Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [147]
Poland’s greatest struggle, from early 1919 to the autumn of 1920, was with the Russian Bolsheviks. Where the Poles, even relative moderates such as PiƗsudski, wanted to push Poland’s borders well to the east and gain control, directly or indirectly, over Byelorussia (Belarus) and Ukraine, the Bolsheviks wanted to spread their revolution into the industrial heartland of Europe. Their history had left the Poles wary of all Russians, even those talking the language of international brotherhood. The Bolsheviks for their part saw in Polish nationalism and Polish Catholicism an obstacle to revolution. Nationalism, in their view, was simply an excuse for feudal landowners, factory owners and reactionaries of various sorts to try to hang on to power. “While recognizing the right of national self-determination,” wrote Trotsky, “we take care to explain to the masses its limited historic significance and we never put it above the interests of the proletarian revolution.”48 This was old-fashioned Russian imperialism in new clothes.
From February 1919, fighting between the Bolsheviks and the Poles spread along a wide front. The Poles pushed deep into Russian territory, taking much of Byelorussia in the north. Secret talks for a temporary truce in the summer of 1919 went nowhere when the Poles tried to insist on an independent Ukraine. On April 24, 1920, PiƗsudski launched a fresh attack, driving toward Kiev, Ukraine’s capital. By May Polish troops were in control of the city, but PiƗsudski, deeply superstitious, was uneasy; Kiev was notoriously unlucky for its occupiers. A month later the Bolsheviks recaptured the city and started westward. “Over the corpse of White Poland,” said the order to their troops, “lies the road to world-wide conflagration!” The British ambassador in Poland sent his wife and children home. By August the Soviet troops were outside the suburbs of Warsaw. “I have packed up all the plates, pictures, prints, lacquer objects, china, photographs, best books, best china and glass, carpets etc.,” the ambassador wrote to his wife. “I wonder what will happen to all the nice furniture and good beds etc. which I could not pack up.” The Poles appealed desperately for weapons or for pressure on the Bolsheviks to make a truce. None came. The French were drawing back. They did not like the Bolsheviks but they were by now tired of Polish ambitions. Lloyd George urged the Poles to open negotiations. The Poles were hopeless, he told C. P. Scott, the great editor of the liberal Manchester Guardian, and quite as bad as the Irish. “They have quarrelled with every one of their neighbours—Germans, Russians, Czecho-Slovaks, Lithuanians, Rumanians, Ukrainians—and they were going to be beaten.” Lloyd George, fortunately, was wrong. “If Poland had become Soviet,” Lenin later said, “the Versailles treaty would have been shattered, and the entire international system built up by the victors would have been destroyed.”49
The battle for Warsaw was one of the great triumphs of Polish history. The army, which had been racked with jealousy and infighting among the officers, pulled itself together in the face of a common enemy. “I continue to marvel at the absence of panic,” wrote a British diplomat, “at the apparent absence indeed of all anxiety.” PiƗsudski calmly planned a daring counterattack. On August 16 Polish forces attacked the Soviet forces in the rear, cutting their lines of communication. The Soviet commander began a hasty retreat. By the end of September 1920, Lenin asked for peace. The Treaty of Riga, signed on March 18, 1921, gave Poland a border in the east well beyond what the peacemakers had recommended