White Eagle, Red Star

White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War 1919-20 by Norman Davies, 278 pages

In the aftermath of the First World War, the Russian Empire fractured.  While the Bolsheviks consolidated their hold over the core territories, the Baltic States asserted their independence, and Poland became a sovereign nation again after a century of foreign domination.  As Norman Davies relates, this was not a simple, clean, or peaceful process.  With the Bolsheviks preoccupied with the Russian civil war, the Poles rushed forward to establish their eastern border near Minsk.  The Soviet response was conditioned not only by the border question, but by their dialectical fantasies of a general European revolution, which envisioned Poland as a stepping stone to Germany and the West.  In the end, the superior Soviet forces overextended themselves and were routed by a counterattack at the gates of Warsaw, and the whole episode concluded with a hasty peace which pleased neither government.

Writing in the early 1970s, Davies laments that the war is little known and poorly understood.  The Soviets were badly embarrassed by their defeat, and soothed their wounded pride by casting the bourgeois Allies as the actual belligerents.  However, as Davies chronicles, the British particularly gave the Poles little support, with David Lloyd George far more interested in building bridges with the Soviets than guaranteeing the future of the Polish state.  After the victory was won, the Western powers were glad to share in this view, with much of the credit accruing to the French general Maxime Weygand who was sent to Poland as an advisor and was credited as the architect of the Polish victory.  Yet Davies demonstrates that Weygand was treated with indifference and even contempt by the Poles and contributed little of value.  For the Poles those most responsible were Commander-in-Chief Pilsudski and God Almighty, and having dismissed the latter Davies gives the credit to the former.

As Davies demonstrates, despite the brief duration of the war and the compromise peace that ended it, the Polish-Soviet War had far-reaching consequences, especially in the area of Soviet foreign policy and the growing rivalry between Trotsky and Stalin.  For the Poles, of course, the war merely bought them a couple of decades before Nazi and Communist occupation.  For Davies, from his position in the early '70s, this seemed a small enough thing, but from a later perspective it is undoubtedly significant that Karol Wojtyla spent the first 19 years of his life in a free, Catholic Poland.