Aleksander Błażej Prystor (; 2 January 1874 – 1941) was a Polish politician, activist, soldier and freemason, who served as 23rd Prime Minister of Poland from 1931 to 1933. He was a member of the Combat Organization of the Polish Socialist Party and in 1908 took part in the Bezdany raid. Between 1912 and 1917 he spent in Russian prisons before being released in 1917. In March 1917 he joined Polish Military Organisation. After independence, he became secretary in the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare. He fought as a volunteer in the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1920. He worked for a few ministries (Labour, Industry and Commerce). Between 1931 and 1933 he served as Prime Minister of Poland. After that, he became the Marshal of the Polish Senate 1935–1938. After the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, he fled to neutral Lithuania. After Lithuania was annexed by the USSR he was arrested in June 1940 by the NKVD; he died probably in 1941 (the date is not known) in the prison hospital of the Butyrka prison in Moscow. Early life Aleksander Prystor was born in Vilnius, now the capital of Lithuania and then called Vilna under the Russian Empire, to a railroad worker Feliks Prystor and Maria (née Olejnik). In 1894 he graduated from the Second High School in Vilna and began studying mathematics and physics at Imperial Moscow University. Lacking financial support from his family, Prystor lived in poverty. After graduation in 1900, he decided to study medicine at the University of Tartu. In the summer of 1902, he returned to Vilna, taking a job in a bank. Between November 1903 and September 1904, Prystor served in the 16th Sapper Battalion of the Imperial Russian Army. Sometime in the early 20th century, Prystor joined Polish Socialist Party, and became a close associate of Józef Piłsudski. In September 1903, he left Vilna, and went to Switzerland, to undergo military training, together with Pilsudski and other activists. In 1904 Prystor, together with Jozef Kwiatek, Walery Sławek and Boleslaw Jedrzejowski, organized public protests against the forcible draft of ethnic Poles into the Russian Army to fight in the Russo-Japanese War. Also, he constructed bombs which damaged the monument of Tsar Alexander III of Russia. In early 1905, Prystor became one of the leaders of the Combat Organization of the Polish Socialist Party. Using the pseudonym Katajama, he organized groups of activists in