Putin In Ukraine Parallels 1920 Invasion Of Poland

The plan was to seize Warsaw and“sovietize” the country, creating a “revolutionary bridge” that would eventually stretch as far as Germany. Considering the extent to which the Soviet military was already stretched and the hostile reception that awaited invading Red Army soldiers, this was a colossal risk. But, despite doubts from some senior Bolsheviks (most notably, Joseph Stalin), Lenin was certain that Poland was on the cusp of a workers' revolution.

Meanwhile, out-of-touch Polish Bolsheviks in Moscow gave support to Lenin's misapprehensions that Polish workers would rise and side with invading Red Army soldiers. So the Soviet leader decided to take the gamble.

In the end, and in a moment sometimes depicted as a turning point in modern history, Lenin's offensive came crashing down in spectacular defeat outside the gates of Warsaw in mid-August 1920. In a matter of days, Polish supreme commander Józef Piłsudski had successfully exploited the strung-out Red Army forces.

The Polish Army smashed through its opponent's overstretched lines, forcing them into humiliating defeat, later immortalixed as the “Miracle on the Vistula” .

Before the Battle of Warsaw , not all Bolsheviks had agreed with Lenin that“sovietizing” Poland was a realistic strategy. But the party leadership, as well as Soviet Russia's foreign and intelligence commissariats and military establishment, were unanimon one thing: Poland was not the primary enemy.

They pointed instead to the capitalist West. At the time, this was represented by the“Entente powers” – Britain and France – who were perceived as coordinating, supplying and sometimes giving direct orders to the Polish Army in an attempt to reverse the revolution.

In truth, Britain and France – which had been Poland's closest allies since it was reconstituted as an independent state in 1918 – offered little tangible support in the Soviet-Polish war and had moved away from intervention in Soviet Russia by 1920. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks grossly exaggerated the threat from the western powers.

“All the Entente states are doing their utmost to incite Poland to make war against us,” Lenin remarked at a meeting of the central executive committee in February 1920 .

It's tempting to dismiss Lenin's public addresses as purposeful propaganda. But the same conspiracy theories run through masses of internal Soviet correspondence. To take just a few examples, writing in private in 1919, Stalin described how a“single unified command” was preparing operations against Soviet Russia using bases in Riga in Latvia to the north, Warsaw in Poland, and as far as Chișinău in Moldova in the south.

Stalin later complained to Leon Trotsky, again in private, that the Entente's“hypnosis” was“extraordinarily strong” over the countries on Russia's western borders: the Baltic States, Poland, and Romania. Chief diplomat Georgy Chicherin claimed without evidence that British and French forces might launch parallel attacks against Soviet Russia, supported by Finland, the Baltic States and Italy.

A complicated anti-Soviet conspiracy loomed large in the Bolsheviks' minds. Poland, in this fantasy, was seen as possessing little agency of its own – acting as nothing more than a puppet of capitalist Britain and France.

Bolshevik fears of international conspiracies were not unique to the Soviet-Polish war.“Capitalist encirclement” was a deeply rooted conviction stemming from the international isolation of the 1917 Revolution. But the humiliating defeat by Poland in August 1920 – and the way the Bolsheviks explained it in conspiratorial terms – amplified an instinct to see“anti-Soviet blocs” everywhere.

Soviet military intelligence went on to write inaccurate reports to this effect continually throughout the 1920s. And before Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany, Stalin – behind closed doors – identified a coalition of Poland and the Baltic States, backed by Britain and France, as the central threat to Soviet security .

Putin, of course, is not a Bolshevik and how much he believes his own propaganda is hard to determine. And while Poland received relatively little support in 1920, the same cannot be said of Ukraine today.

But echoes in Putin's rhetoric and Russian propaganda of an older Soviet worldview – exaggerating interventionist blocs supposedly encircling Russia while refusing to recognize the agency of Ukraine, which is precisely how Lenin once saw Poland – are hard to ignore.

Peter Whitewood is an associate professor of history at York St John University .

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