Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland, Joshua D. Zimmerman, Harvard University Press
Jozef Pilsudski (1867–1935), Poland’s liberator, grew up in a country divided between Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Noblemen ran politics, dominated a congeries of peasants of various ethnicities, and uneasily collaborated with German and Jewish townsmen and rural functionaries to extract wealth from their estates. Pilsudski himself was a Polish noble from modern Lithuania. He dreamed of a Poland that included the eastern lands where Poles owned land and peopled the towns among non-Polish peasantries. {…]
What is Pilsudski’s legacy? The multinational Poland he dreamed of died. Hitler murdered the Jews, Stalin drove the Poles from the eastern marches and sliced away all lands beyond the eastern ethnic frontier, and the rump of Poland is an ethnic Polish state. Multinational Poland might not have survived anyway: in the end, Pilsudski could only maintain the façade of a Poland of free and mutually loving nations by a Polish variant of authoritarian liberalism. Läs artikel
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