Pilsudski possessed an iron will and a quick mind. He clearly regarded the new Polish army as his special province, and himself as the guarantor of independence. The republic's forces, still motley and ill-equipped, would soon be put to the test as the commander in chief turned his attention eastward.

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The re-establishment of Poland's pre-partition 1772 frontiers, which included substantial parts of the Ukraine and Belorussia ('White Russia,' now Belarus), was a matter of top priority for Pilsudski. To accomplish that goal, the veteran revolutionary resurrected the old Polish idea of federalism, first championed in the Middle Ages by the kings of the Jagiellonian dynasty. Put simply, the plan called for an East European federation consisting of the independent republics of the Ukraine, Belorussia and Lithuania, bound together with Poland. The latter nation would, according to the Pilsudski scheme, play the leading role.

This incredibly ambitious designed was destined to disintegrate almost immediately. The Lithuanians, former partners in the old Polish kingdom, were intensely nationalistic, after their own long submergence in the Russian empire, and they zealously sought to protect their own newly proclaimed independence in the wake of the tsar's fall. They wanted no part of Pilsudski's federalist notions. The Ukrainians, while keenly desiring independence, were naturally suspicious of the Polish leader's motives, realizing how much of the Ukraine was intended for incorporation within the Polish state. The Belorussians, for centuries caught in the crossroads of Roman Catholic Poland and Orthodox Russia, had no outstanding national consciousness yet and were frankly interested in neither in independence nor in Pilsudski's proposals of union. The Polish argument that none of those three nations could stand next to Russia alone fell on deaf ears. To all three of the potential federal members, it appeared that they might be exchanging the former Russian yoke for a Polish one.

The Western Allies, too, were decidedly against Pilsudski's plans. Both Britain and France accused the Polish chief of state of imperialism at Russia's expense, and they urged Poland to limit its eastern frontiers to the farthest extent of clear-cut Polish ethnicity. As for Russian Bolshevism, London and Paris saw that not as a threat, but a temporary disease, soon to be destroyed by the anti-Communist White forces, which the Allies supported in the ten-raging Russian Civil War.

The new Bolshevik government, besieged by a multitude of armies commanded by a politically diverse collection of generals ranging from tsarist aristocrats to disillusioned socialists to provincial warlords, had its hands full at the time. The White forces of Generals Anton Denikin, Nikolai Yudenich and Piotr Wrangel, and Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, supported by Western and Japanese armies and funds, had to be stopped. The Reds had little time in 1918 to worry about Polish schemes to expand on Russia's western periphery.

Lenin's dynamic associate Leon Trotsky organized the Red Army to meet the White threat. By using powerful idealism awakened in the revolution, and invovling fears that the landowning aristocrats might return to power, Trotsky built a formidable force of workers, peasants and ex-soldiers of the old imperial army, complete with a tough cavalry corps, to protect the Bolshevik regime. Throughout 1918and 1919, the Reds turned the tables on their foes, one by one.

At that moment of chaos and civil war in Russia, the Poles struck. In February 1919, Pilsudski sent his troops northeast, occupying as much territory as possible for the purpose of presenting a fait accompli to the Allied Supreme Council. That body would then be forced to recognize Poland's expanded eastern boundaries.

The Polish forces encountered little resistance and advanced rapidly, soon capturing Wilno (Vilius), a historically Polish city, from the Lithuanians, who had proclaimed it the capital of their new republic. By the autumn of 1919, the Polish red-and-white banner was flying over large sections of Belorussia and the western Galician part of the Ukraine was well.

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