Krzysztof Kloc

On Piłsudski's attitude to Russia. Interview with Professor Krzysztof Kloc

- In what way was Piłsudski's attitude to Russia influenced by his upbringing, his family home?

Piłsudski's home was an anti-Russian one. Józef Piłsudski was born in 1867, so barely a few years after the January 1863/64 uprising and its suppression by the Russians. It is therefore natural that the still very vivid memory of the uprising strongly influenced his childhood and youth. Particularly as he was born in Lithuania, in the Vilnius region, where the course of the insurrection itself, its bloody suppression and Russian repressions were distinct, much harsher for the Poles, than in other lands of the former Polish Commonwealth. Let us also remember that Piłsudski’s father – Józef senior – was directly involved in the uprising, in its civilian strand; he was a government commissar in one of the districts. All that, plus direct family traditions, upbringing on the part of his parents, first and foremost his mother – Maria née Billewicz, but also his father, whose educational role is usually downplayed, from his youngest years shaped Piłsudski into a Polish patriotic and anti-Russian spirit. He would revisit the January Rising many times later, not only as a certain generational experience, but also in his political concepts and historical interests – or even research ones, one might say. Piłsudski’s anti-Russian attitude, which some of his later associates referred to outright as hatred of Russia, was cemented in the later years of his life ‘thanks’ to a Russian school institution, the Russian Gymnasium, through which Piłsudski passed in Vilnius. Interestingly, some time later Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky attended the same Vilnius Gymnasium. That first, pubertal period would also leave a strong mark on Piłsudski in the form of his attachment to the ideas and traditions of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, as well as to Lithuania – as a part of Poland –itself. Later, he would often return to his Lithuanianness, with time – especially since the assassination of President Narutowicz – emphasising more and more the difference between him, Piłsudski the Lithuanian, and the Poles, while not sparing the Poles very harsh words.

- Was Piłsudski’s attitude to Russia also shaped by his reading? For example, the works of the Polish Romantics? 

Such literary works in Polish were of course forbidden by the Russians, but there was access to the Romantics in almost every home library. I once wrote that Piłsudski could not even remember when he had read Krasiński, Mickiewicz and Słowacki. Krasiński was adored by Piłsudski’s mother, his Irydion reminded her of the post-Insurrection atmosphere in Lithuania, and she read it constantly to her children. From childhood, however, Piłsudski was most fond of, or ‘felt’ the most, Słowacki. Wilam Horzyca even wrote in the second half of the 1930s that, had Słowacki rhymed differently, the look of Poland would have been completely different, as Słowacki had shaped Piłsudski, and Piłsudski was now shaping Poland. Piłsudski read Słowacki all the time, and knew him in large parts by heart, especially his beloved works – Wacław, which he read to his mother before her death, and Beniowski. He was also very familiar with Mickiewicz. Lidia Łojko, who met Piłsudski in Siberia, remembered that Piłsudski could recite whole lengthy excerpts from Pan Tadeusz. Besides, he would later turn to Mickiewicz, for quotations, in his letters to the labourers.

- Did Piłsudski read the classics of Russian literature?

As far as Russian literature was concerned, Piłsudski was more or less forced to familiarise himself with it from his school days. He was familiar with Turgenev, and most appreciated Chekhov’s and Tolstoy’s writings. In Tolstoy he savoured above all the beauty of his writing style and the richness of his language, while he emphatically rejected the “Tolstoyan principles”, the turning of the other cheek, the complete renunciation of violence. Piłsudski would later juxtapose Tolstoy’s works with Żeromski’s, especially the descriptions of war, fights and battles. Piłsudski very much disliked Pushkin. However, in this case, his judgments were dominated by political considerations. He regarded Pushkin as a Tsarist courtier, a servant. He particularly remembered his poem To the Slanderers of Russia, in which Pushkin dealt with the November insurgents in the spirit of Russian chauvinism. It is likely that Piłsudski came across Dostoyevsky during his school years. However, the moment of first contact itself is not as important as Piłsudski’s reaction to the Russian writer’s work. Michał Sokolnicki, one of those closer to Piłsudski, wrote that, in his contacts with Piłsudski, he had the impression that one of the main reasons for Piłsudski’s distrust of Russia was his knowledge of Russian literature, and in particular an almost instinctive need to detach and dissociate himself from that psychological substrate which, following Piłsudski, Sokolnicki and others called ‘Dostoyevskyshness’. It seems, therefore, that Piłsudski was already using that term, which for him was synonymous with Russian nihilism.

- How did Piłsudski see the Tsarism? Was it in terms of a primarily political enemy, as a partitioner that must be defeated? Or did he also see it as an enemy in ideological terms?

Piłsudski’s programme text on Russia, with such a sophisticated title – Russia, published in 1895, that is at the beginning of his political path in the PPS [Polska Partia Socjalistyczna; Eng. Polish Socialist Party], contained a sentence that encapsulated Piłsudski’s entire philosophy: “The greatest enemy of the Polish working class is the Russian Tsarism”. We are aware that the text was written by one of the leaders of the socialist party for a workers’ magazine addressed to the proletariat, but we can safely replace the term “Polish working class” with “the nation”, or more broadly – “Polish society”, for which Tsarist Russia was and is the main enemy and obstacle at the same time to breaking out for independence. A year earlier, Piłsudski had written on behalf of the PPS: “We think that the Tsar should be overthrown. End of story, full stop. Russia is the nations’ prison, and the Tsar is its bars, shackles and guard at the same time.” Piłsudski was keen that not only the proletariat should realise this, but that it should regard Russia, and with it the whole of society independently – to use the language of the time – of class, not even so much as a partitioner but an occupier, and that the Russians on Polish soil should feel as if they were in a foreign country, occupied only by them. Hence, for example, the later 1906 action of the PPS militia known as “Bloody Wednesday”, where a number of assassination attempts were made on Russian servicemen, gendarmes, policemen, officials – they were to be treated as occupiers. To return to the substance of the question: Piłsudski consistently regarded Tsarist Russia first as a political enemy, and only later did he see and feel all the threats emanating from the ideology and system of the Tsarism itself. What were those threats? Above all, he saw and emphasised the civilisational foreignness of Tsarist Russia, saw its continuity from the Mongols and precisely on this foundation, its Asian roots. Russia was not Europe in civilisational terms, and there the sword and cudgel would always be not only an effective but also a desirable tool of politics; Russia meant mental slavery.

- How did Piłsudski assess the Russian people? Did he make a distinction between ‘bad Tsarism’ and ‘good people’? Or did he have a critical attitude to the latter as well?

One commentator on Piłsudski’s thought – Jerzy Niezbrzycki, perhaps better known as Ryszard Wraga – claimed that Piłsudski saw in Russian statehood, and only in Russian statehood, the beginning and end of evil. I believe, however, that although Piłsudski did indeed make a clear distinction between the Tsarism and the people, or rather the peoples inhabiting the Russian empire, he did not value these two – shall we say – phenomena according to the criteria of good and evil. The most numerous of Russia’s peoples – the Russian people – was judged very harshly by Piłsudski. He was of the opinion that the peasants as a class were completely unaware of their interests, that is above all of the need to overthrow the Tsar. Thus, Piłsudski was convinced that it was the Russian peasantry – along with the civil servants he called the Tsar’s army – that was the very foundation of the Tsarism, its bulwark. He looked at other peoples in a different way, especially the Ruthenians, Lithuanians, Latvians and, above all, the Poles, that is those – to use Czesław Miłosz’s language – nations that had a different history, the tradition of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, their own national and religious traditions, to some extent republican, and not – as Piłsudski argued – Mongolian.  

- What were Piłsudski’s contacts as a socialist activist with Russian revolutionaries and democrats like? Was there understanding between them, some thread of ideological agreement, something more than a common enemy – the Tsar and his entourage?

At first, Piłsudski – and he had strong grounds for this – downplayed the significance of the Russian workers’ and revolutionary movements, believing them to be simply weak and unorganised, and then, after they had become established and gained real strength, distrusted them. In the name of the PPS, he demanded that Russian revolutionaries – if they thought of co-operating with Polish socialists – should renounce Great Russian chauvinism, accepting the independence of all nations wishing to break away from Russia, denouncing the policy of Russification, renouncing the idea of all-Russian (in the sense of a state) economic union of the various parts of the empire, and so on. The PPS demanded that, in the territory of the former Polish Republic, them alone as a party should represent the interests of the proletariat; the ‘work’ of the Russian parties could only be carried out with the consent of the PPS. All this was happening even before the formation of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Russia, which would soon be appropriated by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. This branch of the Russian movement, however, would already find a ‘partner’ in the persons of Rosa Luxemburg and Julian Marchlewski, in the SDKPiL [Socjaldemokracja Królestwa Polskiego i Litwy; Eng. Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania], which would become part of the Russian party from 1906. This would already be a period of revolution in the Polish lands and a reorientation of policy on the part of Piłsudski and the so-called ‘old PPS’ activists. The revolution was the proverbial dotting of the ‘i’ in Piłsudski’s putting forward the postulate for absolute independence of the PPS’s actions, the necessity for the Polish party to separate completely from the Russian movement, which had its own interests, often at odds with those of Poland, and – above all – the constant reiteration that the PPS’s aim was to strive for Polish independence. The so-called ‘youngsters’ – not by age or generation, but by seniority in the party – were at that time mainly interested in an alliance with the Russian revolutionaries; they were closer to the international interests of the proletariat, to supranational slogans, and so they embarked on a path which led them directly to the later communist Party of Poland. It is interesting to note that old Russian revolutionaries, such as Feliks Wołchowski, approached Piłsudski years later, on the eve of the Great War, asking him to accept and train Russians in Związki Strzeleckie [Riflemen Associations]. At the time, Piłsudski was looking for excuses, and refused. In the 1920s, already in free Poland, some Piłsudskiites referred to their Commander’s revolutionary past in talks with the communists.

- How was Piłsudski’s attitude to Russia and the Russians affected by his personal experiences – exile, brutal beatings? Was his policy towards Russia – if one can put it that way – dominated by ‘pure’ politics, or was there also an element of personal vengeance, a revenge?

Pure politics. Siberia was for Piłsudski first and foremost a political school. It seems that it was there that he finally came to the conviction that, should another uprising ever take place on Polish soil, its base should be the workers. Piłsudski was not a Marxist, and it is debatable whether he was a socialist at all, but it was the proletariat that was to play a major role in his plans at the time – no matter whether out of ideological conviction or as a tool for implementing his independence plans. First, however, the proletariat had to be made class-conscious – here Marx could already be of use – and nationally conscious. That is to say, first the worker had to realise his class disadvantage, and then let himself be convinced that only an independent Poland could improve his lot and everyday existence. That is one thing about Siberia and the political university that Piłsudski underwent there. The second thing was his meeting in exile and friendship with Bronisław Szwarce. Szwarce was commissioner of home affairs of the Central Committee preparing the 1863 Uprising. However, he was arrested and exiled deep into Russia just before the outbreak of the January Uprising. In Siberia, Szwarce deepened Piłsudski’s fascination with the January Uprising, especially drawing his attention to the idea of a National Government, the need for a strong centre of power to coordinate all movements and actions. Piłsudski would be possessed by this idea for the rest of his life – strong power, the rule of a firm hand, discipline, obedience. He would try to put it into practice in the Party, the militia, the riflemen’s organisations, the Legions, the Polish Army and, finally, the Polish State. Thus, from Siberia, Piłsudski brought back his main political concept – the Government and the Army, or vice versa: the Army and the Government.

- Did Piłsudski believe before the First World War that the overthrow of the Tsar was real? By what means did he think it would be achieved? 

I think it depends what time we are talking about. I think that, until the Russo-Japanese War, Piłsudski believed that an anti-Russian uprising was possible. But could it, in his opinion, have brought independence, or was it merely a manifestation of the Polish cause in the international arena? It is difficult for me to judge. I am convinced, however, that he set aside the insurrectionary idea – as he probably did not abandon it altogether – at the time of the revolution in the Polish lands, when he came face to face with the force that was to decide on the uprising, that is the proletariat. This came as a shock to Piłsudski and the so-called ‘old ones’. This demonstrating and striking element of the workers in Warsaw or Łódź turned out to be largely non-Polish – Jewish, Russian, German and not at all interested in the cause of Polish independence. It was then that Piłsudski’s policy was reoriented – he became the leader of the pro-independence PPS Revolutionary Faction [PPS Frakcja Rewolucyjna], which emerged after a split in the PPS and the creation of the rival internationalist PPS Left Wing [PPS Lewica], and moved his so-called ‘pro-independence work’ to Galicia – to Kraków and Lvov. Here, he organises the paramilitary movement, establishes overt and covert cooperation, intelligence-wise, with Austria, and, preparing the cadres of the future Polish army, waits for the general war, which finally breaks out in 1914, a year salutary for the Poles. Both the Riflemen Association and Strzelec – let me repeat – were cadre organisations, and the First Cadre Company [Pierwsza Kadrowa], which marched out from Oleandry in August 1914 to the front, was a cadre organisation. What I am saying is that I believe – and I emphasise it wherever I can – that Piłsudski did not intend to trigger an uprising in the Kingdom of Poland in 1914. Firstly, he wanted to build up and preserve those cadres of the future Polish Army for the later stages of the war, and secondly, he was well aware of the situation in the Kingdom, of the sentiments in favour of national democracy as well as pro-Russian prevailing there, and that there was no one to make an uprising there! He had his own people behind the cordon, units of the Union of Active Struggle [Związek Walki Czynnej], he was constantly sending missions there, he was simply well aware of the situation in the Kingdom of Poland. He needed the bluff of an uprising for external use, to play games with the Austrians, as well as for internal use – creating the myth of the Riflemen and Legionaries, Piłsudski’s followers, betrayed by the nation and pitted against all those around them, whom no one helped, all turned their backs on them, while they, as before, wanted an uprising and a fight for freedom... Hence the March of the First Brigade and all the subsequent legend. Of course, throughout this period, Piłsudski believed that the Tsar would fall. The best method for that would have been a great upheaval – war, revolution and, as a result – which was originally not Piłsudski’s but Leon Wasilewski’s concept – the tearing of Russia apart at the national seams, and the consequent breaking out into the independence of the nations enslaved by the empire. That card would be played by Piłsudski already in a different, post-war reality. According to some of Piłsudski’s subordinates, from the start of the Great War he was constantly expecting a revolution in Russia, the outbreak of which he took for granted. He was even to express at one point that “the revolution was late for him”, that in his concepts he had anticipated its earlier start. The February Revolution made it possible for him to change his orientation – after all, Russia was practically out of the war, the whole of the Polish lands were in the hands of the Central Powers, so policy had to be reversed and its blade turned against Berlin. The October coup by the Bolsheviks found Piłsudski already in Magdeburg, imprisoned there by the Germans.

- The accusation was sometimes made against Piłsudski that he had not entered into closer cooperation with the Whites against the Bolsheviks, which would have offered a chance to defeat the latter. What guided him then? Was it mainly political calculation and the situation at the front, or was there also an element of ideology, of old prejudices?

This subject has already been discussed many times in Polish historical and political thought, most famously by Józef Mackiewicz. What more can be added here? The real difference, if it can be called that at all, was in Piłsudski’s war concepts between ‘old’ Russia and ‘red’ Russia, Soviet Russia. The so-called ‘third Russia’, personified by Boris Savinkov, was a pipe dream in 1919-1920, perhaps a song of the future with a big question mark, and it was necessary to act here and now. Piłsudski was well aware of what Bolshevism was, but the first fiddle in his concepts was great politics, not ideology and its – in the case of the Soviets – criminal practices. The issue of whether communism was bad and criminal or good and beautiful was for Piłsudski secondary to the fact that it was an ideology and system that was being attempted to be imposed from outside, through coercion, with an eastern neighbour behind it. Before that, however, big politics was telling Piłsudski that putting his hand to Russia’s restoration would have the concrete consequence of bringing back into play a state with great-power and imperial traditions and ambitions that could count on the support of Great Britain and, in particular, France – the faithful ally of the old Russia and its financial, credit, backer. Poland would have been at a loss immediately, already, and this is not a conjecture from the genre of alternative history, for we know what Paris and London’s policy towards Poland was at the time, when the restoration of Russia was barely possible, let alone if it had been successfully carried out. Piłsudski’s support for the so-called ‘Whites’ in the war against the Bolsheviks was not encouraged by the former Tsarist generals who, with a knife at their throats and in danger of being completely destroyed by the Reds, for no price in the world would agree to specific borders with the future Poland, usurping part of her lands, postulating her rebirth within ethnographic boundaries, and refusing to accept the independence of other peoples of the former empire, citing, among other things, the will of some future Russian constitution. A Polish ally in Ukraine being liberated from the Bolsheviks would be expected to fly Russian flags... In a conversation with Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Pilsudski was to say that – and I quote – “with the restoration of Russia Poland can have no connection. Anything but that. Rather Bolshevism but that!”. This does not mean, I repeat, that Piłsudski was unaware of the nature of Bolshevism. He did, however, believe – correctly in my opinion – that at the beginning of Poland’s road to independence, when the fate of its basic existence and borders was at stake, support for former Russia would – in the long run – have brought worse results than not giving a hand to the so-called ‘Whites’. The question as to whether Piłsudski had saved Bolshevism was positively answered by such Piłsudskiites as Michał Sokolnicki and Ryszard Wraga, who immediately added that it was obvious that it was in Poland’s interest at the time not to help ‘white’ Russia. At the same time, Piłsudski reiterated that an immanent feature of Russia – any Russia – was imperialism, be it ‘white’ or ‘red’. Nevertheless, he stressed that Russia too had its bottom, that the time would come when it too would hit it, that Russia would collapse.

- Did Piłsudski's policy have some ideological component, related to the perception of the Russian threat in terms not only of politics or the military, but also of civilisation/culture?

Piłsudski once said that, depending on who was in power in Russia, Russia would look for an ally either in Berlin or in Warsaw, and that, as far as Germany was concerned, both the ‘whites’ and the ‘reds’ would see them as an ally, while only the so-called ‘third, democratic’ Savinkov’s Russia could be oriented towards an alliance with Poland. However, regardless of the nature of the government in Moscow, Piłsudski believed – let us repeat it once more – that Russia would pursue an imperial policy, aiming to revise treaties and borders, to conquer new territories. Moreover, after the Polish-Soviet War, and after the signing of the Riga Treaty in 1921, it was obvious to Piłsudski that the Soviets – like Germany – would articulate specific revisionist demands towards Poland, sometimes loudly, sometimes veiledly; that they would never come to terms with the post-1921 Polish-Soviet border; that territorial claims would never disappear. Let us add that already at the time of the signing of the Peace of Riga there were voices among Soviet politicians that Eastern Galicia was a territory only temporarily ‘occupied’ by Poland. I am leaving aside here such voices as those of Juliusz Mieroszewski and Piotr Wandycz, for example, who claimed that the Peace of Riga had only postponed the sword blow which was constantly hanging over Poland’s head from the Soviets; that the Polish-Soviet War was Poland’s last chance to assert its superpower status, pursue an independent policy in the region and stop the Soviets from marching westwards. Piłsudski, according to the same voices, was well aware of this, and saw confrontation with Russia as inevitable. Communism itself, both in 1920 and after 1926, was secondary here; secondary in view of the fact that, regardless of ideology, the Soviet (Russian) threat was constant, permanent and anticipated, and war was bound to happen sooner or later. The famous slogan “once they enter, they never leave”, which was backed up by Poland’s opposition to a military alliance with the Soviets, or to let the Red Army pass through Polish territory if it wanted to move to the ‘aid’ of France or Czechoslovakia, also stemmed from, among other things, this conviction that the Soviets’ designs on Polish land were a permanent feature of Soviet policy. Throughout the whole of the twentieth century, it was actually the Soviet Union that was the enemy with which war was expected to be most imminent, not Germany. And this stemmed not only from the memory of the 1918-1921 war, but also from the political calculations of Piłsudski and his camp. The rapprochement with Moscow in the short period of the lats. 30, the ‘honeymoon’ I mentioned above, was a bluff, a game on Piłsudski’s part to strengthen Poland’s position on the international arena, including in contacts with Berlin. Communist ideology, based on Piłsudski’s words that Bolshevism was thoroughly Russian, was regarded as a threat in domestic politics – for the Communist Party of Poland [KPP; Komunistyczna Partia Polski] was an agent of a foreign power, and agents were to be guarded against – as Piłsudski said – and liquidated. Popularity of communism meant popularity of the Soviets; it meant working for their benefit. Here the equation was obvious. Marshal Śmigły-Rydz was once to say that, in a war with Germany, Poland might lose territory, while in a conflict with the Soviets it might lose spiritual independence. For Piłsudski, war with any Russia threatened the same thing, as mentioned by Śmigły. It was, in principle, a different civilisation for him. Nevertheless, let us remember Piłsudski’s words from 1920, in which he stated that perhaps Soviet communism, Lenin’s Bolshevism, was attractive to the West because the people there were not familiar with it. However, we, Piłsudski said, already know it very well, and Poles have an educated opinion about it, so the danger of losing that spiritual independence, to quote Śmigły, is much less... 

- What was Pilsudski’s attitude to the Soviet leaders?

In his own way, Piłsudski valued Lenin. He appreciated his shrewdness and cunning, his flexibility in approaching Marxism in practice, the art – false admittedly – but nevertheless of compromise, the ability to withdraw, to wait. According to Piłsudski, Lenin had something of a Teutonic Knight from Sienkiewicz’s novel. All that made him a very dangerous politician, unlike Trotsky, whom Piłsudski described as a professional agitator who believed that he could win a revolution and war with speeches and dialectical tricks. In one conversation, sometime in late 1919/early 1920, Piłsudski said that Lenin had rightly chosen terror as a method for mastering relations in Russia, for Russia – with its Asiatic mentality – understood such a method. Mentioning Dzerzhinsky on that occasion, and wondering why it was he who headed the Bolshevik terror machine, Pilsudski said that perhaps Lenin had deliberately chosen a Pole, because it was easier for a Pole to murder Muscovites. Pilsudski regarded all Lenin’s peaceful slogans merely as pyeredyshka [a breather], the result of Russia’s crisis and the internal, temporary, perturbations of the nascent Soviet state. He was convinced that the moment Lenin got control of the situation, he would immediately move west, and for that Poland not only had to be prepared, but also to strike its own blow in advance. After the war with Soviet Russia, Piłsudski returned to Lenin on rare occasions. For example, in 1928, during a speech to MPs of BBWR [Bezpartyjny Blok Współpracy z Rządem; the Non-Party Bloc for Cooperation with the Government], he was to say that, since the French Revolution, there had been two attempts in history to introduce a new system of governing whole nations – Lenin’s Bolshevism and Mussolini’s fascism. Stalin, on the other hand, directly as a person, a character, did not particularly concern Piłsudski. The non-aggression treaty with the Soviets, the subsequent short ‘honeymoon’ in Polish-Soviet relations, the balancing act and Piłsudski’s obvious game with Moscow were all driven by the interests of the state as Piłsudski understood them, that is as Poland’s de facto dictator, and not by any personal idiosyncrasies or otherwise. In April 1935, the British politician Anthony Eden, who had just returned from Moscow, visited Warsaw. During a meeting with the dying Piłsudski, he mentioned that he had met Stalin in the Soviet capital, to which Piłsudski was to reply in French that whenever he saw a portrait of Stalin, he had the impression that he was seeing a bandit. But you also have to make politics with bandits, just as Piłsudski used to say that, when there is no other material, you have to build monuments out of shit. Stalin valued Piłsudski as a leader and statesman. He remembered him from 1920, but was also impressed by the fact that Piłsudski had taken over the state by force of arms, put everything on the line and won. There is an anecdote that a Polish communist, terribly nervous during a meeting with Stalin sometime after 1945, shouted “cheers to Marshal Piłsudski!” instead of “cheers to Marshal Stalin!” during a toast. After a moment of deadly silence, Stalin apparently to have smiled and said, “nothing happened, he was a good Marshal too”.