Józef Piłsudski
Russian Revolution

During the Russian Revolution of 1905, Piłsudski played a leading role in events in Congress Poland. In early 1905 he ordered the PPS to launch a general strike there; it involved some 400,000 workers and lasted two months until it was broken by the Russian authorities. In June 1905, Piłsudski sent paramilitary aid to an uprising in Łódź, later called June Days. In Łódź, armed clashes broke out between Piłsudski's paramilitaries and gunmen loyal to Dmowski and his National Democrats. On 22 December 1905, Piłsudski called for all Polish workers to rise up; the call went largely unheeded.

Piłsudski instructed the PPS to boycott the elections to the First Duma. The decision, and his resolve to try to win Polish independence through revolution, caused tensions within the PPS, and in November 1906, the party fractured over Piłsudski's leadership. His faction came to be called the "Old Faction" or " Revolutionary Faction " (" Starzy " or " Frakcja Rewolucyjna "), while their opponents were known as the "Young Faction", "Moderate Faction" or " Left " (" Młodzi ", " Frakcja Umiarkowana ", " Lewica "). The "Young" sympathized with the Social Democrats of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, and believed priority should be given to co-operation with Russian revolutionaries in toppling the tsarist regime and creating a socialist utopia to facilitate negotiations for independence. Piłsudski and his supporters in the Revolutionary Faction continued to plot a revolution against Tsarist Russia to secure Polish independence. By 1909, his faction was the majority in the PPS, and Piłsudski remained an important PPS leader until the outbreak of the First World War.
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