Jozef Pilsudski

The story of the enigmatic Jozef Pilsudski, the founding father of modern Poland: a brilliant military leader and high-minded statesman who betrayed his own democratic vision by seizing power in a military coup.In the story of modern Poland, no one stands taller than Jozef Pilsudski. Ahead of World War I, he created a clandestine military corps to fight Russia, which held most Polish territory. From the age of sixteen he devoted his life to reestablishing the Polish state that had ceased to exist in 1795.

When he died in 1935, he was buried alongside Polish kings.Yet Pilsudski was a complicated figure. After the war, his dream of an independent Poland realized, he took the helm of its newly democratic political order. Passionately devoted to the idea of democracy, he ceded power on constitutional terms, only to retake it a few years later in a coup when he believed