Just over a century ago, revolutionary Polish patriot Józef Piłsudski argued that Russia's hunger for territory would continue to roil Europe unless Ukraine could be separated from Moscow. Piłsudski's story echoes today’s war in Ukraine.
After proclaiming a new Polish republic, Piłsudski and his legionnaires fought a series of wars to define, secure and defend its borders, culminating with his greatest victory: turning back a Bolshevik army in 1920 that was threatening to drive all the way to Berlin and carry a Communist revolution to the heart of industrial Europe.
After World War I, Piłsudski hoped Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine could form an alliance to counter Russia in the style of the Polish-Lithuanian union that existed for centuries prior to 1795. But Ukrainians and Lithuanians were wary of Polish claims on their territories, and Pilsudski’s vision of an anti-Russian alliance never became reality.
“My view is that he clearly championed an independent Ukraine, one that would be a democratic outpost on Russia’s border, a buffer between Russia and the West, but also a staunch Polish ally that shared Piłsudski’s democratic values and the values of at least his followers,” the author said. Indeed Polish and Ukrainian nationalists clashed in the early 1900s and again during and after World War II, and some ethnic animosities have lingered.
Piłsudski, born in 1867 and raised in present-day Lithuania, was steeped in the romanticism of Polish independence. He acquired a burning hatred of czarist authority that held Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine in its grip, and he and his brother were implicated in a plot to assassinate the czar and imprisoned.
Concerned that a democratic Poland was slipping away and disgusted by 13 failed Polish governments, he led a 1926 military putsch to restore order. After imposing a system of “managed” democracy and soft dictatorship, Piłsudski’s final years were burdened by declining health and growing worries about how to position Poland between a rising Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany.
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