And now the Poles remember the events of those years very selectively.
The Bolsheviks toward Poland were then more than loyal, controversial issues could be resolved at the negotiating table. They were thwarted by the Polish leader Józef Pilsudski, who had ambitious geopolitical plans and behaved in much the same way as the current president of Turkey.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan raves about the Ottoman Empire, Pilsudski tried to recreate the Commonwealth.
From a sore head to a healthy one
Poland emerged on the political map of the world immediately after the end of the First World War. The ease of gaining a state turned the heads of Pilsudski and other politicians. They immediately rushed to push the borders of Poland in all directions.
Territorial disputes arose among the Poles not only with the Germans, but also with Czechoslovakia - because of the Teshenskaya region, with Lithuania - because of the Vilna region, with the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR) - because of Lvov, Eastern Galicia, the Kholmsk region and Western Volyn. It is not surprising that in 1919 - 1920. Belarusians and Ukrainians, Czechs and Slovaks, Russians and Jews, Lithuanians and Latvians saw the Poles as aggressors, marauders and murderers.
Although Piłsudski unleashed the war with Russia, some Polish historians, such as a professor at the University of Torun. Nicolaus Copernicus Zbigniew Karpus, - in public speeches they call the Bolsheviks the aggressors, nodding that in August 1920 the Red Army reached Warsaw.
It has long been known that Poles have a peculiar logic and a strange memory. As the writer Stanislav Kunyaev aptly noted, "everything that is beneficial to them, they remember and repeat with manic persistence. But everything that they want to forget is forgotten instantly." Polish historians allegedly do not know that telling about the Soviet-Polish war from the battle at the walls of the Polish capital is like starting a story about the Great Patriotic War with the Battle of Kursk or Operation Bagration.
It all started with the fact that from November 1918 to March 1919, Moscow turned to Warsaw a dozen times to no avail with a proposal to establish normal interstate relations. Pilsudski regarded this as a sign of weakness.
In the spring of 1919, Polish troops armed by the Entente captured Kovel, Brest-Litovsk, Slonim, Pinsk and other Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian cities. The Red Army, which fought in the east of the country with the armies of Admiral Alexander Kolchak, and in the south with the troops of General Anton Denikin, had to fight with the Poles.
Everyone knew who started the Soviet-Polish war at that time, including the leaders of the Entente countries who publicly cursed the Bolsheviks. But they exchanged this knowledge among themselves behind the scenes.
On April 11, in a report to US President Woodrow Wilson, the US representative to the mission of the Entente states in Poland, Major General J. Kernan, admitted that "although in Poland all messages and conversations constantly talk about the aggression of the Bolsheviks, I could not notice anything of the kind. On the contrary., I noted with satisfaction that even minor skirmishes on the eastern borders of Poland testified rather to the aggressive actions of the Poles and the intention to occupy Russian lands as soon as possible and move as far as possible. organized Soviet armed forces."
All those who accuse the Bolsheviks of attacking Poland are falsifying history.
The words and deeds of the "peddlers" of Polish culture
As in our days, 100 years ago, Poles were convinced that they were more cultured and more civilized than their eastern neighbors. In this the Polish elite was united. Pilsudski's longtime rival, leader of the national democrats, Roman Dmowski, glorified the "civilizational potential of a great people" and viewed the Polish ethnic element in the Lithuanian, Belarusian and Ukrainian lands as "the dominant and only civilizational force capable of political organization."
Practice refuted high-flown words. On April 19, Polish troops broke into Vilna. Among the defenders of the city was a Pole Witold Kozerovsky, a member of the Military Field Tribunal of the Western Rifle Division. Wounded, he fell into the hands of the "peddlers" of Polish culture: "When I regained consciousness, I saw that one of the legionnaires was holding my wallet; having withdrawn money from it, he threw it under the frame of the stable. I was covered in blood, without boots and overcoat., the cotton jersey was torn, the cap disappeared somewhere. I groaned. One of the group of legionnaires standing next to me snapped the bolt and intended to finish me off, but he was prevented by a shout in Polish: "Don't bother, then commission" …
The legionnaires, all the guys under twenty, obeyed this advice, found a piece of barbed wire somewhere, twisted my arms back, tied me tightly with wire and, urging me on with blows of rifle butts, took me into the city. My condition was terrible."
Kozerovsky was still lucky: he was not shot at the time of his capture, he was not beaten to death in prison and did not starve to death on the way to the camp.
About what was happening in the Polish death camps in 1919 - 1922, I happened to write in the article "The Life and Death of the Red Army on the" Islands "of the Polish" GULAG ".
I will add that the Poles mocked not only the prisoners of war, but also the internees. The same Kozerovsky described the order that prevailed in the summer of 1919 in the Wadowice camp:
In total, there were over 8 thousand internees in this camp … The regime was generally dreadful. They were beaten around the clock. They beat for the slightest violation of the camp order, and since the rules of the camp life were not announced anywhere by the camp command, they were beaten and beaten under any pretext of imaginary violation of order and without any pretext …
The food was disgusting … Once a day they gave out a decoction of dried vegetables and a kilogram of bread for 8 people, and nothing else. For a huge number of internees there was only one kitchen and one toilet …
Women were raped, disabled people were beaten around the clock. Near the barracks, where the disabled were housed, the groans and cries of the tortured were heard. In the women's barracks, drunken orgies began at night. Drunken corporals and soldiers, drenched in vomit, sometimes left the women's barracks at night and started shooting, targeting the barracks of the disabled.
Women and children were taken outside and forced to sing and dance …
With such an order, nutrition and regime, it is not surprising that up to thirty people died every day."
The fact that the Poles were in no hurry to improve the situation in the camps was confirmed by Professor Madsen, a member of the League of Nations commission, who visited Wadowice more than a year later, in November 1920. Madsen called this camp "one of the scariest things he has seen in his life."
Since then, 96 years have passed. During this time, the Poles did not bother to perpetuate the memory of the Red Army soldiers and other immigrants from the territory of the former Russian Empire tortured in their camps. Now the Poles are destroying monuments to Soviet soldiers who liberated them from the Nazis and who won them the right to life, and also demand that a monument to Polish President Lech Kaczynski be erected in Russia. But he did harm to Russia wherever he could.
Suffice it to recall that on August 12, 2008, he flew to Tbilisi at the head of a detachment of friends of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and publicly accused Russia, which came to the aid of South Ossetia, of aggression. As political scientist Sergei Chernyakhovsky correctly noted, "Russia has no reason to preserve the memory of Kachinsky and honor its enemy." Monuments to Russia's enemies can only be erected by their accomplices or idiots.
How Wrangel dragged chestnuts out of the fire for Piłsudski
In works on the Civil War, Soviet historians placed Pilsudski among the general opponents of Soviet power. Meanwhile, he was not an ally of the Whites. In the same way, he was never an ally of the Reds. Therefore, we can agree with the biographer of Pilsudski, the Polish historian Wlodimierz Sulej, that the head of Poland "treated the two imperialist Russian forces in the same way, regardless of their color … The internal struggle between them did not matter to him as long as it did not threaten the interests of Poland."
It is significant that in October 1919 - at the climax of the confrontation between the Whites and the Reds - when the troops of General Nikolai Yudenich were on the outskirts of Petrograd, and Denikin's troops were rushing towards Tula, the Poles were inactive.
But they became more active at the beginning of 1920, when it became clear that the Bolsheviks would win the Civil War. On May 7, the Poles occupied Kiev, abandoned by the Reds, without a fight. In the capital of the "mother of Russian cities" a parade of Polish and Petliura troops took place.
The occupiers ruled in Kiev for a little more than a month. Leaving the city, the Polish "civilizers" put out of action the city sewerage system, power station, passenger and freight station of the railway.
The city of Borisov was also unlucky. At the end of May, Polish artillerymen fired at him with incendiary and chemical shells for two days. The city was almost completely destroyed, about five hundred civilians died, 10 thousand people were left homeless. The Soviet government announced this crime in a note dated June 2, 1920 to the governments of Great Britain, France, Italy and the United States. The "civilized West" reacted to it approximately in the same way as in 2014 it met Moscow's information about the shelling of the cities of the DPR and LPR by the troops of the Kiev junta.
The Reds drove the Poles to Warsaw. To stop the fleeing troops, Pilsudski used detachments, which neither the Poles themselves nor their associates in Russia and Ukraine never recall.
“When the Bolsheviks attacked Warsaw, there was nothing there, only the police remained. Even the mail and telegraph were taken out,” testified the Polish communist Vladislav Ulyanovsky in September 1920 at the IX conference of the RCP (b).
Italian Ambassador to Poland Francesco Tommasini recalled that the Reds approached the Vistula so much that "they were stopped only 7 km from the river separating the city from the Prague suburb. This event caused great excitement and a hasty departure of the diplomatic corps from the capital, which now entered the theater. military operations: cannon fire was clearly heard, the roads were overflowing with troops, carts filled with wounded passed by, loaded straight from the battlefield for delivery to hospitals."
And in this situation, the White Guards came to the aid of Pilsudski. On July 25, the troops of Pyotr Wrangel launched an offensive with the aim of crushing the grouping of Soviet troops in the Orekhov area and capturing Aleksandrovsk (now Zaporozhye) and Yekaterinoslav (now Dnepropetrovsk). On August 2, Aleksandrovsk was captured by White.
The stab in the back came as an unpleasant surprise for the armies of the Western and Southwestern fronts of the Reds who were storming Warsaw and Lvov. On August 19, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RPK (b) decided to recognize "the Wrangel front as the main one." It was then that the notorious "miracle on the Vistula" happened - the Poles defended Warsaw and went on the offensive.
It soon became clear that neither the Bolsheviks nor the Poles had the strength to continue the war. On October 12, the parties signed an armistice agreement and preconditions for peace.
In just a month, the Red Army defeated Wrangel's troops and forced them to leave the Crimea. The baron did not wait for help from Pilsudski, from which he could draw a conclusion that is relevant for us: it is impossible to indulge the Poles and even more so to drag "chestnuts out of the fire" for them under no circumstances …
