Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeAbstractThis article examines the dynamic of the debate around the political and military leader Jozef Piƚsudski (1867–1935) in Polish postwar historiography, more precisely in the years from 1982 to 1989. During this period, the communist authorities, after considering him a Socialist antihero, tried—in the context of the military regime of Jaruzelski—to rehabilitate him as a great patriot and military leader. They attempted this by the political exploitation of the historians’ debate, especially in the historiography of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. In the political exploitation of such a national symbol, the communist regime was searching for a way to enter into dialogue with a society completely hostile after the December coup, and one which venerated Pilsudski as an anti-Socialist hero. For most historians, including the Marxists, it presented an occasion to discuss openly the real contribution of Piƚsudski in Second Republic Poland (1918–1939). Ironically, from this very moment, the communist system renounced one of its most important dogmas in its vision of this historic period.