really is. The source material says
there were 66 different types of rail systems
and 165 different models of locomotives. But
the crucial part was the tracks themselves. The
track gauges were different. The Russian Empire
deliberately built their tracks on a wider gauge
than the European standard to make it harder
for an enemy, like Napoleon or the Germans, to
invade by rail. So you physically could not drive
a train from Warsaw to the eastern territories.
You had to stop at the old border. Stop. Unload
every single passenger and every piece of cargo
and put it all on a completely different train.
Piłsudski wasn't just governing a country. He
was trying to glue together broken shards of
pottery that didn't even fit. And on top of all
that, he has to hold it together politically.
He makes a very shrewd move. He brings in Ignacy
Paderewski to be prime minister. Why him? He
was a pianist. He was a global superstar. Yeah.
Paderewski was arguably the most famous... pole
in the world at that time. He was a world -famous
concert pianist and composer. He was basically
a celebrity in America and Britain. More importantly,
he had the ear of President Woodrow Wilson. So
it was about international recognition. Exactly.
Pisutsky knew that the Western allies were suspicious
of him. They remembered him as that socialist
radical, the guy who worked with Germany at the
start of the war. He was a question mark. So
he made the charming, universally admired Paderewski
the prime minister to win over the West, while
Piłsudski held the real power as head of state
and commander -in -chief of the army. Very smart.
But Piłsudski had a vision that went far beyond
just the borders of Poland. He had this grand
idea of intermarium. Misimors, literally between
seas. This was his grand geostrategic dream.
He looked at the map and saw a giant, resentful
Germany to the west and a giant, chaotic but
potentially powerful Russia to the east. And
Poland was stuck in the middle. And he concluded
that a medium -sized Poland on its own would
always be crushed between them eventually. It
was just a matter of time. The only long -term
solution, in his mind, was a massive federation.
Who would be in it? Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine,
Belarus. Maybe even Latvia, Estonia, Finland,
and Romania down the line. A massive power block
stretching from the Baltic Sea in the north to
the Black Sea in the south. A counterweight to
Germany and Russia. A third superpower in Eastern
Europe. It sounds logical on paper. Why didn't
it happen? Nationalism. The very same force that
Piłsudski had harnessed to build Poland was now
working against him. The Lithuanians didn't want
to be the junior partner in a Polish -led federation.
They wanted their own independent state. The
Ukrainians wanted their own independence, not
to trade Moscow's rule for Warsaw's. They were
suspicious of Polish intentions. Deeply suspicious.
They worried that federation was just a polite
code word for a new Polish empire. And the Russians,
obviously, were not just going to sit by and
let this happen. Which brings us to the absolute
climax of his military career. Section 5. The
Polish Soviet War of 1920. This is the moment
where the fate of Europe really hung in the balance.
That is not an exaggeration. Lenin and the Bolsheviks
had won the Russian Civil War. They had consolidated
power. And their goal was never just Russia.
It was world revolution. World revolution. They
wanted to march west and link up with the powerful
communist movements in Germany. If they could
turn Germany communist, they believed all of
Europe would fall. And Poland was the land bridge
they had to cross to get there. Poland was the
red bridge they had to cross. Yeah. And the corpse
of white Poland, as they put it, was the obstacle
in their way. Pisutsky doesn't wait to be attacked,
though. He strikes first. He makes an alliance
with the exiled Ukrainian leader, Simon Petliura,
and he launches an offensive, capturing Kiev
in May 1920. It was a huge gamble. He was trying
to create that independent Ukraine that would
act as a buffer state between Poland and Russia,
a key part of his intermarium idea. But the Red
Army's response was overwhelming. They counterattacked
with incredible ferocity and numbers. The Soviet
commander, the brilliant and ruthless Mikhail
Tukhachevsky, issued that famous order to his
troops. Over the corpse of white Poland lies
the path to world conflagration. Onward to Berlin.
By the summer of 1920, the Red Army is at the
gates of Warsaw. The diplomatic corps is fleeing
the city. The government is in a state of total
panic. And Piłsudski's political enemies are
accusing him of treason for the initial failure.
It was the absolute darkest hour. The situation
was so bleak, he actually offered his resignation
as commander -in -chief to the prime minister,
Winston DeVitos. And Widows refused it. He refused
to accept it. He knew Piłsudski was the only
one who could save them. But it shows you the
level of desperation. So the Battle of Warsaw,
August 1920. All the international military experts
say Warsaw is doomed. What is Pisutsky's plan?
He decides to do something that violates every
rule in the standard military textbook. The main
Soviet force was sweeping around to the north
of Warsaw, trying to encircle the city and cut
it off. Pisutsky, looking at the maps, noticed
a huge gap. a weak seam between the Soviet armies
attacking from the north and the smaller armies
in the south. So he sees a weakness. What does
he do with that information? He does something
incredibly risky. He pulls his best, most battle
-hardened troops, about 20 ,000 men, which he
calls the strike group. out of the main defensive
line around Warsaw. Which weakens the city's
defenses. Terrifyingly so. If the main defensive
line had broken while he was repositioning his
troops, it would have been game over. The city
would have fallen. He took personal command of
this strike group, moved them south of Warsaw,
and launched a massive surprise attack straight
up from the south, slicing right into the exposed
flank and rear of the encircling Soviet armies.
It's a massive scythe maneuver. It's a perfect
scythe. He completely severed their supply lines,
their communications, and caused absolute panic.
The Red Army just disintegrated. Tukhachevsky
himself actually thought the Polish plans, which
his intelligence had found on a dead Polish officer
a few days earlier, were a bluff. He thought
the maneuver seemed so reckless and amateurish
that it had to be a trick. So he ignored the
intelligence. A fatal mistake. One of the biggest
military blunders of the 20th century. And the
result was a total rout of the Red Army. Lenin
later called it an enormous defeat. It single
-handedly stopped the westward expansion of communism
into Europe for the next two decades. And they
called it the miracle at the Vistula. And interestingly,
that name was originally meant to be an insult.
It was coined by his political rival, Stanislaw
Struski, who was a national Democrat. He wanted
to imply that Piłsudski's generalship was so
incompetent that only a divine intervention by
the Virgin Mary could have saved Poland. He was
trying to deny Piłsudski the credit. Exactly.
But the name was so evocative and the victory
so unlikely that the Polish people adopted it
sincerely. They loved the name. Strowski's insult
backfired completely and became a part of the
national legend. But the aftermath of the war
had a bitter taste for Piłsudski. The Treaty
of Riga in 1921. It did. Poland survived and
secured its independence. But the grand dream
of intermarium died. To make peace. The Polish
politicians, against Piłsudski's wishes, agreed
to a border that split Ukraine and Belarus with
the Soviets. So he had to abandon his Ukrainian
allies. He had to abandon Simon Petliura and
his Ukrainian soldiers who had fought and bled
alongside the Poles. It was a source of deep
shame for him. He famously went to an internment
camp of Ukrainian officers after the war and
said, I apologize to you gentlemen, I am very
sorry. He felt it was an act of cowardice by
the Polish parliament. There's also the lingering
issue of Vilnius, his hometown. He couldn't let
it go to Lithuania. No. The post -war international
agreements had assigned Vilnius, which had a
majority Polish population, but was the historic
capital of Lithuania, to the new Lithuanian state.
Piłsudski could not accept that. His heart was
there. So what did he do? He couldn't just invade
a neutral country. So he staged a mutiny. He
secretly ordered one of his generals, Lucjan
Julgowski, to rebel against the Polish government,
march his division to Vilnius, and seize the
city. He ordered his own general to pretend to
go rogue. Yes. It gave the Polish government
plausible deniability. Oh no, what a tragedy,
those hot -headed soldiers acting on their own.
But everyone knew who was really pulling the
strings. It secured Vilnius for Poland for the
next two decades, but it absolutely poisoned
relations with Lithuania for the entire interwar
period. They didn't even have formal diplomatic
relations until 1938. So he is the savior of
the nation. He is the marshal. But Section 6
takes a very dark turn. The new Polish democracy
is messy, chaotic, and Piłsudski has zero patience
for mess. None whatsoever. The turning point
is December 1922. Piłsudski had refused to run
for president because the new constitution gave
the president very limited, mostly ceremonial
powers. He didn't want to be a figurehead. So
his friend and ally, Gabriel Narodowicz, was
elected instead. And the political right, the
National Democrats, Dromsky's party, went absolutely
crazy. They launched a vicious nationalist hate
campaign against him. They called Narodowicz
a Jewish president because he had been elected
with the support of the parties representing
Poland's ethnic minorities, Jews, Ukrainians,
Germans. And it wasn't just words. No. A few
days after taking office, President Nordovic
was at an art gallery opening in Warsaw. And
a right -wing fanatic, an artist who had been
swept up in the nationalist fervor, walked up
to him and shot him dead. The assassination of
the first president, how did that impact Piłsudski?
It broke something in him. He was disgusted.
He was horrified. He felt that if the political
parties could whip up so much hatred that they
murdered the democratically elected president,
then Polish democracy itself was morally bankrupt.
He famously called the politicians prostitutes.
So he lost faith in the system he helped create.
Completely. He resigned all his official posts
and retired to a small manor in Sulajowek, just
outside Warsaw. He said he was done with politics.
He lived simply and wrote his memoirs. But he
didn't stay retired for long? No. By 1926, the
country was unstable again. The economy was in
shambles, there was hyperinflation, and governments
were falling every few months due to petty squabbling
in the parliament. Pisutsky, watching from the
sidelines, decided he was the only adult in the
room who could fix it. The May coup of 1926.
He rallied the military regiments loyal to him
and marched on Warsaw. He actually hoped the
government would just see his troops, realize
the game was up, and step aside out of respect
for him. He met the president on the Poniatowski
Bridge for a dramatic confrontation. But the
government didn't back down. No. The president
refused to yield. The government decided to fight
back. So it wasn't a bloodless coup. Not at all.
It was a short but brutal civil war. For three
days, there was heavy fighting in the streets
of Warsaw, brother against brother. In the end,
379 people died, including over 160 civilians
caught in the crossfire. This is the great stain
on his legacy. He shot his way back into power.
And then in a move that I think confuses everyone,
he wins. He has total power, but he doesn't declare
himself dictator for life or emperor. He doesn't
even become president. It's a very strange move.
The parliament, now terrified of him, elected
him president, and he refused the office again.
He installed a figurehead, a scientist named
Ignacy Machiki, as president. Piłsudski took
the title of minister of military affairs and
inspector general of the armed forces. But make
no mistake about it. He was the dictator. Nothing
of importance happened in Poland from 1926 until
his death without his approval. This brings us
to Section 7, the Senation government. Yes, from
the Latin word sanatio, which means healing.
He claimed he was going to heal the nation's
corrupt public life. But the healing process
involved prisons and cracking down on dissent.
It did. The Senation regime was authoritarian.
The parliament, the Senj, became a rubber -stamped
talking shop with no real power. When the political
opposition got too loud or organized against
him, Bisutski had them arrested. The breast trials
saw the leaders of the opposition parties imprisoned
on trumped -up charges. And then there was the
Bereza -Kartuska prison. That was the darkest
part of the regime. It was a detention camp established
for political prisoners where the conditions
were brutal and mistreatment was common. We cannot
sugarcoat this part of his story. The beloved
grandpa of the nation was, in his final years,
running a police state. But you made a point
earlier that he wasn't a fascist in the mold
of Hitler or Mussolini. It's a crucial distinction.
His regime was authoritarian, but not totalitarian.
He didn't try to control every aspect of people's
private lives. There was no single mandatory
ideology. He didn't have a racial theory. In
fact, he was fiercely opposed to the anti -Semitism
of the Polish right. That's a very important
point. How did Poland's large minority populations,
especially the Jews, fare under his rule? His
philosophy was what's called skate assimilation.
He didn't care if you were Jewish, Ukrainian,
or German by blood or religion. He cared if you
were a loyal citizen of the Polish state. If
you served in the army and paid your taxes, you
were a full citizen in his eyes. As opposed to
the ethnic assimilation of his rivals. Exactly.
The National Democrats, the Indecja, wanted an
ethnically pure Catholic Poland. They were openly
anti -Semitic. For this reason, the Jewish community
in Poland generally viewed Piłsudski as a protector.
They consistently voted for his political bloc.
When Piłsudski died, many Polish Jews felt they
had lost their shield against the rising tide
of nationalism. Let's turn to foreign policy
in these final years. He's in an impossible position.
He's looking at a rising Adolf Hitler in the
West and a consolidating Joseph Stalin in the
East. The policy he developed was called the
policy of two stools. He famously told one of
his aides, we are sitting between two stools.
This cannot last long. We have to know from which
stool we will tumble first and when. He was trying
to balance between them. He signed non -aggression
pacts with both, right? Yes, with the Soviet
Union in 1932 and then shocking the world with
Nazi Germany in 1934. He was buying time. He
knew war was inevitable, and he knew Poland was
not ready. There are those persistent rumors
that in 1933, right when Hitler first came to
power, Piłsudski secretly proposed a preventive
war to France. Yes, the evidence is debated among
historians, but the story is that he sounded
out the French. Let's invade Germany now, together,
and crush Hitler while he's still weak and rearming.
And what did France say? The French, still scarred
by World War I, weren't interested. They wanted
peace at any price. So Buczynski had no choice
but to pursue the balancing act, knowing it would
eventually fail. Section 8. The end of an era.
It's 1935. The Marshal is dying. He had liver
cancer. It was kept a state secret until the
very end. He died on May 12, 1935 at the Bill
Witter Palace in Warsaw. The reaction in Poland
was seismic. The entire country just stopped.
There was a massive outpouring of genuine grief.
And the international reaction is startling,
to say the least. Condolences came from everywhere.
Pope Pius XI, Stalin sent a message, Mussolini.
But the most chilling and bizarre one came from
Hitler. Hitler sent condolences. Hitler went
much further. He ordered a memorial mass for
Piłsudski to be held in Berlin. And he attended
it himself. He sat in the front row of a Catholic
cathedral to honor the Polish dictator. It was
the only time in his entire rule that he ever
attended a religious service for a foreign leader.
Why on earth would he do that? He respected Piłsudski.
He saw him as a fellow strongman, a bulwark against
Bolshevism. He had this mistaken belief that
with Piłsudski gone, he could woo Poland into
becoming a junior partner in an anti -Soviet
alliance. He fundamentally misread the Polish
character. The funeral arrangements themselves
were also uniquely complex. Oh, even in death,
he couldn't just do things normally. His body
was embalmed and laid to rest in a crypt in Wawel
Cathedral in Krakow. Which is the burial place
of the Polish kings. It's the Pantheon. It was
a massive honor and very controversial. But his
heart, his heart was surgically removed from
his body. And according to his will, it was taken
to Vilnius and buried in his mother's grave.
It was his final romantic tribute to his Lithuanian
homeland and the mother who taught him to be
a Polish patriot. And his brain wasn't buried
with his body either. No. His brain was removed
and sent to the Stefan Batory University in Vilnius
for scientific study. They wanted to see if they
could find a biological basis for his political
and military genius. Talk about leaving a piece
of yourself everywhere. An incredible story.
It truly is. So here we are at the outro. When
we try to sum it all up, how do we assess the
legacy? I know the communists who ruled Poland
after World War II tried to erase him from history,
didn't they? They tried their best. For 45 years
under the Soviet -imposed government, you couldn't
teach Posudski's story honestly in schools. He
was officially branded a fascist, an imperialist,
an enemy of the people. Because, of course, he
had personally humiliated the Red Army and stopped
their march into Europe. But the memory survived.
People told the stories in their homes. And after
1989, when Poland became free again, the statues
went back up almost immediately. It brings us
right back to that central question, that image
of the Red Tram. He was willing to be a socialist,
a robber, a soldier, a coup leader, a dictator.
He was willing to be whatever he needed to be
for that one singular goal of independence. There's
a quote from him back in 1908 where he asked
his followers not to make him out to be a whiner
and a sentimentalist. He despised the Polish
tradition of martyrdom, of Poland as the noble
victim. He believed independence was something
you took, something you fought for and seized,
not something you were given by other countries
and treaties. And that leads us to the final
provocative thought for you to take away. We
can critique the authoritarianism. We can. And
we absolutely should condemn the Borysa -Kartuska
prison and the May coup. But when you look at
the map of Europe today, without this one specific
contradictory man, without that unique blend
of romanticism and ruthlessness, would Poland
exist on that map at all? Or would it just be
another province on a Russian or German map?
That's the question he leaves us with. Sometimes
history needs a man who is willing to get the
details wrong in order to get the one big thing
right. Thank you for joining us for this deep
dive. Bye.