In the spring of 1887, his older brother Bronisław was arrested for involvement in preparing an assassination attempt on Tsar Alexander III. He was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor and lifelong exile in Siberia. Józef was arrested for contact with the conspirators and despite lack of evidence, sentenced to five years of exile. In Kirensk, Siberia, he was accused of armed resistance to prison authorities, and an additional six months were added to his sentence. Because of poor health he was transferred south to Tunka, 1,000 km from Kirensk. There he met many insurgents and revolutionaries, accelerating his political maturation. He returned from Siberia determined to fight based on the socialist movement. 

In the summer of 1896, the 26-year-old Józef, as a member of the Vilnius group of Polish socialists, took part in the First Congress of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) in Vilnius. A year later, at the Second Congress in Warsaw, he was elected to the Central Workers’ Committee of the PPS. After joining the party leadership, he began to direct the party’s activities. Editing Robotnik (“The Worker”), he promoted social equality and independence. From 1905 to 1907 he headed the PPS Combat Organization. In 1906 he became the leader of the Revolutionary Faction, and from 1908 he devoted himself to military activities. 

Around the same time in Lwów, the Union of Active Struggl organized by Kazimierz Sosnkowski, one of Piłsudski’s closest collaborators, began its work. The Union of Active Struggle was a non-party, independent military organization whose purpose was to prepare officer cadres for a future armed uprising against Russia. The organization spread throughout Galicia and reached the Kingdom of Poland. Józef Piłsudski was elected its Commander-in-Chief. In August 1909, the Second Congress of the PPS Revolutionary Faction restored the party’s old name, the Polish Socialist Party, and appointed Piłsudski to the three-member Central Workers’ Committee. The Congress also elected a Party Council, which functioned until the outbreak of World War I. 

Military organizations were multiplying. In Lwów, in 1910 the Riflemen’s Association was established; in Kraków, “Strzelec.” In the same year, the Polish Army was formed, later transformed into the Polish Rifleman Units. In August 1912 in Zakopane, the Polish Military Treasury was created to collect funds for the national revolution. The Provisional Commission of Confederated Independence Parties was also formed. After the outbreak of World War I, Piłsudski created the Polish Military Organization in the Kingdom of Poland to prepare for an uprising against Russia. 

This moment came on August 6, 1914, when a small group of soldiers in gray uniforms set out from the Oleandry district of Kraków toward the Russian partition border. Piłsudski read them the daily order, in which he said, among other things: 

“I look upon you as the cadres from which the future Polish army is to be formed, and I greet you as the First Cadre Company...” 

Of the three Legion Brigades, two, First and Third, recognized his authority; the Second was under the influence of the National Democrats. Piłsudski commanded the First Brigade. After skirmishes near Kielce, the Brigade fought along the Nida River and took part in the Central Powers’ summer offensive in Volhynia. The Legion Brigades earned the respect of the German command, and to give them higher status, their name was changed to the Polish Auxiliary Corps. Piłsudski hoped to regain independence with the support first of Austria-Hungary, and later Germany. After conflicts with the Legion command, Władysław Sikorski and Wacław Zagórski, he left the Legions and became a member of the Provisional Council of State and head of its Military Department. In 1917 he broke with the Council and redirected the Polish Military Organization’s activity against Germany. He refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the Central Powers (the Second Brigade took the oath), and on July 22, 1917, he was imprisoned in the fortress of Magdeburg. 

After returning to Poland in November 1918, he became Provisional Head of State, and in March 1920 he was appointed Marshal. He worked to bring the Polish Army to full combat readiness and, despite the evacuation of the occupying armies, feared the threat from the eastern neighbor. His vision involved a federation of states in the East previously occupied by Russia. In February 1919 a Polish offensive began in Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, and Volhynia. The situation was more difficult in Ukraine, whose western part was held by the Poles and whose central region belonged to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. The Kiev Expedition began the war with the Bolsheviks. On April 21, 1920, Piłsudski signed an agreement with Ataman Symon Petliura, under which Ukraine became an independent state for the first time, though not for long. On April 25, 1920, the Polish offensive against the Bolsheviks began in Ukraine. Polish troops entered Kiev on May 7, 1920. 

On May 18, when Piłsudski returned to Warsaw, he was greeted as a national hero. Meanwhile on the southern front the situation turned against Poland. Budyonny’s powerful army arrived at the end of May and struck the 13th Division of General Haller’s army. After initial resistance, the front broke in early June. In Warsaw, the Skulski government collapsed. In the Sejm, political infighting over ministerial posts paralyzed governance. The young Polish state, threatened by enemy offensive, was left without a government for two weeks. Finally, on June 23, Władysław Grabski’s government was formed. On July 4, Tukhachevsky’s Bolshevik army attacked on the northeastern front. In an address to his troops Tukhachevsky declared: 

“Through the corpse of Poland leads our way to the worldwide revolutionary fire. Forward to Minsk, Vilnius, Warsaw!” 

The retreat of Polish divisions in the north ceded key strategic points without resistance. At the same time, Prime Minister Grabski agreed to and signed, on July 10, 1920, a disastrous armistice with the Bolsheviks on the so-called Curzon Line—an agreement that determined Poland’s eastern borders 25 years later. A new government of National Unity under Prime Minister Wincenty Witos was formed on July 24. 

A military mission from the Western Allies arrived in Warsaw, including General Weygand, who offered his assistance as adviser to the Commander-in-Chief or Chief of the General Staff. Among the members of the French Military Mission was also a tall young captain, Charles de Gaulle. 

Piłsudski preferred weapons and supplies over advice. Polish forces were pushed back to the outskirts of Warsaw, where the decisive battle with the Soviet army took place. From August 13, Warsaw was within direct range of the Bolsheviks. Despite their assaults on August 13 and 14, the city did not fall. Two days later, on August 16, Polish forces under Marshal Piłsudski struck from the Wieprz River at the rear of the concentrated Bolshevik armies. The Bolshevik forces were defeated. The halting of the Bolshevik onslaught by an undertrained and often poorly equipped army bordered on a miracle, and thus the battle went down in history as “the Miracle on the Vistula.” 

In the battle, the Bolsheviks lost 25,000 killed and 66,000 taken prisoner. Lord d’Abernon, head of the Allied Military Mission, wrote in his work Eighteen Decisive Battles of the World: 

“Victory was achieved above all thanks to the strategic genius of one man, and thanks to the execution of an operation so dangerous that it required not only talent but heroism...” 

Józef Piłsudski became the hero and defender of the country from the communist invasion. The Treaty of Riga, signed on October 16, 1921, ended the war with Soviet Russia. Meanwhile, in the reborn Republic, the political scene was filled with parties and parliamentary discord. After the tragic death of Poland’s first President, Gabriel Narutowicz, assassinated by the nationalist Eligiusz Niewiadomski, a new government was formed with General Władysław Sikorski as Prime Minister, General Sosnkowski as Minister of Military Affairs, and Marshal Józef Piłsudski as Chief of the General Staff. 

A state of emergency was declared in Warsaw. On December 20, 1922, the National Assembly elected Stanisław Wojciechowski as President. Piłsudski resigned from the War Council on May 30, 1923. He settled in Sulejówek near Warsaw and devoted himself to writing, his only source of income since he donated his salary as Head of State to social causes. 

Piłsudski closely observed events in the country and maintained contact with his former comrades. He watched political and economic conditions deteriorate: inflation, abuses, parliamentary quarrels, national debt. In early May 1926 anti-government demonstrations began among officers and Riflemen units. Loyal military units awaited the Commander in Rembertów, and on May 12, 1926, he marched with them toward Warsaw. 

Talks with President Wojciechowski, whose final meeting with Piłsudski occurred on the Poniatowski Bridge, failed to resolve the crisis. General Orlicz-Dreszer led the forces loyal to the Marshal, while General Rozwadowski commanded the government troops. Piłsudski made several more attempts to negotiate a ceasefire, but the President remained unyielding. The fratricidal fighting ended on May 14 with the President’s resignation. The May Coup resulted in casualties. This coup divided the loyalties of many Poles, and Piłsudski himself suffered deeply from the events. 

On May 31, 1926, in a session of the National Assembly, Marshal Józef Piłsudski was elected President of the Republic by a majority of votes. He did not accept the office. In the next vote, Professor Ignacy Mościcki became President. In the first post-coup government of Prime Minister Kazimierz Bartel, Piłsudski took the office of Minister of Military Affairs, which he held in successive governments until his death. 

On August 6, 1926, President Mościcki appointed Piłsudski Inspector General of the Armed Forces. Two years later, in 1928, the Marshal initiated the creation of the Non-Party Bloc for Cooperation with the Government (BBWR). After the collapse of Bartel’s government, on August 28, 1930, President Mościcki appointed the Marshal as Prime Minister. The next day, August 29, at the request of the Council of Ministers, the President dissolved the Sejm and Senate. In the subsequent elections, BBWR won by a large margin. Under the slogan of “sanation of political life” and moral reform, the governments of Piłsudski’s followers became known as the Sanation governments. 

On May 12, 1935, Marshal Józef Piłsudski died. His body was laid to rest at Wawel, in the crypt of St. Leonard. His heart, according to his last wish, was placed beside his mother’s coffin at the Rossa cemetery in Vilnius. In the crypt beneath the Silver Bells Chapel of Wawel Cathedral, fresh flowers always lie beside the Marshal’s coffin. Józef Klemens Piłsudski was a great Pole and a patriot; he may have made mistakes, but in the most difficult moments of Poland's struggle and the birth of the Second Republic, he set and example of the highest patriotism.