Bezdany raid participant Józef Piłsudski
Bezdany raid was a train robbery carried out on the night of 26/27 September 1908 in the vicinity of Bezdany (since 1946 Bezdonys) near Vilna on a Russian Empire passenger and mail train by a group of the Combat Organization of the Polish Socialist Party led by Józef Piłsudski.Background
Piłsudski expected that only a conflict between the powers who partitioned Poland in the late 18th century could restore Poland as a country; he also viewed the Russian Empire as the worst of Poland's occupiers. Therefore, he decided to temporarily support the Central Powers (the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires).In 1906 Piłsudski, with the knowledge and support of the Austrian authorities, founded a military school in Kraków for the training of Bojówki (Combat Teams), a military arm of the Polish Socialist Party (or, specifically, its Revolutionary Fraction). In 1906 alone, the 750-strong Bojówki, operating in five-man units in the former Congress Poland, killed or wounded some 1,000 Russian officials. Bojówki were certainly not above robbing Russian authorities to obtain funds for their operations, and by 1908 Piłsudski and his organization were desperately short on cash.Piłsudski expressed his thoughts about this violent action in a last will or obituary that he wrote to a friend before the raid:
I am not going to dictate to you what you shall write about my life and work. I only ask of you not to make me a 'whiner and sentimentalist.' [...] I fight and I am ready to die simply because I cannot bear to live in this latrine which is what our life amounts to [...] Let others play at throwing bouquets to Socialism or Polonism [...] My latest idea, which I have not yet fully developed, is to create in all parties, and most of all our own, an organization of physical force, of brute force. I have already done much towards its fulfillment but not enough to rest on my laurels. So now I am staking everything on this last card [...] I may die in this 'expropriation' and I want to explain [...] Money [...] may the devil take it!  I prefer to win it in a fight than to beg for it from the Polish public which has become infantile through being chicken-hearted. I haven't got money and I must have it for the ends I pursue.