Dictator's Ghost

Toughest job of Poland's cultivated soldier-aristocrats is to maintain a dictatorship based on the personality of the late great Marshal Josef Pilsudski. Excuse for the dictatorship is Poland's nightmare situation in European politics. Potent Germany on the west wants to take a slice of Poland's territory; potent Soviet Russia on the east wants to overthrow Poland's economic system. Poland has a President and a Premier. But last week the Premier. Felicjan Slawoj-Skladkowski, proclaimed that henceforth Poland's No. 2 Man, second only to mild, scholarly President Ignacy Moscicki, will be the Inspector-General of the Army, Edward Rydz-Smigly. He will outrank the Premier himself and all his Cabinet members, and his orders are to be obeyed.

Ever since Pilsudski's death last year, the Polish Government has tried to convince the Polish people that Rydz-Smigly is a man of the same stern, lusty stripe. Actually Rydz-Smigly is a polite, modest gentleman with a bald head, whose thin lips are his only evidence of severity. Before he joined the revolutionary Pilsudski Legion in 1914, he was an art student, specializing in landscapes.

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