Aleksander Prystor

Aleksander Prystor

Aleksander Błażej Prystor (born January 2, 1874 in Vilnius , † summer 1941 in Butyrka prison in Moscow ) was a Polish colonel , politician and Prime Minister .

Life

Studies and early revolutionary activities

Prystor graduated from 1894 to 1901 with a degree in mathematics and medicine at the Lomonossow University in Moscow and the Imperial University of Jurjew . Already during his student days he developed sympathy for the independence of Poland from the Russian Empire and the revolutionary ideas of the fighting organization of the Polish Socialist Party ( Organizacja Bojowa PPS ), the Polish Socialist Party - Revolutionary Group ( Polska Partia Socjalistyczna - Frakcja Rewolucyjna ), the Union for the armed Fights ( Związek Walki Czynnej ) and the 1910 founded rifle association "Strzelec" ( Związek Strzelecki "Strzelec" ), in which he takes part in officers' courses. Thereby he got in contact with Józef Piłsudski under whose leadership he took part in the attack on a Russian passenger and mail train near the Lithuanian city ​​of Bezdany , the so-called "Bezdany Raid" ( Akcja pod Bezdanami ) on September 26, 1908 .

In 1912 he was arrested for his activities and then spent five years in Russian custody in Oryol until his release in 1917 . After his release from prison, he immediately joined the Polish Military Organization ( POW , Polish Polska Organizacja Wojskowa ) and became a member of the POW High Command in Warsaw .

Independence and promotion to Prime Minister and Senate President

After Poland gained independence on November 22, 1918, he was Undersecretary of State in the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare from 1918 to 1922 . During the Polish-Soviet War from 1919 to 1920 he was also a volunteer in a fighting unit and became an officer for special assignments for Supreme Commander Piłsudski. Most recently he held the rank of colonel and as such belonged to the colonel clique, the inner circle of advisers to Marshal Piłsudski. In addition, from 1920 to 1923 he was political advisor to Lieutenant General Lucjan Żeligowski , who at that time was first the military dictator of Central Lithuania and then the inspector of the army.

After the May coup in 1926, under the command of Piłsudski, he became head of cabinet of the General Inspector of the Armed Forces. In April 1929 he became Minister of Labor in the governments of Kazimierz Świtalski and Kazimierz Bartel and held this office until March 1930. In December 1930, Prime Minister Walery Sławek appointed him Minister of Industry and Trade, an office in which he was obviously inexperienced.

On May 27, 1931, he succeeded Sławek as Prime Minister . As such, he was in office until May 12, 1933 and was then replaced by Janusz Jędrzejewicz . His cabinet follows the economic experiences of the Western European democracies , the USA , but also those of the authoritarian states of the Soviet Union and Italy . In addition, he later participated in an electoral reform for the election of the Senate for the fourth term (1935–1938), after which only two percent of citizens were eligible to vote due to age and property requirements. On behalf of Piłsudski in 1934 he was negotiator for the improvement of Lithuanian-Polish relations.

In October 1935 he was elected senator from Vilnius as a representative of the Polish minority . On October 4, 1935, at the first plenary session, he was elected President of the Senate ( Senate Marshal ( Marszałek Senatu ) ) as the successor to Władysław Raczkiewicz . He held this office until his replacement by Bogusław Miedziński on November 18, 1938. The Senate of the fifth electoral term (1938–1939) he is a senator again and was also chairman of the budget , economy and agriculture committees .

After the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in September 1939, he fled to neutral Lithuania . There, however, after the annexation of the country by the Soviet Union in 1940, he was arrested by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) and transferred to the Butyrka prison in Moscow , where he died the following year.

His symbolic grave is in the Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw.

Web links

• Biography on the homepage of the government chancellery (Polish) ( Memento from October 26, 2008 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The History of the Polish Senate - 1935 (PDF). (No longer available online.) Formerly in the original ; accessed on February 18, 2020 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  
2. ^ "Colonel Clique" . In: TIME Magazine , April 29, 1929
3. ↑ Central Lithuania 1920–1922. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on July 23, 2008 ; accessed on February 18, 2020 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
4. ^ New Premier . In: TIME Magazine , June 8, 1931