56 Facts About Zygmunt Balicki

Zygmunt Balicki was a Polish sociologist, publicist and one of the first leading thinkers of the modern Polish nationalism in the late 19th century under the foreign Partitions of Poland.

Zygmunt Balicki was a key protagonist in the National Democratic campaign of antisemitic agitation.

Zygmunt Balicki was born on 30 December 1858 in Lublin.

Zygmunt Balicki's father was Seweryn Tomasz Balicki, and his mother was Karolina Balicka, nee Gruszczynska.

Seweryn Zygmunt Balicki was a clerk in the Lublin governorate administration.

In 1876, with his matriculation examination, Zygmunt Balicki graduated from the Male Middle School in Lublin, which was a typical example of the Russification policy of the partitioning government.

The latter was the "Community of Polish Socialists" in St Petersburg, which Zygmunt Balicki joined with his brother Tadeusz in 1879.

Zygmunt Balicki was commissioned by the Petersburg authorities of the Commune of Polish Socialists to create its structures in the Polish capital.

Already during his studies Zygmunt Balicki became known as a talented organiser.

Zygmunt Balicki enjoyed the great confidence of his colleagues and was widely liked by his female colleagues.

Zygmunt Balicki found refuge in Lwow and he continued his political activity in Galicia.

Zygmunt Balicki started to cooperate with socialist sympathizers among students of the Lwow universities as well as the Agricultural Academy in Dublany.

Zygmunt Balicki published his first political articles in the socialist biweekly "Praca" [Work] published in the capital of Galicia.

On 10 May 1883 Zygmunt Balicki was sentenced to four months' imprisonment in a trial brought before the National Criminal Court in Lwow against the entire Galician socialist organisation.

Zygmunt Balicki awaited his fate in police custody in Lwow.

Zygmunt Balicki's escape abroad, that was being organised by local socialists, did not succeed.

Parallel to this, Zygmunt Balicki developed his scientific interests in Switzerland.

Zygmunt Balicki had no permanent employment and earned his living as a casual labourer.

Zygmunt Balicki's stay in Switzerland did not mean that Balicki broke off his contacts with Poland.

The organisational structure of "Zet" based on three degrees of initiation was the work of Zygmunt Balicki Considering the fact that he joined freemasonry, it was assumed that the structure of secrecy present in Masonic lodges was the prototype.

In 1892 Zygmunt Balicki joined the Foreign Union of Polish Socialists, the parent organisation of the Polish Socialist Party.

When in 1894 the convention of the ZZSP decided that it was impossible for its members to belong to other political organisations, Zygmunt Balicki decided to leave its ranks.

Zygmunt Balicki thus severed his last organisational links with the socialist movement.

In 1895, in a farewell article published in the socialist "Przedswit", Zygmunt Balicki explained that the reason for his parting with socialism was ideological.

Zygmunt Balicki addressed his polemic to the pro-independence direction represented by the PPS, which was dominant in the Polish socialist movement.

Zygmunt Balicki accused it of underestimating the significance of the "right to parallelism", which - as he stressed - meant the necessity to combine the struggle for social goals with the struggle for socialism.

Zygmunt Balicki found unacceptable the view fixed in the PPS about the natural leadership of workers in the fight for national liberation.

The National League was founded on 1 April 1893 in Warsaw, and during its first years of existence it operated on the basis of a statute authored by Zygmunt Balicki He did not join the highest authorities of the National League until August 1897.

Since the establishment of the National League, which coincided with his severance of ties with the socialist movement, Zygmunt Balicki became increasingly involved in the organisational and programmatic development of the nascent All-Polish movement.

Thanks to the efforts of Zygmunt Balicki "Zet" resumed its activities in 1898.

Zygmunt Balicki settled in Krakow, hoping to continue his scientific career there.

However, the offer was linked to the condition that Zygmunt Balicki ceased his political activity.

Zygmunt Balicki was active as a journalist, for example in the "All-Polish Review", which was published in Lwow from 1895 onwards.

Zygmunt Balicki did not accept ascribing to the omnipotent state the role of the basic tool for introducing "progressive" social reforms.

The "national ethic" thus outlined by Zygmunt Balicki was based on the fundamental conviction that the nation "encompasses the whole of man's comprehensive life".

However, this did not mean that Zygmunt Balicki transferred the principles of Darwinism without any restrictions to the social matter or international relations.

Admittedly - as Zygmunt Balicki wrote - "a nation, as a living organism, has a moral right to grow not only at the cost of passive, thoughtless and socially formless elements, but even at the cost of other nations", he added at once with a reservation: "so long as this growth is natural and not based on brute force, coercion and exceptional laws".

Zygmunt Balicki emphasised in his treatise that "raised to the dignity of an ethical banner, the nation does not thereby become an end, capable of all means of sanctification; it constitutes only the conscience of the human citizen".

Zygmunt Balicki's words resound with the heritage of the political thought of Polish Romanticism.

The role models here were - as Zygmunt Balicki stressed - the participants of all the Polish national uprisings.

Zygmunt Balicki's dissertation became notorious due to polemicists from conservative and Catholic circles, who criticised this distinction between two ethical orders as "the purest chauvinism, permeated by hackatism" or neo-populism.

Zygmunt Balicki was a patron of other initiatives aiming to extend the influence of the national democratic movement.

In 1908, in Przeglad Narodowy, Zygmunt Balicki argued that "Russia has been weakened internally and externally, and has ceased to play the role of the axis around which international politics revolved a few years ago".

The conclusion that Zygmunt Balicki drew from this conjecture in 1908 was: "The Hohenzollern state is preparing for a new [blood] spilling and that towards the whole line of the east and south-east from the Baltic to Constantinople".

Three years earlier, in the pages of a monthly he edited, Zygmunt Balicki had written about "socialist training", which "breaks characters and people in us, degenerates them, makes them unfit for fruitful civic work".

Zygmunt Balicki accused them of abandoning the cause of Poland's independence, social egoism and "passively sticking to the past".

The political thought of Zygmunt Balicki revealed many points of contact with conservative thought.

Zygmunt Balicki pointed out that the most important task of this national elite was to lead "the citizenship of the people".

In 1905 Zygmunt Balicki emphasised that the Polish nation, deprived of the state, "deported, destroyed, disorganised, and even outright exterminated mechanically and spiritually" naturally "had to be conservative".

Zygmunt Balicki's pointing to culture as the fundamental binder and determinant of belonging to the Polish national community meant, in his opinion, that there was no chance for the Jewish population to assimilate into the Polish nation.

Jews - as Zygmunt Balicki wrote in 1912 in National Review - are a community "closed tightly in their own spirituality, too crystallized by centuries of one-sided and exclusive living".

In 1912, in National Review, at the time of the boycott of Jewish trade announced by National Democracy, Zygmunt Balicki wrote about the need to "support your own national production, buying only from your own people, buying land and not selling it to foreigners, defending the national language and customs, counteracting foreign influences in opinion".

In October 1913, Zygmunt Balicki left for Petersburg as a correspondent of the "Warsaw Newspaper".

Zygmunt Balicki came to the city at the Neva River with impaired health.

Zygmunt Balicki published in the pages of "Sprawa Polska" - a weekly founded by Dmowski, the press organ of the KNP.

The last political initiative in which Zygmunt Balicki got involved was his idea to create Polish military formations attached to the Russian army.