Joshua D. Zimmerman, Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). 640 pp., $39.95.

EASTERN EUROPE occupies an increasingly prominent place in American foreign policy. The United States is a treaty ally of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. Through NATO, it has an Article 5 commitment to defend these countries if they are attacked. Having kept Ukraine at arm’s length on NATO accession since 2014, when Russia started its war against Ukraine, Washington has become the biggest supplier of military aid to Kyiv. U.S. intelligence helped Ukraine to survive the first few weeks of Russia’s February 2022 invasion, just as it has materially helped Ukraine to fight the war. The United States is more active in Eastern Europe than France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, Europe’s major military powers. If Russia loses, the United States will be the region’s dominant power. It will have the most allies, the most diplomatic say, the most on-the-ground clout. 

American influence in Eastern Europe is not without precedent. Woodrow Wilson bestowed the phrase “ethnic self-determination” on the peoples of Eastern Europe. He did so just as four massive empires—Russian, German, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian—collapsed and the hope for a new mode of Eastern European nationhood emerged. (Today the central train station in Prague is named after Woodrow Wilson, in honor of his contributions to the Czech nation.) Then came a long hiatus. Washington did nothing in 1939, when Adolf Hitler initiated World War II by attacking Poland. Nor could President Harry Truman do much more than watch as a victorious Soviet Union subjugated one ethnically self-determined state after another in Eastern Europe. In the 1980s, the United States took its revenge on Joseph Stalin, exploiting nationalism and anti-communism in Poland and elsewhere to bedevil the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev never found a way to manage these complications.

In 2022, the degree of U.S. engagement in Eastern Europe was unwilled by Washington. When Ukraine endured the first round of Russia’s war in 2014 and 2015, the United States had the goal of “Europeanizing” the conflict. Hence the diplomacy meant to terminate the war—it would come to be known as “Minsk” after the Belorussian capital city in which it was negotiated—was led by France and Germany. Their job was to help Ukraine negotiate with Russia. Forget Dayton, Ohio. Forget a sleepless Richard Holbrooke corralling the leaders of the Balkans and restoring Europe to peace. “Minsk” was to signify the hour of Europe in Europe; but this hoped-for hour of Europe never came. “Minsk” failed. War returned in 2022 and with it the United States.

Given the enormous military and financial outlay the United States is making in Ukraine, the importance of U.S. actions to the war in Ukraine, and the large impact the United States will have on whatever postwar settlement comes into being, both policymakers and U.S. citizens should be thinking carefully about the history of Eastern Europe. This history is not well known in the United States, where Europe often means Western Europe and where the reservoir of historical references and analogies is tacitly Western European: Versailles as in the 1919 treaty of Versailles; Munich as in the appeasement of Hitler in the late 1930s; the Marshall Plan as in the assistance the United States gave to Western European nations after World War II; and nato itself, which extends across Europe in 2022, but as its very name indicates was originally rooted in the “North Atlantic,” in Europe’s West. At the same time that policy questions related to Ukraine are being debated, so too should the historical questions related to Eastern Europe be reviewed.

JOSHUA D. ZIMMERMAN’S Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland is a well-timed book. Zimmerman holds the Eli and Diana Zborowksi Chair in Holocaust Studies and Eastern European Jewish Studies at Yeshiva University. Pilsudski, who died in 1935, has no connection to the Holocaust, but he does stand at the center of interwar Eastern European history. This well-researched and clearly written biography sheds light on the emergence of an independent Poland, which without Pilsudski might never have existed. It is also a meditation on the confluence of ethnic, religious, national, and imperial history that is Eastern Europe. Pilsudski, the founding father of modern Poland, spent much of his life trying to figure out the conundrum of Eastern European ethno-politics and worried about either Russian or German power. Even with his military daring and his brilliant statesmanship, he could find only a temporary solution to the dilemma of Polish security or, rather, of Polish independence. 

Pilsudski was born in 1867 in the far west of the Russian empire. His parents had married in 1863, the years of a Polish uprising against Russian autocracy. The abortive uprising haunted Pilsudski—its bravery and its audacity and its failure all left a deep impression on him. Pilsudski’s mother instilled in him a love of Polish poetry, which in the 1870s described a nation in words and in waiting—not least because Poland itself had been partitioned by Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Prussia in the late eighteenth century. Pilsudski grew up near the formerly Polish city of Wilna, which is today the capital city of Lithuania, Vilnius, and to which its many nineteenth-century Jewish inhabitants referred as Vilna. The Russian authorities who controlled the city spelled its name in Cyrillic letters. They thought of it as Russian, and that was the state of affairs the young Pilsudski devoted himself to overturning.

Pilsudski was not only a nationalist. In Vilnius, he joined “a circle of socialist youth,” Zimmerman writes. Pilsudski cared sincerely about the problems of the working class, but socialism spoke as well to a separate problem set: how to handle the patchwork quilt of religions and languages and ethnicities in Vilnius and in the larger region. No clear line on the map separated Poles from Lithuanians from Ukrainians from Jews from Belarusians from Russians. They lived among each other, and in Pilsudski’s eyes socialism gave them common cause. Socialism was not an alternative to Polish nationalism for Pilsudski; it was a necessary complement. By 1887, Pilsudski’s dedication to socialism was conspicuous enough to merit a trip to Siberia, where in classic prisoner’s fashion he met and learned from “two generations of Polish nationalist and socialist leaders.”

For decades, Pilsudski led a life on the run. He wrote journalism in the name of Polish independence. He traveled. He escaped from prison in Saint Petersburg. In his life and career, opposition to tsarist rule was the thread, as was Pilsudski’s dream of “a large, multinational federal state,” which would one day house Jews, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and of course Poles—a latter-day Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. A powerhouse in early-modern Europe, the Commonwealth was a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional republic that by 1795 fell victim to partition. Pilsudski’s opposition to tsarism was also an opposition to authoritarianism. An admirer of Britain and the United States, he espoused the virtues of parliamentary democracy. A rival to Pilsudski’s vision was that of Roman Dmowski’s, who created the National League in 1893 and who sought a homogeneous Polish state, in which Jews and other minorities would not have equal footing with Poles.

Pilsudski’s gift for foresight led him to build a Polish army before there was a Polish state. He formed a Riflemen’s Association in 1910. When World War I broke out, Pilsudski lent his Polish legions to the Austro-Hungarian army. At the same time, Dmowski aligned himself with the “pro-Russia and pro-Entente camp” among Poles, betting they would win the war. Tsar Nicholas II was promising him much greater autonomy than Poles had had before the war. In 1914, Russia had advanced quickly eastward until the war turned in 1915—on the eastern front. In 1915, the celebrated Polish pianist Ignacy Paderewski met with Woodrow Wilson’s close adviser Edward House. It was a meaningful encounter. “The United States was the only great power to have endorsed Polish independence prior to entering the war,” Zimmerman notes. The ascendant United States would find itself among the victors in World War I.

Pilsudski had a good war. It was not that Austria-Hungary triumphed; Pilsudski’s good fortune was the vanishing of imperial Russia. In 1918, he had been arrested and imprisoned by the German authorities, turning him into “a potent symbol of national unity.” He was a romantic figure, and not just in his taste for poetry. He left prison with Europe in turmoil and his life-long dream on the cusp of realization. The Bolsheviks had taken charge in Russia; Imperial Germany was no more. Although Ukrainians and Poles were fighting one another in 1918 and anti-Jewish violence was flaring, Pilsudski could create a Polish state and imbue it with “his unambiguous support for constitutional, parliamentary government, support for rule of law, and for minority rights,” as Zimmerman writes. Rule of law would vex Pilsudski, but about minority rights, he was truly unambiguous. The matter of borders and, over time, of Poland’s position between Germany and Russia was the bigger challenge. So was the relationship between an independent Poland and an independent Lithuania.

Circa 1919, ethnic self-determination had all the hallmarks of a ticking time bomb.

NOT ALL of Pilsudski’s dream came true after the war. Accurately predicting the failure of the White Russians in the Russian Civil War, he wanted to see an independent group of nation states stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea: Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Poland; the territories of the erstwhile Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth free at last. Pilsudski had a joint Polish-Lithuanian state in mind. Because the Lithuanians had a state of their own in mind, he staged a coup in Kaunas, the capital city of independent Lithuania, in August 1919. Briefly independent after World War I, Ukraine was crucial for Pilsudski. “‘I think that the mission of Ukraine is the historical heritage of Poland spreading the culture of the West,’” he stated in 1920. Motivated by nostalgia for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Pilsudski was acting on a twentieth-century civilizing mission, and one that was zero-sum. Where Moscow would win, Poland would lose. Where Poland would win, Moscow would lose. The transition from imperial Russia to the Soviet Union did nothing to change this equation.

Pilsudski’s greatest achievement may have been his defeat of the Red Army in August 1920. Vladimir Lenin was exporting revolution on the tip of a bayonet, and the Red Army came within six miles of Warsaw. Through intelligent military maneuver, Pilsudski won the Battle of Warsaw and with this, he reversed the Soviet onslaught. The Poland that emerged from the chaos was much larger than today’s Poland. It encompassed the city of Lwiw (now Lviv in Ukraine) and the city of Vilnius. Its population was 14.3 percent Ukrainian, 7.8 percent Jewish, 3.9 percent German, and 3.9 percent Belorussian. Poland’s claim on Vilnius, a matter of military force, was deeply offensive to Lithuania, which until 1938 considered itself at war with Poland. The 14.3 percent of Polish citizens who were Ukrainian could be politically active as Ukrainians in Poland. They had minority rights, but they had no country. To the east, Ukraine (Kyiv included) had been absorbed into the Soviet Union.

Pilsudski’s later years were less romantic than his youth. Poland struggled with democracy. Its president was assassinated in 1922 and in May 1926, Pilsudski directed a coup d’état, toppling a democratically elected government. His goal was to stabilize the Polish political system—to prevent it from lurching toward reaction or anarchy. After the coup, this foe of authoritarianism was Poland’s authoritarian leader. Thus did Poland diverge from interwar Czechoslovakia. The scholar Tomas Masaryk preserved Czechoslovakia’s democratic integrity, anticipating the divide between the contemporary Czech Republic and Poland, which has struggled with democracy for the past several years. Pilsudski capably managed various kinds of extremism within Poland. It was in no sense an easy task, but he made compromises along the way. His was a mixed, but not awful, record.

Pilsudski also had to navigate the treacherous European landscape of the 1920s and 1930s. He did not place too much stock in civilizing missions. He was an effective statesman because he based his actions on the military balance of power, both before and after Polish independence. “What will happen after I am gone? Who will look reality in the eye?” he asked. There were problems to the East: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists founded in 1929, which provoked a Polish pacification campaign in response and foreshadowed the terrible Polish-Ukrainian bloodletting in the 1940s. There were problems to the West: namely, Hitler’s Germany. In Poland, Hitler saw “‘an outpost of Asia,’’’ as he derisively put it, and not a beacon of glittering European-ness. In the 1930s, Hitler focused on Gdańsk, Poland’s city on the Baltic Sea and formerly the Prussian city of Danzig. But for Hitler this was a pretext. He intended to extinguish all of Poland. Intuiting this, Pilsudski formed alliances with France and Romania. He looked reality in the eye after 1933, and it terrified him.

Zimmerman is a fine historian, and as such he sticks to history. His biography can nevertheless be read through a different lens, and from it can be extracted a suite of lessons about today’s Poland and Eastern Europe. They revolve around the European Union and NATO, which Pilsudski never lived to see, and around the ever-fraught relationship between Germany and Russia. 

A simple lesson concerns the gifts that the European Union and NATO have given Europe. These institutions have done less to democratize Poland (and Hungary) than many in Brussels and Washington would have liked. Beneath their respective umbrellas, however, they have resolved questions that tormented Pilsudski. Zimmerman’s lightly hagiographic biography glosses over Pilsudski’s condescension toward Lithuania, but even if current Polish-Lithuanian relations have a few sticking points (related to Polish minority rights in Lithuania) these two countries are genuine allies and active trading partners. More consequential for Europe is the Polish-German relationship, the relationship that haunts the conclusion to Jozef Pilsudski. Only four years after Pilsudski’s death Germany crossed the border and eviscerated everything from Polish statehood to Poland’s Jewish community. The EU and NATO have overcome this horrific history, an accomplishment so absolute that it can now be taken for granted in Poland and Germany alike. Zimmerman’s meticulous biography helps us to appreciate the magnitude of this accomplishment. 

A less simple lesson concerns the limitations of the EU and NATO. The spiritual opposite of Mahatma Gandhi, Pilsudski never conceived of national or post-colonial independence in other than military terms. (Perhaps this is how he could live with an authoritarian Poland that he did not want to be authoritarian; politics was merely politics; independence was the thing.) Poland would equal the territory it could defend. In 2022, NATO can certainly defend NATO territory, but it abuts a great deal of non-NATO territory in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Here the military terms of European or transatlantic policy are unclear, and they have been unclear since 1991. Russia never forgot Pilsudski’s insight into Eastern Europe: that the political order follows from the military balance of power. Russia has slowly usurped Belarus, which is under Moscow’s military control. The current war in Ukraine is about the political order in Europe, not just in Ukraine. This is why Russia has been intervening militarily since 2014. Pilsudski would not be at all surprised.

What might have surprised Pilsudski was the European Union’s Eastern Partnership Program of 2009. It was a political project directed at Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—the six former Soviet Socialist Republics that were European perhaps but were not in the EU. The Program was a political project far from imperialism, a project to capitalize on proximity and on the growing constituencies in these countries that wanted a greater connection to the EU. It was a political project with no military component—suitable to an EU without a military yet unsuited to a neighborhood where military tensions are non-trivial. The EU had mistaken Russia’s military weakness in the 1990s for a new order of the ages. It was not a new order. It was recognizably Pilsudski’s Europe going through one of its periodic moments of turmoil, as had been the case in 1918 and 1919. Ethnic self-determination can be achieved when a multi-ethnic empire falters. It should not be achieved, though, on the assumption (which Pilsudski never made) that this empire will falter forever.

The tragedy of U.S. and European Ukraine policy, beginning in 2009, was that common sense accrued to it only after February 24, 2022. Russia’s was a clarifying invasion. Ukraine’s destiny would reflect the military balance of power in the region: that was as true in the twenty-first century as it had been in the twentieth. Quite possibly, the EU would never have launched its Eastern Partnership Program had it looked reality in the eye. Nobody wanted war with Russia in 2009; that was the inverse of what the EU aspired to. It was foolish, however, to contemplate Ukraine’s integration into Europe without seeing that this integration would have to be made militarily viable—through a treaty alliance, through credible deterrence, through the building up of the Ukrainian military. Some seven months into the 2022 war as of the time of writing, it is obvious that Europe’s shape and structure will be determined by what happens on the battlefield and by the balance of forces that the war will foster.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY Press, the publisher of Jozef Pilsudski, will surely promote this study in Poland. It should promote it in Germany as well. Germany is on the margins of Pilsudski’s story, and Germans do not need to read this biography to learn about the plight of interwar Poland; this is not news. They should read it to understand their situation in the present tense. Pacifist for the right reasons, Germany is losing the Europe it wished to have after 1945 and the end of the Cold War. Much as the EU and NATO forged a better Europe, enveloping Germany in peace and prosperity, they never did so for all of Europe. Too much had been left out, and the EU and NATO never reconciled Russia and Germany (to Germany’s immense disappointment). The old antagonism is now back, and as in the 1920s and 1930s—as in World War I—the site of German-Russian competition is the territory between Germany and Russia. It is Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, the four countries Pilsudski fantasized about as the bulwark of Western civilization and as Europe’s buffer zone against Russia. Pilsudski had a capacious imagination and more than for most politicians what he imagined came to be. Capacious as his imagination was, though, he was a reader of poetry, not a poet, and always a gifted reader of the military tea leaves. Instructively, he was prepared for the worst.

Michael C. Kimmage is a professor and Department Chair of History at Catholic University of America.

Image: Reuters.