Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe by Adam Zamoyski
Harper Press, £14.99
IN 1920 a battle took place the outcome of which had a profound impact on European politics in the inter-war years. The Battle of Warsaw is also one of the biggest “what ifs” for students of 20th century European history.
Adam Zamoyski meticulously documents from a military perspective the battle between the Russian and Polish armies which eventually led to the end of the Russo-Polish War. He sets the scene by analysing the political and military conditions of the new Polish and Soviet states which emerged from the ashes of the Great War.
The revolutionary government in Russia was presiding over a country in turmoil. According to Zamoyski, the Bolsheviks’ solution was to despatch the Red Army across Russia’s western border into Europe: “To Lenin and his comrades the best way of ensuring its [communism’s] survival appeared to be to export the revolution to Germany.” Standing between Russia and Germany was Poland.
While Lenin did believe that circumstances in Poland were ripe for revolution, and it could serve as a staging post for exporting communism to Germany and the rest of Europe, Zamoyski fails to acknowledge that it was the Polish invasion of Soviet Ukraine in the spring of 1920 – with the intention of regaining territories which had previously been a part of Poland – which precipitated the Russian advance on Poland with the objective of realising Lenin’s dream.
The Red Army retook western Ukraine and, with the Russians at the gates of Warsaw in August 1920, it seemed that Poland was about to lose its newly-acquired independence. But in what is remembered as “the miracle on the Vistula” the Poles launched a counter-offensive which led to the retreat of Russian forces and represented a major development in the middle of Europe. Zamoyski writes: “Even if the Polish victory was soon cancelled out by what happened after 1939, the two decades of freedom from communism it bought for east central Europe provided much of that part of the continent with its first taste of some kind of democratic and civilised existence.”
Warsaw 1920 is a concise and intriguing account of a battle which helped convince Western policy-makers that Russian imperialism was alive and well in the new Soviet state. But by the end of the book the reader is imbued with one intriguing thought. Had the Red Army triumphed at Warsaw would communism, on the back of a Russian advance, have engulfed Germany and the rest of Western Europe? If so, then the history of Europe would be very different today.
Marcus Papadopoulos
