Soviet-Polish War

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SOVIET-POLISH WAR

The Soviet-Polish War was the most important of the armed conflicts among the East European states emerging from World War I. The Versailles settlements failed to delineate Poland's eastern border. The Entente powers hoped that the Bolshevik Revolution was temporary, and that a Polish-Russian border would be established after the victory of White Russian forces. As the eastern command of the German Army withdrew after the armistice of November 11, 1918, Vladimir Lenin in Moscow and Józef Pilsudski in Warsaw planned to fill the vacuum. Lenin hoped to export revolution, Pilsudski to lead an East European federation.

In early 1919, Lenin's main concern was the White Russian forces of Anton Denikin. Pilsudski did not support Denikin, a Russian nationalist who treated eastern Galicia as part of a future Russian state. In late 1918, Pilsudski watched as the Red Army moved on Vilnius and Minsk. Pilsudski's offensive began in April 1919, his forces taking Vilnius on April 21 and Minsk on August 8. In collaboration with Latvian troops, Poland took Daugavpils on January 3, 1920, returning the city to Latvia. By then Denikin was in retreat, and the Red Army could turn to an offensive against the remnants of independent Ukrainian forces.

The Ukrainian National Republic of Symon Petliura allied with Poland in April 1920. With Ukrainian help, Pilsudski took Kiev on May 7, 1920, only to find his troops overwhelmed by the forces of Soviet commanders Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Semen Budenny. On July 11 Great Britain proposed an armistice based upon the Curzon Line, which left Ukraine and Belarus to Moscow. These terms displeased Pilsudski, but Polish prime minister Stanislaw Grabski had agreed to similar ones in negotiations with British prime minister David Lloyd George. Moscow's replies questioned the future of independent Poland, and the Red Army encircled Warsaw in August.

With the exception of its Ukrainian ally, Poland faced this attack alone. The French sent a military legation, but its counsel was unheeded. Pilsudski himself planned and executed a daring counterattack against the Bolshevik center, shattering Tukhachevsky's command. He then drove the Red Army to central Belarus. The Battle of Warsaw of August 16–25, 1920, was called by D'Abernon "the eighteenth decisive battle of the world." It set the westward boundary of the Bolshevik Revolution, saved independent Poland, and ended Lenin's hopes of spreading the Bolshevik Revolution by force of arms to Germany.

The Soviet-Polish frontier, agreed at Riga on March 18, 1921, was itself consequential. Poland abandoned its Ukrainian ally, as most of Ukraine was still under Soviet control. Yet the war forced the Soviets to reconsider nationality questions, and led to the establishment of the Soviet Union as a nominal federation in December 1922. During the 1930s, Josef Stalin blamed Polish agents for shortfalls in Ukrainian food production, and he ethnically cleansed Poles from the Soviet west. These preoccupations flowed from earlier defeat.

Riga divided Belarus and Ukraine between Poland and the Soviet Union. The Red Army seized western Belarus and western Ukraine from Poland in September 1939 thanks to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty, undoing the consequences of Riga and encouraging forgetfulness of the Polish-Bolshevik War. Yet more than any other event, the Polish-Bolshevik War defined the political and intellectual frontiers of the interwar period in eastern Europe.

See also: civil war of 1917–1922; poland; world war i