Peace was finally signed between Poland and Russia at Riga on 18 March 1921. The Polish negotiators, eager to repair Poland’s damaged image abroad, did not insist on her historic frontiers and settled for a compromise that nevertheless included much of Byelorussia and Ukraine within her borders. Nor did they attempt to accommodate an independent Ukraine in the settlement. Petlura was soon overwhelmed by the Red Army, and the remnants of his forces were disarmed as they sought refuge in Poland once more.
They, along with defeated White Russians and other oppressed minorities, regarded the peace, as did many outraged Poles and the Bolsheviks themselves, as no more than a truce in an ongoing struggle. And so it turned out to be. In 1939 the Soviet Union would seize the opportunity offered by Hitler to help itself to Polish territory up to a line roughly following that suggested by Lord Curzon in the summer of 1920. Two years later, many Petlurists, White Russians, Georgians and others would throw in their lot with Germany in the hope of ousting the Bolsheviks or gaining independence. In 1945 Stalin would achieve much of what he and Lenin had set out to do in 1920, but after 1989 it would be the turn of the heirs of Pilsudski and Petlura to triumph.
Seen in this context, the events of 1920 seem not only irrelevant, but almost quaint. The horrific Armageddon that rolled back and forth across the area two decades later, and the dark night of communism that engulfed it for half a century after that, make them appear almost Lilliputian. The frontiers which were deemed so important then were swept into oblivion. So were the state structures to which so much value had been attached. And so were a staggering proportion of the principal actors.
The officer who led the 8th Lancers into the charge at Komardw lived out his last years in West London under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. Budionny had died in his bed a decade earlier at the grand old age of ninety-four, a hero of the Soviet Union. They were among the lucky ones.
In 1926 Petlura, whom destitution had forced into the profession of cabaret artiste, was assassinated on the boulevard St Michel in Paris by a young Jew whose parents had been killed during a pogrom in Kiev. The Polish chief-of-staff Rozwadowski, who as military governor of Warsaw resisted Pitsudski’s coup d’etat of 1926, died two years later in suspicious circumstances. Pilsudski himself died in 1935, having achieved cult status: in 1945 Marshal Zhukov took time off from pursuing the retreating Germans to visit his grave in the royal mausoleum in Krakow’s cathedral. Zhukov and his comrade Timoshenko were also fortunate.
Between 1935 and 1938, Tukhachevsky, Gai, Sollohub, Sergeyev, Lazarevich, Kork, Putna, Yakir, Primakov, Uborevich and countless other senior officers were murdered in Stalin’s purges. Even the wives of Tukhachevsky and Uborevich were declared ‘enemies of the people’and shot in 1941. A year earlier, in 1940, Trotsky had been tracked down in Mexico by an assassin sent by Stalin, and murdered with an ice-pick. When Russia went to war in 1939, the Red Army was led by old cronies such as Budionny and Voroshilov, with predictable results.
Smigly-Rydz, who commanded the Polish army in 1939, died in Warsaw in 1941. Others, including Stanislaw Haller, General Skierski, the commander of the Fourth Army in Piisudski’s
Strike force, and Plisowski, the dashing young colonel of the 14th Lancers, were among the 20,000 Polish officers who ended up in the mass graves of Katyn and other places of extermination. The venerable Krajowski and many more perished in Nazi concentration camps, while Sikorski lost his life when his plane crashed into the sea shortly after taking off from Gibraltar in 1943. It is as though a curse had been cast on them. And it is difficult to shake off entirely the suspicion that Stalin’s behaviour towards the Poles in the 1940s was tinged with revenge for the humiliation of 1920.
It had indeed been one, and the Bolshevik leadership was profoundly affected by it. The events had revealed the frailty and limits of their power. They also suggested that the whole world was ranged against them, and that the masses in other countries could not be relied on to support them. This gave rise to a siege mentality, isolationism and the doctrine of ‘communism in one country’, expressed to the outside world in a sulky, defensive aggressiveness. Hurt pride is in evidence in the attitude of most of Russia’s leaders to the rest of the world, beginning with Lenin.
The isolation in which Russia spent the 1920s and 1930s undoubtedly assisted Stalin in his seizure of power and his reign of terror, and it ultimately pushed her into the arms of the other regime born of humiliation and fired by a determination to overthrow the Versailles settlement - Nazi Germany. And when his troops marched into Poland in support of the Germans in 1939, Stalin showed that he had learnt the lessons of 1919-20. There would be no attempt to win the Poles over to communism; his previous experience had taught him that they were not amenable. So he set about extirpating not only nobles, priests and landowners, but also doctors, nurses and veterinary surgeons, and in general anyone who might show the slightest sign of independent thought or even curiosity - the scores of charges which entailed immediate arrest and deportation included possessing a stamp collection. Over 1,500,000 people were caught up in this fine net. Army officers, for whom Stalin felt a particular hatred, were murdered in the forest of Katyn and elsewhere, other ranks and civilians were despatched to the Gulag, where a majority died. After 1945 he would do his best to extend the same principles to the rest of Poland.
How differently things might have turned out in Russia had some kind of peace been negotiated back at the beginning of 1919, and the whole war avoided, it would be idle to speculate. It would be equally pointless, if fascinating, to try to extrapolate the consequences of a Russian victory at Warsaw in 1920: Poland and the Baltic states would have been turned into Soviet republics, followed almost certainly by Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, and very probably Germany, and the rest of Europe would have been profoundly affected; whether this would have led to world revolution or an international crusade leading to the destruction of Soviet Russia is anybody’s guess. But some of the consequences of the war are there for all to see.
The events of 1919-20 affected attitudes not only in Russia and Poland, but throughout the region and even the world. They confirmed the belief that Russia would always remain an imperialist power and a threat to her neighbours, whoever was at the helm. They buttressed the right-wing conviction that socialism would never be a benign force in politics. This encouraged a certain mistrust of democracy and led many to favour governments led by ‘strong men’, even at the cost of some personal liberty. Mussolini, Admiral Horthy, General Franco, Salazar and Hitler, not to mention other less obviously dictatorial leaders, were all direct beneficiaries. And even where there was no direct threat apparent, as in mature democracies such as Britain and the United States, fear of the ‘red peril’ exerted a powerful influence. Cardinal Achille Ratti’s presence in Warsaw in 1920 meant that both during his later nunciature in Germany and his reign as Pope Pius XI, anticommunism would be one of the prime considerations in the formulation of Vatican policy.
One of the more noteworthy consequences of the events of 1919-20, also felt in varying degrees throughout the world, was that they helped transform the residual anti-Semitism of the majority of the inhabitants of Europe into a political factor, and injected a rich mix of nutrients into the budding fantasies about Jewish and Masonic plots to destroy Christian civilization. The fact that there were Jews in prominent positions in the Soviet apparatus, that the short-lived communist regime in Hungary had been led by a Jew, that there had been Jews in the PolRevKom, that many of the Jews living in Byelorussia, Ukraine and Poland had welcomed the Red Army, that many of the intellectuals in the West who had taken the side of Bolshevik Russia were Jews, ineluctably identified all Jews with communism, notwithstanding the large numbers of Jews who had fled before the approach of the Red Army, been massacred by it, or had fought against it. And for the same reasons, societies such as Poland were apt to regard the Jews as traitors to the nation - even though it was not clear why any Jew living somewhere that had suddenly become part of a new nation should feel any loyalty towards it, and notwithstanding that tens of thousands of Jews had fought bravely in the ranks of the Polish army. These attitudes and assumptions were to have a long life, in many countries, and would contribute not a little to the horrors of the subsequent decades. They also thrived in Soviet Russia, where the Jews were viewed at best as unreliable, and more commonly as agents of a worldwide capitalist or Trotskyite plot to bring down the Soviet regime.
The war of 1920 also clouded perceptions among the military all over the world, and the discussion that followed it was rich in erroneous assumptions and consequently even more erroneous deductions. Participants and observers were quick to explain, excuse and blame. Tukhachevsky blamed the disaster on lack of coordination between the fronts, and bad luck. Other Russian commanders pleaded inferiority of numbers and equipment, and only a few, such as Putna and Sergeyev, put it down to Tukhachevsky’s inability to concentrate his forces at the right points, combined with the assumption that Russian Civil War conditions would obtain in Poland.
In the West, the main preoccupation was not so much with how the war had been won, but by whom. When he heard of the victory at Warsaw, Lloyd George sent a communique congratulating Lord D’Abernon and General Weygand. Lord D’Abernon congratulated Lloyd George and, for reasons which remain obscure, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff Sir Henry Wilson. President Millerand congratulated Weygand, and decorated him with the Grand Cordon of the Legion d’Honneur. Despite several formal and many verbal rebuttals on his part, he was widely regarded as the author of the plan that had brought victory. The Poles distributed their congratulations according to political affiliation, personal loyalty or religious outlook: to Pitsudski, Sikorski, Haller, Rozwadowski or the Virgin Mary.
Little effort was made to analyse the campaign or to learn anything from it. General Radcliffe, an eyewitness, dismissed it as ‘an eighteenth-century war’. Coming as it did just after the Great War, with its static trenches, its armies of millions and its heavy concentration of firepower, this campaign could not but stand out for its mobility. Large bodies of cavalry had led the action by carrying out deep flanking raids, while tanks and planes had failed to make an impact. These points were picked up by redundant cavalrymen and traditionalists all over the world, who used them to argue that cavalry still had an essential role to play in modern warfare. Only a handful drew the conclusion that the warfare of the future would indeed be one of deep thrusts and pincer movements, but that these would be carried out by a new generation of mobile armour. Among them were two participants in the campaign, De Gaulle and Sikorski, whose published reflections were read with interest but laid aside.
Yet although the war of 1920 taught many people the wrong lessons, making the Poles too trustful of training and morale, and the Russians too reliant on vast numbers when it would be superior weapons that carried the day, it did temper some of the finest commanders of the Second World War. And it did contribute to Allied victory in a crucial way: the Polish Army’s concentration on radio monitoring, which led to its interest, from the late 1920s, in the use the Germans were making of the ‘Enigma’ encoding machine, lies at the origins of Bletchley Park, where the German codes were comprehensively broken, allowing the Allies to read most of the German army, navy and air force’s orders.
And even if the Polish victory was soon cancelled out by what happened after 1939, the two decades of freedom from communism it bought for East Central Europe provided much of that part of the Continent with its first taste of some kind of democratic and civilized existence. This was certainly not always an edifying experience, and many of the countries in the region followed the lead of Italy, Spain and Germany by adopting more or less dictatorial forms of government.
Poland itself resisted this tendency at first. But its parliamentary politics were so bedevilled by squabbling and factionalism, understandable after over a century of political repression, that disenchantment grew on all sides of the political spectrum. In 1926, exasperated by the antics of the parliamentarians, Pilsudski emerged from retirement and staged a coup which, while far from bloodless, was neither particularly violent nor drastic in its impact. The only formal change was that the constitution was amended to give the president greater powers. But Pilsudski and his supporters hovered in the background, defying anyone to challenge their authority. The parliamentary opposition’s power to affect policy dwindled and more obvious opponents such as communists were locked up or repressed by other means. After Pilsudski’s death in 1935 it was his faithful supporters, many of them former Legionary officers, who pulled the strings. As they increasingly invoked national solidarity to deal with every problem, be it economic or political, they fostered ill-feeling between the ethnic Poles and the various minorities, such as the Germans, the Ukrainians and particularly the Jews.
Yet, imperfect as it may appear to a modern observer, that brief experience of democracy would allow the peoples of an area stretching from present-day Estonia down to the Balkans to develop and expand the institutions and forms of civil society - more successfully than has been generally acknowledged: in welfare and social housing, in the emancipation of women, in public education and in many other areas they outstripped older democracies such as France and Britain, not to mention the United States. And it was this, ultimately, that allowed them to survive, defy and eventually overcome both fascism and communism. The democratic and civic instinct in that part of Europe today is largely the product of the two decades of freedom secured by Pilsudski and his armies on the Vistula in 1920.
World History
