Warsaw 1920. Adam Zamoyski

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      ‘Here were about 28,000,000 people who had for four years been ravished by four separate invasions during this one war, where battles and retreating armies had destroyed and destroyed again,’ wrote Herbert Hoover, who arrived in Poland with his relief mission in January 1919. ‘In parts there had been seven invasions and seven destructive retreats. Many hundreds of thousands had died of starvation. The homes of millions had been destroyed and the people in those areas were living in hovels. Their agricultural implements had been depleted, their animals had been taken by armies, their crops had been only partly harvested. Industry in the cities was dead from lack of raw materials. The people were unemployed and millions were destitute. They had been flooded with roubles and kronen, all of which were now valueless. The railroads were barely functioning. The cities were almost without food; typhus and other diseases raged over whole provinces.’⁴

      This meant Poland was heavily dependent on the support of her western allies for everything from supplies of food to machine-gun bullets. And while they were generous with this, they were not in a position to help her militarily, even if the will had been there. Lenin guessed that it was not. He and his comrades also believed that history was on their side and that no ‘bourgeois’ government such as that currently running Poland could possibly stand up to the force of Bolshevism.

      Lenin ordered the formation of an Army of the West, which was instructed to carry out ‘reconnaissance in depth’ in the wake of the evacuating German troops, an operation code-named ‘Target Vistula’. On 5 January 1919, after a short battle with a small unit of local Polish irregulars, it occupied Wilno (Vilnius), capital of the erstwhile Grand Duchy of Lithuania, an integral component of the pre-partition Polish state. In February a Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania-Byelorussia was set up under Russian protection, with its capital at Minsk, and a Soviet government-in-waiting for Poland was constituted in Russia under the leadership of the Polish communist Józef Unszlicht. The III International of the Communist Party, or Comintern, was scheduled to meet in Moscow on 4 March to watch over the imminent triumph of revolution throughout the world.

      An encouraging portent was the emergence that same month of a Soviet government in Hungary under Béla Kuhn, a Hungarian Jew who had become a Bolshevik while a prisoner of war in Russia. But this was short-lived and did not herald further successes. The political situation in Germany stabilized in the spring of 1919, and democratic elections had gone smoothly in Poland, whose ‘bourgeois’ government was proving unexpectedly vigorous. So was its head of state. As a native of Wilno, Pilsudski could not stomach its occupation by the Bolsheviks, so he gathered together all available reserves and in a daring operation on 20 April Polish troops expelled the Red Army, forcing them back along the whole front and over the next three months occupying most of formerly Polish Byelorussia, along with the city of Minsk.

      Pilsudski was determined that while the area lying between Poland and Russia did not necessarily have to belong to Poland, it must be denied to Russia. His favoured scheme was a federation of Poland with democratic Lithuanian and Ukrainian states. This was something of a forlorn hope, since the Lithuanian nationalists who would have been his natural partners were adamant that the whole territory of what had been the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (which included Wilno and all of Byelorussia) be given to them as a precondition of any talks, while the Ukrainians were split between pro-Polish and anti-Polish factions, as well as a variety of Pro-Russian, nationalist and communist groups. But he hoped that some kind of union might yet emerge, and in the meantime determined to occupy as much of the territory of the pre-partition Polish state as possible in order to create a ‘safety cushion’ and to be in a position of strength when peace negotiations did begin.

      The Russian Army of the West had never been intended to fight its way across Poland, only to fill any available power-vacuum. And at this precise moment, the vacuum was behind, not in front of, it. Three White armies, lavishly equipped by the Entente, were challenging the Bolsheviks, from the Baltic in the west, Siberia in the east and Ukraine in the south. The Volunteer Army of Southern Russia, commanded by General Anton Denikin, was beginning to pose a real threat as it began its march on Moscow, inflicting defeat after defeat on the Red Army.

      Poland, Germany and world revolution would have to wait. Lenin desperately needed what he called a ’peredyshka’, a breather, in order to marshal all available forces against this new threat. He therefore decided to repeat the previous year’s tactic of buying time with peace, and agreed to secret talks suggested by Pilsudski.⁵

      Pilsudski had no illusions about the Bolsheviks. He had personal experience of collaborating with them (he had, at the age of nineteen, supplied Lenin’s elder brother with the explosives for the bomb which he had hurled at Tsar Alexander III), and they included a number of Polish socialists with whom he had had close dealings. He was well acquainted with their real aims, and the means they used to achieve them.

      But Poland also needed a breather. Her army, a СКАЧАТЬ