Bezdany raid

Bezdany raid was a train robbery carried out on the night of 26/27 September 1908 in the vicinity of Bezdany near Vilna (now Bezdonys near Vilnius) on a Russian Empire passenger and mail train by a group of Polish revolutionaries, led by future Polish national hero and dictator, Józef Piłsudski.

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:

In September 1908, the Bojówki assaulted a Russian mail train near Vilna (Vilnius). The train was carrying tax revenues from Warsaw to St. Petersburg.

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