Along with the next anniversary of the Battle of Warsaw, a propaganda campaign takes place in which all the reactionary fantasies of official anti-communist historiography spread over the last 3 decades are repeated. To resist them, we need to understand the historical context of the Polish-Bolshevik war.
The Bolshevik Revolution was a result of World War I. This global conflict resulted from the intensifying competition between imperialist powers seeking a new division of the world. Before the outbreak of war, the Second International exhorted the workers to prevent the proletarians from letting themselves be used in a bourgeois war and to seize the opportunity of a revolutionary seizure of power in the event of an armed conflict. Social Democratic leaders opposed the war until it broke out, and when he conflict engulfed Europe, they backed their own national bourgeois classes and joined the militarist propaganda.
The current of the internationalist and anti-militarist left stood in opposition to the social-chauvinism of the leading circles of the Second International. This trend was represented, among others, by Russian Bolsheviks, German Spartacists and SDKPiL and PPS-Left in partitioned Poland. Internationalists declared „war on war” and, while pointing out that „the enemy is in their own country,” called for „transformation of the imperialist war into civil war”, ie to end the war by means of revolutionary seizure of power.
The revolutionary agitation paid off. In Russia, in March (February) 1917, a revolt by soldiers demanding an end to the war led to the fall of the tsarist regime. In the aftermath of the February Revolution, the bourgeois-landlord Provisional Government came to power and continued the imperialist policy of tsarism.
At the same time, competing organs of power were established – the Councils (Soviets) of Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Delegates. The Bolsheviks saw in the soviets the nucleus of the future dictatorship of the proletariat. Under the slogan „All power to the Soviets,” they called for a revolutionary seizure of power, while demanding land reform and peace without annexation (which meant not only the cessation of hostilities, but also the recognition of the right of the oppressed peoples of the Russian Empire to self-determination).
The Bolshevik example inspired revolutionists, in Germany (1918-1919), in Hungary and Slovakia (1919) and in Italy (1919-1920), among others. The workers formed councils and attempted a revolutionary seizure of power to which the bourgeoisie responded with bloody terror. The revolutionary ferment did not bypass the Polish lands.
The first Councils of Workers’ Delegates in Poland were established in the fall of 1918. The Lublin Council of Workers’ Delegates was established before Daszyński proclaimed himself Prime Minister and Piłsudski became the Chief of State. With the growth of the Soviet movement, the slogan of a nationwide Congress of Soviets began to enjoy more and more support among the proletariat. The Soviet movement collapsed in mid-1919 due to, on the one hand, the split and sectarian reformist activity of the PPS, which gained a majority in the councils, and on the other, repression by the bourgeois state, which was aimed at ending the dangerous situation of dual power.
Parallel to its counter-revolutionary domestic politics, bourgeois-landlord Poland pursued a counter-revolutionary and avantursit policy towards Soviet Russia. At the beginning of 1919, Piłsudski’s troops captured Brest, Kovel, Lutsk, Rivne, Vilnius, Minsk, reached Berezyna and Dzwina in the north-east, and Żytomierz in the south-east. In the territories occupied by Poles, the army and the military police took the land from the peasants and returned it to the landowners. In pursuing the imperialist policy of eastern expansion, the Polish ruling classes ignored the Soviet peace proposals and sought to escalate the conflict with the first workers state.
The culmination of this agressive policy was Piłsudski’s invasion of Ukraine in April 1920, which forced the Bolsheviks into organizing a military offensive. In the conditions of suppressing the revolutionary movement in Poland and the defensive war of Soviet Russia, the Polish revolution had to be a function of the military victories of the Red Army. And since capitalist Poland became the vanguard of Entente imperialism, the war with Poland had to become an element of the world revolution.
And we must remember that the Polish-Bolshevik war was rightly perceived as one of the fronts of the world revolution. The Entente states, which, as a result of their victory in World War I, became the main imperialist bloc and which made military intervention in the Russian civil war, supported the Polish government militarily. At the same time, workers, e.g. in Great Britain, Germany or Austria, refused to transport weapons intended for Piłsudski’s troops.
Did this mean that the Poles were to be laid on the altar of the revolution, that the war was an attempt by Soviet Russia at „Fourth Partition”? No, the Bolsheviks, and especially Lenin, consistently stood for the right of nations to self-determination, up to and including separation (a right respected in practice, e.g. by recognizing the independence of Finland in December 1917). In the first years of the USSR, the communists under the so-called korenizatsiya policy supported the cultural development of national minorities, even going so far as to create alphabets for previously unwritten languages. It was only with the victory of Stalinism that there was a return to the tsarist policy of Russification and national oppression. Stalinization was not, however, inevitable.
At the same time, Piłsudski’s victory near Warsaw did not secure Poland’s independence, but only delayed its loss. In the period after World War I, two camps emerged in the world – that of socialist revolution and that of bourgeois counterrevolution. There was no third way. Either the dictatorship of the proletariat, ie, proletarian democracy based on the power of the armed working masses, or the rule of the bourgeoisie based on reactionary terror. Any opposition to the dictatorship of the proletariat of pure, classless „democracy” meant capitulation to a bourgeois counterrevolution. The alternative „socialism or fascism” hung over the entire interwar period. For the bourgeois-landowner Poland, this alternative was an insoluble contradiction – the interests of the world reaction required the vassalisation of Poland under German fascism, while at the same time it was impossible to fight fascism without fighting capitalism. This is the historical and social background of the „September defeat”.
The bourgeois propagandists are right about one thing – the Battle of Warsaw was an event of world-historical importance.
Trotsky once stated that if the Bolsheviks lost the Russian Civil War, fascism would be a Russian word. If the Bolsheviks had won battle of Warsaw in 1920, this word would have never arrive in our dictionaries.
If Piłsudski had not saved „Western culture” from „Bolshevik barbarism”, Hitler’s stormtroopers would not have been able to burn books and resurrect the medieval ghetto institution (also as a part of „defense of culture” against „(Judeo-) Bolshevik threat”). Piłsuidski’s saber did not cut the Gordian knot of capitalism’s contradictions. It was inevitable, therefore, that competition between the bourgeoisie of different countries would intensify and the oppression of the proletariat would increase – hence war and fascism.
At the same time, in the Soviet republic, the collapse of the world revolution contributed to the triumph of the bureaucratic political counterrevolution. During the civil war, the low level of Russia’s productive forces and the hostile imperialist encirclement forced the Soviet authorities to use administrative-military coercion and to establish unequal relations of division. The spread of revolution to the developed capitalist countries would make it possible to ease this policy. After the defeat of the international revolution, the layer of the party-state bureaucracy, using the methods of administrative-military coercion, secured unequal relations of division that favored it by suppressing Soviet and intra-party democracy. This political counter-revolution was led by the Stalin clique.
The defeat of the international revolution ultimately resulted, on the one hand, in the triumph of capitalist reaction in the West (fascism), and on the other – in the bureaucratic counter-revolution in the East (Stalinism), which had bloody ramifications for the fate of the communist movement in the 20th century.
The defeat in Warsaw cannot be equated with the collapse of the post-war revolutionary wave. The outcome of one armed skirmish does not prejudge the fate of entire social formations. There are, however, historical moments that significantly shift the tide of victory to one of the struggling social classes. August 15, 1920 was just such a moment. The revolutionary wave collapsed then, but the struggle for socialism did not stop. The war against capitalist barbarism and for a better socialist tomorrow continues.
Translation of a modified version of an article originally published on 1917.net.pl. Published with the consent of the author.
VOLLHANDFRÜHLING 