The Polish-Soviet War

Trotsky addresses Red Army during revolutionary war against Pilsudski's Poland



The Bolsheviks and
the "Export of Revolution"

The Russo-Polish War

The issue of making "revolution from without" arose

among the Bolsheviks as a result of the Russo-Polish war of

1920. Its formulation and the ensuing debate were

organically linked to the course and outcome of that war.

In April 1920 Joseph Pilsudski, the bourgeois nationalist

"Libetator" of Poland, launched an

unprovoked attack on the Soviet forces in the Ukraine.

Backed by French imperialism, Pilsudski had ambitions to

recreate "Greater Poland" by bringing the Ukraine and

parts of the Baltic states back under Polish rule. The Soviet

government, which had been desperately trying to

negotiate a peace with Poland, was taken unprepared and

was forced to abandon Kiev and much of the Ukraine. But

the Red Army mustered fresh forces and in June launched a

successful counterattack that sent the overextended Polish

armies reeling in disorderly retreat. By the end of June the

Soviet armies had advanced almost unopposed right up to

the border of national Poland. The question was then

posed point blank: whether to conclude peace with

Pilsudski or to go over to the offensive in a revolutionary

war against Poland? It was this agonizingly difficult

question that the Bolshevik Politburo debated.

No Bolshevik leader considered revolutionary war

against Pilsudski's Poland impermissible in principle.

Rather the debate centered on two interrelated, empirical

questions. One, would the Red Army's advance into

Poland ignite a proletarian uprising leading to

peasant aid to the Soviet forces, mutinies among

Pilsudski's troops, etc.? Two, how would the Soviet

peoples, devastated bv six years of war and civil war, stand

up to a new major war? The stronger the indigenous

revolutionary forces in Poland, the less the demands on the

offensive capacity of the Red Army and behind it on the

Russian and Ukrainian masses.

Of the top Bolshevik leaders Trotsky alone advocated

negotiation of an immediate peace with Poland. Writing

later in his 1930 autobiography, Trotsky explained his

position as follows:

"Even more perhaps than any one else, I did not want this

war, because I realized only too clearly how difficult it

would be to prosecute it after three years of continuous

civil war…

"A point of view that the war which began as one of

defense should be turned into an offensive and revolutionary

war began to grow and acquire strength. In principle,

of course I could not possibly have any objection to such a

course. The question was simply one of the correlation of

forces. The unknown quantity was the attitude of the

Polish workers and peasants."

—My Life

Trotsky believed that a Russian offensive against

Pilsudski could hope to succeed only if a proletarian

revolution broke out early on in Poland. And he had good

reason to doubt that a communist revolution in Poland was

so imminent. He listened to the sober estimates of such

leading Polish Communist emigrés as Julian Marchlewski

and Karl Radek. Marchlewski evidently spared no effort to

persuade the Russian Politburo not to undertake the

invasion of Poland. But perhaps none was so opposed to a

war with Poland as was Radek, who believed that Russian

troops marching on Polish soil, even if they raised the banner

 "For our freedom and yours!", would be regarded

by the masses as conquerors and not liberators. Radek

urged the Bolshevik leaders to let the Polish revolution

mature on its own before sending Russian troops to its aid.

There was a definite logic to this position. If the Soviet

government were to conclude a peace with Pilsudski, then

both the Red Army and the Polish Communists would buy

time to better gather forces for the offensive. If Pilsudski

were to reject a generous Soviet peace offer, making war

inevitable, then the Polish masses would be able to see

clearly who was the real aggressor.

Of the other Bolshevik leaders Lenin was most resolutely

in favor of going over to the offensive against Poland. No

doubt Lenin was impressed by the effect on the Soviet

forces of Pilsudski's attack on the Ukraine. The Red Army

certainly appeared ready and willing to rout the retreating,

demoralized units of the Polish army. But what seemed to

have clinched the question for Lenin were the reports he

received from resident Polish Communists like Felix Kon

and P.L. Lapinski. Kon and Lapinksi, who came from the

anti-Luxemburgist wing of the old Polish socialist

movement and would therefore presumably be sensitive to

the national sentiments of the Polish masses, predicted

imminent revolution in Warsaw.

Moreover, Lenin fixed his gaze on Berlin. Revolution

indeed seemed imminent in Germany. Only a few months

earlier the German proletariat had defeated the right-wing

Kapp putsch with a general strike and also had prevented

French munitions shipments from reaching Poland after

Pilsudski's attack on the Ukraine. In a revolutionary war

against Poland the stakes were enormous. A Soviet Poland

would remove the last bulwark sealing off the October

Revolution from Germany. If only the Soviets could

deliver lhe coup de grace to Pilsudski, the entire Treaty of

Versailles would come crashing down, and the floodgates

of revolution would burst open in Germany, spreading

over the entire continent. The very prospect made for an

almost overwhelming argument. To a certain extent Lenin

and the Politburo majority were willing to subordinate the

degree of indigenous support for the sovietization of

Poland to the goal of securing a common border with

Germany, then in the throes of a revolutionary situation.

And certainly with the Red Army on Germany's border in

the period 1920-23, the entire course of modern history

could have been radically altered.

Lenin's most complete statement of the international

significance of the Polish war was given in a speech to a

congress of leather industry workers on 2 October 1920:

"The Versailles Peace has turned Poland into a buffer state

which is to guard against German contact with Soviet

communism and is regarded by the Entente as a weapon

against t the Bolsheviks....

Had Poland turned Soviet, had the Warsaw workers

received from Soviet Russia help they awaited and

welcomed, the Peace of Versailles would have been

smashed, and the entire international system set up as a

result of the victory over the Germany would have collapsed.

France would then not have had a buffer protecting

Germany against Soviet Russia."

—Collected Works, Vol. 31 ( 1966)

lronically, in comparison with the differences over the

Brest-Litovsk peace in 1918, Lenin and Trotsky now

switched roles. At that time it was Lenin who had most

adamantly pressed for concluding the "shameful peace" in

order to secure a respite for the newly formed Soviet state.

Trotsky, in advocating his "not war, not peace" position,

banked on a more or less imminent revolution in

Germany.

Whereas events proved Lenin right in 1918, the course of

the Russo-Polish war did not bear out his optimistic

projections. The Polish peasants, whipped up by the

Catholic clergy, resented the advancing Reds as conquerors

and not liberators. The memories of a century and a

half of national and religious oppression were still fresh in

the mind of the Polish rural majority. And the Red Army's

forced grain requisitions, coupled with some incidents of

vengeance against individuals by raw Russian soldiers,

didn't help win the mistrustful Poles to the Communist

cause.

Nor was the Soviet Russian advance welcomed in

general by the urban proletariat, which in its majority was

still under socialdemocratic leadership. The Polish

Communist Party, which had been forced underground

more than a year before, issued a call for a general strike,

but it found no response except among the militant miners

in the extreme southwestern industrial region of Dabrowa.

In Warsaw some workers even volunteered to serve in

Pilsudski's militias. After the Russians' defeat at the

historic battle of the Vistula, Lenin admitted that the

offensive provoked not class war within Poland but

national unity. Spartacist nº29, 1980.

-Spartacist

Piłsudski

Poloniar kapitalistak, frantziar inperialisten morroi

Red Army

Wojna polsko-sowiecka