중동부유럽

Is there a more dominant and polarizing historical figure in inter-war Poland than its so-called "founding father"? Joshua D. Zimmerman does not think so. Indeed, this fine monograph convincingly justifies his bold assertion. Born on 5 December 1867 in a village northeast of multicultural and multiethnic Vilna to a Polish-Lithuanian landed-gentry family, Jozef Klemens Pilsudski, under the strong influence of a very patriotic mother, grew up in a household where anti-Russian sentiments naturally pre- vailed. At both the Russian State Gymnasium in Vilna and the university in Kharkov, young Jozef discovered socialism and involved himself in conspiratorial activities that landed him in Siberia for five years (1887-1892). Back in Vilna in June 1892, Pilsudski, then the leader of the Lithuanian branch of the Polish Socialist Party, acted as the editor-in-chief of Robotnik (Worker), the first party newspaper, whose many editorials disseminated the idea that the separation of Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland from Russia was a prerequisite for attaining democratic institutions and realiz- ing a civil society. In 1901, he moved to Austrian Galicia, where he would spend most of the next twelve years. The Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) and subsequent Russian Revolution of 1905 progressively led him to focus his attention on the mili- tary. The decision to build a national army-a process that started in 1910 with the Riflemen`s Association was grounded in his belief that routing Russian forces from Polish lands was not to be achieved by armed insurrection (this nineteenth- century model had twice proved to be a recipe for disaster), but as the result of war with a neighboring great power.