The battle of Warsaw, 1920

The Battle of Warsaw in 1920, commonly referred to as the Gates of Warsaw victory and subsequently used in Polish propaganda as Poles saving Europe from "the communist advance", was nothing of the sort.

History

The Versailles Treaty stipulated that the border between the Soviet Union and Poland would be the so-called Curzon Line.

Before and during the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth vast tracts of Lithuanian territory, including their provinces of Volhynia and Podolia, were annexed by Poland and then taken over by Polish landowners who continued in possession right down to the Russian Revolution of 1917, after which they fled and took refuge in the new Poland. "They not unnaturally put strong pressure on the Polish Government to reconquer their lands for them." Meanwhile the victorious plutocratic Western Allies at Paris proposed that the eastern frontier of Poland should be drawn as to include only those territories where the Polish population was in a majority. The Poles replied that this was insulting. Polish patriots called for action, as they wanted to see a Greater Poland (including territories not historically ethnically Polish, ever), and it was in such a mood that Marshal Pilsudski, the head of the new Polish State and the Commander-in-Chief of the (French-armed) army, set out in the Spring of 1920 to conquer Ukraine for Poland. The Red Army, disorganised by the continuing Russian civil war, made a feeble resistance; and Polish troops quickly reached Kiev.

By June, however, the Soviet forces had reorganised and were able to launch a massive counter-offensive, which not only drove the Poles fast out of Ukraine, but brought Soviet troops within a few miles of Warsaw, where the Soviet offensive, like the Polish offensive before it, became exhausted and outstripped its supply lines, halted. The Polish army now went on another alternative diversionary offensive by marching due east into White Russia where they were again halted by the Soviets. Both sides were totally exhausted and had again outstripped their supply lines, and an armistice was concluded upon a line 150 miles east of the ethnographical frontier proposed by the Allies. In 1921 the Treaty of Riga confirmed the armistice line as the border between Poland and Soviet Russia. A victory of sorts for Poland despite the tract of land being sparsely populated and of poor quality. (These territories would be taken by the Soviets in September 1939, who restored the Allies original proposed border.)

Since that time, the Poles have turned around their rash attempt at conquest of foreign lands into a great propaganda offensive in the West saying that the Soviets were invading Poland and only their great defence at the "Gates of Warsaw" saved a communist invasion of western Europe. For those ignorant of the true facts this is a nice story.

"The Poles, haughty, headstrong, and inordinately proud, [also] deeply resented the patronising attitude of the French whose assertions that the military mission under their General Weygand saved Warsaw from capture by the Bolsheviks in 1920 [and] were hotly denied by the Poles."

Encouraged by their success, Poland now invaded Lithuania under General Zeligowski, in October 1920, and annexed the province and city of Vilna, in a flagrant violation of armistice terms and Versailles. Pilsudski admitted later that this operation had been carried out with his knowledge and approval. Protests from the League of Nations failed to dislodge the Poles and Poland was left in possession until 1939 when Lithuania was able to recover it.