Józef Pilsudski was born in the Vilna governorate into a wealthy gentry family. He graduated from the First Vilna gymnasium (1885), studied at the medical faculty of Kharkiv University. In 1886, he was expelled for his involvement in student riots. In March 1887, he was arrested and sentenced to 5 years of exile in Siberia over the involvement in the preparation of the assassination attempt on Emperor Alexander III. In 1892, upon his return, he joined the newly founded Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and became one of its leaders. Since 1906, he was the leader of its right-wing nationalist faction (PPS-revolutionary faction). During World War I, Pilsudski organized Polish legions, that acted on the side of the Central Powers, and he was the Commander of the 1st Brigade of the Polish Legions in the Austro-Hungarian army. Pilsudski appreciated the victory of the February Revolution in Russia and the decisions on the Polish issue, adopted by the Provisional Government in Petrograd, which enabled to launch building an independent state in the former Russian Poland.

On November 11, 1918, the Regency Council of the Polish State in Warsaw (established by Germany and Austria-Hungary in September 1917) transferred military power to Józef Pilsudski, and on November 14, the civil power as well. Until December 9, 1922, he had been Chief of the Polish State. Implementing the great-power plans to restore Poland “from sea to sea”, he led the seizures of Belarusian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian lands since February 1919.

During the Soviet-Polish war (1919–1921), Pilsudski was in charge of the general leadership of the Polish forces. In August 1920, in the battle for Warsaw, the 120-thousand strong strike force under his command broke through the front and entered the rear of the armies of the Western Front of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army under the command of Mikhail Tukhachevsky. This ensured the victory of the Polish army and the conclusion of the Riga Peace Treaty with the Russian SFSR, which was beneficial for Poland (March 1921).

In December 1922, he handed over the power to the first elected President of Poland, Gabriel Narutowicz. In 1926, he carried out a coup d'état establishing a dictatorship, the so-called Sanacja [sanitation, rehabilitation] regime. In 1926–1928 and 1930, Pilsudski was Chairman of the Council of Ministers, in 1926–1935, Minister of Military Affairs of Poland. He died of liver cancer in Warsaw on May 12, 1935.