Polish Soviet War 1920 Facts Zamoyski

Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe, by Adam Zamoyski. 2008

An Outstanding Work That Addresses Common Misconceptions About the 1920 Polish-Bolshevik War

The Soviet Union was the aggressor, and there is no contradiction between the wartime emaciation of Russia and her expansionist ambitions. To the contrary: The commentary on the inside front cover states that: “In 1920 the new Soviet state was a mess, following a brutal civil war. The best way of insuring its survival appeared to be to export the revolution to Germany, itself economically ruined by defeat in World War I and racked by internal dissention.”

POLES DID NOT “START” THE 1920 POLISH BOLSHEVIK WAR

In this overall geographic region, one set of political and combat events had succeeded another, and WWI had never ended. So talk of a “new war” is meaningless. The German armies, occupying this territory, began to withdraw and to be replaced by Russians. (So the Russians were conducting an invasion-by-osmosis: my term. This was called ‘Target Vistula’: p. 8). After a short battle with some Polish units, the Soviets seized Wilno (Vilna, Vilnius) on January 5, 1919. (p. 8). (This was as much an act of war against Poland as if the Soviets had seized Warsaw or Krakow.) So Pilsudski’s subsequent “attack” was actually a counterattack. (p. 9).

THE POLES AND RUSSIANS FIGHTING OVER THE SAME BOOTY? HARDLY

is absurd to suppose that the Poles and Russians had the same valid claim to the territories east of the Curzon line. These territories had belonged to Poland until the Partitions of the late eighteenth century. They had never belonged to Russia up to that time. Also, the territories contained a large Polish minority and considerable Polish cultural development. In contrast, the Russian population and Russian culture on these territories had been virtually nonexistent before the Partitions, and, even after over a century of Russian rule, remained much smaller than their Polish counterparts.

So, by any rational measure, the Poles had much greater moral and political right to these territories than the Soviets. (Taking this further, note that the entire Russian empire, first tsarist and then Communist, consisted of numerous non-Russian peoples conquered by Russia. Ironic to Soviet protestations about Poland’s “non-ethnographic” boundaries, most of the Russian empire had always consisted of territories where ethnic Russians formed a distinct minority!)

THE PILSUDSKI-PETLYURA ALLIANCE

Polish-Ukrainian relations, etc., were a separate issue. Zamoyski notes that, regardless of the degree of eventual Polish possession of these territories (direct or federated), Pilsudski’s top priority was to deny them to the Soviets. (p. 9). The Petlura (Petlyura) Ukrainian Army may have been small, but was nontrivial in size. It peaked at about 30,000 members. (p. 37, 135).

MISCELLANEOUS INTERESTING DETAILS

This book contains details about such things as the beginnings of mechanized warfare by both sides (e. g., the Putilov armored cars), and the Polish successes in cracking the Russian military codes. (p. 28). The latter skill, of course, was later further developed into the Poles’ cracking of the “invincible” Nazi German ENIGMA code.