Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Piotrus (talk | contribs) at 09:58, 27 April 2005 (→POWs). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The Aftermath

According to the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, the Polish-Bolshevik War "largely determined the course of European history for the next twenty years or more. Unavowedly and almost unconsciously, Soviet leaders abandoned the cause of international revolution." Certainly the Bolsheviks' defeat in the war prevented Poland from becoming another Soviet republic and likely saved Germany, Czechoslovakia and other nearby states from suffering a similar fate.

Bolshevism was not destroyed, however, only contained for a generation. Russia kept control of substantial western territories and their vast resources. Soon after the war officially ended, groups of Soviet-sponsored bandits and undercover agents begun raiding Polish eastern frontier, prompting Poland to creat a special, elite Border Defence Corps (Korpus Ochrony Pogranicza) to combat those constant incursions. A second Soviet effort at expansion was more successful. In August 1939 the Soviet Union allied itself with Nazi Germany in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and on September 17, 1939, invaded eastern Poland, ensuring Poland's defeat in the Polish Defence War of 1939 and sealing the fate of the Second Polish Republic. The Soviet occupation of eastern Poland rivaled in atrocities the German occupation of the remainder of the country. Persons who were deemed dangerous by the communist authorities were subject to sovietization, forced resettlement, and imprisonment in labor camps (the Gulags) or were simply murdered, as in the case of Polish officers in the Katyn massacres. Having served in the Polish-Bolshevik War on the side of Poland was punishable with death. After Poland had been "liberated" by the Red Army in 1944, Soviet atrocities resumed, with persecutions and prosecutions of Polish Home Army soldiers and executions of their leaders. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Soviet Union succeeded in acquiring control of more territory than Imperial Russia had and partly fulfilled Lenin's original dream of bringing communist revolution to Germany. Until 1989, while communists held power in a People's Republic of Poland, the Polish-Bolshevik War was either omitted or minimized in Polish and other Soviet block countries history books, or was presented so as to fit with the "truths" of communist propaganda.

Much of what Poland had won during the 1920 war, was lost in the peace negotiations that were by many characterized as short-sighted and petty-minded. They were lacking what brought Poland independence: Pilsudski's combination of far-reaching predictions, and understanding, with his soul and body of a fighter; also, his integrity. In 1921 Pilsudski was no more "The Leader of the State", and was only an observer during the Riga negotiations, which he called an act of cowardience. Due to the disastrous military defeat, Bolsheviks offered the Polish peace delegation substantial territorial concessions in the contested borderland areas. However, to many observers it looked like the Polish side was conducting the Riga talks as if Poland had not won, but lost the war. The exhausted Poles, pressured by the League of Nations, decided to sign the Peace of Riga on March 18, 1921, splitting the disputed territories in Belarus and Ukraine between Poland and Russia. The Ukrainians led by Symon Petliura had been fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with Poles, but in Riga the Soviet negotiators were able to talk Poles into betraying them - to the peril of both Poles and Ukrainians. Those shameless, short-sighted political calculations made Pilsudski deeply ashamed; he walked out of the room, and told the Ukrainians waiting there for the results of the Riga Conference: "Gentlemen, I deeply apologize to you".

The treaty actually violated Poland's military alliance with Ukraine, which had explicitly prohibited a separate peace. It worsened relations between Poland and her Ukrainian minority, who felt Ukraine had been betrayed by her Polish ally, a feeling that would be exploited by Soviet propaganda and result in the growing tensions and eventual violence in the 1930s and 1940s. By the end of 1921, the majority of Ukrainian, Bielorusian and White Russian forces had either crossed the Polish border and laid down their arms or had been annihilated by the Soviets.

The Polish military successes in autumn 1920 allowed Poland to reclaim the city of Wilno, but the control over city has been transferred to Lithuanians by the retreating Soviets. With Lithuanians unwilling to enter into an alliance with Poland, and wishing to avoid a full-out conflict and international condemnation, Poland staged a fake rebellion by Polish army units (under command by gen. Lucjan Żeligowski) in the Wilno area, which allowed the Polish army to take control of the city in 9 October 1920. The fighting ended this month. Despite the Poles’ claim to it, the League of Nations chose to ask Poland to withdraw. The Poles did not. Theoretically, British and French troops could have been asked to enforce the League’s decision. France, however, did not wish to antagonize Poland, seen as a possible ally in a future war against Germany, and Britain was not prepared to act alone. Thus the Poles were able to keep Wilno, where a puppet goverment (Komisja Rządząca Litwy Środkowej) was formed. A plebiscite was carried out and the Wilno Sejm has voted on 20 February 1922 for incorporation into Poland. This has worsened Polish-Lithuanian foreign relations for many decades to come and was one of the reasons Piłsudski's Miedzymorze federation was never formed. And as Poland kept the city of Wilno, this further poisoned diplomatic relations between Poland and Lithuania. Repercussions of this still continue (though to a diminishing extent) to affect the foreign relations among these countries.

The outcome of the Polish-Bolshevik War, while welcomed by some Polish politicians such as Roman Dmowski, who favored a relatively small, ethnically rather homogeneous state, was a death blow to Piłsudski's dream of reviving the powerful and multicultural Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the form of a "Międzymorze Federation."

Pilsudski's military and political victory ensured that the armed forces became an important national institution in the new government. His reputation as the creator of the miracle at Vistula has vastly risen, and the National Democrats (endecja) lost the post-war elections. The new president Gabriel Narutowicz elected in 1922 was a socialist politician. In 1926, after Poland had experienced several years of political uncertainty and weak leadership, Pilsudski eventually took over the state in a coup d'etat (the May Coup), assuming the posts of minister of defense and general inspector of the army.

The Treaty of Riga avoided ceding historically Polish territory back to Russia, and ethnic Poles initially had two Polish Autonomous Districts within the Soviet Union, with an eventually tragic outcome for the Poles. The Ukrainian minority in Poland received some internal autonomy within the southeastern voivodships of Poland, but plans for a broader autonomy or for introduction of a federation finally came to nothing.

Military strategy in the Polish-Bolshevik War influenced Charles De Gaulle, an instructor with the Polish Army who fought in several of the battles. He and Władysław Sikorski were the only military officers who, based on their experiences of this war, correctly predicted how the next one would be fought. Although they both failed in the interbellum to convince their militaries to heed those lessons, early in World War II they rose to command of their respective armed forces in exile. This war also influenced the Polish military doctrine, which for the next 20 years would stress the mobility of the elite cavalry units.

Among the technical advances ultimately associated with the Polish-Bolshevik War was one that would, two decades later, affect the course of World War II and whose story, when revealed decades after that, would astound the world. In the Polish-Bolshevik War, Poland's Marshal Piłsudski and his staff enjoyed a vast advantage from their military intelligence decrypting ("breaking") Red Army radio messages. These were encrypted in primitive ciphers and codes, and often involved incredible breaches of security by Bolshevik cipher clerks. The Polish cryptologists and commanders were thus regularly able to look over the shoulders of the Bolshevik commanders, including Mikhail Tukhachevski himself, and their superior, Leon Trotsky. (It is curious that, in this regard, the Red Army repeated mistakes that had been made in World War I by its Tsarist predecessor vis-a-vis the German Army, and that had contributed fundamentally to the Russian 1914 defeat at Tannenberg.) Poland's cryptological achievements in the Polish-Bolshevik War were a prelude to the spectacular achievements of her General Staff's Cipher Bureau (Biuro Szyfrow), from December 1932, in decrypting German Enigma machine ciphers. Their subsequent decryption in World War II by the Western Allies at Bletchley Park--given a flying head-start by Poland's having revealed her techniques and technology to Britain and France at Warsaw a month before the outbreak of war--substantially affected the outcome of the war.

POWs

During the course of the war, waged by two countries experiencing great economic and social difficulties, and often unable to care even for their own populations, the treatment of the prisoners of war was far from adequate.

Throughout the course of the war about 150,000 Soviet soldiers became prisoners of war, and were held in Polish POW camps. The conditions in these camps were bad, as the newly recreated Polish state lacked many basic capabilities and had little resources to construct proper POW camps. Thus the existing camps, many of which were adapted from WWI German and Russian facilities or constructed by the prisoners themselves, were not adequate for holding the large number of prisoners, who suffered from hunger, bad sanitation and inadequate hygiene. As a result, according to Polish historians, between 18,000 and 24,000 prisoners died, mostly as a result of epidemics which raged in the camps, especially the diasastrous post-WWI Spanish Flu Pandemic. The bad conditions in these camps were known to public opinion in Poland at the time, as a number of Polish newspapers openly wrote about them, criticizing the government for not correcting the situation. Little public awareness about this part of Polish history exists in present day Polish society, but the issue has been addressed in a number of scholarly publications.

Some Russian historians have put the number of deaths of prisoners much higher, estimating that it was up to 70,000. They arrive at this number by first estimating the number of POWs, then subtracting the number that has been repatriated to the Soviet Union after the hostilities ended, and then assuming that most of the remainder died in POW camps. Polish historians counter this by arguing that: (a) the number of POWs is very difficult to estimate accurately, due to the chaotic situation prevailing for most of the war, and (b) many Soviet POWs lost that status after they switched sides and entered units fighting alongside Polish forces against the Red Army. There is also the problem that significant number of Russian POWs were left in the territory of Poland since WWI (about 3.9 million soldiers of the Russian Empire were taken captive by the Central Powers) and obviously when the Polish-Soviet conflict deteriorated, these POWs were not released to Russia.

The condition of Polish POWs held by the Soviets during this time is less well known. While the conditions for Soviet prisoners were clearly exposed by the free press in Poland, no corresponding factfinding about Soviet camps for Polish POWs could be expected from tightly controlled Soviet press of the time. There have been also cases of Soviet army executing Polish POWs, when no POW facilities were available. Some scholarly works addresses the subject.

Notes

1. Ścieżyński, Radjotelegrafja...
2. Kahn, The Code-Breakers.
3. Kozaczuk, Enigma.
4. Karpus, Jeńcy i internowani rosyjscy... Polish table of contents online
5. Karpus, Zwycięzcy za drutami..

References

See Polish-Soviet War#References.

• Polish-Soviet War