Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe - Adam Zamoyski

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of crushing the Bolsheviks by force, now declared that Russia would be saved by commerce, affirming that ‘the moment trade is established with Russia, communism will go’. Sensing an opportunity, Lenin launched a peace offensive, suggesting negotiations with all parties and offering Poland generous terms. Neither Lloyd George nor the French premier Georges Clemenceau had any intention of making peace with Bolshevik Russia, which they viewed as a dangerous example and a possible source of contagion for the working classes of their own countries. But having failed to destroy the Bolsheviks by military means, they were hoping to contain them. They therefore urged Poland and other states neighbouring Russia to take up the offer. As a result, Poland and Russia entered into official negotiations.7

      Neither side was in good faith. While the Poles were being publicly urged by Lloyd George and Clemenceau to make peace, they were receiving conflicting messages from other members of the British government and from the French general staff. When Clemenceau resigned, to be replaced by Alexandre Millerand in January 1920, the signals reaching Poland from France were unmistakably warlike. Albeit a socialist himself, Millerand saw his priority as stamping out the strikes paralysing France, and imposing order. This suited Pilsudski, who continued to consolidate his own military position. On 3 January he captured the city of Dunaburg (Daugavpils) from the Russians and handed it over to Latvia, whose government was decidedly anti-Bolshevik and pro-Polish, thereby cutting Lithuania off from Russia. He carried out a number of other operations aimed at strengthening the Polish front, and delayed the peace talks by suggesting venues unacceptable to the Russians.

      Lenin was not interested in peace either. He mistrusted the Entente, which he believed to be dedicated to the destruction of the Bolshevik regime in Russia. He saw Pilsudski as their tool, and was determined to ‘do him in’ sooner or later. He feared a Polish advance into Ukraine, where nationalist forces threatened Bolshevik rule, and was convinced the Poles were contemplating a march on Moscow. Russia was isolated and the Bolsheviks’ grip on power fragile. At the same time, the best way of mobilizing support was war, which might also allow Russia to break out of isolation and could yield some political dividends.

      Germany beckoned. The terms of the Treaty of Versailles, signed the previous summer, added humiliation to the already rich mix of discontent affecting German society, and even the most right-wing would have welcomed a chance of overturning the settlement imposed by it. The appearance of a Red Army on its borders would be viewed by many there as providential.

      In the final months of 1919 Lenin increased the number of divisions facing Poland from five to twenty, and in January 1920 the Red Army staff’s chief of operations Boris Shaposhnikov produced his plan for an attack on Poland, scheduled provisionally for April. This was accepted by the Politburo on 27 January, although the Commissar for War Lev Davidovich Trotsky and the Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgii Chicherin warned against launching an unprovoked offensive. Accordingly, Chicherin publicly renewed his offer of peace to Poland the following day. Two weeks later, on 14 February, Lenin took the final decision to attack Poland, and five days after that the Western Front command was created.8

      2

      Playing Soldiers

      A precondition of the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 had been the destruction of the Imperial Russian Army, which they achieved by systematically undermining every aspect of military service. The first step had been to incite mutiny. They followed this up by encouraging the wholesale murder of officers, by persuading the peasant conscripts to desert and go back to their villages (to ‘vote with their feet’, in Lenin’s famous phrase), and by getting trusted Bolsheviks elected to take command of the remaining troops. Not surprisingly, their attempts to create a new army once they had taken control were hampered by their success in destroying the old one.

      As the forces of counter-revolution gathered against them, all the new rulers of Russia could count on were some regular Latvian rifle brigades left over from the Imperial Army and a collection of self-styled Red Guards and detachments of Bolshevik sailors. This motley force combined idealists with criminal elements, professional soldiers with mutineers, students with workers, and Russians with every nationality of the former Russian empire. The overall commander was a former Ensign of the Imperial Army, Nikolai Krylenko.

      Desperate measures were called for, and in March 1918 Lev Davidovich Trotsky was appointed Commissar for War to implement them. Trotsky, the epitome of the fastidious intellectual, had no military experience whatsoever, but he was a good organizer. He was also pragmatic. Just as industry needed engineers, he argued, an army needed professional soldiers. He replaced Krylenko with Colonel Ioakim Vatsetis, a Latvian career officer of the Imperial Army, abolished elective command, set up an officers’ training school, reintroduced call-up and reasserted the notion of discipline.

      While Trotsky did not bring back the old hierarchy of ranks, he introduced a new one, based on the command currently held, abbreviated in the Soviet manner: the commander-in-chief (Glav-nii Komandir) was titled GlavKom, while commanders of army groups, divisions and brigades were, respectively, KomandArm, KomDiv and KomBrig, and the man in charge of the SouthWestern Front assumed the less than mellifluous title of KomYug-ZapFront (KoMY3apPpoHT).

      Brushing aside ideological reservations, Trotsky sought out former Tsarist officers, whom he re-designated from the status of ‘enemies of the people’ to that of ‘specialists’. He would reinstate 48,409 of them in field commands and a further 10,339 in administrative posts over the next two years, with the result that by the spring of 1920 over 80 per cent of the Red Army’s cadres would be former Tsarist officers.1

      This presented a number of problems. Elected commanders who had been demoted to make way for the ‘specialists’ often took the first opportunity to shoot them in the back. At the same time, many of the ‘specialists’ proved psychologically incapable of commanding mistrustful, undisciplined troops and adapting to the exigencies of ideological civil war. Others simply looked for the first opportunity to take themselves, and sometimes their units, over to the Whites.

      Trotsky resolved these problems by giving each officer a guardian angel in the shape of a political commissar, both to protect him from his troops and to keep him in line. A twin hierarchy of these political officers, beginning with Trotsky himself, who stood behind the commander-in-chief, shadowed every single officer right down to the level of company commander. But while this provided an effective check on unreliable officers and gave the Commissar for War a measure of control over the armies in the field, it did impede military efficiency. It furnished limitless grounds for friction between officers, who resented the implied mistrust and the meddling in military matters, and the commissars, who saw themselves as the effective commanders and sniffed treason everywhere. It was largely thanks to Trotsky’s frequent personal intervention that the system worked at all, and with time, even quite smoothly.2

      Just as challenging for Trotsky was the question of how to recreate the necessary esprit de corps and sense of loyalty which the Bolsheviks had so successfully undermined in the former army. His solution was to disband all existing units and feed the men piecemeal into new formations, each of which contained a communist cell loyal to the party, a hard core of committed men who, unlike the conscripted peasants, who were apt to melt away into the countryside, were impervious to the ups and downs of war. The system worked less well in the cavalry: this was largely made up of Cossacks, whose sense of allegiance was volatile at the best of times, with the result that entire units did change sides with astonishing frequency.

      For much of 1918 and 1919 Trotsky lived in his armoured train, continually on the move between one front and another, meting out cigarettes, encouragement and threats. In the event, his army proved more resilient and more adaptable in the difficult conditions of the Civil War than the more traditionally structured White armies, which it saw off one by one. But it was about to face a more difficult test, in the Polish army.

      Unlike the Red Army, the Polish army was born of tradition. Not the tradition nurtured by most European armies, but one forged in the noble yeomanries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, enriched by the struggles for freedom of the late eighteenth, the Napoleonic wars and the nineteenth-century insurrections. Many Poles had been obliged to fight in the armies of the three

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