Josef to Josef

As one dictator to another Josef Stalin sent last week to Josef Pilsudski an extraordinary personal gift. It comprised a bulky sheaf of time-worn documents Every one of them damned the present Dictator of Poland as a radical, conspirator, firebrand, socialist, fake-madman and terrorist. This present Dictator Stalin had carefully gathered from the files of the Imperial Russian Secret Police When he received the documents on his farm near Vilna last week Dictator Pilsudski growled gruff delight, shut himself up in his study to devour item after item.

Item: 1887, the youth Josef Pilsudski nicknamed "Ziuk" by his fellow students at the University of Kharkhov, was arrested and charged with complicity in an abortive plot to assassinate Tsar Alexander III. Among leaders of the plot who were hanged was the elder brother of Nikolai Lenin. Though nothing could be proved against Prisoner Pilsudski, he was sentenced to five years exile in Siberia Last week Dictator Pilsudski remembered that in Siberia he was well treated by sympathetic guards, was even permitted to go hunting with a double-barreled shotgun (see cut).

Item: 1892. the "hardened conspirator" Josef Pilsudski helped found the Polish Socialist Party on Russian soil and became one of its "desperate activists."

Item: 1900, for turning out the illegal Socialist journal Robotnik ("The

Worker") on a hand press which was frequently moved from hideaway to hideaway, Editor & Publisher Pilsudski was arrested and placed in the dread "Pavilion X" of the Warsaw Citadel. Item: 1901, unable to escape from "Pavilion X," Prisoner Pilsudski brilliantly feigned madness and was transferred to St. Nicholas Hospital in St.

Petersburg (now Leningrad) from which he and a genuine madman escaped Item: 1904, during the Russo-Japanese War able Conspirator Pilsudski rushed around the world to Tokyo and nearly persuaded the Imperial Japanese Government to finance a Polish revolution against Tsar Nicholas II. The Japanese took Conspirator Pilsudski so seriously that they made a solemn agreement by the terms of which prisoners of war who turned out to have been born in the then Russian Poland were kept separate from other "Russian" prisoners in Japan while Polish organizations arranged for their transport to Polish colonies in the neutral U.S. Items: 1906, et seq., bands of Polish guerrillas or bandits organized by Activist Pilsudski were charged by the Imperial Police with raids and bank robberies all over southern Russia, similar to those staged during the same period by Activist Stalin. The stolen money, in both cases was used to finance the Party of Revolution--which meant to Lenin and to Stalin the Communist Party. Said Lenin to Pilsudski about this time. "You are our companion in arms until the fall of Tsarism but after that you will turn your back on us.'' Said bristling Pilsudski to a group of Socialists long after the World War from which Poland emerged free: "You accuse me of having betrayed Socialism. It is this way, gentlemen: We rode together in a streetcar marked Socialism, but I got off at the stop 'Independent Poland ' " Josef Pilsudski "got off" by desperate battling as commander of his Polish Legions who fought Imperial Russia during the World War, sometimes under their own ensign, sometimes as units--but always distinct units--in the hospitable armies of Imperial Austria. Today such old campaigners as Josef Stalin and Josef Pilsudski can understand each other even hough their dictatorships are different. Both, of course, disclaim being dictators. Comrade Stalin says he is only the Secretary of the Communist Party. Marshal Pilsudski is only War Minister--but both tell their countrymen what to do and are obeyed. Last week Dictator Pilsudski was so pleased by Dictator Stalin's gift that he agreed to put a capstone on the new edifice of Russo-Polish friendship which diplomats of the two countries have been building with trade treaties and non-aggression pacts (TIME, July 17). The capstone: Poland and Russia will shortly raise their respective Legations to the rank or Embassies.

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