Hi, I'm the History Guy. I have a degree in history,
and I love history, and if you love history too, this is the channel for you.
The First and Second World War were the most devastating wars in world history. They were
so devastating in fact, that they tend to overshadow all other events in the world
at the time. But of course, the World Wars didn't occur in a historical vacuum, and you
cannot possibly understand the context of those wars, if you don't know what else was going on
in the world at the time. It might surprise some people to find out that one of the most decisive,
and potentially one of the most historically important battles in Europe in the first half
of the 20th century, occurred not during one of the World Wars but in between them,
in a conflict that is nearly forgotten, because it is so overshadowed by those massive Wars. In 1920,
newly Bolshevik Russia, still in the throes of the Russian Civil War, went to war with a
surprisingly resurgent Poland. And that conflict, and the central battle that defined the conflict,
changed the course of world history, and it deserves to be remembered.
Over the course of the 18th century the once powerful Polish State, then known as
the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, had come to be dominated by its more powerful neighbors, Prussia,
Austria, and Russia. In a series of partitions, the lands of the Commonwealth were claimed by
those powers, until the final partition in 1795 eliminated the Polish State entirely.
In the hopes of preventing a nationalistic uprising, the three powers went so far as
to attempt to destroy any historical reference to Poland as having ever existed as a nation.
But the people of Poland did not forget, and continued uprisings ensured that what became
known as, the Polish Question, remained a subject of interest in Europe for the next 123 years. An
opportunity arose, when the events of the First World War resulted in the surprising collapse,
and retrenchment of all three great powers that had once partitioned Poland.
The Polish state was officially reconstituted, June 28th of 1919,
by agreement of the representatives of the victorious Allies of the First World War,
in what was called the little Treaty of Versailles. But the newly reconstituted
Second Polish Republic almost immediately found itself in conflict with its neighbors over its
borders. And the most significant of those conflicts was the war with Bolshevik Russia.
Marxist revolutionaries had overthrown Czarist Imperial Russia in two revolutions in 1917,
immediately sparking a civil war between multiple factions trying to control the future of Russia.
One Marxist fashion called the Bolsheviks, meaning literally, one of the majority,
under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, had taken control of the central government, and had created
its own army called the Red Army. Central to Lenin's thinking was the idea that all of Europe
was on the verge of a workers' revolution, and it was the responsibility of the Bolsheviks,
and their Red Army, to facilitate that revolution; at the point of a bayonet if necessary.
In 1919, the leadership of Poland decided that they wanted to push their borders as far east
as possible, hoping to bond with other central Eastern European countries in a
federation that could resist any resurgence of Russian, or Prussian, Imperialism. But,
still in the throes of the Russian Civil War, Vladimir Lenin wanted the Red Army to push West,
seeing Poland as a necessary bridge to cross in order to bring Workers
Revolution to the rest of Europe. By 1920, these competing ambitions resulted in war.
The war was initially fought over territory in the Ukraine and Belarus, as both armies rushed
to fill the vacuum left by the withdrawal of German troops. Initially the Polish army
was successful driving East, but they suffered a major setback when Russian cavalry broke through
the Polish lines, during a Russian counter attack in 1920. The Polish front quickly collapsed, and
their army was in retreat, with major elements at risk of being cut off and annihilated. By August,
with the Polish army in disarray and massive Russian armies bearing down on the capital of
Warsaw, international observers were predicting the total defeat of Poland was imminent. The
Poles were fighting for their very existence, and the Bolsheviks saw the offensive as their
singular opportunity. Their propaganda argued that the shortest route to Berlin and Paris was
through Warsaw, and Lenin believed that defeating Poland would spark a worldwide revolution. With
24 army divisions at his command, and believing the Polish army to be on the brink of collapse,
the Russian commander Mikhail Tukhachevsky, planned to encircle Warsaw and attack from the
northwest. With their retreat becoming more organized as their supply lines shortened,
the Polish army, under Polish President Jozef Pilsudski, formulated a risky plan to regroup for
defence, while creating a reserve for a counter attack that, hoping to exploit a weak spot that
Polish intelligence suspected existed between the Russian Western and southwestern fronts. As this
would have their armies regrouping close to the front, if they missed timed the Russian attack,
their front could collapse in chaos. Russian success on the first day of the battle
compelled most foreign diplomats to leave Warsaw, expecting Polish defeat. But on the second day,
Polish forces to the north, supported by Poland's few armored cars and tanks, were able to push back
Russian forces, and disrupt their attack. And the counter-attack in the south succeeded beyond
all expectations, finding the suspected weak spot between Russian forces and exploiting it,
cutting out whole army groups. With communications disrupted, the Russian forces lost cohesion,
and eventually collapsed into a rout. On the verge of what they thought was victory,
they collapsed. Tens of thousands were captured, thousands of others escaped into East Prussia
where they weren't interned by the Germans, some 125,000 Russian troops were killed,
wounded or captured; Polish losses were less than a third of that.
By October both armies were exhausted and sued for peace, and the Treaty of Riga in
1921 divided the disputed territories, and put an end to the war. Both sides claimed
victory. Poland had defended their territory and guaranteed the existence of their nation,
but Russia claimed victory for having driven Poland out of the Ukraine, and spun the war
as a defense of their revolution from foreign aggressors. There were many impacts of this war,
most directly on the people who were directly affected by the new borders, but the broadest
historical impact might have been on Lenin's goal of exporting the Bolshevik Revolution, because had
the Russians won the Battle of Warsaw, that would have put the Red Army on the borders of Germany,
Hungary, and Romania during critical points in those nations history, in the unsettled period
following the First World War. Essentially, the Russian defeat at the Battle of Warsaw forestalled
Soviet goals of exporting their revolution, for a generation. But how important is that
really? Because in 1939, Poland was overrun by the combined forces of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia,
and ended the war under Soviet domination. But in a broader sense, had Russia taken Warsaw in 1920,
then Eastern might have fallen under Soviet sway more than two decades ahead of when they
really did. And not only that, but that revolution might have spread much further, through Germany,
or France, or even Great Britain. And if that have happened, might that have prevented the
rise of Nazi Germany and prevented the Second World War, or might it have sparked a broader
conflict in Europe, more than two decades before it actually occurred. The entire history of the
continent would have been different, had the Russians won a battle that everyone expected
them to win. On that battle turned the course of history, and it deserves to be remembered.
I'm the History Guy, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of my series, 5 minutes of history,
short snippets of forgotten history, 5 to 10 minutes long. If you did enjoy it, please go
ahead and click that thumbs up button which is there on the left. If you have
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