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Episode 10.91: The Battle of Warsaw

Last time we saw how Red victories over the Whites and the Russian Civil War paved the way not to peace, but to war of another kind, this time war with Poland. There was in fact a nearly seamless transition from the one conflict to the other, as the officers and soldiers who had pushed back Kolchak and Denikin were transferred over to the long neglected western front to face the ambitions of Poland. The two sides and the resulting Polish-Soviet War had mutually exclusive visions for the future of eastern Europe. The Russian Communists, riding high on their victory over the Whites, rekindled their dream of rolling the proletarian revolution west towards Germany, and they plan to establish a network of Soviet socialist republics under Moscow’s leadership.

The Poles, meanwhile, wanted to expand their borders east, rebuild the old boundaries of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, and bring almost all of Eastern Europe under Warsaw’s leadership. With the Russians still untangling their civil war in the spring of 1920, the Polish army under Józef Piłsudski launched a daring offensive that saw them capture most of Eastern Ukraine, and by the first week of May, see their armies marching into Kiev.

Now, though the Poles were pretty much going to stop there — like they were not threatening to March on Moscow and overthrow the Communist government — their advance still represented a dire threat to the Russian Communists, both from their national perspective as Russians, and international perspective as Communists. As I mentioned last week, they viewed the Polish War as the third campaign of the entente and believed Britain, France, and the other Allies were using the Poles to fight Russian Communism as they had previously and unsuccessfully used Admiral Kolchak and General Denikin. So the Polish advance was really taken to be the advance of the Allies, who would then install pliant puppets on the borders, threatening both Russia’s traditional territorial integrity and their ongoing socialist revolution.

Now in general, the Soviet government in Moscow had struggled to truly rally the people to fight for their side, to get them to fight for the ideological program of Communism. As we’ve seen, the best they were ever able to do during the Russian Civil War was get people to say, oh, well, when it comes down to it, I guess the Reds are the lesser of two evils. So, in facing the Poles, the government in Moscow focus less on political ideology and far more on good old fashioned patriotism. Their papers trumpeted the threat to Russia posed by a foreign invader, and called upon the people of Russia to rally not so much in an ideological defense of the revolution, but in a patriotic defense of Mother Russia. Joining the Reds in this effort was now old General Aleksei Brusilov. Brusilov was one of the few great military heroes to emerge from World War I, and his word still carried a lot of weight, both among his former fellow officers of the tsarist army, and the common people of Russia. Brusilov had spent the last few years laying low, reconciled, if not precisely sympathetic to, the Bolshevik revolution. But in the spring of 1920, he emerged to publicly encourage his military colleagues and the citizens of Russia generally to set aside their political differences and join the Red Army. On May the 30th, Brusilov published an appeal in Pravda that was formally addressed to all former officers, wherever they may be.

And in this address, he said, “Forget the wrongs you have suffered. It is now your duty to defend our beloved Russia with all your strength, and to give your lives to save her from irretrievable subjugation.” Now, this is a bit of an overstatement, but Brusilov’s point was generally that the Russian Civil War was kind of being put in the rear view mirror and they were all going to have to move forward together, and right now they faced a threat together, the threat posed by a resurgent Poland. Brusilov himself was then appointed chairman of a new advisory council of military officers, and he would remain in the service of the Revolutionary Military Council until his death in 1926.

The patriotic calls in the spring of 1920 proved highly successful, and the Reds quickly raised an 100,000 soldiers, as well as 14,000 officers to join the war against Poland. The usefulness of intermixing Russian patriotism with Russian communism was plainly evident, and it would be used to great effect in the years and decades to come. There is a reason Stalin called the war against the Nazis the Great Patriotic War.

Before this patriotic war, the Communists mobilized a huge army on two fronts: one called the western group mobilized in Belarus, and the other, known as the southwestern group, in Ukraine. In total, they got together 400,000 for the western front and 350,000 in the southwestern front, although how many of those were actually combat ready was debatable both then and now. The foremost task of the soldiers on these two fronts was to run the Polish army back out of the disputed territories in Belarus and Ukraine. But if all went well, they were to continue pushing to the outer boundaries of the former Russian Empire and capture Warsaw. With a communist aligned government installed in Poland, the revolutionary landbridge to Germany would be established. And though the Spartacist Uprising had ended in demoralizing failure, in 1920, Weimar Germany remained a chaotic mess of revolutionaries, reactionaries, and separatists, with the final political outcome of the fall of the German Empire still very much in doubt. As Pravda trumpeted in May 1920 under the headline “Go West,” they said, “Through the corpse of White Poland lies the way to the world inferno. On bayonets, we will carry happiness and peace to working humanity.” Because you know, happiness and peace always comes at the point of a bayonet.

The Red Army launched its counter offensives against the Polish Army in two staggered waves. First, down in Ukraine at the end of May, they opened up a battle for control of the Dnieper River. The Polish forces in the region may have nominally held Kiev, but they were way out ahead of themselves, and far too overextended. Plus their supposedly local Ukrainian ally, Symon Petliura, led only a small and relatively insignificant army, and he enjoyed no local influence to speak of. The Red Army, meanwhile, was led from the front by General Budyonny, and his First Cavalry Army, those guys who had proven so decisively effective during the campaign against Denikin the year before. Budyonny won a critical breakthrough in the lines on June the fifth, and Pilsudski had to order the evacuation of Kiev on June 10th. Now Pilsudski had planned to send forces from Ukraine up north to reinforce the defensive lines in Belarus, but the Red Army successes in Ukraine precluded that possibility. Over the next 10 weeks, the Red Army in Ukraine steadily advanced towards the western city of Lviv, where they expected to soon stand poised to join their comrades moving freely across Belarus for a mass convergence on Warsaw.

The Red Army advancing through Belarus was moving just as easily. The Polish defensive plans called for occupying the vast networks of the German trenches leftover from World War I — which remembers only 18 months in the rear view mirror. But they did not have sufficient manpower and they were spread far too thin. The Reds launched their offensive on July 5th, and quickly sent the Polish army tumbling backward. After breaking through the first line of Polish defense, the Reds recaptured Minsk on July 11th, then they broke through the second line of the Polish defenses and captured Vilnius on July 14th. Then the third Polish line of defense fell, and the Reds captured Grodno at the end of July. Marching with bold confidence, the Red Army now stood just to the east of the so-called Curzon Line, the line the Allied Powers had marked down as the eastern border of Poland. Not recognizing the validity of this demarcation at all, the Red Army simply continued to advance west, and orders went out confirming that their final destination was now Warsaw.

As the Red Army marched, the Soviet leadership’s confidence soared. Lenin became positively giddy at the idea that the depressing setbacks for international revolution in the immediate wake of World War I were not proving to be mere hiccups. He could once again trumpet worldwide socialism as a historical inevitability. In Pravda, Nikolai Bukharin wrote that they would move beyond Warsaw right up to London and Paris. And for every mile further the Red Army marched west, the exhortations to patriotic defense of the motherland against a foreign invader grew weaker, and the triumphant declarations of the revolutionary advance of socialism grew louder. They started taking the capture of Warsaw for granted, and Communist plans now looked ahead to Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, and Italy. The summer of 1920 was the last true high point of the belief that Russia would be the launchpad of the international revolution, something to be aggressively exported abroad, rather than merely protected and cultivated at home.

The brief spell of being dizzy with success just so happened to coincide with the Second Congress of the Communist International, which met in Moscow from July 19 to August 7th. Now, unlike the extremely ad hoc First Congress, which was not even sure if it could count itself as a founding congress, the Second Congress had 218 delegates, including representatives from Germany and France, as well as 30 delegates representing Asian countries like India, China, Indonesia, and Korea. Now Russia was still under a general Allied blockade, and delegates mostly had to sneak their way across the various borders using smugglers or false passports. Once assembled though, Lenin proposed to them 21 conditions for membership in the Communist International, which was going to set up the organizational basis for the final split with the Social Democrats and other moderate socialist groups. And more than anything, Lenin wanted this Congress to be the final divorce between the Communists and the Social Democrats. So point 7 read:

The parties that wish to belong to the Communist International have the obligation of recognizing the necessity of a complete break with reformism and centrist politics, and of spreading this break among the widest possible circles of their party members.

Then point 15 read:

Parties that have still retain their old social democratic programs have the obligation of changing those programs as quickly as possible, and working out a new communist program corresponding to the particular conditions in the country, and in accordance with the decisions of the Communist International.

The point was to greet a strong, clear, independent and uncompromising communist identity that would lead them away from the traps of reformism and social chauvinism, which in their minds had been the fatal virus that had infected the Second International. Representing the appearance of the delegates from the Asian countries, the Second Congress of the Communist international is also where we first start getting the idea floated that maybe the path that global communist revolution did not lay west, towards Berlin and Paris, but instead east, into places like China and India, where they would be able to completely destabilize the European imperial order. The delegates agreed to support national liberation movements in all their forms, whether if they were explicitly communist or not, because destabilizing European imperialism could only help the larger communist cause. While in Moscow, the delegates eagerly followed daily reports from the front lines of the Polish-Soviet War as the Red Army approached Warsaw. It led them all to believe that this new Communist International might be on the verge of completely displacing the newly formed League of Nations, which they obviously considered nothing more than a front for imperialist capitalism.

Meanwhile, in the corridors of western power — that is the headquarters of all those imperialist capitalists — the leaders of the Allies were getting awfully frustrated by the people of eastern Europe, because they seem to be taking this whole notion of self-determination literally. Neither the French, nor the British were enthused about all these border wars in eastern and central Europe, and they were very put out by countries like Poland, which were meant to be little more than grateful clients states of Britain and France, but who ignored them and chased their own ambitions. So yes, the French provided the Poles with money and munitions and officers to fight the Russians, but they were very annoyed by the fact that all of this aid was being used for offensive operations beyond the Curzon Line. Aggressive Polish ambitions in Ukraine and Belarus and Lithuania had invited this counter offensive by the Russian Communists who might now march all the way to the border with Germany and completely disrupt the post-war political settlements the Allies had put in place, and maybe even drag them into a war with Russia that neither the French, nor especially the British, wanted. With the Polish army falling back and the Red Army advancing, the Poles now went to the allies and asked for help negotiating an end to the conflict, which the Allies agreed to on the condition that Polish forces withdraw to the border intended to delineate their eastern ethnographic frontier, arbitrarily determined to be the aforementioned Curzon Line. Further, the Poles had to agree that all territorial disputes in the borderlands between Poland and Russia would be left to the Allies to decide. They would be the ones who decided who went where, not the people on the ground.

On July 11th, British foreign secretary George Curzon — he of the Curzon Line — sent a telegram to Russian Commissar of Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin requesting the Red Army halt at the Bug River and accept it as a temporary border with Poland, implying that the allies would actively aid the Poles to defend this line if Russia kept advancing. On July 17th, Chicherin rejected the British mediation offer, and declared that Russia would only negotiate directly with Poland. Frankly, the Allies had no business meddling in eastern European affairs and had no right to go around drawing boundaries. Both the British and the French responded to this with more definitive promises of aid to the Polish Army, and at the end of July, they sent what is called the Interallied Mission to Poland. The Allied governments assumed that this mission would take a leading role in the Polish War, that they would become something of a defacto general staff of the Polish Army, but when they got there, they found that the Poles, for all their aid requests, were uninterested in simply taking orders from British or French officers. And the French managed to bungle their relationship with the Poles even further, and they encouraged the Polish government to recognize and support the Russian Whites in Crimea now led by Pyotr Wrangel. We’ll talk more about this next week, but Russian White policy continued to deny the right of independent Poland to even exist, so the French were not exactly winning friends and allies among the Polish leadership.

The Red Army, meanwhile, captured Brest on July 29th, and then reach the Bug River on July 30th. Now the Bug River does have some historical significance as a loose geographical dividing line between east and west, with those east of the river tending to be Orthodox Christian, while those on the west side of the river being Catholic. And it meant that if the Red Army crossed this river, that they would be moving into territory that was well beyond their cultural limits. Suddenly the framework of this being a patriotic war of national defense hopped over to the other side. Whereas in the spring, Russian patriotism was mobilized to defend against the foreign invasion of the Poles, now it was Polish patriotism being mobilized to defend against foreign invasion by the Russians.

Now like any army of this type, the Red Army attempted to portray itself as a liberating army, freeing the peasants and the workers of Poland from the clutches of the old landed aristocracy and the new exploitive capitalists. But, as always, liberation at bayonet point is a pretty tough sell, especially because the Russians were now the ones with long extended supply lines operating well beyond their own home frontiers and forced to feed and supply themselves by local requisitioning. So, when the Red Army showed up, the local Polish population did not see liberators, but oppressors and occupiers. As Lenin later lamented to German Communist Clara Zetkin, ” They had to requisition bread from the Polish peasants and middle classes. And in the Red Army, the Poles saw enemies, not brothers and liberators. The Poles thought and acted not in a social revolutionary way, but as nationalists. The revolution in Poland which we counted on did not take place. What happened instead was that the Polish peasants and workers did not rally to the Red Army, but to the Polish Army.”

Now, originally the Russian plan was for the armies they had operating Ukraine to come up and support the western army advancing on Warsaw. But this seemingly sensible and obvious approach was preempted by communist overconfidence. Still believing that the revolution in Poland they counted on would come to pass, and obviously lulled into believing the Red Army would just steamroll the Polish army, the Red Army in Ukraine was directed to capture the city of Lviv in far western Ukraine. The capture of Lviv would then be a launch point for further adventures abroad. This meant that instead of getting closer together, the two Russian armies out there grew further apart. The armies now approaching Warsaw were left unsupported due to a misreading of the situation and it costs them badly needed reinforcements. There’s a good case to be made that it costs them the Battle of Warsaw. Now, just before the final battle, Polish and Soviet negotiators met in Minsk to possibly hammer out a ceasefire, but the Russians, riding high on their momentum, issued demands that were far too harsh for the Poles to accept, as it would turn Poland into a Soviet dependent state. So talks went nowhere. All matters would be decided on the battlefield, and it would all come down to the Battle of Warsaw.

The Battle of Warsaw was a huge affair, with somewhere between 225,000 and 275,000 troops participating, evenly split between the two sides. After advancing toward the city over several days, the Red Army launched its final assault on the city on August 12th. The plan was to send one force directly west towards Warsaw, while others would sweep up around and cross the Vistula River north to outflank and surround the capital. But the fighting by the Poles was much stiffer than the Russians anticipated. The people were not rallying to the Red Army or to the communist revolution, but to the defense of their homeland. Within a few days, it was obvious the Red battle plan wasn’t going according to plan. The armies down in Ukraine were ordered to go northwest to reinforce the assault, but General Budyonny, apparently following orders from Comrade Stalin refused to obey. Stalin was one of the leading political commissars down on the Ukrainian front, and he had his own political and military ambitions. He seems to have been seduced by the idea that the Poles were already as good as defeated, and he didn’t want to get stuck in a merely supportive role in an all but guaranteed victory up by Warsaw, and instead insisted they continue to focus on capturing the city of Lviv, partly to stick laurels in his own cap.

But with the Red Army around Warsaw actually badly in need of reinforcements, Stalin and Budyonny missed the chance to be the glorious saviors of the cause who wrote in to save the day. After several days spent fending off the Russians, Pilsudski launched an all or nothing counter attack that would sweep up and around from the south and come at the Red Army from the rear. He launched this attack on August the 16th and in the midst of the fighting, the Red Army broke into confused retreat. Different armies and divisions broke in completely different directions. Two of the main armies apparently disintegrated entirely. The Red Army high command was cut off from accurate communications with their forces in the field, and they issued commands that had little or nothing to do with the actual strategic or tactical situation facing their soldiers. Disoriented and demoralized and hit from all sides, the Red Army started falling back from Warsaw in disarray. Their sure victory turned into a massive and stunning defeat.

As late as August 19th, the Red high command tried to hold the line and regroup for another assault, but it was already too late. Their units were spread out far and wide, cut off from each other, many of them in chaotic retreat. Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers simply gave up and surrendered around Warsaw. Tens of thousands more wound up crossing the border into east Prussia, where they were detained and interned by the Germans. The estimated Russian losses in the battle of Warsaw were something like 10,000 killed, 500 missing, 30,000 wounded and 66,000 taken prisoner. It was, by all accounts, a devastating military defeat. It was also a shocking turnaround from the high hopes they had had just a few days earlier. The reds believed they were about to capture all of Poland, and now they were falling back hundreds of miles east to the Neman River in Belarus. The battle of Warsaw was a huge victory for the Poles, and for Pilsudski in particular, who had been enduring heavy criticism for his handling of the war to date, though, his critics were eager to deny him even this great victory, and they called the Battle of Warsaw, the Miracle on the Vistula, and they attributed the salvation of Poland to divine providence, and specifically the Virgin Mary, rather than the political and military acumen of Józef Piłsudski.

So with the Polish army once again advancing while the Red Army retreated, we can see that the Polish-Soviet War unfolded as a great sloshing Back and forth of armies across eastern Europe. First, the Red Army had sloshed west over the winter of 1918-1919 during the Target: Vistula days. This triggered the counter slosh east as the Polish army advanced in the summer of 1919, and the Red Army fell back, until the frontline was practically on the Russian border by the spring of 1920. Then there was the counter-counter slosh back west, as the Red Army advanced and the Polish Army retreated all the way to the gates of Warsaw by the summer of 1920. And now, here in the late summer and early fall of 1920, we have the final counter-counter-counter slosh back east. The Poles pushed the Reds back across the Bug River, which just a few weeks earlier, the Allies had tried to get the Red Army not to cross, and which maybe at this point the Red Army kind of wishes it hadn’t crossed. The Russians then tried to make a stand around the city of Gradno on the Neman River, but in the subsequent battles at the end of September, the second largest battles after the battle Warsaw, the Red Army was again outflanked and forced to retreat deeper into Belarus. By now, the Poles were also on the march down in Ukraine, and they forced the whole frontline in the Polish-Soviet War hundreds of miles east by the beginning of October.

This sudden about face and the Miracle of the Vistula led both sides to reconsider peace. Now Piłsudski was adamantly opposed to making a peace with Russia. He believed he had the Red Army on the run, and his dream of that vast Polish-led Intermarium Confederation still burned in his heart. But most Polish leaders believed that would be a mistake. They had just stared total annihilation in the face, and now that they had restored some geographic breathing room for themselves, they sought only the confirmation of a sovereign and independent Poland recognized by Russia. Over in Russia, some quarters of the Communist leadership believed in trying to regroup and keep fighting — Poland was after all, still the land bridge to Germany, a bridge that had to be crossed in order to carry out international communist revolution — and had they wanted to, they probably still could have kept fighting. Their western forces were in a state of disarray at the moment, but they still had millions of soldiers under arms spread throughout Russia. Had they really wanted to, they could have regrouped and launched a counter-counter-counter-counter slosh in the spring of 1921. But the ever practical Lenin believed that this might be nothing less than political suicide. That if they tried it, they wouldn’t make it through the winter. As we’ll discuss more next week, the burdens of war communism were becoming intolerable to the people of Russia, and as Lenin said to Clara Zetkin, “I myself believe that our position did not force us to make a peace at any price. We could have held out over the winter, but I thought it wiser to come to terms with the enemy. The temporary sacrifice of a hard peace appeared to me to be preferable to a continuation of the war. Soviet Russia can only win if it shows that it carries on war to defend the revolution, that it has no intention to seize land, suppress nations, or embark on imperialist adventure. But ought we above all unless absolutely compelled to have exposed the Russian people to the terror and suffering of another winter of war? No. The thought of the agonies of another winter of war were unbearable. We had to make a peace.”

By October 1920, then, leaders in both Poland and Russia concluded they wanted to end the war. And when their respective negotiators sat down in the city of Riga, they were both looking for a stable peace, rather than the fulfillment of all their heart’s desires. Both sides, in fact, abandon their primary objectives. The Poles gave up on the idea of expanding their borders to the old limits of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Russians gave up on the idea of trying to install a communist regime in Poland. A preliminary ceasefire was signed on October 12th, which took effect on October 18th. Now there was still some sporadic fighting and jockeying for position over the winter of 1920-1921, but both sides were ultimately committed to ending the war and settling into the negotiated peace that left neither with what they wanted, but with enough to walk away clean. Poland put its army on peace time footing in January before the final peace treaty was even signed, partly because the Red Army had begun a program of mass demobilization before the winter even set in. Though the final peace treaty would not be signed until March 1921, the Polish-Soviet War was over.

The immediate impact of the Polish-Soviet War and its lasting legacy are mostly about what didn’t happen, rather than what did. Because when you look at the final maps of the Treaty of Riga, after all this sloshing about, everyone is kind of right back where they started. Something like a hundred thousand people were killed, there was massive material and economic devastation, there was incalculable traumas inflicted on both soldiers and civilians as the armies marched back and forth across eastern Europe, and for what? Kind of looks like for nothing. Kind of looks like they could have done none of that and wound up in exactly the same place. So the legacy of the war is wrapped up in the fact that it headed off the dramatic scenarios that would have resulted from a clear victory for either side. Polish victory might have led to a legitimately resurgent Poland occupying a massive space on the maps of Europe, no longer a contested borderland between Germany, Austria, and Russia, but a major power in its own right, ascendant at a time when Germany, Austria, and Russia were all reeling from the collapse of their respective empires. Who knows how that would have changed the near future of European war and diplomacy.

On the other hand — and this is the legacy more commonly pointed to — had the Red Army won the battle of Warsaw and successfully installed a communist regime in Poland, who knows what they might have accomplished in neighboring Germany. Maybe their communist revolution would have kept marching to Berlin, and then to Paris and London. With this threat on the table, the Allies probably would have been forced into a direct war with Russia they did not want, but which they probably would have deemed unavoidable to prevent western Europe from going Red. As it stands, the battle of Warsaw is treated in some quarters as one of the most important battles in European history, as the moment when communism was blocked from entering western Europe. And certainly we can see a clear departure in both domestic and foreign policy in Russia come the spring of 1921. These changes were not entirely caused by the defeat in Warsaw, but certainly there were very much informed by it.

Now, all this talk of the Miracle on the Vistula halting the spread of evil atheist communism can obviously go too far, especially because it’s not clear how much even a victorious Russia, at that time, and under the conditions that prevailed in 1921, would have been able to truly exert their authority over a hypothetically communist Poland, nor how much support the local Polish communists would have even had. Which is to say, once installed, they might have been overthrown in a fortnight. And so, yes, the battle of Warsaw is the historical moment when the spread of communism is halted, but it’s by no means the only possible historical moment when that might’ve happened. But hypotheticals aside, the Battle of Warsaw was that moment. It was the historical moment when the spread of communism was halted, and it is thus a critical moment in the timeline of the Russian Revolution and European history.

Now, next week, we’ll turn our attention back to domestic concerns in Russia, as Lenin himself was already doing as he pushed to make peace with Poland. Since October 1917, the communists had imposed a harsh reign on the people of Russia. Three years of emergency conditions and ongoing war had justified those conditions, but the people were getting awfully sick of the burdens imposed on them, and going into the winter of 1920-1921, the most acute threat to the Communist government in Moscow was not the Allies or conservative Whites or the Poles, but the very workers and peasants on whose behalf they claimed to rule.