Ferdynand Ossendowski was one of the most popular writers of his time, and 2nd most popular Polish writer in history who sold 80 million books worldwide. At his time he was compared to Karol May and Rudyard Kipling. After denouncing the genocidal nature of the communist regime Ossendowski was condemned to oblivion in the post-war communist Poland. 

Ossendowski was born on 27 May 1878 near Witebsk in today’s Belarus on the Polish eastern borderlands. He started his studies in the Russian capital St. Petersburg from where he started his first journeys to Caucasus, India and Japan. 

Because of his Polish patriotic activity, Ossendowski was forced to leave Russia and finish his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. 

He later returned to Russia and took up a job at the Technical University in the city of Tomsk, in Siberia. Unfortunately, he was arrested for participation in protests during the Russo-Japanese War and sentenced to death, eventually commuted to a year and a half in prison, which he served. When Ossendowski left prison in 1905, the revolutionary tide was spreading all around the country, with a huge impact on the Polish independence movement, and also within socialist circles.

Interestingly at that time, one of the small Polish cities called Sławków proclaimed a Republic within the Russian Empire, which was something completely new to the political situation and brought hope. The so-called Republika Sławkowska survived for only 11 days. 

After the revolution of 1905, Ossendowski worked as a journalist. He often visited St Petersburg and was an eye-witness to the birth of Bolshevism, against which he fought from the very beginning. In St Petersburg, he also saw the revolution itself, the first repressions and bloodshed in the streets. 

At that time Ossendowski also claimed he found the document of the US Ambassador to Russia, Edgar Sisson that proved Lenin’s journey from Switzerland to Russia was financed by the German government. 

In 1918, he fled St Petersburg and moved to Siberia, where he joined Alexander Kolchak’s White army.

After the collapse of the White Russians, Ossendowski moved to Mongolia where he was able to meet the legendary Russian warlord Baron Roman Ungern von Sternberg who formed a cavalry division that fought with the Bolsheviks. Ossendowski left his company just a year before his death from the Bolsheviks. 

In 1922 Ferdynand Ossendowski published his first book in New York, called the Beasts, Men and Gods – his first bestseller that brought him fame and financial status. 

Ossendowski sold some 80 million books worldwide which made him the 2nd most popular Polish writer after the Noble Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz.

A collection of columns entitled ‘The Shadow of the Grim East’, published in 1923, was also highly successful, with the ambition of creating a sketch of the mentality of the inhabitants of the Tsarist and Bolshevik empires.

In 1930 he published his most famous book Lenin which was a satirical political biography of the Bolshevik party leader showing the true nature of the Marxist ideology in Russia. 

From that time Ossendowski became a deadly enemy of the Soviet and communist regimes. According to various sources, his grave was opened by the Russian NKVD to make sure the “personal enemy of Comrade Lenin” as he was named, was dead. 

During the Second World War, Ossendowski was a member of the underground National Party. He died on 3 January 1945 in Grodzisk Mazowiecki. 

In post-war communist Poland, Ossendowski’s works were condemned to oblivion and his name was placed on the so-called “censorship record”. It meant all of his works were banned from publishing and by 1951 all library copies were confiscated.

Source: Dzieje.pl

Photo: @visegrad24

Tomasz Modrzejewski