One of the most easily overlooked, yet momentous short wars of the 20th century was the swift-moving clash between the post-World War I Polish Republic and Russia’s brand-new Bolshevik regime of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Reaching a climax during the summer of 1920, the Russo-Polish War is often regarded as the final episode of the Russian Civil War. In fact, it was much more — at once a reflection of the age-old enmity between two Slavic neighbors and a Marxist crusade bent on varying the torch of revolution into the heart of Europe. The campaign featured a remarkable cast of characters on both sides and mixed ferocious cavalry charges with early blitzkrieg tactics in quest of exceptional objectives.

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The roots of the war ran deep. For a century and a quarter, the once-formidable Polish nation was a political nonentity, having been dismembered by Prussia, Austria and Russia in the infamous partitions of 1772, 1793 and 1795. Three national insurrections had failed to dislodge the occupying powers; severe Germanization and Russification efforts, aimed at the destruction of the Polish language and culture, were imposed upon the population during the 19th century. Although such campaigns had little effect, by the turn of the century only the most optimistic Polish patriots could still dream of independence.

Yet World War I provided exactly the right set of circumstances for the Poles. On November 6, 1916, Austria-Hungary and Germany, in a desperate bid to ensure the loyalty of their Polish populations, jointly agreed to the formation of a semi-autonomous ‘Kingdom of Poland.’ In Paris, France, Polish spokesmen beat the ears of Allied statesmen on behalf of an independent Poland, but none of the Western powers cared to antagonize their imperial Russian ally, which was opposed to such a move. In 1917, however, Russia had dropped into a violent vortex of chaos and revolution. Partly in consequence to that development, the Fourteen Points for peace drafted by United States President Woodrow Wilson included the creation of an independent Poland and its recognition as ‘an allied belligerent nation’ as of June 3, 1918. On October 7, 1918, with the Central Powers clearly on the brink of defeat, the Regency Council in Warsaw declared Polish independence. After the guns of war fell silent on November 11, the three torn pieces of the Polish nation were triumphantly reunited.

The representatives of France, Great Britain, Italy and the united States met in the mirrored halls of Versailles in 1919 to dismember the German and Austro-Hungarian empires and set the world right. Russia, the erstwhile ally that in November 1917 had established the world’s first Communist government, was shunned by the Western Allies; Lenin’s decision to make a separate peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk in the spring of 1918 would not be forgiven just then. Moscow’s absence form the Versailles conference later proved to be a costly blunder. While the Allies were able to produce a tentative settlement for Poland’s western frontiers, they had no means of establishing any agree-upon border between the new Polish state and the Russian colossus.

The resurgent Poles, meanwhile, quickly established a Western-style parliamentary government and chose a 51-year-old romantic, a conspiratorial and avidly Russophobic military hero named Jozef Klemens Pilsudski as chief of state. Pilsudski, a longtime member of the Polish Socialist Party’s right wing, had always placed the achievement of Polish independence ahead of the social reforms advocated by some of his more ideological colleagues. As a young man he had felt the brutality of tsarist justice, spending five years in Siberian exile for revolutionary activity. During World War I, he organized and commanded a Polish legion under Austrian auspices on the Eastern Front, convinced that Russia was the chief enemy of his country’s independence. He soon became disillusioned with vague Austrian promises in favor of Polish independence, however, and refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Central Powers. Arrested and imprisoned in Magdeburg for two years, he was released on November 10, 1918, and returned home to be acclaimed as a national hero.

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