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By 1919, the First World War had left the old European order in ruins and radically redrawn the map. A new Polish republic struggled to establish itself, while the Bolsheviks struggled to secure their revolution in Russia. In the midst of the chaos, the two new states launched into a full-scale war that will ravage Eastern Europe again: it's the Polish-Soviet War. In 1918 and 1919, both the 2nd Polish republic and Bolshevik Russia were fighting on many fronts. The Poles fought the Germans, Czechoslovaks, Lithuanians, and Western Ukrainians over disputed
borders, while the revolutionary Bolsheviks fought the counter-revolutionary Whites, Allied intervention forces, and national independence movements in the Baltics and Ukraine. The border between Poland and Russia was still up in the air in spite of the efforts of the Allied peace delegations at the Paris Peace Conference, who supported Poland but disagreed on where its eastern border should be and how much military help they should provide. The Allies proposed the Curzon Line as a border, but this satisfied neither the Poles nor the
Bolsheviks - nor others who claimed parts of the region, like Belarus, Lithuania, the White Russian movement, and two Ukrainian National Republics. In Poland, Head of State Josef Pilsudski and his socialist party favoured a federation under Polish leadership that would stretch from the Baltic to the Black Sea, but Roman Dmowski's National Democrats wanted a more compact nation-state with a Polish-speaking majority. In Moscow, Bolshevik leaders also argued about their goals. Some wanted to concentrate on defeating the Whites and establishing a Soviet state in
most of the old Russian empire, while others insisted on pushing the Red Army as far west as it could go to bring the revolution to Europe. Meanwhile, people living in Poland and Russia had been suffering since 1914. Battles, harsh occupation by Austria-Hungary and Germany, and the new wars after 1918 brought poverty, hunger, and disease that killed millions. The coming war between Poland and Bolshevik Russia would only add to their misery. In early 1919, German troops left their occupation zone in the east, which allowed Polish and Red Army units to advance into the gap. Neither side had a critical mass of troops for a
conventional campaign, so they instead engaged in skirmishes, guerilla fighting, and cavalry raids, and used paramilitary forces as well. The Poles drove the Bolsheviks from Minsk in August, and took control of Eastern Galicia from the short-lived Western Ukrainian Republic. At the same time, the Red Army had its hands full until the fall with White forces driving towards Moscow. Warsaw had gained new territories but they were not easy to administer. The local population was of mixed ethnicity, language, and religion, and while many patriots welcomed the Polish army as their own, others did not. Even amongst Polish-speaking Catholics,
local identity was sometimes more important than that of the new Polish state. Some Polish troops also acted harshly towards the locals, especially Jews - although this was against official policy and the army tightened up discipline soon after. Polish-Lithuanian-German Michael von Römer/Michal Roemer/Mykolas Roemeris wrote in his diary in March 1919: "The Polish troops' advance onto Lithuanian-Belarusian soil […] is sad and pitiful in nature, and certainly cannot contribute to glorifying Poland in the hearts and minds of the local people and is
not conducive to the idea of those lands uniting with the Polish state voluntarily." (Boehler 154) The Bolsheviks Russia also had trouble imposing its will on the peasants and non-Russians in the borderlands. Many people resented and resisted the Red Army's political terror, looting, or pogroms, or opposed Russian domination. On the other hand some locals did support the Bolsheviks, often because they feared the return of the Polish landowners. Overall, locals were more worried about how any armed force in their area would behave, more than which state or nation was winning the war. (Boehler 152)
In 1920, the Polish-Bolshevik border clashes escalated into a full-blown war. Polish-Russian negotiations in March and April failed, partly due to maximalist demands by the Polish side, and partly because most leading Bolsheviks, like Vladimir Lenin and War Commissar Leon Trotsky, wanted to continue the war. Both sides prepared for renewed hostilities: the Bolsheviks brought up reinforcements that were freed up by victories against the Whites, including the famous First Cavalry Army under Semyon Budyonni, whose ranks included future WW2 commanders Giorgy Zhukov and Semyon Timoshenko, and writer Isaac Babel.
To reach the western front they fought their way past yet another faction in the Russian Civil War: the Ukrainian anarchist army under Nestor Makhno. The Poles felt they needed to strike before the Red Army completed its pivot west. Pilsudski was confident: "I am not afraid of Russia's power. If I wanted to, I could now advance as far as Moscow, and nobody would be able to withstand my power." (Borzecki 27). To help its cause, Poland entered into an alliance with the Kyiv-based Ukrainian National Republic under Symon Petlura. The UNR had been defeated by the Reds and was sheltering in Galicia - and they hoped the
alliance with Poland would lead to a smaller but independent Ukraine if Russia could be defeated. On April 25, 1920, 75,000 Polish troops and 12,000 Ukrainian soldiers launched the Kyiv Offensive. Opposing them were probably about 30,000 men of the Red Army, since Budyonni's cavalry had not yet arrived. The Polish 3rd army under General Smigly-Rydz struck the main blow towards Kyiv, and at first they swept all before them in a war of movement. Polish cavalry dashed ahead, and the outnumbered Bolsheviks retreated as quickly as they could with minimal resistance. The main
Polish force entered the city unopposed May 7, and the entire operation cost the Poles just 150 dead and 300 wounded (Davies 110), while the Red Army's losses were unknown but probably much heavier. So the Poles had won a great victory and captured Kyiv, but the Red Army was not destroyed. Poland was not strong enough to launch a full-scale invasion of Russia, and the Bolsheviks still had the means to strike back. With Poles in control of Eastern Galicia and much of central Ukraine, they had the chance for a strategic political victory: an independent Ukraine that would fight against Russia alongside them. Pilsudski made a friendly declaration on April 26:
"I formally declare that the foreign invaders, against whom the Ukrainian people have risen sword in hand to defend their homes from rape, banditry and looting, will be removed by the Polish force from territories inhabited by the Ukrainian nation. The Polish forces will remain in the Ukraine for such time as may be necessary to enable a legitimate Ukrainian government to take control." (Davies 110) There is some debate about whether Pilsudski really wanted a fully independent Ukraine or a buffer state to gain time in the fight against Russia, but in any case Petlura failed to establish a working
administration or win over enough of the long-suffering and distrustful population. The last of many attempts at an independent Ukraine after the First World War failed. Far from the battlefields, Poland was also wrestling with political problems. Opposition leader Dmowski was not happy about the alliance with Ukraine, some Polish communists went on strike. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George was especially critical: "The Poles are inclined to be arrogant and they will have to take care they don't get their heads punched." (Davies 112)
The League of Nations in Geneva even accused Poland of a premeditated attack on Russia. For the Bolsheviks, the Kyiv Offensive was a political gift. They claimed Russia was under attack by the same Polish aristocratic landowning class that was resented by many Ukrainian peasants, some of whom joined the Bolsheviks. Even former Imperial Russian General Aleksei Brusilov rallied to the Bolshevik side. g Other Bolshevik thinkers like Mikhail Kalinin saw the war as the chance to spread the revolution to Europe: "I believe the Polish lords by marching on the Soviet republic are only digging their
own graves […] but they will only succeed in founding yet another Soviet state through which we will gain close relations with the proletariat of the west." g (Davies 114) Although Trotsky was worried about the weak state of the Red Army, the Bolsheviks launched an offensive in Belarus on May 15. Under the command of 27-year-old General Mikhail Tukhachevsky, himself partly of Polish origin, they drove the Poles back over 100km and relieved the pressure in Ukraine, before Polish counterattacks stabilized the northern front in June. In the south, Budyonni's First Cavalry finally arrived at the front on May 18, but the Red offensive in Ukraine got off to a bad start.
Budyonni lost two armored trains, and the Orenburg Cossacks switched over to the Polish side. But then the Red horsemen changed tactics to operate in smaller groups and concentrate on strongpoints, which led to a breakthrough on June 5 - for which Joseph Stalin would later unjustly take credit since he was the top Bolshevik on that part o the font. The Poles managed to avoid the complete destruction of their army partly thanks to Budyonni's hesitations, and partly due to their advantage in the air. Isaak Babel wrote autobiographical stories about his experiences, including an attack by a Polish-American volunteer squadron:
"They dropped down to three hundred metres and shot up first Andrushka and then Trunov. None of the shots fired by our men did the Americans any harm…So after half an hour, we were able to ride out and fetch the corpses […] All [Trunov's] wounds were in his face, his cheeks punctured all over, his tongue ripped out." (Davies 129) The Red Army took Kyiv on June 10, and reached Pilsudski's former headquarters at Rivne at the start of July. So the Poles had taken half of Ukraine, only to be driven back again early in the summer of 1920. With the Red Army marching west, the spectre of European revolution was on the horizon, unless the desperate Poles could pull off a miracle.
The Bolshevik command was now ready to launch an offensive across the entire length of the front - and Tukhechevsky announced the revolution would advance over the corpses of White Poland. In the south, the Red Army reached Lviv after a hard-fought advance, and laid siege to the town in early August. Babel recalled the aftermath and the corpses: "A field of horror, strewn with mangled dead, inhuman cruelty, unimaginable wounds, crushed skulls, young, white naked bodies flashing in the sun, lost notebooks laying about, single pages, paybooks, prayer books, human cadavers in the grain." (Lehnstaedt 89)
But the main Red offensive came in the north, in July. The Bolsheviks outnumbered the Poles 160,000 to 115,000 in men, and had a crucial 3 to 1 advantage in artillery. Red Army cavalry under General Gaia Gai led the advance, who managed to defeat a Polish force equipped with French tanks at Grodno on the 19th. The Poles intercepted Red Army telegrams, and they even re-used old German trenches from the First World War - but they could not stop the Bolsheviks. During the Red Army's advance, Lithuania joined in the fighting to recover the disputed city of Vilnius from the Poles, though the Reds insisted it was theirs. By August 1, the Red Army was just 200km from Warsaw. A week after that,
Tukhachevsky's spearheads were northwest of the Polish capital, threatening it with encirclement. The series of Polish defeats plunged the country into a crisis. Pilsudski was painfully aware of the situation: "This breakdown of our forces, this sinking morale was, in my view, [Tukhachevski's] greatest triumph." (Lehnstaedt 89) and he later admitted: "I could not trust the morale of the troops or the civilians, or the leaders of either group." (Lehnstaedt 115). Pilsudski twice offered his resignation as head of state, the Prime Minister did
resign and a new government formed. The crisis also worsened already tense relations between Catholics and Jews. Because many associated Jews with Bolshevism, the War Ministry reduced the army to 5% Jewish soldiers, and put the rest into labour battalions to dig trenches. The war also divided some urban Poles from their rural countrymen. Middle class, urban and middle class Poles mostly supported the war effort and saw it as a struggle for their nation and Christian civilization. 100,000 men, mostly students, scouts and craftsmen volunteered for the
army, and middle and upper class women volunteered in non-combat roles like nursing. Most workers' unions also supported the cause. Polish aristocrat Prince Lubomirski reflected this view in a speech: "The war which Poland is carrying on is not one of conquest, but exclusively one of defense. The Bolsheviks invaded Poland at the moment of its liberation and we were forced to take up arms in our defense. […] We have only wanted to protect those regions peopled by Polish subjects, to liberate them from the oppression of Bolshevism, and to create around us friendly nations who will stand with us against the barbarism of the East." (Reed 223)
Polish peasants, on the other hand, were sometimes more hesitant, since they were less likely to feel strongly connected to the idea of Polish nationhood. Patriotic volunteer Michal Slowikowski recalled a peasant soldier scoffing at the notion of national honour: "What does honor give me when the lice are biting?! […] Do [our soldiers] all have boots on their feet? And you know how many haven't got shirts? […] Honor, my ass! If there's nothing to eat, the lice are biting, and the soldiers have no underpants. […] Whoever wants war is
welcome to fight, but it's a farmer's job to cultivate the soil." (Boehler 134-135) Poland was both united and divided in the face of defeat, and Warsaw called on its British and French allies to help. The Allies sent weapons and a Military Commission to advise the Poles, including French officer Charles De Gaulle, but neither country was willing to enter the war. On the diplomatic front, the British and French tried to force both side to accept the Curzon Line and get the Bolsheviks to accept Polish independence. Behind the scenes, the Bolsheviks also faced
internal troubles. Commander in Chief Sergey Kamenev wanted to stop at the Curzon Line, whereas War Commissar Leon Trotsky thought the army should be able to cross the line temporarily if necessary. Lenin, however, gave orders to push past the Line in mid-July. They set up a Polish Revolutionary Committee under Polish Bolshevik Feliks Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka secret police. The Committee was crystal clear about their plans for Poland: "All representatives of the Polish bourgeoisie and landowners, all who support White Poland, will be arrested and sent to concentration camps." (Engelstein 501)
Red leaders also differed as to what to do once they had defeated Poland. The Red Army was too weak to conquer the rest of Europe, so Tukhachevsky favoured limited war aims, like a deal with Weimar Germany over a future Russian-German border. Lenin hoped that once the Red Army took Poland, its simple presence on the border with Germany, Romania and Hungary might set off an unstoppable wave of revolution that would not require military conquest. Some of the rank-and-file, like Isaac Babel, were committed to revolution at all costs:
"We will wage war forever. Russia has thrown down the gauntlet. We will march into Europe to conquer the world. The Red Army has become a factor in world politics." (Lehnstaedt 93). Most Bolshevik leaders did at least agree that Poland's presence in Belarus and Ukraine was a strategic threat to Russia and both ideological and military motivations caused Moscow to push past the Curzon Line. So the Red Army had the Poles on the run and was at the gates of Warsaw. The coming battle would decide whether the Polish Republic would survive. As the Red Army moved into Poland, its military commanders fought amongst themselves. Trotsky
and Tuchachevsky did not get along with the clique of Stalin, Yegorov and Budyonni. This stopped the Bolsheviks from the making the logical military decision to concentrate their forces in the north under Tukhachevsky. To make matters worse for the Reds, they expected the local population would support them, but they faced hostility from the majority of Catholics and Jews. This worsened their already terrible supply situation, and the army was short on food. Morale was low, and desertions common - by August about 116,000 Bolshevik troops faced 156,000 Polish defenders.
Still, Tukhachevsky launched his assault on Warsaw on August 13, 1920. He knew his forces were overextended, but gambled that the poles would not be able to react in time. On the 14th, near Radzymin's Red Army forces pushed back the Poles, but Polish General Haller's defenders rallied with the help of French-supplied tanks, and won a local victory that boosted morale - some historians have argued that this was the decisive turn in the battle. North of Warsaw, things went equally badly for Gaia Gai's Red cavalry. General Sikorski's
inexperienced Polish troops pulled off a bold counterattack, helped by the chance destruction of a critical Russian radio, and prevented an encirclement. Some historians consider this battle north of the city to have been the decisive moment, not Radzymin. Regardless of which was more important, both of these fronts held long enough for the main Polish counterattack in the south to start. The Poles had planned a very risky counteroffensive, which would lead either to a smashing victory, or total defeat. They shifted units to the southern flank, and then attacked north on August 16 to cut off the Bolshevik
armies threatening the capital. But if the Poles were too slow, Budyonni's cavalry might move west from Lviv and catch the Poles in mid-maneuver. Tukhachevsky had learned of the preparations, but did not believe his intelligence reports. If Budyonni had been quicker, he might have caught the Poles in the flank and turned the tide of the battle - but he was too slow. The Polish attack smashed through weak Red Army resistance and raced 120km into the gap. Budyonni was too far away, and Tukhachevsky's forces were stuck - they couldn't take Warsaw,
and now the enemy was getting behind them. Three Red armies were routed within the space of a few days, and a chaotic retreat eastwards began. Supply trains and artillery were abandoned, and Gaia Gai's cavalry was cut off and crossed into East Prussia, where they were interned by the Germans. As the remaining Red forces withdrew, the Polish population that had generally refused to support them now also rose up against them, as a Red Army commissar reported: "[The locals] were extremely hostile to us…In many cases the retreating units conducted
rearguard battles with the local population, during which the Red Army soldiers dealt brutally with the insurgents." (Engelstein 507) The Polish victory at Warsaw was as complete as it was surprising. Two thirds of Tukhachevsky's army was killed, wounded or captured - about 100,000 men. In Catholic Poland, many felt that divine intervention had granted them victory, and the battle became known as the Miracle on the Vistula. Lenin later reflected on what might have been: "If Poland had become Soviet, the Versailles treaty would have been shattered, and the entire
international system built up by the victors would have been destroyed." (Engelstein 507) Both Lenin and Trotsky blamed Stalin for the failure since he had helped keep Budyonni in Galicia for too long. Not only had Poland prevented a Bolshevik conquest and perhaps stopped the spread of the revolution, but ironically the result of the Battle of Warsaw may have had benefits for the Bolsheviks as well. If they had won, the Allies might have intervened and potentially overthrown them. In the words of historian Laura Engelstein: "Polish victory may have
saved Europe from Bolshevism; it also saved Bolshevism from Europe." (Engelstein 510) So by the third week of August 1920, the Poles had won a major victory, the Red Army was on the run, and armistice talks began at Minsk. But the Polish-Soviet War was not yet over. In spite of this dramatic victory, Poland still faced challenges. Pilsudski's Socialists and Dmowski's National Democrats still couldn't agree on the eastern border, and relations with Britain and France were still difficult. More dangerously, Poland was still at war with a larger and ultimately, more powerful neighbour. As the Polish army chased the defeated Bolsheviks away from the capital, the Red Army forces near
Lviv belatedly moved north to help their comrades. But the Poles prepared a trap for the First Red Cavalry Army outside Zamosc near the village of Komarow. Once the Red Cavalry had advanced close enough to the city and engaged in fighting the Poles' superior numbers of infantry and artillery, the Poles sprung the trap and encircled the Bolsheviks on August 31. The desperate Red cavalry charged again and again to free itself, taking heavy losses but avoiding complete destruction. The Battle of Komarow, known as the Zamosc Ring in Russian, is considered by many to have been the last great cavalry battle in history, and was the biggest
since the Napoleonic Wars a century before. By September 18, Polish forces had once again reached Rivne. Exhausted Red forces were a sight for sore eyes: "For every fighting man there are 4 non-combatants, 2 ladies, 2 chests with belongings, and even the combat soldier isn't fighting […] The Russian infantryman of the Red Army - barefoot, not only not modernized, but really the face of poor Russia [.] bloated, lousy, runty, hungry peasants." (Lehnstaedt 140) These demoralized units also committed several pogroms against Jewish communities as they withdrew, leading to responsible officers being punished (Davies 232).
Tukhachevsky planned to make a stand on the Niemen River with fresh reinforcements, but Polish commanders immediately launched an attack to destroy the Bolshevik Western Front. In the third week of September, at the Battle of the Nieman, Polish forces pinned the Bolsheviks at Hrodno. After some early struggles, Polish cavalry crossed through Lithuanian territory, pushed Lithuanian troops aside, and cut off a key railway line. Other Polish forces captured Pinsk, and the Red Army retreated to Minsk by October 18. Pilsudski's order of the day was triumphant:
"Soldiers! You have made Poland strong, confident, and free. You can be content with the fulfilment of your duty. A country, which in two years has produced soldiers such as you, can regard its future with tranquility." (Davies 238) In early October, the Poles signed a ceasefire with the Lithuanians, but the Vilnius Question was still unresolved in the eyes of Polish nationalists. The day before the ceasefire was to come into effect Polish General Lucjan Żeligowski and his 1st Lithuanian-Belarusian Division - made up of men from the region serving the
Polish cause - crossed the border and marched on Vilnius, easily capturing the city - a strange end to the brief Polish-Lithuanian War. On the 18th, Warsaw and Moscow agreed to a ceasefire, bringing an end to the fighting. About 200,000 Polish and more than 400,000 Bolshevik soldiers had been killed wounded or captured, and up to 450,000 civilians had died (Lehnstaedt 150-151). Tens of thousands of prisoners of war held by both sides also died from hunger and disease. The Peace of Riga signed in March 1921 shaped the map of Eastern Europe for the next 20 years. The new border ran east of the Curzon Line,
and left the fate of disputed East Galicia and Vilnius to Poland. Both formally became parts of the Polish Republic within a few years. The treaty also meant the end of Ukrainian and Belarussian hopes for independence, as Poland and Russia recognized the Russian-controlled Soviet Republics. Poland now included 1.5 million more Poles, but also 6 million more Ukrainians, Belarussians, and Jews (Leonhardt 1195), and 2 million Poles remained on the Bolshevik side. Pilsudski considered the Peace of Riga a failure, as he admitted in 1925: "You will not be able to
keep this Poland. The storm that is coming is too strong. Today's Poland can only live in a special, golden age […] I have wasted my life. I wasn't able to create a federation that the world would respect." (Lehnstaedt 156) But in 1921, flush with a hard-won victory in a war of national survival, few Poles could imagine the uncertain future that lay ahead. Not even 20 years later, Poland was ravaged by war once again during the Second World War and in 1944 Georgy Zhukov once again moved through the country. This time as Soviet Marshal and leading the 1st Belorussian Front towards the Oder River
with the ultimate goal of taking Berlin. The battle for the capital of the Third Reich was the dramatic climax on the Eastern Front and saw millions of soldiers clash. We produced a 4.5h documentary series about this important battle called 16 Days in Berlin. A detailed and uncompromising look that we couldn't upload to YouTube because it would be immediately demonetized or worse. Instead you can watch 16 Days in Berlin on Nebula, a streaming platform we're building together with other creators. Nebula is a great place where you can enjoy exclusive content like 16 Days in Berlin or the Modern Conflict series from Real
Life Lore where you can learn about more recent military conflicts like the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea. Signing up for Nebula supports us directly and your subscription includes so much more than just exclusive videos. You get all our videos ad-free and earlier than on YouTube and now you also get access to Nebula Classes where you can learn new things directly the creators on Nebula - if you follow link in the video description or the pinned comment below this video you get access to all that for just $30 for an entire year, and you support our work directly. If you are watching this video on Nebula already, thank you so much
for the support. As usually you can find all our sources for this video in the video description below. I am Jesse Alexander and this is a production of Real Time History - the only history channel that has become a factor in world politics.
