Warsaw 1920

WARSAW 1920

Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe

ADAM ZAMOYSKI

COPYRIGHT

Harper Press

HarperCollinsPublishers

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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2008

Copyright © Adam Zamoyski 2008

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007225521

Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007284009

Version: 2020-02-04

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

Introduction

1 Old Scores and New Dawns

2 Playing Soldiers

3 Grand Designs

4 The Miracle on the Vistula

5 Settling the Scores

6 The Aftermath

Keep Reading

Sources

Further Reading in English

Index

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

ILLUSTRATIONS

Pilsudski reviewing volunteers setting off for the front. (Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, Warsaw)

Kamenev with soldiers of the Red Army. (The David King Archive, London)

Russian infantry on parade. (The David King Archive, London)

Russian heavy artillery outside Warsaw, August 1920. (The David King Archive, London)

A colour party of Red cavalry, spring 1920. (The David King Archive, London)

The Red cavalry’s secret weapon, the tachanka. (The David King Archive, London)

Polish field artillery in Pinsk, spring 1920. (Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, Warsaw)

The Polish 16th Lancers marching through Równe, March 1920. (Biblioteka Ksiazat Czartoryskich, Kraków)

Polish heavy artillery in Ukraine, May 1920. (Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, Warsaw)

The Polish Air Force’s Kosciuszko Squadron, made up of American volunteers. (The Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, London) Polish armoured train. (Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, Warsaw)

A Russian divisional radio transmitter. (The David King Archive, London)

Zeligowski. (Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, Warsaw)

Yakir. (The David King Archive, London)

Uborevich. (The David King Archive, London)

Sosnkowski. (The Józef Pilsudski Institute, London)

A Russian armoured car captured by the Poles in the Kiev offensive.

(Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, Warsaw)

Smigly-Rydz taking the salute as Polish troops march into Kiev, 7 May 1920. (The Józef Pilsudski Institute, London)

Smigly-Rydz greeting the Ukrainian leader Ataman Symon Petlura in Kiev. (Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, Warsaw)

Recruits of the Ukrainian National Army parade before Petlura.

(Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, Warsaw)

Lenin calling for volunteers to fight Poland, May 1920. (The David King Archive, London)

Tukhachevsky. (The David King Archive, London)

Szeptycki. (The Józef Pilsudski Institute, London)

Stalin. (The David King Archive, London)

Yegorov. (The David King Archive, London)

Budionny and Voroshilov. (The David King Archive, London)

Gai. (The David King Archive, London)

Units of the Polish First Army in retreat, early August 1920. (The Józef Pilsudski Institute, London)

The PolRevKom, Lenin’s government for Poland. (Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, Warsaw)

Soldiers of Budionny’s Konarmia, July 1920. (The David King Archive, London)

Officers of the French military mission to Poland. (Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, Warsaw)

Haller. (The Józef Pilsudski Institute, London)

Iwaszkiewicz. (Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, Warsaw)

A detachment of the Women’s Volunteer Legion, August 1920.

(Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, Warsaw)

Sikorski. (Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, Warsaw)

Polish machine-gun emplacement outside Warsaw, August 1920.

(Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, Warsaw)

Polish tanks at Minsk Mazowiecki, August 1920. (Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, Warsaw)

Polish infantry advancing outside Warsaw. (Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, Warsaw)

Pilsudski. (Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, Warsaw)

Men of Gai’s KonKorpus being disarmed by German lancers.

(Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, Warsaw)

MAPS

Europe after the Paris peace settlement

The Kiev offensive and the battle of the Berezina

The Kiev débâcle

Tukhachevsky’s march on Europe

The battle for Brody

The Polish regrouping operation

The battle for Warsaw, 14 August

The battle for Warsaw, 15–16 August

The counterstroke, 16–22 August

Budionny’s last battle

Last stand on the Niemen

INTRODUCTION

It may come as something of a surprise to most people that a battle as decisive as Marathon or Waterloo took place in Europe between the end of the First World War in 1918 and the outbreak of the Second in 1939. Dramatic and fateful as they were, the events that took place at the gates of Warsaw in August 1920 have sunk into oblivion.

This is the more surprising as they had a profound effect on the politics of the 1920s and 1930s, on the course of the Second World War, and on the peace settlement of 1945, as well as a lasting one on attitudes throughout Europe — figures such as Stalin, Churchill and De Gaulle were personally involved, while others such as Mussolini, Franco and Hitler took careful note.

The reasons for this eclipse are not hard to find. One is that while the battle did indeed alter the course of history, it did so by preventing something from taking place rather than by reversing it; this meant that it had no palpable impact on anyone not directly involved. Another is that historians of the time were mostly preoccupied with other themes, such as composing triumphalist accounts of the Great War from their own national standpoint. If they mentioned the battle of Warsaw at all, they tended to follow the lead of Soviet historians, who, not wishing to accept that their country had lost a war, treated it as part of the Russian Civil War, which the Soviets had won. Finally, the Second World War reversed the effect of the 1920 contest, seemingly rendering it irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. A negative view of Eastern Europe and the wholesale acceptance of socialist orthodoxies by Western historians in the decades following it did the rest.

This little book does not pretend to fill the resulting void. All it can aspire to is to provide an outline of the events, and specialists will find my generalisations wanting. Since the political and diplomatic background has been extensively covered by others (see Further Reading, page 149), I have concentrated on the military operations, and in particular on providing a synthesis accessible to the general reader and a succinct overview of what happened and how. This necessarily excludes dozens of minor actions and ignores the part played by many lesser actors, some of them of crucial importance. Nor can it give anything but a hint of the horrors and the heroism involved, or of the sense, which comes through all personal accounts and contemporary documents, that this was a crisis of European civilization.

I was fortunate enough to take an interest in these events some years ago, when many participants and even a few key players were still alive. There was something both exciting and unreal about sitting in a seedy London flat or a clapboard house somewhere in the great expanses of American suburbia, talking to someone who had stared death in the face at the end of a lance or seen the glint of Trotsky’s spectacles. It was also deeply rewarding, as it helped me to bridge the gulf between how events appear from documents and how they are experienced on the ground. Sadly, it was not then possible to talk to participants on the Soviet side, which would have added a remarkable perspective.

In spite, or perhaps because, of its contentious nature, the Polish-Soviet conflict of 1919–21 is extremely well covered in Polish and Russian, and there has never been any shortage of written sources. All of the essential operational documents were accessible, either in print or in archives, remarkably early on, and little has emerged in the past two decades to shed the kind of new light that would prompt a reinterpretation of the events. And although the numerous studies produced in Poland and Russia between the wars are rarely free of bias, they do contain a wealth of solid information. Perhaps surprisingly in the circumstances, it is the even more numerous accounts and studies by participants that provide some of the most interesting material. Although they tend to be written from a partisan and often blinkered position, an intelligent reading that takes this into account can yield rich pickings.

As the participants and witnesses I was able to interview are no longer with us, I would like in the first place to thank them, and particularly the late Aleksander Praglowski, Kornel Krzeczunowicz, Wladyslaw Anders and Adam Minkiewicz. I am also indebted to Stanislaw Bieganski of the Józef Pilsudski Institute and Waclaw Milewski of the Sikorski Institute in London; to Boguslaw Winid, to Dr Andrzej Czeslaw Zak of the Central Army Archive and Dr Grzegorz Nowik of the Army Centre for Historical Studies in Warsaw, to Professor Andrzej Nowak, Bogdan Gancarz, and to my friend Norman Davies. As always, Shervie Price anticipated the queries of the standard reader.

Adam Zamoyski

London

September 2007

Europe after the Paris peace settlement

1

Old Scores and New Dawns

ON 28 JUNE 1919, a multitude of frock-coated statesmen gathered in the great hall of mirrors of the palace of Versailles for the ceremonial signature of a treaty between Great Britain, France, the United States and their allies on the one hand, and a defeated Germany on the other. The document fixed not only the borders of Germany and the reparations to be paid by her; it redrew the political map of Central Europe. It separated Germany from Russia by resurrecting Poland and bringing into being a number of new states, from Estonia in the north to the Czecho-Slovak Republic in the south. This was done partly in the new spirit of national self-determination advocated by the US President Woodrow Wilson, and also to create buffers against any future attempts at German expansion. This new order would, it was hoped, draw a line under the militaristic imperialism of the nineteenth century and guarantee a lasting peace.

This peace had cost millions of lives and irretrievable resources. It had robbed countries such as Britain and France of a generation of young men. The price paid had shaken the faith of society in the institutions that had led to the war, creating an ideological crisis whose profound social and political effects could be felt at every level. Yet within a year of its signature, the peace and the political settlement the treaty had brought into being were threatened with annihilation.

In the summer of 1920 a seemingly unstoppable Russian army was sweeping across Poland with the avowed aim of bringing about revolution in Germany and using that country as a springboard for imposing Bolshevik-style governments on the other nations of Europe. ‘By attacking Poland we are attacking the Allies,’ warned the leader of the Bolshevik government in Russia, Vladimir Illich Lenin; ‘by destroying the Polish army we are destroying the Versailles peace, upon which rests the whole present system of international relations.’1

Exhausted by the blood-letting of the Great War, ravaged by the influenza epidemic sweeping the world and wary of the mass of unemployed soldiers resentful of a system that could not provide them with a dignified future, neither the United States, which was rapidly slipping back into isolationism, nor the Entente, as Great Britain and France were commonly referred to, was in a position to defend its cherished peace settlement. All they could do was look on anxiously as the fate of Europe, and by extension that of the entire West, was decided by two of its most immature states. For a few weeks 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 Marx had only ever envisaged communism working in an advanced industrial society. Its triumph in the backward agrarian economy of Russia had been something of a freak, and to Lenin and his comrades the best way of ensuring its survival appeared to be to export the revolution to Germany. Humiliated by defeat in the Great War, racked by political dissension, awash with unemployed and disaffected soldiers, Germany seemed fertile ground.

Between Russia and Germany lay Poland, a nation that had only just recovered its independence after more than a century of foreign oppression, and was not likely to give it up without a fight. Fervently Catholic and imbued with a patriotism that bordered on religious conviction, the majority of Polish society was impermeable to the most powerful weapons in the Soviet armoury — the lure of socialism on the one hand and the international solidarity of working people on the other. Yet these did hold an appeal for sections of the Polish urban proletariat, for downtrodden or marginalized minorities, and also for many of the Jews who made up some 10 per cent of the overall population; they were mostly extremely poor, underprivileged, often discriminated against, and had little reason to feel any allegiance towards the emergent Polish state over a Russian socialist one. And Poland was in catastrophic condition.