Revisiting the Polish Vector in Soviet History and Politics

Abstract

In 1918, newly-established Poland and Bolshevik Russia became Eastern Europe’s main rivals. The Bolsheviks regarded Poland as the biggest threat to their plans of spreading revolution to the West, whereas Poland strove to restore the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth within its pre-1772 borders, which would include large parts of Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania. Existential ideological tensions coupled with overlapping territorial claims for the borderlands made a military confrontation between Warsaw and Moscow inevitable. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Polish-Soviet relations of the interwar period were determined by war. Following the armistice of 11 November 1918, Vladimir Lenin annulled the highly unfavourable Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and began seeking opportunities to recover former imperial territories. In the meantime, the Polish Army seized most of Lithuania, including its capital Vilnius/Wilno, and Belarus, and took control over most of western Ukraine, continuing its victorious eastward offensive all the way up to Kyiv. The Red Army’s counterattack pushed the Polish forces back to Warsaw, only to withdraw and eventually sue for peace in 1921. Although direct military conflict ended on 18 March 1921 with the signing of the Treaty of Riga between Poland, Soviet Russia, and Soviet Ukraine, it did not provide a lasting peace. The resultant border split apart the territories populated predominantly by Ukrainians and Belarusians, providing the ideological justification for the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939 at the beginning of the Second World War, and the subsequent incorporation of these territories into Soviet Ukraine and Belarus. War also provides a framework for studying Polish-Soviet relations. The 1919–21 war, in particular, remains a key focus for academic studies, ranging from military and diplomatic accounts to social and cultural histories of the border zones. Polish-Ukrainian relations of the period present a separate scholarly sub-field, with the key themes spanning the Polish-Ukrainian War of 1918–19, the Polish-Ukrainian rapprochement of 1920, the Polish-Ukrainian anti-Bolshevik military alliance, and the fate of the