Intent on bringing World Revolution from one end of the Continent to the other, the Red Army led by Trotsky (aided and abetted by Stalin) came crashing through the no-man's land of the kresy (Polish eastern borderlands) pushing westward at alarming speed. "Onward to Berlin, Paris and London, over the corpse of Poland!" was the slogan of the Bolsheviks.
The British and French could see the peril. Having sided unsuccessfully with the anti-Bolshevik Whites in the Russian Civil War, they had no appetite (this was less than two years after the end of WWI) for another large-scale intervention.
And so it was down to the Polish Army, led by commander-in-chief Jozef Piłsudski, to stop the Bolshevik surge.
And this the Poles did 90 years ago at Radzymin, a town just 15 miles (24km) from the centre of Warsaw. The Red advance was broken, the Bolshevik army routed.
Trotsky and his ideologues were convinced that as soon as the Red Army had crossed into Poland, it would be greeted as heroic liberators by the oppressed toiling masses. This was not to be. Polish workers and peasants showed no interest at all in the new proletarian order being offered by the Soviets. Poles of all social classes were far more concerned with the rebuilding of the Polish nation after 120 years of partition than with any new-fangled revolutionary ideas.The Polish victory in 1920, like the Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland on 17 September 1939 and the Katyń massacres were all events that were not commemorated (or even publicly mentioned) during the communist era.
Over 25,000 Bolshevik soldiers were killed in the battle. For the first time, a cemetary for them (at least the few whose remains have been identified) has been opened, in Ossów. The graves are marked not with red stars, but with Orthodox crosses - a sign that most of the fallen would have spent more of their lives identifying with their religion than with the new order. The survivors either fled back to Soviet Russia or to internment in East Prussia - or else ended up in Polish captivity. The fact that a similar number of the prisoners-of-war perished compared to the number of Polish officers murdered at Katyń has been used by Russian propagandists as an argument why Russia should not apologise for the massacres. However: a) the Bolsheviks died of typhus or starvation (in a period of epidemic and famine) rather than a bullet in the back of the head and b) they were PoWs because their invasion had failed.
I thought Stalin opposed Trotsky's policy of advancing on Warsaw and failed to take part in the Polish-Soviet war, remaining instead in the Ukraine. Indeed, I understood that he was blamed by the Bolsheviks for their defeat because of this. I may be wrong, of course.
ReplyDeleteThanks to your and others' inspiration I decided to try and produce something regular myself. I was planning on doing something on the Polish-Soviet War today, which was helped by your own and Polish M'Kob's comments. I would be very flattered if there was anything in the future that you might feel worth picking up on your own blog. See EnglishWarsaw
ReplyDeleteSteve - 'Aided and abetted'... Stalin's role was always controversial and he was not above airbrushing his role in the Polish-Bolshevik War to make his actions seem masterful rather than vacillating.
ReplyDeleteI shall read your blog from end to end, and link.
To add a c) to your a) and b), even a larger number of Polish POWs perished in Soviet POW camps at that time. It'd seem there was a tie long before Katyń.
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