40 NAROD
to a 'sovereign and independent' one, involved upheavals in the established
order hardly less profound than those designed by the national revolutionaries.
Apart from Dmowski, its spiritual fathers included the journalist Jan Ludwig
Poplawski (1854-1908), and Zygmunt Balicki (1858-1916), author of the
influential Egoizm narodowy wobec etyki (National Egoism and Ethics, 1902).
Pitsudski (1867-1935) was an Insurrectionary in a generation of Conciliators,
a Romantic in the age of Positivism. He was born in Lithuania, and lived most
of his early life in Wilno. He was the second son of an old Polish family living in
straitened circumstances. He was strongly influenced by a fiercely patriotic
mother, and from an early age resisted the mood of dejection which, in the after-
math of the January Rising, affected most of his contemporaries. At the age of
20, he was arrested by Tsarist police investigating the attempt to assassinate
Alexander III; and for a conspiracy in which he and his elder brother Bronislaw
were little more than unwitting accomplices, he spent five years of penal exile
in eastern Siberia. In this first period of his political career, he was closely asso-
ciated with the socialist movement. He was the founding editor of Robotnik
(The Worker), the journal of the Polish Socialist Party, and worked in the under-
ground as an agitator and party organizer. He spent some time among the
revolutionary exiles in London. His second arrest in 1900 led to incarceration in
a mental hospital in St. Petersburg whence he escaped with the help of a Polish
doctor. In 1904-5 he was in Japan, vying with Dmowski for the political crumbs
of the Russo-Japanese War. In 1905-7 he was back in Poland, in Lodz, in the
thick of the revolutionary terror and strikes. Although he only dabbled with
Marxism, and never belonged to any Bolshevik organization, his origins were
much the same as those of the Bolshevik leaders. Like Lenin, whose own elder
brother had been executed for that same attempt on the Tsar in 1887, he found
the emotional drive for his activities in the adolescent humiliation which pun-
ished him for a crime which he did not commit. Like Feliks Dzierzynski, who
attended the same school in Wilno until expelled for speaking Polish in class, he
did not distinguish at first between 'Nationalism' and 'Socialism'. He used any
idea, any instrument to hand, for fighting the hated regime. The second period
of his career began in 1908 and lasted until 19Z1. It was the period of force, and
of military action. It was inspired by the crushing defeat which by then had been
imposed on all the revolutionary factions in Russia. As he wrote to a veteran
socialist friend:Let others play at throwing bouquets to socialism or to Polonism or to anything they like
... I can't, not in this present atmosphere of a latrine ... I want to conquer. My latest
idea is to create ... an organization of brute force—to use an expression which is unsup-
portable to the humanitarians. I have sworn to realize it, or to perish.^42Like the Bolsheviks, he denounced the prevarications of mainstream Social
Democracy, and concluded that an elite, disciplined organization offered the
only chance of combating the force which was ranged against them. He raised
his funds by highway robbery; and in April 1908 at Bezdany, near Wilno, pulled