In Moscow, amid these weighty considerations, an anti-Poland demonstration scheduled for April 22, 1920, was postponed so that Soviet Russia could instead celebrate Lenin’s fiftieth birthday. The regime’s two principal newspapers were devoted almost exclusively to the Bolshevik leader, with encomia by Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Stalin, who hailed Lenin’s extirpation of enemies.56 But at the regime gathering on April 23, Stalin made so bold as to recall Lenin’s political errors, including his vociferous demands, not indulged, that the October coup be carried out before the Congress of Soviets had met. “Smiling and cunningly looking at us,” Stalin noted, “he said, ‘Yes, you were probably right.”’ Lenin was not afraid to acknowledge his mistakes.57
The same day, Lenin submitted a peace offering to Poland to cede all of Belorussia and much of Ukraine.58 This proposal would make any Polish military advance farther eastward resemble an unprovoked aggression. Had the Polish marshal called the Bolshevik bluff by accepting Lenin’s peace offer, Piłsudski would either have exposed it as a fraud, when the Bolsheviks failed to live up to the proposed terms, or obtained a Polish border far to the east without having to fight. Instead, on April 25, citing a supposed need to preempt a Bolshevik offensive, Piłsudski rolled the iron dice, sending some 50,000 Polish troops into historic Ukraine.59 Assisted by Ukrainian nationalist forces, Piłsudski’s army captured Kiev on May 7, 1920, announcing the liberation of Ukraine from Russia. In fact, the Bolsheviks had abandoned the eastern Slav mother city without a fight, seeking to inflame Russian feeling against the Poles and to conserve Red forces, which were massing to the north.
Lenin saw in Piłsudski’s eastward march not a messianic Polish nationalist drive but a contrivance of world imperialism, and in Bolshevik propaganda, this was a class-based conflict. “Listen, workers, listen, peasants, listen Red Army soldiers,” Trotsky proclaimed. “The Polish szlachta [gentry] and bourgeoisie have attacked us in a war. . . . Death to the Polish bourgeoisie. On its corpse we have concluded an alliance with worker-peasant Poland.”60 But Trotsky himself privately warned not to expect a supportive Polish worker uprising.61 Stalin, ever attentive to the power of nationalism, also voiced early skepticism. While Denikin and Kolchak had possessed no rear “of their own,” he wrote in Pravda (May 25 and 26, 1920), “the rear of the Polish army appears to be homogenous and nationally knit together. . . . Surely the Polish rear is not homogenous . . . in the class sense, [but] the class conflicts have not reached such intensity as to damage the feeling of national unity.” National feeling trumping class among the Poles: heresy but true. Stalin agreed with Lenin on one point, though: he, too, saw the hand of the Entente behind Poland.62 Indeed, Piłsudski’s very recklessness seemed prima facie evidence of this supposed backing. Furthermore, the British War Office would end up shipping rifles and artillery to Piłsudski; these had been contracted for the previous year, but in the new context they looked like British support for Polish “aggression.” In fact, the British, as well as the French, were irritated at Piłsudski’s eastern offensive in spring 1920.
Whatever the clash’s national and international versus class dimensions, this began as a Great War military surplus clash. Perhaps 8 million Poles had fought for the Central Powers in the Great War; 2 million fought in the tsarist army.63 Now the Poles were still wearing their Austrian or German gear, to which they affixed a white eagle pin. Many Poles who had become POWs in the West got French uniforms. The Red troops in many cases wore tsarist uniforms, to which they affixed red ribbons, as well as pointed hats with red stars. Some Poles, too, wore their old tsarist Russian uniforms.
As for the field of battle, it resembled a triangle, with points at Warsaw in the west, Smolensk in the north, and Kharkov in the south. Inside the triangle lay the Pripet Marches, meaning that an advance westward could take place only on either side of the forested bogs: via the northern Smolensk-Wilno-Grodno-Warsaw axis (Napoleon’s route, in reverse); or via the southern Kiev-Rivne/Równe-Lublin-Warsaw axis (which the Soviets designated the Southwestern Front). These two lines eventually met up, but they lacked a single base in their rear or a single headquarters, complicating Red military operations.64 But the Polish dash to Kiev had put them far from home, overextended, and vulnerable to counterattack. In a battlefield innovation, the Russian side fielded the First Cavalry Army, formed in fall 1919 to counter the Cossacks. The leader of these Red Cossack equivalents was Semyon Budyonny, a tall, big-boned, and breathtaking horseman, holder of the St. George Medal for Bravery in the tsarist army, where he had been a sergeant major. Voroshilov served as the First Cavalry Army’s political commissar, meaning their higher patron was Stalin. They grew to 18,000 sabers—former Cossacks, partisans, bandits—and in their ranks could be found young commanders such as Georgy Zhukov (b. 1896) and Semyon Timoshenko (b. 1895). Trotsky, typically, was condescending: after visiting the cavalry force, the war commissar called it “a horde” with “an Ataman ringleader,” adding “where he leads his gang, they will go: for the Reds today, tomorrow for the Whites.”65 But Budyonny and his army, formed to counter the Whites’ devastating Cossack cavalry, had pushed Denikin’s forces into the sea at Novorossiysk in the southeast in February 1920. Their tactics combined supreme mobility with mass: they probed for enemy weak spots, then concentrated all forces upon that point to smash through and wreak havoc deep in the enemy rear, thereby forcing a panicked enemy retreat, which they savagely converted into a rout. To reach the southwestern front from Novorossiysk, the Red’s First Cavalry Army traveled westward more than 750 miles on horseback.66 In late May 1920, Polish intelligence, from an airplane, spotted the dust storm that the Red cavalry’s horses were kicking up en route.67
Before the Red cavalry swept across Ukraine, on April 29, 1920, Sergei Kamenev, Red supreme commander, had written to Lenin requesting that Mikhail Tukhachevsky be placed in overall charge of the army in the field for a Polish campaign.68 Tukhachevsky was not merely an aristocrat; he could trace his ancestry back to a twelfth-century noble clan of the Holy Roman Empire that had served the princes of Kievan Rus. His mother was a peasant. He was graduated first in his class at the Alexander Military School in 1914 and chose the Semenov Guards, one of the empire’s two oldest and most prestigious regiments, which were attached to the court. “He was a well-proportioned youth, rather presumptuous, feeling himself born for great things,” recalled a friend.69 Another classmate recalled that Tukhachevsky behaved despotically toward underclassmen and that “everyone tried to avoid him, being afraid.” (Three younger cadets he disciplined were said to have committed suicide.)70 During the Great War, Tukhachevsky fell captive to the Germans in June 1915, becoming one of 5,391 Russian officers held as POWs. Unlike General Lavr Kornilov, who quickly escaped, Tukhachevsky languished two and a half years in Ingoldstadt, a camp outside Munich (the same place de Gaulle had been interned). He made it back to Russia just days before the Bolshevik seizure of power, volunteered for the Red Army early, and even joined the party (April 1918).71 In summer 1918, White forces had captured him in Simbirsk but the young Bolshevik activist Jonava Vareikis rescued him.72 In fall 1918, Tukhachevsky smashed the Whites at Simbirsk (Lenin’s hometown), and in 1919 he triumphed in the Urals uplands, chasing Kolchak’s army into Siberia, where it would be annihilated.73 By the time he spoke at the General Staff Academy in December 1919, outlining a theory of “revolutionary war,” he was recognized as the top Red commander. In spring 1920 his star rose higher still when, as the commander of the Caucasus front, he helped smash Denikin’s army. Twenty-seven years old in 1920, the same age as his idol Napoleon during the fabled Italian campaign, he arrived at western front headquarters in Smolensk the week that Kiev had fallen to the Poles, and began to amass forces for a major strike to the northwest.
Another former tsarist officer, Alexander Yegorov (b. 1883)—a metalworker and lieutenant colonel who had taken over Tsaritsyn from Voroshilov and lost it, then lost Oryol to Denikin, but then initiated a spectacularly successf
ul counteroffensive—was named top commander of the southwestern front. This is where Stalin had recently been appointed commissar. The southwest’s responsibilities included mopping up Wrangel’s White remnants in Crimea, but also, now, assuming a secondary part of the counterattack against Poland. On June 3, 1920, Stalin telegrammed Lenin demanding either an immediate armistice with Wrangel or an all-out offensive to smash him quickly. Lenin wrote to Trotsky aghast (“This is obviously utopian”). Trotsky was affronted that Stalin had bypassed his authority as head of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic and gone to Lenin. “Possibly this was to make mischief,” Lenin admitted. “But the question must be discussed urgently.”74 No immediate decision was made on Wrangel. On June 5, in Ukraine, Budyonny’s cavalry ruptured Polish lines. “We have taken Kiev,” Trotsky gloated on June 12, adding that “the retreating Poles destroyed the passenger and freight rail stations, the electric station, the water mains, and the Vladimir Cathedral.” He advised publicizing these stories to exert international pressure on the Poles to stop destroying more infrastructure as they retreated.75 The advancing Reds, meanwhile, would loot and desecrate everything in their path: churches, shops, homes. “The universal calling card of a visit by Red soldiers,” one writer explained, “was shit—on furniture, on paintings, on beds, on carpets, in books, in drawers, on plates.”76
Stalin publicly expressed doubts about mission creep in the Polish campaign to a newspaper at southwestern front HQ in Kharkov on June 24, 1920. “Some of them are not satisfied with the successes on the Front and shout, ‘March on Warsaw,’” he observed, in words evidently aimed at Tukhachevsky. “Others are not satisfied with the defense of our republic against enemy attack, and proudly proclaim that they can make peace only with ‘a red Soviet Warsaw.’”77 But such doubts were lost in the euphoria spurred by battlefield successes. “Soldiers of the workers revolution!” Tukhachevsky stated in a directive issued at western front HQ in Smolensk (his hometown) on July 2, cosigned by western front commissars Ivar Smilga and Józef Unszlicht. “The time for payback has arrived. Our soldiers are going on the offensive across the entire front. . . . Those taking part smashed Kolchak, Denikin, and Yudenich. . . . Let the lands ruined by the Imperialist War testify to the revolution’s blood-reckoning with the old world and its servants. . . . In the West will be decided the fate of the world revolution. Across the corpse of White Poland lies the way to world conflagration. On our bayonets we will carry happiness and peace to laboring humankind. . . . To Vilna, Minsk, and Warsaw—march!”78
Eight days later, in the south, Budyonny, having completely rolled Polish forces back, occupied what had been Piłsudski’s field headquarters at the launching-off point of his Ukrainian campaign, the town of Rivne/Równe, and its richly symbolic Hotel Versailles.79 (Lenin liked to denounce Poland as the “bastard child” of Versailles.) The Red Army now stood upon the Bug River, the rough divide between mostly Polish-speaking territories and mostly Ukrainian-speaking ones.80 Even though Tukhachevsky had already called for a march on Warsaw, strategy remained undecided in the Red camp. Trotsky, Stalin, Dzierzynski, and Radek—just back from a year in a Berlin prison, and considered well informed on Polish affairs—argued that an offensive on Warsaw would never succeed unless the Polish working class rose in rebellion, a remote prospect.81 Stalin added, in a public warning in Pravda (July 11, 1920), that “it is laughable to talk about a ‘march on Warsaw’ and more broadly about the solidity of our successes while the Wrangel danger is not liquidated.”82 That very day, however, Minsk fell to forces directed by Tukhachevsky. Poland’s government again appealed to the Allies. The French government, still angry at Piłsudski’s recklessness, nonetheless suggested an anti-Bolshevik operation; the British government, on July 11, sent the Bolsheviks a note signed by Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon proposing an armistice on western territorial terms favorable to Soviet Russia, an armistice with Wrangel and a neutral zone in Crimea (Wrangel’s sanctuary), accompanied by a stern warning not to cross into “ethnographical” Polish territory. The note seemed to establish a Polish-Soviet boundary some fifty miles east of the Bug (essentially the 1797 border between Prussia and imperial Russia); it would become known as the Curzon Line.83 The Poles were taken aback: the British appeared to be giving away eastern territories the Poles viewed as their “historic” patrimony (whoever might be living there as of 1920).84 To Lenin, it looked like the British wanted, Gibraltar style, to annex the Crimean peninsula, pointing a dagger, like White Poland, at the Reds; on July 12–13, he urged “a frantic acceleration of the offensive against Poland.”85
Battlefield momentum helped fulfill Lenin’s wishes: the First Cavalry Army had already advanced into ethnic Polish lands. Isaac Babel (b. 1894), a city boy from Odessa attached to one of Budyonny’s divisions, kept a diary that he later used to write short stories collected in Red Cavalry, making poetry out of their savagery.86 Tukhachevsky’s parallel northerly advance was also led by horsemen, the Third Cavalry Corps, under Haik Bzhishkyan. Known as Gai Dmitrievich Gai (b. 1887), he had been born in Tabriz, Persia, the son of an Armenian father and Persian mother who had emigrated from the Caucasus but in 1901 had returned to Tiflis; Gai fought for Russia in the Great War. Although just half the size of the First Cavalry Army, on which it was modeled, and without a Babel to immortalize its exploits, Gai’s Third Cavalry Corps would manage to cover twice the ground at twice the speed of Budyonny’s sabers, and against the main Polish concentrations, whose lines they pierced repeatedly. Gai personally could not match Budyonny in horsemanship, but he did so in terror tactics and, what is more, he knew how to employ cavalry as a spearhead for infantry.87 (This would be the last significant reliance on cavalry in European history.) Impatiently, Lenin instructed foreign affairs commissar Georgy Chicherin, who was negotiating a treaty with Lithuanian nationalists (signed July 12), that “all these concessions are unimportant. . . . We must occupy and Sovietize. . . . We must ensure that we first Sovietize Lithuania and then give it back to the Lithuanians.”88 In fact, Gai chased the Poles from Wilno/Vilna, entering the city on July 14, ahead of the Lithuanian nationalists.89 The next day Gai received his second Order of the Red Banner.90
Sergei Kamenev, on July 14, advised war commissar Trotsky that whatever position the regime adopted toward the Curzon Note, with the Poles on the run, “it would be more desirable to enter peace negotiations without ceasing combat operations.”91 Two days later, the Central Committee assembled to discuss the Curzon Note, among other issues; Stalin, at southwestern front headquarters in Kharkov, was the only politburo member absent. Trotsky urged negotiations, arguing that the Red Army and the country were exhausted from war.92 But the majority followed Lenin in rejecting Entente mediation and continuing the military action.93 On July 17, Lenin telegraphed the two top frontline commissars, Stalin and Smilga (western front), crowing about his policy victory and instructing them, “Please expedite the order for a furiously ramped up offensive.”94 Already on July 19, Gai’s forces seized Grodno. Red Supreme Commander Sergei Kamenev arrived in Minsk, the new western front HQ, to survey the situation; around midnight on July 22–3, he directed Tukhachevsky that Warsaw be captured no later than August 12, 1920, a mere six weeks into the Red Army campaign.95
Lenin had ridden to power by denouncing the “imperialist” war. Had he accepted the Curzon Note as a basis for a peace settlement—whether of his own volition or, because the unthinkable happened and Trotsky and Stalin teamed up to impose their well-founded skepticism upon the politburo—then the Poles reluctantly would have been forced to accept the Curzon Note as well. This would have put Ukraine, most of Belarus, and Lithuania in Soviet hands. Instead, Lenin dreamed of igniting a pan-European revolutionary blaze. He rolled the iron dice.
LENIN’S FLIGHT OF FANCY
Moscow formed a “Polish Revolutionary Committee” on July 23 consisting of a handful of Polish Bolsheviks, including the Chekists Dzierzynski and Unszlicht. That same day, Stalin’s southwest
ern front redirected its forces from the Lublin-Warsaw salient farther south, toward Lwów/Lviv, Galicia’s eastern capital.96 Partly this was because the northern-salient offensive was going so well. In addition, Greater Romania, the power in southeastern Europe, whose forces had crushed the Hungarian Soviet republic, had occupied tsarist Bessarabia and clashed with Soviet troops; Stalin sought to deter Romanian forces.97 Trotsky, too, was worried Romania might go on the offensive now that the Red Army had crossed the Curzon Line. Occupying Lwów/Lviv, therefore, could secure the Soviet flank with Romania and furnish a base for the offensive military revolutionizing in Central Europe that Lenin sought. Lev Kamenev, negotiating with the British in London for recognition of the Soviet Union, had written to Lenin on the urgency of capturing Lwów/Lviv, because Curzon had acknowledged it as Russia’s and because it was a gateway to Hungary.98 On July 23, a giddy Lenin wrote to Stalin of a Sovietization thrust all the way to the Italian peninsula: “Zinoviev, Bukharin, and I, too, think that revolution in Italy should be spurred on immediately. . . Hungary should be Sovietized, and perhaps also the Czech lands and Romania.” Stalin, indulging Lenin, responded the next day from Kharkov that it would indeed be “sinful not to encourage revolution in Italy. . . . We need to lift anchor and get under way before imperialism manages little by little to fix its broken-down cart . . . and open its own decisive offensive.” Stalin also observed that Poland essentially was already “defeated.”99
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