Władysław Sikorski

Nationality

Poland

Date of Birth

1881

Date of Death

1943

Political
Preference

Independent

Władysław Sikorski was a Polish military and political leader. Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the young Sikorski was involved in several Polish activist movements with the aim of achieving Polish independence. During World War I, he was drafted to fight for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the 1920s and 1930s, after Polish independence in 1918, Sikorski continued to fight and command Polish forces in the wars that followed, and held a number of high government offices. In 1921 he was appointed the Polish Prime Minister, a post he held for a year. During his tenure, he guided Poland’s foreign policy in a direction that gained the approval of the League of Nation and worked towards a more solidified Polish-French cooperation. At the Conference of Ambassadors in March 1923, Sikorski obtained the recognition of Poland’s eastern frontiers from the United Kingdom, France and the United States.

When World War II broke out, Sikorski took command of the Polish Armed Forces in France, and was later called to serve as the Polish prime minister-in-exile. Despite the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, Sikorski struggled for France and the United Kingdom to declare Russia an aggressor, which they denied to do. One of Sikorski’s political goals was the creation of a Central and Eastern European federation based on the Polish-Czechoslovakian confederation, an alliance meant to counter-act both German and Russian imperialism.

This plan would ultimately fail, but his ideas gained traction both within Polish as well as Czechoslovakian circles at the time. Moreover, due to the actions of his close confidant Joseph Retinger, they also spread within the circles of other exiled governments. Eventually, these efforts would lead to the creation of the Comité des Ministrès des Affaires Étrangères des Gouvernements allies in 1942. Another result of this Polish effort was that the British started to pay more attention to the voices of the exiled Europeans they found in their midst.

Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Sikorski opened up diplomatic talks with the Soviet Union, resulting in the Sikorski-Maisky Pact in August 1941, in which Stalin agreed to and subsequently did release thousands of Polish prisoners and declare the partition of Poland in 1939 null and void. However, relations between the two countries remained tense, and broke down in 1943 after the deaths of 20,000 Polish soldiers killed by Soviets in Russia were revealed. In the same year, Sikorski died when his plane crashed on his way to an inspection of Polish forces in the Middle East.