in the summer of 1920, the future depended on the performance of a self-taught Polish general commanding an ill-equipped rag-tag of an army and an aristocratic Russian nihilist leading an improvised and tattered yet menacing horde. Reflecting on the resulting struggle a couple of years later, the Polish commander would describe it as ‘a half-war, or even a quarter-war; a sort of childish scuffle on which the haughty Goddess of War turned her back’. But this scuffle changed the course of history.2
It was itself born of a long history, of a centuries-old struggle between Russia and Poland over who was to control the vast expanses of Byelorussia and Ukraine that lay between them. This was not so much an issue of territory as of Russia’s need to break into Europe and Poland’s to exclude her from it; yet it had brought Russian armies into the heart of Poland, and a Polish occupation of Moscow as far back as 1612. The matter had been settled at the end of the eighteenth century by the partition of Poland between Russia, Prussia and Austria and its disappearance from the map. Despite a continuous struggle for freedom and repeated insurrections, Poland remained little more than a concept throughout the next hundred years, and its champions were increasingly seen as romantic dreamers.
But the partition that had removed Poland from the map had also brought her enemies into direct contact, and, in 1914, into deadly conflict. In February 1917, undermined by two and a half years of war, the Russian empire was overthrown by revolution. In October of that year Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power, but their grip on the country was weak, and they were in no position to prosecute the war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. In the spring of 1918 they bought themselves a respite: by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk they ceded to Germany Russia’s Baltic provinces, Lithuania, the parts of Poland under Russian occupation, Byelorussia and Ukraine. A few months later revolutions in Vienna and Berlin toppled the Austro-Hungarian and German empires, which left the whole area, still occupied by German and Austrian troops, effectively masterless. The Poles seized their chance.
Under pressure from President Wilson, the allies had already decided that the post-war settlement should include an independent Poland. They had even granted recognition to a Polish National Committee, based in Paris, which was preparing to form a provisional government. But they had no authority in German-occupied Poland, and no influence at all over the Bolshevik rulers of Russia, whose government they did not recognize. It was clear that the fate of Poland would be decided on the ground rather than in the conference room, and with Russia floundering in her own problems, the Poles, or rather one Pole, took the initiative.
His name was Józef Pilsudski. He was born in 1867 into the minor nobility and brought up in the cult of Polish patriotism. In his youth he embraced socialism, seeing in it the only force that could challenge the Tsarist regime and promote the cause of Polish independence. His early life reads like a novel, with time in Russian and German gaols punctuating his activities as polemicist, publisher of clandestine newspapers, political agitator, bank-robber, terrorist and urban guerrilla leader.
In 1904 Pilsudski put aside political agitation in favour of paramilitary organization. He organized his followers into fighting cells that could take on small units of Russian troops or police. A couple of years later, in anticipation of the coming war, he set up a number of supposedly sporting associations in the Austrian partition of Poland which soon grew into an embryonic army. On the eve of the Great War Austro-Hungary recognized this as a Polish Legion, with the status of irregular auxiliaries fighting under their own flag, and in August 1914 Pilsudski was able to march into Russian-occupied territory and symbolically reclaim it in the name of Poland.
He fought alongside the Austrians against Russia for the next couple of years, taking care to underline that he was fighting for Poland, not for the Central Powers. In 1916 the Germans attempted to enlist the support of the Poles by creating a kingdom of Poland out of some of their Polish lands, promising to extend it and give it full independence after the war. They persuaded the Austrians to transfer the Legion’s effectives, which had grown to some 20,000 men, into a new Polish army under German command, the Polnische Wehrmacht. Pilsudski, who had been seeking an opportunity to disassociate himself from the Austro-German camp in order to have his hands free when the war ended, refused to swear the required oath of brotherhood with the German army, and was promptly interned in the fortress of Magdeburg. His Legion was disbanded, with a only handful joining the Pol-nische Wehrmacht and the rest going into hiding.
They did not have to hide for long. Pilsudski was set free at the outbreak of revolution in Germany and arrived in Warsaw on 11 November 1918, the day the armistice was signed in the west. While his former legionaries emerged from hiding and disarmed the bewildered German garrison, he proclaimed the resurrection of the Polish Republic, under his own leadership.
Pilsudski was fifty-one years old. Rough-hewn, solid and gritty, he invariably wore the simple grey tunic of a ranker of the Legion. His pale face, with its high, broad forehead, drooping moustache and intense eyes, was theatrical in the extreme.‘None of the usual amenities of civilized intercourse, but all the apparatus of sombre genius,’ one British diplomat noted on first meeting him.3
Pilsudski felt that thirty years spent in the service of his enslaved motherland gave him an indisputable right to leadership. His immense popularity in Poland seemed to endorse this. But that was not the view of the victorious Allies in the west, nor of the Polish National Committee, waiting in Paris to assume power in Poland. After some negotiation a deal was struck, whereby the lion-maned pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski, who had devoted himself to promoting the cause of Poland in Britain, France and particularly America, and was trusted by the leaders of those countries, came from Paris to take over as Prime Minister, with Pilsudski remaining titular head of state and commander-in-chief. While he allowed Paderewski to run the day-to-day business of the government and its relations with the Allies, Pilsudski continued to direct policy in all essentials. And he had firm ideas on how to ensure the survival of Poland.
The vital question at this stage was, quite simply, the country’s geographical extent. Poland’s frontiers with Germany and the new Czecho-Slovak state would be decided at the peace conference to be convened shortly in Paris. But her extent in the east would depend on political developments in Russia and the intermediate lands of Lithuania, Byelorussia and Ukraine.
In Russia, the Bolsheviks who had seized power in October 1917 had taken up the German offer of peace in order to concentrate on consolidating their hold, which entailed liquidating all other political factions, on the left as well as on the right. This had allowed the Germans to withdraw troops from the Russian front and throw them into battle against the Allies in northern France, and to make use of the much-needed wheat and oil of Ukraine for a final attempt to win the war in the summer of 1918. Desperate to restore to Russia a government that would resume the war against Germany, the Allies had sent military supplies and even troops to support those Russians opposed to Bolshevik rule who were forming up ‘White’ armies for the purpose of overthrowing them.
The collapse of Germany and the end of the war in November 1918 allowed the Allies to devote more resources to this aim, while at the same time removing its primary purpose. From now on, Allied support for the Whites took on the character of military intervention in a civil war. This entrenched Lenin and the leading Bolsheviks in their view that the governments of the whole world were ranged against them, and that their only hope of long-term survival lay in toppling the established order worldwide.
The end of the war in the west and the defeat of Germany also meant that Lenin and his comrades had to apply their minds to the subject of Russia’s western border. On taking power, they had denounced the eighteenth-century partition of Poland as an act of imperialism and renounced Russia’s claim to the areas taken from her. But this did not mean that they intended to relinquish control over them.
The whole area was still occupied by German troops, partly because Germany lacked the means to repatriate or feed them, and partly because the Allies wished them to provide some kind of transitional order. This did not prevent the Bolsheviks from sending in agents who, with the aid of local sympathizers, proclaimed Soviet Republics in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Byelorussia and Ukraine. When the Germans did retire, Russian troops took their place: the purpose was not to set up a string of independent states, but to provide stepping stones for a more important enterprise -the export of revolution.
Karl