Warsaw 1920. Adam Zamoyski

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ