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Episode 10.90 – The Polish Soviet War

After spending 1919 launching multiple attempts to overthrow the Communists, the White movement was collapsing into a heap on all fronts by 1920. In the east, Admiral Kolchak’s forces disintegrated in Siberia, and he himself was executed in February 1920. Down in the south, General Denikin’s armies were pushed all the way down to the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, where Denikin evacuated as many people as he could over to Crimea before resigning his command and departing for permanent exile in April 1920.

This was not the end of the Whites, as remnants of Kolchak’s armies will remain active in Sibera, while General Pyotr Wrangel will organize a final redoubt of the southern Whites in Crimea. But history will soon mark this all down as the last stands of a defeated cause, not a springboard back to final victory. From a contemporaneous point of view, it was clear by the spring of 1920 that the chances of the Whites prevailing over the Reds in the Russian Civil War were small. From a historical point of view, we know that those small chances would not be converted. But this does not mean the Russians are done fighting with each other, nor does it mean the Communist regime in Moscow no longer faces dire threats to their existence. Their victories over Kolchak in the east and Denikin in the south simply changed where they fought, and who they fought, and specifically it turned their attention to unanswered questions in the west.

For centuries, millions of people in hundreds of thousands of miles of territory in central and eastern Europe had been dominated by imperial regimes based in Berlin, Vienna and St. Petersburg. As these great empires collapsed in the midst of World War I, subject peoples revived the dreams of 1848 and sought independence. Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Romanians, Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles all sought sovereign independence, both from their former Imperial masters and from each other. The final defeat of the Central Powers in the autumn of 1918 triggered a violent race among all these peoples to stake out as much territory as possible for themselves before the dust settled and the diplomats of the victorious Allied Powers started drawing lines on maps in Paris.

Now, so far we’ve talked about these scrambles in the regions immediately bordering central Russia — places like Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. We know that we are dealing with conflicts defined by a dozen different factional dimensions, including ethnicity, language, religion, social class, political ideology, and national identity. These conflicts thus unfolded simultaneously as internal civil wars and external border wars, as armies crisscrossed central and eastern Europe capturing and relinquishing territory in the name of this political party or that nationality.

The objective of the Allied diplomats in Paris was to organize new nation states that would ensure national self-determination, but this is massively complicated by the fact that these regions were, in reality, a jumble of different ethnic and national groups living side-by-side — often literally next door neighbors, each wielding their own historical claim for their groups’ right to political dominance in that region. In circumstances such as these, it is usually force of arms that makes the final determination of whose title is recognized, and whose is discarded.

Now, today, we are going to turn the dial one big click to the west, and talk about Poland, because one of the most immediate consequences of the collapse of the Russian Whites in the Civil War in 1919 was the eruption of the Polish Soviet War in 1920. Now, having been erased from the map of Europe by the third Polish partition in 1795, Polish leaders had never given up their dream of winning back independence, as was evidenced by numerous revolts, rebellions, and revolutions during the 123 year interval between 1795 and 1918. None of those revolts, rebellions, or revolutions had proved successful, but to say that the political situation in 1918 was quite a bit different would be a massive understatement. In November 1918, Polish leaders got together in Warsaw and declared the independence of what they were calling the Second Polish Republic. The final borders of this Second Polish Republic were yet to be determined, as there was quite a range of possibilities. At its maximum extent, during the medieval period, the great Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth had been one of the largest political entities in Europe, encompassing a massive swath of territory between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea. On the other hand, at its minimum extent, Poland didn’t even exist — all of its territory was claimed by the Prussian, Austrian, and Russian Empires. So, the final border of this new Second Polish Republic was bound to be somewhere in between those extremes, and they were going to have to fight for every potential square mile. Starting in November, 1918, the Poles fought and they fought hard. To the west, they embarked on the greater Polish Uprising and Silesian Uprisings against Germany; to the southwest, it was the Polish-Czechoslovak War; to the northeast, the Polish-Lithuanian war; to the Southeast, it was the Polish-Ukrainian War, the latter two of which are folded into the main topic of today’s episode and the reason why we’re talking about all this: the Polish-Soviet war of 1919 and 1920.

The Polish Soviet conflict began almost the minute the Central Powers admitted defeat in World War I. As we talked about back in episode 10.84, after the Soviet leaders in Moscow, annulled the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, they sent Red Army detachments west into territories they had once renounced, and now plan to reclaim. Over the winter of 1918-1919, they occupied cities like Vilnius, Minsk, and Kiev. But their strategy was not one of annexation or direct incorporation of territory, but instead establishing an array of nominally independent socialist soviet republics in the former territories of the Russian Empire. So, there would be an Estonian SSR, a Latvian SSR, a Ukrainian SSR. The idea was to co-op national liberatory ambitions while ensuring local Communists prevailed over other would be leaders, whether they were liberal, bourgeois, nationalist, or reactionary. This was a practical step towards the ultimate goal, which was international revolution of the proletariat that would erase all national boundaries and identities.

But in most cases in 1918 and 1919, the local Communist parties were not very strong. And the advance of the Red Army was not welcomed by locals as a harbinger of liberation, but instead resisted as a harbinger of renewed Russian imperialism. Over in Poland, alarm bells clanged incessantly by the time new year’s 1919 came around when it got out that the Red Army was referring to part of their western push as Target: Vistula, indicating their plans to march all the way to Warsaw.

Now by far the most important Polish leader facing this Russian advance, and who had spent his life fighting for an independent Poland, was a guy called Yosef Pilsudski. So, before we go on, we really got to introduce Pilsudski, because he’s been around the revolutionary block about a dozen times. Yosef Pilsudski was born in 1867 into a noble Polish family from Lithuania, an area that was at that time part of the Russian Empire. This was, in fact, just a few years after the 1863 Polish Uprising against Russian domination, which led to some pretty severe reprisals and policy changes from the tsar. This meant stepping up Russification of the region, pushing Orthodox Christianity over local Catholicism, and the Russian language over Polish.

Pilsudski came from a family of adamant Polish patriots. His father participated in the 1863 Rebellion, and Pilsudski himself was a rebellious revolutionary against tsarist Russia from a very young age. He participated in demonstrations, got rejected from university for his political affiliations, and was even tangentially caught up when his brother was implicated in a plot to kill the tsar. And — small world alert — his brother was caught up in the 1887 plot to kill Tsar Alexander the Third where one of the co-conspirators was Lenin’s brother, so that’s how small this revolutionary world really was. Pilsudski himself was arrested in the wake of all this and exiled to Siberia for five years.

When he returned, he joined the socialist underground in Poland and became editor in chief of the newspaper called The Worker. But though he had left-wing sympathies, his main motivation was Polish patriotism, and this left him hanging in a space between the more overtly nationalistic Poles and the internationalist socialists like, for example, Rosa Luxemburg. But he never lacked for revolutionary fervor, and he spent the next several years bouncing in and out of prison before going abroad, and at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, we actually find him in Tokyo trying to convince the Japanese government to arm and fund a Polish rebellion against Russia, which they considered, but ultimately declined, after other Polish representatives in Japan maintained it would be a fool’s errand — and in particular, I’m talking here about a guy called Roman Dmowski, who emerged as the leader of right wing Polish nationalism, and who would be a long standing political rival of Pilsudski, even as they both worked towards the same goal of Polish independence.

Pilsudski then returned to Poland and formed a paramilitary unit that was active all throughout the 1905 Revolution. They led strikes and demonstrations, but also bombings and assassinations, invariably directed at Russian interests, but his group also occasionally clashed with Dmowski’s National Democrats.

After the 1905 Revolution, Pilsudski moved away from his old socialist comrades to maintain a sole fixation on Polish independence. He spent those post-1905 pre-World War I years fixated on independence through armed revolution. He ran a paramilitary group that continually assassinated Russian officials and engaged in revolutionary expropriation like the Russian Bolsheviks, which is to say, they were armed robbers. Operating in between the nationalists on one side and the socialists on the other, Pilsudski tried to hold himself aloof from all parties, though he seems far more antagonistic towards the right wing National Democrats than the left-wing socialists. In the lead up to World War I, he had moved over to the Austrian part of Poland and with their apparent permission, organized sporting clubs that were ostensibly about hunting, but which were actually about regular rifle training for future deployment against the hated tsar. By 1914, Pilsudski sporting clubs numbered 12,000 members, and they were a defacto Polish legion ready for service. Pilsudski himself entered the war under Austrian auspices to fight the Russians on the eastern front, and served with distinction over the next several years. In 1916, he was critical in the push that forced the flagging Germans and Austrians to declare an independent kingdom of Poland. They finally agreed to this in November 1916, mostly to garner more Polish recruits for their armies, and they absolutely expected this thing that they declared to be the kingdom of Poland to be nothing more than a puppet state. Pilsudski and his colleagues, however, considered this the first step to real independence.

Pilsudski himself was invited to serve as minister of war of the new Polish government, but in the summer of 1917, with the defeat of the Central Powers seeming like a real possibility, Pilsudski started unshackling Poland from their puppet strings. He forbade Polish troops from swearing a loyalty oath to the Central Powers and was promptly arrested and tossed into the Magdeburg Fortress, which had once upon a time been the prison of the Marquis de Lafayette, which I discussed on pages 301 to 303 of Hero of two Worlds: the Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution, which, you know, I just had to jam that right in there.

Pilsudski spent the remainder of the war in the Magdeburg Fortress. But on November 8, 1918, the Germans released him and sent him on a train back to Warsaw, apparently in the vain hope that he would, like, rally the Poles to their defense. But by this point, Pilsudski had spent decades in the service of Polish independence and Polish independence alone. When he returned to Warsaw, he enjoyed basically unrivaled popularity. Everybody knew who he was, everybody knew what he had been doing, everybody knew what he wanted to do; he was the natural choice to be the visible leader both of the government and the army during the post-World War I tumult. He was the man best situated to secure independence and not let it go, because more than anything, he had the loyalty of just about every Pole under arms.

On November 11th, 1918, the Regency Council that was running the Kingdom of Poland appointed Pilsudski commander in chief of the Polish Army, and later that day, he was the one who proclaimed an independent Polish state. On November 22nd, he was named provisional chief of that state, making him both the head of state and the commander in chief of Poland. After taking over control of the Polish Army, Pilsudski helped organize a counter attack against the western Red Army, whose advances over the winter of 1918-1919 had stalled out, now that the Russian Communists were dealing with far more pressing threats in the form of Kolchak and Denikin. By necessity, they withdrew resources, manpower, and attention from their relatively less threatened western borderlands. This was golden opportunity for Poland to stake out a generous border for itself in the region. Pilsudski himself said “At the moment, Poland is essentially without borders, and all that we can gain in this regard in the west depends on the entente, or the extent to which it may wish to squeeze Germany. In the east, it’s a different matter. There are doors here that open and close, and it depends on who forces them open and how far.”

In February, 1919, the Polish government declared its policy was the liberation of what they called the northeast provinces of Poland, with their capital in Vilnius. This led to the first official skirmish between the rapidly growing but still somewhat ramshackle Polish Army and the western Red Army. It came on February 14th, 1919 at the town of… oh boy, uh… Bereza Kartuska, a town about midway between Warsaw and Minsk. This skirmish involved less than a hundred soldiers on each side, but it did see the Poles capture 80 prisoners and begin to run a virtually unbroken success through the spring and summer of 1919.

In April, Pilsudski personally led a renewed offensive that took the Polish army into Vilnius, where they expelled the recently proclaimed Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania and Belorussia. In Moscow, Lenin was furious when he got the news that Vilnius had fallen, and on April 25th, ordered the Red Army to do everything in their power to reclaim the city. But, with the great battles of the Russian Civil War presently raging around the Volga River and the Don River, the Western Red Army was little more than a skeleton crew. The only thing that it was in their power to do was retreat.

When Pilsudski entered Vilnius, he was taken to be something of a liberator. According to a 1916 census taken by the Germans, Vilnius was 53% Polish and 41% Jewish, and both groups were optimistic about their prospects under a Polish regime. Doubly so because had his own idiosyncratic political program that did not actually jive with a lot of the more nationalistic Polish leaders back in Warsaw. They believed the object was direct annexation and incorporation of Lithuania and Belarus into a Poland restored to its former historical greatness.

Pilsudski thought this extreme folly, and pushed instead for a Polish led confederation dubbed the Intermarium, as it would encompass all that territory between the Baltic Sea in the north and the Black Sea in the south. In his grandest visions, this political Confederation would include Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Belarus, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. Now, Pilsudski was a Polish patriot, and he absolutely conceived of Poland as the dominant power in this confederation. He envisioned them overseeing a defacto empire that placed them between Germany and Russia. But, not unlike the Communist SSR system, he believed the best and most practical way to go about achieving Polish dominance was to create a bunch of nominally independent units that would, yes, look to the ascendant power of Poland, but not have their own national aspirations threatened by direct incorporation into Poland. So wherever he went, he loudly and publicly declared his army had come not to conquer and annex, but to liberate and set free.

So for example, after entering Vilnius, Pilsudski issued a proclamation on April 22nd, which read in part:

The Polish army brings Liberty and freedom to you all. It is an army which I led here in person to expel the rule of force and violence and to abolish governments which are contrary to the will of the people. I wish to create an opportunity for settling your nationality problems and religious affairs in a manner that you yourselves will determine without any sort of force or pressure from Poland.

This was of course welcome to the people of Vilnius, but it caused quite a stink back in Warsaw among Polish leaders who absolutely expected Poland to rule these places, using all the force and pressure due to a sovereign government ruling its own territory. But there wasn’t much they could do, because none of them could match Pilsudski’s reputation and authority, especially inside the army.

So as the Polish Army moved east into Belarus, they simultaneously advanced into western Ukraine as a part of the little Polish-Ukrainian War that had been ongoing since November 1918. The historic boundary line of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth had been the Nepa River, and they had once upon a time claimed even the city of Kiev as their own. Now, Pilsudski, did not necessarily share any plan for Poland to occupy and rule Ukraine, but he did believe that keeping Ukraine free from Russian domination was vital to the security and integrity of Poland, and he expected Ukraine to be a key component of his planned Intermarium confederation. Now, the Polish-Ukrainian War had gotten going in November 1918, when Ukrainian leaders in the western city of Lviv declared themselves to be the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic. They successfully resisted Polish encroachment over the winter, but come the spring of 1919, the Poles drove them back hard, thanks especially to the arrival of General Józef Haller’s famous Blue Army. This Blue Army had been formed of Polish volunteers in France in 1917, and they had spent the remainder of the war fighting on the western front. They now numbered more than 60,000 men and would prove to be by far the best led, best trained, best equipped, and best fighting armed military force in the whole theater. They pushed deep into western Ukraine at the same time that the Russian Whites were pushing their way up into Eastern Ukraine.

In the summer of 1919, the Poles then capitalized further on the fact that the Russian Reds and Russian Whites were caught up in a fight to the death with each other during the Moscow Directive campaign that extended into the fall. During this period, the Polish army advanced and captured Minsk on August 8th, and by mid-September, had secured a north south running line that covered hundreds of miles between Lithuania in the north and incorporating most of Belarus and western Ukraine before terminating in the south around the Romanian border. For Pilsudski, this was just about the limit of what he thought was viable, and he did not think it was a good idea to go any further. The Red Army made a half-hearted attempt to push them back in October, but it accomplished little, and these lines more or less settled into place until the following spring.

All of these border wars and civil wars in eastern Europe were very frustrating for the Allied diplomats at the Paris Peace Talks. After all, they were the victors of World War I, and assumed it was their right to settle all the final territory boundaries. And here all these people were out there trying to settle things for themselves in their own way. It was making a mockery of self-determination! The Allies meant self-determination after they put everyone in boxes of their own making, not that the people would get to design the boxes themselves. Polish aggression in particular flummoxed the British and the French, who didn’t want Poland getting so ambitious that they forced Soviet Russia and Weimar Germany to form a military alliance, which would be just about the worst possible post-war scenario imaginable. They wanted an independent Poland, but one that knew its place. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George didn’t want the British to get involved with Polish conflicts one way or the other, and mostly fobbed it off on the French to take responsibility for the Poles. And while the French did extend loans and equipment to Poland, plus a bunch of French officers to train the new Polish Army — including a young Charles de Gaulle — they wanted this to be a defensive force protecting boundary lines drawn by European diplomats in Paris, not an offensive force, marching around trying to draw their own lines. And for example, the French only released Józef Haller’s Blue Army after the Poles promised not to use it for an offensive campaign, a promise the Poles had no intention of keeping, and when he returned, they promptly ordered Haller to invade Ukraine.

Now, despite their attempts to contain Poland, in the fall of 1919, the Allies changed their tune a little bit, and leaned heavily on Pilsudski to join forces with General Denikin to defeat the Russian Communists. If the Poles sprang forth from the line they had reached over the summer and attacked the western flank of the Reds, it might very well cinch victory for the Whites. But Pilsudski was absolutely his own man with his own plans. When the Allies wanted him to stay put, he advanced, now that they wanted him to advance, he refused to budge. In Pilsudski’s opinion, whatever his issues with the Russian Communists were, the Russian Whites were by far the greater of two evils. The Reds may clash with the Poles over some disputed territory, but at least they had declared the partitions of Poland a historical crime, and recognized the right of something called Poland to exist. The White leaders refuse to do even this. They refused to recognize even the basic right of Poland to exist. This, even as they tried to court Pilsudski into an anti-Communist military alliance. It was absolutely not in Poland’s national interest to side with the Whites. And Pilsudski said, “The lesser evil is to facilitate White Russia’s defeat by Red Russia. With any Russia, we fight for Poland. Let all that filthy west talk all they want; we’re not going to be dragged into and used for the fight against the Russian revolution. Quite to the contrary, in the name of permanent Polish interests, we want to make it easier for the revolutionary army to act against the counter-revolutionary army.”

Pilsudski absolutely believed that Poland would be better served dealing with Russian Reds than Russian Whites. He resisted all Allied pressure to aid Denikin, and went so far as to promise the Reds that he would not launch any offensive campaign in the fall of 1919, leaving them free to pull troops from their western front to defend against Denikin’s advance coming up from the south. In his memoirs, Denikin mentions that had Pilsudski joined him. .They probably could have won the war. But frankly, that was Denikin’s problem, not Pilsudski’s.

Over the winter of 1919-1920, there was at least in theory an opportunity for the Poles and Soviet Russia to come to terms that would settle the boundary between them without further conflict. It should come as no surprise that in November 1919, Moscow was absolutely ready to sign a peace favorable to Poland, as they were presently in the midst of fighting for their lives against Denikin. On the Polish side, they had just about reached the limit of their territorial ambitions and could plainly see that the Reds would be dealing with them from a position of weakness. The two sides communicated in October, and as I said, Pilsudski had indicated he wasn’t going to resume hostilities anytime soon. Lenin gave a speech on October 24th where he said, “We have clear indications that the time has passed when we might have expected further encroachments by the Polish Army.” On November 3rd, the Poles communicated a list of seven conditions of peace; Lenin and the Politburo sought nothing too objectionable on the list, and only countered on point five, a demand that the Red Army not engage in any hostilities with the Ukrainian nationalist forces under Symon Petliura. This didn’t seem like a deal breaker, but instead, Pilsudski surprised everyone by using this objection as a pretext to abruptly end negotiations. The two negotiating teams went their separate ways on December the 14th, and the opportunity to avoid a full blown war seemed to leave with them.

Pilsudski’s decision to abruptly end the peace talks came from two basic assumptions he made. First, he was succumbing to overconfidence about his ability to handle the Red Army. After all, he had been besting them for the better part of a year, and they would surely be even more battered and exhausted after their war with Denikin. He said, “I am not worried about the strength of Russia. If I wanted to, I could go now, say to Moscow, and no one would be able to resist my power.” But I think even more importantly, he absolutely did not trust the Reds. At all. He knew they would promise him everything under the sun to keep the Polish army from attacking, but as soon as they bested the Whites and their position improved, they would go right back to their Target: Vistula nonsense. Their whole ideology was premised on exporting communist revolution, and the idea that Lenin would feel bound by his promises once he felt like he was in a position to break those promises was to fundamentally misunderstand the political character of Lenin. The day after the talks ended, Trotsky published an awfully bellicose statement that was clearly ready to go, which read:

The Polish lords and gentry will snatch a temporary marauders’ victory, but when we have finished with Denikin, we shall throw the full weight of our reserves onto the Polish front.

Now this was no doubt a bit of calculated gamesmanship, but it also pretty much predicts what’s about to happen. Far more so than the note Lenin and Trotsky sent to the Polish government in late January 1920, which said,

You are deceived when our common enemy say that the Russian Soviet government wishes to impose communism on Poland at the point of the Red Army’s bayonets.

Pilsudski absolutely did not believe that for a second, and it’s hard to blame him.

But there were a couple of flaws in Pilsudski’s reasoning. First, he was counting on alliances with all the states that were threatened with domination by the Russian Communists. He expected them to join his Polish led confederation. But not unlike Pilsudski himself, most of their leaders had concluded the Reds were actually offering them a better deal, that Moscow posed less of a threat to them than Warsaw. So Latvia signed a cease fire with the Russians on February 1st; Estonia signed that first formal peace treaty with the Soviets on February 3rd. Lithuania would follow suit in July. Pilsudski also had similar difficulties gaining favor for Poland in Belarus and Ukraine, because people just weren’t interested in joining a reborn Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. Eventually, Pilsudski had to settle for making just a single alliance of real consequence with the Ukrainian nationalist Symon Petliura, who was by that point reduced to pretty third rate status — he had been pushed out of Ukraine entirely and was presently living in exile in Polish territory. Petliura enjoyed little popular support in Ukraine, and all he could offer was the veneer of Ukrainian participation in Pilsudski’s plan to invade Ukraine in the spring of 1920.

The other big flaw was his underestimation of the capacity of the Red Army, to say nothing of the morale of the Russian Communists. Far from flagging on their way to total exhaustion, the victory over Denikin seemed to revitalize the grandest and most optimistic ambitions of the Communists. Lenin was once again speaking of Poland as the revolutionary bridge to Germany — that is literally the physical geographic link between revolutionary communism centered in Russia, and its advanced towards Berlin, and from there to Paris. Lenin was now talking internally about his hopes of looking at things like the failure of the Spartacus Rebellion is a mere unfortunate blip in the grand historical march of the proletarian revolution. He once again laid plans to advance west with revolutionary bayonets. Approaching the spring of 1920, he wrote in a telegram, “We must direct all our attention to preparing and strengthening the western front. A new slogan must be announced: prepare for war against Poland.”

And this is exactly what Pilsudski had expected. And though he was, I think, over confident heading into the spring of 1920, he was acutely aware that the Red Army’s western front would only get stronger with each passing day.

This is why he made the decision to launch a preemptive strike before the Reds got settled. In late April, 1920, just as General Denikin was boarding a British destroyer to leave Russia forever, and the Red were trying to reestablish their hold in Ukraine, Pilsudski ordered his forces to launch a daring raid through western Ukraine, and in just a matter of days, all the way to the Nepa River. Their forces marched into Kiev on May 7th. As Norman Davies notes in White Eagle Red Star, the classic history of the Polish-Soviet War, Pilsudski sought to assuage the potential fears of the people of Kiev by ordering his forces to march through the streets with flowers in their muzzles to demonstrate their peaceful intentions, but mostly the people of Kiev just didn’t pay any attention, because as Davies notes, this was the fifteenth time in three years that a new army had come marching into town.

The Kiev offensive of the spring of 1920 was meant to be an audacious punch to the nose of the Reds that pushed the Russians back out of Ukraine and force them to consider the efficacy of simply giving up their larger ambitions and settling for control of Russia and Russia alone. But though the capture of Kiev was surprising, the Communists did not draw the conclusion Pilsudski hoped they would. And next week the Red Army will rapidly regroup and turn the tables. As one Polish soldier would later say, “We ran all the way to Kiev, and then we ran all the way back.”

We are going to pick up this story in two weeks, as I’m taking next week off to travel home for a family visit. But when we come back in two weeks, we will talk about the Reds turning the table on the Poles, and then the Poles turning the table on the Reds, which they humbly refer to as the Miracle on the Vistula.