2
War and Revolution / Society and Ethnicity / Expansion and Intervention / Red Nations and White Nations/ Patriotic Wars / Borders and Minorities / Hungary and Rumania / Greeks in Odessa /Poles and Soviets /Stalin and Tukhachevsky/ Germany and Russia / Revision and the Status Quo / Hitler’s Wars / Poland’s Frontiers / Germany’s Unity
From the war had sprung revolution, and not just the Russian insurgency. The Great War was the progenitor of all those rebellions that followed Red October. In 1919, Central Europe looked as if it were hurtling toward radical transformation. In Berlin, the Spartacus League staged an uprising. In Vienna, all signs pointed to storm. In Bavaria, the Munich Soviet Republic was proclaimed.Bolsheviks were in power in Hungary. They were able to open a path for the Russian Revolution straight to the center of Europe. The prevailing anxieties and conjured-up prognoses suggested it was only a question of time until the Red Army was at the gates.1
No revolution without a world war.2 After decades of dormancy, the idea of radical change had reawakened. Because of the previous calm, the reawakening was quite unexpected. Since the quashing of the Paris Commune in 1871, revolution had withdrawn from Europe’s urban centers. Encircled by social reformism in the West, it had disappeared from the strategic arsenals of the workers’ movement. Social democracy had duly distanced itself from revolution. The homage it paid at the altar of high socialist principle was, to be sure, all the more profuse, a ritual performed in the shadows of historical-philosophical discourse. But all speculation to the contrary, revolution did not spring from any societal telos. Its return in 1917 was triggered more by the imponderabilities of the war than the afflictions of oppression.3 Insurgency erupted where military defeat loomed or decrees handed down by the victorious powers at the Paris peace conference were perceived as draconian. In this situation, the Russian Revolution played a unique role.4 It preceded the postwar arrangements and had a lasting impact on them. Red October broke into the war as a result of Russia’s military and social exhaustion in face of the Central Powers, themselves to be vanquished by the Allies. In the eastern theater, the Central Powers manifestly maintained the upper hand until the European conflagration’s end. The trophy of this superiority was the enormous amount of territory ceded to Germany by czarist Russia—actually the defeated front of the Allied coalition. The March 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk reflected the actual power relations on the eastern battlefields. Even the revolutionary government had to accept its stipulations.5
Along with exhaustion, despair, and social deprivation, the nature of the war’s conduct on the eastern front hastened the uprising. Compared with the relentless corset of trench warfare in the West, combatants in the eastern theater were far less restricted. Moreover, the closeness of the front brought troops into the capital. The dissatisfaction and despair of the troops, who were being repeatedly thrown into battle, soon turned against their own regime. The February revolution, a mutiny by peasants in uniform,6 had already been sparked by the insurgency of the Petrograd garrison. And the Bolshevist October Revolution would have been hard to imagine without Russia’s epidemic of war weariness and demoralization, spreading in the wake of an offensive in July that had soon turned into a catastrophic rout.7
After the October Revolution, the Allies and associated powers were guided by the exigencies of war in their approach to their former ally Russia. Their motive for intervention was less the revolution and more the fear that Russia would withdraw from the war. Such an eventuality, it was recognized, would have dramatic repercussions.8 The elimination of the eastern front could only be a boon to Germany, which was exhausting itself in a two-front war.9 The Allied and associated powers were under pressure. It had become clear that the Bolshevik government would be neither able nor willing to prevent German troops from advancing across territories they already occupied, to the east and southeast of the Russian land mass. Great Britain in particular saw the approaches to its Asian and Indian possessions threatened by a potential German thrust.10 Also, rapprochement between Germany and Russia would have brought the release and return of war prisoners, replenishing the ranks of the Central Powers. A final concern was preventing German access to the stores of weapons and munitions that had been shipped to Russia to supply Allied units.11 Even before the October Revolution, steps had been taken to strengthen the wobbly Russian front by bringing in troop reinforcements from the Entente powers. After Russia’s de facto removal from the war and the voicing of fears that the Germans would now have free access to the inexhaustible natural resources of Siberia, the Allied War Council also asked Japan to send troops to Russian territory.12
The early Allied intervention in Russia was clearly part of the overall effort to defeat the Central Powers. The political aim of overthrowing the Soviet power was secondary to military concerns. Initially, overtures had even been made to the new regime with the aim of maintaining the wartime coalition. However, the Bolshevik government was not favorably disposed toward the Allies.13 Thus already in November 1917, the Bolsheviks released documents concerning secret agreements between Russia’s former allies and the czarist regime to divide up territory after a victory.14 Moreover, the revolutionary government made no bones about its desire to carry the revolution to Asia in a struggle against imperialism.15 Yet no matter how radical the Bolshevik pronouncements, the Allies’ main concern was Germany. In the top political echelons of the Entente, the mood oscillated between hope and anxiety: hope that the new Russian regime would eventually resume the military struggle against the Central Powers; anxiety that it might even ally itself with Germany.16
The intervening Allies only turned to containing or combating the revolution after victory over the Central Powers had been assured. The intervention itself had very mixed consequences. As a foreign intervention on behalf of the counterrevolutionary Whites, it bolstered the Bolsheviks’ claim to be the true trustees of the nation, elevating them to the rank of a patriotic party. The national question in the civil war provided further paradoxes. The representatives of old Russia not only were bent on restoring the ancien régime; they also wished to reestablish the shattered territorial unity of the czarist empire. They here clashed with those peoples that had left the empire as a result of the German policy of dismemberment and the onset of the 1917 revolution.17 In this way, civil war, intervention, and national quarrels had coalesced into an impenetrable muddle. These events unfolded in the broad cultural-geographic border area stretching from the Baltic Sea to eastern Poland and White Russia and beyond to the Ukraine and the Black Sea. A similar fusion of civil war and national uprising was taking place in the Caucasus and the Central Asian parts of the former empire.18
The October Revolution was thus not so much a social revolutionary uprising as the outcome of an endless and debilitating power struggle. It was the expression of military and social exhaustion; above all, it was the outcome of Russia’s weakness in face of the Central Powers. The situation was similar to the revolutionary uprisings that soon broke out in the territory of the former Central Powers.They too were a reaction to war and defeat.19
In view of the previous constellation of allies and adversaries, the situation evolving in the crisis period 1918–19 had a paradoxical tenor. Together with Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and, to a limited extent, the Italian kingdom, Russia belonged to the losing side in the Great War. For all their differences, these countries shared a common problem: war, defeat, postwar developments, and the imminent results of the peace deliberations in Paris produced revolutionary shock waves.20 In Germany and Austria (more specifically Vienna), events took on an unmistakable social-revolutionary cast, appropriating the language of class warfare. In Hungary, the events emerging from defeat and decisions taken at the Paris peace conference were of a more complex nature. Although at first glance social-revolutionary, the Hungarian Soviet Republic’s basic impetus was in reality highly nation centered. The chief concern in Budapest was prophylactic: to forestall a massive loss of territory and population by activating revolutionary energies. On the other hand, the new Turkey emerging under Kemal Pasha was steered by obvious national revolutionary and anti-imperialist principles. In Italy, nationalistic expectations for expansion had been thwarted by the results in Paris. This led to the notorious vittoria mutilata, tied to an outbreak of social-revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence.
These various situations in which military defeat combined with hunger blockades, social misery, territorial losses, and national humiliations were crucial for both the social rebellions and the ensuing counterrevolutionary reactions. The internal confrontations in West Central Europe reflected a sharp social divide, class against class. As one moved further east, conflicts took on a more national tint. Political discourse underwent a veritable conversion, from class conflict to national struggle. A distinct arc of conflict emerged from this general meshing of military defeat, social revolution, and national battles on the frontier. It spanned Central and East Central Europe, from the Baltic to northern Italy and the Adriatic. In a conspicuous manner, it overlapped with the cultural-geographical area previously under the control of dynastic supranational empires.
The nation-states that succeeded the collapsing empires looked to a troubled future. Fledgling in their independence, they were mired in bloody border battles without and festering conflicts between nationalities within. The polities born from the breakup of the multinational empires were not intent on becoming civic states in the Western model, nor was their territory particularly homogenous in ethnic terms. The region’s titular nations in any case diverged from its ethnic minorities. These nations had emerged from the world war with indeterminate borders and provisional governments.21
A central objective of the Paris peace conference was to regulate the complex processes involved in the formation of new nation-states. The conference’s foremost task was demarcating borders and determining the area comprised by restored, expanded, and new states such as Poland, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia. This highly problematic mission assumed by the Great War’s victors was all the more weighed down by events unfolding in these same areas during the course of the Paris negotiations.22
The factors shaping the territorial decisions taken at the conference were not just theoretical. The original intention of the Allies had been to base resolutions on the principle of self determination and the potential economic viability of the new states. But due to swiftly changing circumstances, the deliberations, unfolding over some eighteen months, often left no choice but ratifying faits accomplis on the ground. The Allies looked on with apprehension as the complex process of territorial reconfiguration was compounded by revolutionary uprisings and civil wars. This ferment interacted with the procedures for determining territorial borders,since the Allies often favored those nations hoping to partake of neighbors weakened by revolutionary upheaval.23
The front lines in an emerging universal civil war would thus have far-reaching consequences for the territorial makeup of the new nation-states in Central and East Central Europe. German Austria, for example, was able not only to forestall revolutionary trouble at home but also to exploit the calamities of neighboring Hungary for the benefit of its territorial ambitions in Burgen land.24 In Germany, revolutionary activity was massively repressed by the provisional government of the Council of People’s Deputies, in part because of the threat generated by the territorial questions raised in Paris. The government was in any case not prepared to encourage France’s exorbitant demands on the Reich by tolerating the revolutionary unrest inside Germany. At the same time, by pointing to the Bolshevik danger at its doorstep, the provisional government could hope for greater leniency from the victorious powers. Hence by playing up the dangers emanating from a sovietized Russia,the German negotiators at the armistice talks in the forest near Compiègne managed to postpone the imminent demobilization of the German armies in the East.25 Article 12 of the armistice agreement of 11 November 1918 contained a corresponding proviso. From a historical perspective, it can be considered an early building block in an evolving strategy, pursued primarily by the French, of erecting a cordon sanitaire as a bulwark against Bolshevik Russia.
The ambitious food-supply operations for starving populations carried out by Allied relief organizations, especially the American Relief Organization headed by Herbert Hoover, were also meant to forestall a spread of desperation encouraging revolutionary activity.26 In the spring of 1919, Otto Bauer, the eminent Socialist state secretary in German Austria’s foreign office, rejected an appeal for aid from the Hungarian Soviet government, indicating that Austria, and especially Vienna, was totally dependent on American aid. Lenin in turn made a—tactically transparent— offer to the German Council of People’s Deputies: the Soviets would send trains loaded with wheat to Berlin for its hungry population.
In general, one pattern was quite conspicuous in the peace conference’s territorial decisions: states that seemed about to slide into Bolshevism could expect disadvantages, while governments acting along counterrevolutionary lines could anticipate territorial gains.27 Given this fact, it is hardly surprising that the territorial conflicts shifted into interstate civil wars between “white” and “red” nations. The territorial conflict between Soviet Hungary and its enemies Rumania, Czechoslovakia, and Serbia revealed just such a shift, and a similar situation crystallized in the Baltic between 1918 and 1920. The circumstances that led to the 1919–20 Polish-Soviet war were analogous.
Germany and Russia had not been invited to officially participate in the Paris deliberations, although their presence hovered over the negotiations table. The shadow of the excluded, of Russia and Prussia as the Anglo-Americans liked to call them, was constantly present.28 The negotiators hoped that by means of territorial arrangements in the area between Germany and Russia— Zwischeneuropa—they could prevent a possible blending of Soviet inspired social-revolutionary tendencies and a German appetite for revenge and revision. The most extreme and frightening scenario was the spread of Bolshevism to Germany.29 The Council of People’s Deputies took on the task of nipping such an eventuality, with all its internal and external repercussions, in the bud. It did so not just to please the powers assembled in Paris, but very much for its own reasons. Friedrich Ebert was well known for abhorring revolution. And in 1918–19, Ebert’s so-called Majority Socialists had the results of Russia’s Red October right before their eyes. They had no intention of letting anything even remotely similar come to pass in Germany.30
French policy was aimed at weakening Germany over the long term while effectively containing the Soviet Russian regime, if not abetting its overthrow. For different reasons, both Germany and Russia had become outcasts; any ties between them were to be prevented. The arsenal of resolutions incorporated to this end in the Versailles Treaty included a prohibition of the annexation of German Austria by Germany and other, quite well-known resolutions regarding territorial boundaries, security policy, and the economy. And in another turn of the screw, possible Hapsburg inclinations as well as Hungarian revisionist intentions were frustrated in East Central Europe by the security system of the Little Entente, which comprised Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Rumania and was promoted by the French.31
Parallel with its efforts to establish a barrière de l’est, France overtaxed its abilities and resources in the Russian Civil War in its bid to support the counterrevolutionary Whites. In December 1917, England and France had already agreed on their separate zones of intervention, though they had not yet taken action in the field. France was assigned Bessarabia, the Ukraine, and the Crimea; England was still entangled in the lingering Transcaucasian hostilities. But at the end of the year, after the armistice in the East and especially after the German-Soviet “dictated peace” of Brest-Litovsk, the intervention could finally be launched. The combat-weary Armée d’Orient, commanded by General Franchet d’Esperey and stationed in Salonika, was charged with a costly and exhausting intervention effort in the northern area of the Black Sea and southern Russia.32 The effort far exceeded the moral and material resources of the French polity itself, heavily drained and exhausted by the war. It is thus no surprise that the intervention policy soon foundered. After a series of military humiliations, as well as a mutiny among the French troops, the Allied commanders in southern Russia felt obliged to change course, opting now for precisely the less-direct strategy of the cordon sanitaire. Two pillars supported this approach to containing Soviet Russia: Rumania and Poland, the “Thermopylae of Western civilization,” as an article in the French press put it in the spring of 1919.33
The merger of the two above-described objectives, the power political encirclement of Germany and the counterrevolutionary containment of Soviet Russia, itself an undertaking of Napoleonic dimensions, produced a blend composed of traditional forms of power and elements of ideologically motivated civil war. The climax of the blending process took place on 21 March 1919, when the Hungarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed in the very heart of Central Europe. This event coincided with France’s decision to break off its intervention in southern Russia.34 The proclamation of the republic involved a highly distinctive conversion of national into social semantics. Indeed, the events in Budapest had paradigmatic importance for the fusion of nation and revolution. They alarmed the Allies; France, in particular, saw a challenge to its role of securing order in the Balkans. All sorts of danger to the structure of French stability in Central Europe could emerge from Hungary. A glance at the map was enough to understand what calamities a regime like the Hungarian Soviet Republic, located in such a strategic position, could produce if unchecked. Hungary appeared fully capable of forming that feared revolutionary access route from Soviet Russia to Central Europe. Moreover, the new regime represented a highly volatile mixture of social revolutionary and national motives. This augured ill for the stability desired by the Allies.
The Hungarian Soviet Republic drew its strength from this mixture. Yet its prospects looked extremely bleak. Without support from the outside, namely, from Soviet Russia, and without a revolutionizing of the immediate region, the republic was doomed, above all because the internal support it was offered simply provoked counterrevolutionary intervention from the outside. The temptation of further radicalization also contributed to the revolutionary regime’s downfall. Over time, ever-larger segments of the population felt alienated from it, eventually falling into the open arms of the Hungarian counterrevolution, entrenched in Rumanian-occupied territory. Also, the creation of the revolutionary regime in Budapest furnished Hungary’s neighbors Rumania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, states that in any case had ambitions on Hungarian territory, with handy arguments. France, present throughout the region through the military missions of the Armée du Danube, encouraged these states to intervene. It appeared as though an international rape of Hungary was in the offing.35
The intervention by Hungary’s neighbors was driven less by counterrevolutionary motives than by territorial greediness.36 The latter blended well with the French policy of counterrevolutionary intervention and a securing of Central and East Central Europe through a cordon sanitaire—a policy that went far beyond the intervention in Hungary. France wished to exploit the national aspirations of the new and expanding states for its own needs. In this respect, it is important to note that the Allied intervention in the southern Russian Civil War had not been an exclusively French affair. The interventionist forces included contingents from other states pursuing their national agendas. The most significant of these was Greece, which provided a large troop contingent to reinforce the White volunteer army under Denikin.37 Greece had entered the Great War at a late point and had suffered relatively minor losses. The Allies believed it had to earn the right to its territorial claims. In return for participation by Greek troops, French prime minister Clemenceau, chairman of the peace conference, promised his Greek counterpart Venizelos that France would support Greek territorial demands in eastern Thrace and might take a favorable view of extensive Greek claims on Smyrna.38
Such a problematic tradeoff was nothing unusual, especially since it was accompanied by expectations in keeping with the nineteenth century’s irredentist nationalisms. Mythicized images of history pointed the way. The new and expanded states emerging from World War I had expansive dreams—of a Greater Greece, a Greater Rumania, a Greater Poland. The participation of Greek troops in the Allied intervention in the northern area of the Black Sea should be interpreted in the framework of a nineteenth-century idea of nation-building, an interpretation in fact widespread in Greek historiography.39 The participation of Greek troops in the Allied intervention in southern Russia was thus seen as analogous to the role played by Piedmont-Sardinia’s troops in the Crimean War. At that time, Cavour had hoped that by fighting alongside England and France, he could gain the support of these powers for Italian unificatory aspirations.
The presence of Greek troops as part of an interventionist force in southern Russia and the Ukraine was consequently motivated by national concerns. Moreover, the motives were not based exclusively on the agreement haggled out between Clemenceau and Venizelos. Rather, Greek involvement was also motivated by a desire to protect the interests of the ethnic Greek population in southern Russia. There were Greek communities all along the Black Sea coast—at the Pontus, in the Caucasus, Crimea, and the Ukraine. The southern Russian-Ukrainian city of Odessa had a sizable Greek community that had played a key role in the “invention” of a Greek national consciousness at the beginning of the nineteenth century. There had been Greek colonies in the area long before Catherine II, and these had been significantly expanded during her reign, which saw the founding of Odessa on the ruins of a Tartar village. In the course of World War I and the subsequent civil war, the Greek population swelled as a result of a massive flight of ethnic Greeks from the Caucasus. The Greek population in the Pontus region was also affected by the war’s calamities. The Pontus Greeks were tempted to establish their own state in agreement with the local Armenian population—or to join an expanded Greece.40 With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Russian revolutionary upheaval, it seemed possible to realize such Greater Hellenic aspirations, the Megali Idea of the restoration of a new Greek nation-state with Constantinople at its center, Byzantium redux. In their struggle against godless Bolshevism, Greeks also contributed to the defense of the imperiled Greek Orthodox Church while standing by Holy Russia, a nation with which the Greeks,all intra-Orthodox squabbling notwithstanding, felt a close inner bond. Consequently, the idea of the Greek intervention in Russia’s civil war being spurred by strong national motives is far less odd than it might first appear. The dedication with which Greek troops carried out their duties for the Allied interventionist force itself seems a clear sign of such motives.41
In contrast, the French troops displayed little enthusiasm for the enterprise. One reason for this was that the French contingent was composed largely of colonial troops from Algeria and Senegal. The North and West Africans were disinclined to subject themselves to decimation in a military venture with all the marks of a colonial intervention and in an area beset by a hostile climate and a galloping flu epidemic. Another factor was their battle-weariness. After the armistice, these troops had hoped for demobilization and discharge from service. Instead the Paris government had dispatched them to a civil war far from home, a war whose end was nowhere in sight. The eminently imperialist character of the entire enterprise was not lost on these soldiers and sailors, who had been heavily politicized by war and revolution. Aside from intervening on behalf of the Whites, Clemenceau was intent on gaining compensation for French credits to czarist Russia, now lost in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, by winning access to the rich resources of southern Russia. The landing there of the interventionary forces was carried out with one eye on the coal-rich Donets Basin and the opulent breadbasket of the Ukraine.42
From the start, the French contingent’s reluctance hampered the operation; ultimately, the reluctance led to the operation’s termination. In general it stood under an unfavorable star. The indigenous Russian-Ukrainian population had little love for Denikin’s volunteer army. There was constant friction with the Frenchled intervention troops. Military defeats, such as that at Kherson, were not long in coming, which led to a further decline in morale among the ranks. Mutinies flared, and there was repeated insubordination among the French troops. In Sevastopol, some French soldiers even declared their solidarity with rebellious workers.43 Greek troops, reputed to be especially reliable, were called in to suppress the rebellion. But the French commanders treated their Greek counterparts with marked disdain, keeping the Greek commanders in the dark about decisive events and confronting them with faits accomplis.44 Acting on its own, the French expeditionary leadership decided to scrap the whole undertaking and prepared to withdraw; given the sorry state of the French forces, the move seemed prudent. Yet for the local Russian-Greek population, the withdrawal of the Allied forces from Odessa and Sevastopol spelled potential disaster, including the loss of its ancestral homeland in southern Russia.45 The French saw the pullback as a mere logistical operation. But the indigenous Greeks feared that the Ukrainian population would equate them with the hated Hellenic soldiers. In panic, they swarmed onto the quays, clamoring to be transported away by the Allies—a scene that was a dark prelude to the Greek mass tragedy in Asia Minor in 1922. After their withdrawal from southern Russia in the spring of 1919, the Greek troops were transported to Bessarabia, and then shipped in July to Smyrna, embarking for the Hellenic adventure in Anatolia.
With the end of the French intervention in southern Russia, the policy of direct involvement in the civil war between Whites and Reds came to a close. Instead, smoldering and flaring territorial conflicts between the new and expanding states in Central and East Central Europe would be supported by the Allies, with the aim of containing any revolutionary peril. The participation of Greeks and smaller national contingents of Poles and Rumanians in the southern Russian effort had already revealed this tendency to exploit the national aspirations of other states. The same can be said for the crossing of the Transylvanian line of demarcation by Rumanian troops; the Hungarian-Rumanian war it provoked contributed to the downfall of the Bolshevik regime of Béla Kun in Budapest. The presence of Rumanian troops in Budapest from August to November 1919 brought an end to one stage in the universal civil war. At the same time, it resolved the territorial conflict between Hungary and its neighbors, with Hungarian losses being ratified by the peace treaty of Trianon (1920). For Bucharest, World War I ended with the realization of its ambitions regarding Transylvania. The Rumanians were jubilant in their final victory over the Hungarian archenemy.46
In his military foray into Hungarian territory, the Rumanian prime minister Bratianu was only tangentially interested in overthrowing the Bolshevist regime in Hungary. The Rumanians viewed the conflict with the Bolshevists for what it really was, namely, a national and territorial conflict. Nevertheless the anti Bolshevist rhetoric proved useful. For the Rumanians wished to justify their actions in the eyes of the peace conference in Paris, their aim being to realize the territorial claims laid down in the secret wartime agreement of Bucharest in 1916. In the face of a Bolshevist Hungary, their claims to Transylvania were easier to push through—just as Bessarabia had been wrested from a Soviet Russia now labeled an outlaw state.47
The events that led to the founding of the Hungarian Soviet Republic themselves raise doubts as to whether the revolution of 21 March 1919 had actually been driven by social-revolutionary motives. Immediately after the new state was declared, there was talk everywhere that its emergence reflected no real revolution but rather a national-Bolshevist, national-revolutionary, indeed straightforwardly nationalist venture, its purpose being to wrest concessions from the Allies in the troublesome question of territorial claims. This image of a national rebellion in revolutionary guise seemed to impress others as well. Mussolini, for instance, believed the March events in Budapest represented a linkage of nationalism with socialism worthy of imitation.48 Likewise, representatives of the American Coolidge mission on hand in Budapest repeatedly noted in their reports that the territorial question was an insult to Hungarian national pride: despite all the revolutionary rhetoric, they indicated, the revolution was in fact a national rebellion against the imminent territorial dismemberment of Hungary.49 There was no question of any Bolshevist sentiment among the populace, nor even of any socialist sentiment. In reality, things were quite simple. Hungary had been one of the Central Powers. Its neighbors derived certain advantages from their status as wartime associates of the Allies. Denied the role of keepers of the counterrevolutionary grail, the Hungarians were left with only one option: reversing the usual approach in East Central Europe and embracing Bolshevism. A conservative Hungarian newspaper expressed it as follows: in order to present a credible threat to the powers convening in Paris, Hungary had no choice but to set fire to its own house.50
Budapest in fact experienced no social-revolutionary upheaval. Rather, power was simply handed to Béla Kun and his Bolshevik followers. The Hungarian government under the liberal prime minister (and later president) Mihály Károly had come under massive pressure.51 The representative of the French military mission in Budapest, Lieutenant Colonel Fernand Vix, had issued an ultimatum in the name of the Paris peace conference: Hungary had thirty-six hours to withdraw far behind the line of demarcation laid down in the Belgrade military convention in order to permit Rumanian troops to move into the evacuated zone.52 The Allied order appeared to have authorized the Rumanians to advance their troops into Hungarian territory, which would necessarily have prejudiced any final territorial decision. In any case, the ultimatum made it clear to the Hungarians that they had little to expect from a future final resolution in Paris; huge losses of territory and population were imminent. Also, the economic unity of the country had been shattered. Important agricultural regions were in danger of being lost but above all those areas that constituted the industrial backbone of the Hungarian economy. There could be no compensation for the loss of the coal mines, already a reality.53 The resulting energy deficit led to a surge in unemployment, exacerbated by punctual demobilizations. The continuing blockade by the Allies could only lead to catastrophe. In short, the national question, made pressing by the looming territorial dismemberment of Hungary, mutated into a social question as the economy spun out of control. The main stratum behind the national resistance was thus the hard-hit working class.
Otto Bauer dubbed the constellation that emerged in Hungary a “dictatorship of desperation.”54 Initially, there had been no effort to install a Communist regime, Károlyi’s plan being rather to form a government made up solely of Social Democrats in order to mobilize sister parties in the Western nations to oppose a Carthaginian peace against Hungary. The Communists were to be given the task of supporting the government from outside, with one eye toward Soviet Russia. But events soon took their own course. The Social Democrats decided to join the Communists in a new socialist party. Communist leaders were released from prison, where they had been in detention since February on charges of incitement to rebellion. And instead of orienting itself toward the West, the new Hungarian Soviet government turned to the Russian Bolsheviks and the October Revolution.55
The readiness of the peace conference to give Rumania a green light to march into Hungarian territory crystallized in anticipation of the decision to evacuate Odessa and to hand over all supplies, armaments, and equipment provided for the Whites in southern Russia to the Rumanians—this to help them stabilize the Dniester front.56 Wilson and Lloyd George, who otherwise had misgivings about the French policy of intervention, also came out in favor of strengthening the “Rumanian fortress” against Bolshevism.57 And Rumania made itself ready to realize its territorial claims in Hungary by overthrowing its Soviet government. This decision was all the easier since the French scheme of a barrière de l’est and a cordon sanitaire foresaw no role for Hungary. It was not difficult to hand Hungary over to nationally motivated dismemberment by its neighbors.58
The fact that Hungary let itself be bullied this way was not simply the result of France’s grand design for Central European politics. The problems lay deeper, in the country’s ethnic diversity and an unresolved agrarian question. With the military collapse in 1918, a problem that had long plagued the Hungarian half of the Hapsburg monarchy became even more apparent: Hungary’s substantial ethnic diversity was fundamentally incompatible with the more modern, unitary territoriality of a nation-state. Traditionally, Hungary had been a confederation of the lands under St. Stephan’s crown, dominated by Magyar magnates, a nation ruled by nobility whose Magyarization policies could only provoke the nationalism of other ethnic groups.59
For decades, this notorious combination of a dominant agrarian aristocracy with festering issues of nationality had hampered every effort to reform and modernize the country’s institutions.60 This was the case for both problems of political legitimacy and land reform. Ultimately, Hungary’s social admixture stood in the way of every demand for the introduction of universal suffrage.61 It was thus no surprise that the non-Magyar ethnic groups— Slovaks, Croats, Rumanians, to name only the most important— wished for a way out of Hungary. Also, they came under the gravitational pull of the new nationally minded neighbor states. Indeed, the staggering territorial losses that Hungary had to cope with after the war, as laid out in the Vix ultimatum and ratified at Trianon, were largely due to the country’s explosive mix of unresolved agrarian and multiethnic questions. But even Hungary’s dismemberment was no solution to the accumulated problems. The losses placed an enormous number of ethnic Hungarians— Magyars—outside the new borders. Overnight they found themselves in foreign states. Quite apart from the territorial exactions of its neighbors, Hungary thus faced a difficult question: what form of Hungary did it wish to be?
In view of the country’s multinational makeup, the Soviet government in Budapest proposed a federative approach, both national and internationalist. The approach was national in that it preserved the territorial integrity and economic unity of the ancient crown lands and sought to defend its borders in a patriotic war.62 The Hungarian Soviet government could be sure of popular support, especially from the army, which had promptly transformed itself into a revolutionary army for these patriotic reasons.63 The fact that most of the officers in the Hungarian Red Army came from areas forcibly occupied by neighboring states strengthened its the patriotic mood.64 And the approach was international insofar as the government’s proposed solution to the nationalities problem was to promote a de-Magyarization of Hungary, with autonomous institutions and self-government for the non-Hungarian segments of the population.65 With such often contradictory promises, it hoped to persuade these non Hungarians to remain within the Hungarian state. A blueprint for a potential revolutionary Danube federation encompassing a number of states beyond Hungary proper was meant to neutralize the country’s nationalities question. In any case, a federation would preserve economic unity, the chief concern of the workers in the spring of 1919.
Béla Kun’s popularity thus rested largely on his commitment to preserve Hungary’s territorial unity; his constituencies were not at all annoyed by a defense of Hungarian integrity against the “Entente imperialists” through the use of slogans of class struggle and universal civil war.66 At the same time, the Hungarian Communists were increasingly disliked because of the harsh measures they took against the counterrevolution at home. The position of the Commissariat of the Interior, for example, seemed bizarre: it retaliated against the actions of the Rumanians, labeled as counterrevolutionary Whites, by punishing Hungary’s own political reactionaries, as though what was unfolding were class warfare proper.67 The upshot of this Red terror was a desire on the part of the aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie for both its quick termination and the imminent arrival of the “counterrevolutionary” Rumanians; even the middle classes viewed the approaching foreign troops as saviors.
At the beginning of August 1919, the experiment of the Hungarian Soviet Republic came to an end. The 133 days of Béla Kun were over. The Hungarian Bolsheviks and members of the left-wing segment of the Social Democrats fled across the frontier, most into nearby Austria. Some one hundred thousand refugees crossed the border, which proved a wise decision. After the withdrawal of the Rumanians, the White Hungarian exile government—headed by prime minister Pál Teleki von Szék and with the former commanding admiral of the Austro-Hungarian navy, Miklós Horthy, as war minister—unleashed a wave of terror whose excesses dwarfed the horrors of the Red regime. The anti Semitism surfacing in this new cataclysm was notorious.68
From its outset, the Hungarian revolution, as a national “anti imperialist” revolt against the policies of the Entente, had no real prospect of preserving the country’s territorial integrity. The reasons for this were manifold: its excessive social radicalization; Béla Kun’s error in mistaking the nationalistically motivated support of the population for a pro-Communist attitude; the revolution’s international and regional isolation. The plan to link up strategically with the Russian Red Army, thus realizing a threat initially meant to deter the draconian conditions set by the peace conference, had failed. This projected pathway of revolution into Central Europe had been, in the end, the only serious pressure the Kun government could exert to preserve Hungary’s territorial integrity.69
The plan had been based on false calculations—more on wishful thinking than on reality. Károlyi had been informed by his military advisers Aurel Stromfeld and Jenö Tombar that the Red Army was less than 250 kilometers from the Carpathian Mountains. They suggested it would be a few weeks at the most before the army broke through the Rumanian lines and reached the Hungarian frontier.70 This assessment was based on an error that would be cleared up only slowly. The forces referred to by Stromfeld and Tombar were in fact the Red Ukrainian army. At the time Béla Kun took power, it was involved in fighting the Ukrainian Whites under Semyon Petlyura, in a far more distant region than Budapest assumed. For its part, the Red Ukrainian army under Antonov-Ovseyenko—basically a partisan force little inclined to deployment beyond homeland borders71—faced a clash with powerful Polish forces concentrated around L’vov.
Budapest could not expect any help from the Russian Bolsheviks, whose hands were tied. This involved dramatic events in a theater of the Russian Civil War further to the east. After the Allied loss of Odessa in April, the Whites under Denikin had been able to advance to Kharkov in the eastern Ukraine. At stake were the indispensable Donets Basin and the Danube region.72 To win this strategically decisive battle, the Soviet high command had dispatched all available troops to this front, including the Ukrainians now integrated into the Red Army. In so doing, the Soviets left open their western front. Polish units moved into the breach, taking control of the strategic railway line between Budapest and Kiev. That decided the fate of the sole remaining connection between the Russian and the Hungarian revolution. It was sealed by the so-called White Poles under Marshall Pilsudski and Denikin’s White troops.73
The decision by the Russian Bolsheviks to give priority to the struggle against Denikin and thus to the civil war at home was a crucial factor in the isolation and downfall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. A similar constellation emerged in August 1920 as the Polish-Soviet war was reaching its climax. Here Moscow gave priority to the fight against the Whites under Wrangel in southern Russia over support for Tukhachevsky’s advance on Warsaw. At that point at the latest, it became clear that the revolution in Russia was geared mainly to Russian concerns. Aspirations for world revolution, if a consideration at all, were clearly secondary.
In the cases of both Hungary and Poland, the Bolshevik decision to favor the needs of the Russian Civil War over a world revolutionary effort may have been guided by a wish to avoid excessively challenging the Entente and the Allies. An attempt to forge links with the Hungarian Soviet Republic would have prompted an Allied intervention going well beyond involvement of the republic’s neighboring states. The Russian and Hungarian revolutions thus had different fates. In historical perspective, there is symbolic resonance in the fact that the Red Army’s August 1919 offensive against Denikin in the Ukraine coincided with the end of Béla Kun’s rule in Budapest.
Rumania was one pillar of the “Thermopylae of Western civilization.” The other pillar was Poland. The Bolshevik revolution’s wave broke over Poland, in a war that, despite all its world revolutionary pathos, had all the features of a national conflict. Viscount d’Abernon, British ambassador in Berlin and head of the Anglo-French military mission dispatched to Warsaw, would judge the Polish-Soviet war of 1920 to be one of the most fateful battles in world history.74 However this now largely forgotten war is ultimately assessed, its consequences were substantial.75 It can be understood superficially as having led to a regulation of borders between Poland and Soviet Russia, the March 1921 Peace of Riga. It can be understood less superficially as having spelled the end of the Russian Revolution’s world-revolutionary orientation.
Boundary arrangements are more than just a few lines on a map. They are the expression of deeper changes, in this case the transformation of the Russian Revolution into the Soviet state. To constitute a state means distinguishing between internal and external—a distinction that could be ignored in the earlier revolutionary élan. Following the Polish-Soviet war, the Soviets were in any case forced to accommodate their world-revolutionary leanings to accepted modes of diplomacy, an accommodation leading inevitably to a step-by-step decline in importance for the world revolution’s central command, the Comintern. The contours of Soviet state power emerged with corresponding sharpness. Particularly striking is the concentration of basic Soviet policy decisions in the period following the war’s end. One good example is Trotsky’s brutal suppression of the March 1921 sailors’ mutiny at Kronstadt—a decision made in a quasi-civil war, demonstrating statehood on an interior level. The New Economic Policy, marking the end of wartime Communism, was introduced right after the mutiny’s suppression.76 By 1922, the Soviet Union’s founding process—a process initiated as a “turn to socialism in one country” in the aftermath of the Polish-Russian war77—had finally been formally completed.
For Soviet foreign policy and its formation, the end of the war in Poland was of constitutive importance.78 Along with the trade agreements signed with England and Germany in the spring of 1921—overtures to the West—relations with the Weimar Republic were given special weight.79 Despite all the ideological differences between Germany and Russia, the two outcasts of the Paris peace conference, there was a distinctive geopolitical convergence between the two states, something like a continuation of the “negative Poland policy” long pursued by Prussia and Russia.80 The rapprochement between Germany and Moscow was in fact anchored in the Polish question. Already apparent in the 1922 Treaty of Rapallo, the rapprochement was furthered in the 1926 Berlin Treaty—a confirmation of German-Soviet cooperation even after Germany’s entry into the League of Nations. Then in 1939 the Hitler-Stalin pact extinguished Poland as a state.81
The 1920 Polish-Soviet war strengthened the Polish national identity developed over the course of the nineteenth century to the same extent that it determined Poland’s territorial perimeters as set down in Riga in March 1921.82 To a certain extent, that war can be viewed as a belated Polish war of independence against imperial Russia. It was characterized by a remarkable fusion of nationalistically colored traditional antagonisms with an ideological war of values that had begun in 1917. Correspondingly, the war has been interpreted in markedly different ways. From the Polish perspective, the war was mainly a successful defensive war against the traditional Russian enemy, who once again had designs on Warsaw—this time decked out in red. On the one hand, for Poles the “miracle on the Vistula” took on a downright metaphysical significance. It seemed as if the national telos of Polish history had finally been realized. The August 1920 assault on Warsaw by the Russian Revolutionary general Mikhail Tukhachevsky reawakened all the Polish memories of partition and nineteenth-century uprisings brutally suppressed by czarist Russia. On the other hand, for the Bolsheviks the war was mainly a defensive struggle against a second front, opened up by White Poles, in the counterrevolutionary wars of intervention imposed on them by the imperialist Entente and its allies.83
Both interpretations of the event are accurate; but both situations were more complicated than either interpretation suggests. While the Poles, in their national exuberance, had almost lost sight of the interventionist character of their military move, the Soviets sought to reinforce the pathos of class with the pathos of nation. In defending themselves against an intervention by the White Poles that stemmed ostensibly from the imperialist machinations by the Entente, the Soviets proclaimed a war on behalf of Mother Russia. Such a war was endowed with an intense iconic significance derived from its connection with earlier great patriotic events: the Polish occupation of Moscow in 1610, the Napoleonic invasion in 1812, the outbreak of World War I in 1914.84 In the context of a semantics of civil war and interventionist aggression, couched in terms of class struggle, recourse to such patriotically calibrated discourse was a novelty.But this shift of political semantics can be explained by the historical significance of Poland in Russian memory. The fact that the Polish “lords” had once more attacked the Russian motherland had astonishing consequences. Thousands of former czarist officers rushed to defend the red flag. Deserters from the Red Army flocked to reenlist. Aleksei Brusilov, whose name was indelibly associated with the Great War’s only successful Russian offensive, called on his compatriots to defend the homeland.85
In the battle cry “war against the Polish panowie,” homage was being paid to an early form of Soviet patriotism, marked by a fusion of the categories of class and nation. The slogan articulated the traditional animosity of White Russian and Ukrainian peasants in the eastern borderlands toward their mainly Polish landowning masters.86 In a period of a power vacuum, the latter group had coalesced into a Committee for the Defense of the Frontier, meant to preserve both Polish-national and class interests. Throughout the borderlands, there was a striking merger of social, ethnic, and cultural affiliations. Poles thus preferably executed Bolshevik commissars; Soviets liquidated Roman Catholic priests.87
At the same time that Soviet slogans centered on class struggle were taking on a national coloring, internal differences among the Bolsheviks were becoming increasingly apparent. There was a tension between two Soviet fronts in the Polish war: the western front under Mikhail Tukhachevsky and the southwestern front under Alexander Yegorov. As a member of the war council of the southwestern front, Stalin was subordinate to Yegorov. In his thrust to the west and Warsaw, Tukhachevsky seemed to be pursuing thoroughly independent world-revolutionary goals of his own.88 Stalin, on the other hand, gave priority to fighting the Whites under Wrangel in southern Russia, and thus to Russia’s civil war, over any export of the revolution to the West. An internal Soviet conflict thus emerged within the war between “aristocratic” Poland and “patriotic” Soviet Russia, a conflict between the principles of world revolution and “socialism in one country” that seemingly decided a favorable outcome for Poland in advance.
In any case, the Polish war also had profound effects on Poland. At the end of the Great War, the nature of the future Polish state had still been open to question. There was no clarity regarding its territorial perimeters or ethnic composition. Its population included not only Polish Catholics, but also Ukrainians, White Russians, Jews, Lithuanians, and Germans. The territorial yardstick for the new state was the federal monarchic Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth and its successor body politic dismembered by partition in the last third of the eighteenth century.89 To this extent, Poland saw itself as a restored rather than new nation. The tension between a past-focused vision of a Polish commonwealth controlling substantial territory and the changed social circumstances of the present produced structural discrepancies hardly amenable to political solution. When it came to ethnic and religious coexistence, what may have functioned in a premodern, corporate state and social order generated enormous tensions in the context of modern principles of popular sovereignty and democratic participation.90 During the entire interwar period, the nominally Polish yet factually multiethnic Second Republic suffered from insoluble minority problems; more than a third of all Polish citizens were not ethnic Poles.91 These problems were in turn the expression of an unresolved political identity, wavering between a unitarian nation-state and a state defined by its various nationalities.
So which Poland would it be? There were two competing conceptions. The Polish National Democrats under Roman Dmovski espoused a central state that would seek to Polonize the non-ethnic Poles. This position was challenged by the Second Republic’s founder, Józef Pilsudski, whose goal was the creation of a federated multiethnic state of the Polish nation. One aim of such a federated structure would have been to incorporate both the Jagiellonian empire’s medieval–early modern borders and the non-Polish ethnic populations living within them. This visionary federation under Polish leadership was ultimately to encompass the entire area from Finland to the Black Sea, including at least Lithuania, White Russia, and the western Ukraine. Such a concept was based on an institutionally or culturally based notion of Polish statehood, rather than one that was ethnically constituted; its realization would have made it possible to integrate populations in the eastern borderlands that defined themselves primarily in term of language and religion rather than nation. In the end, such a notion was more imperial than national in its aspirations. To be sure, the two opposing concepts in the Polish-Soviet war were likewise imperially oriented: on the one hand, a Polish concept, itself harking back to early modern configurations, that sought to subsume different ethnic populations beneath an aegis of Polish national hegemony; on the other hand, an imperial Russian concept that had been further universalized by way of proletarian internationalism.
The territorial arrangement made at the end of the Polish Soviet war extended the Polish frontiers far beyond the “ethnographic border,” known as the Curzon Line, that had been proposed by the Allies.92 The result of the arrangement was a territorially overextended Polish national state that had no interest in a federal structure. Rather, the new Polish state was bent on Polonizing its non-Polish ethnic groups.93 Moreover, the extension of Poland’s boundaries beyond its ethnic frontiers meant that identical ethnic populations lived on both sides of the new borders: in the East, Ukrainians, White Russians, and Lithuanians; in the West, Germans. In the context of ongoing state centralization and Polonization of the population, Poland’s problematic ethnic composition was bound to place a double burden on the Second Republic: an unresolved minorities problem within, a festering border question without. As a result of the questions of borders and minorities, Poland’s relations with its neighbor states were extremely difficult; effectively this meant a political isolation of the restored Polish Republic in Central and East Central Europe.94 Its relations with Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, and the German Reich were strained. Despite the Riga treaty, Polish-Soviet relations themselves would be overshadowed by contentions when Warsaw responded to the Soviet Union’s entry into the League of Nations in 1934 by renouncing its obligations for minority protection. The intent was to thwart the possibility of Soviet intervention in Geneva on behalf of the Ukrainians and White Russians living in Poland.95
The personality of head of state Pilsudski has significance for understanding the dilemma of Poland as a restored nation. His biography reads like a narrative of the distillation of Polish national self-understanding from a broad imperial substrate. Józef Pilsudski was born in 1867 in the environs of Vilna, at the time a city largely inhabited by Poles and Jews. His background was the Polish-Lithuanian minor nobility.96 In the czar’s autocratic empire, hebecame involved in revolutionary activity and was banned to Siberia. In 1892, he helped found the Polish Socialist Party. His brother Bronislav, likewise an active revolutionary, was implicated in an attempt on the life of Alexander III, the same assassination plot that cost Lenin’s brother his life. Felix Dzerzhinsky, a revolutionary and Bolshevik, and like Pilsudski from a minor noble background, attended the same school in Vilna, though a decade later.97 In contrast to Pilsudski, who would foreswear revolution and embrace Polish nationalism, Dzerzhinsky remained attached to imperial conceptions, even if in an internationalist, Bolshevik form. In World War I, Pilsudski commanded the “Polish legions” he had formed within the Austro-Hungarian army.98 From December 1917 onward, Dzerzhinsky headed the Cheka, the Bolshevik “extraordinary commission,” or secret political police, he had helped establish and that was known as the party’s “sword and shield.”99
The 1920 Polish-Soviet war was a war of national separation and imperial co-optation. The military confrontation meant a renegotiation of who belonged to the Polish nation and who did not. Historical residue reemerged everywhere. Even the Polish contingents on the battlefield reflected the history of partition, with Prussian, Russian, and Austrian traditions colliding. Polish units that had fought on the side of the victorious Entente in the Great War refused to obey Poles who had sided with the defeated Central Powers. Many soldiers were still uncertain about their ethnic affiliation. For example, Russian Ulans were among the units under Polish general Zeligovsky, who had fought in the civil war on the side of the intervention forces under French command and against the Ukrainian Reds near Odessa. Likewise, Polish riflemen could be found in the ranks on the Soviet western front.100
Social and ethnic markers of national belonging were reconfigured not only on the battlefield but also in Warsaw. There were doubts about whether certain professional groups in the working class, such as the trade union members among the weavers and the metalworkers, actually belonged to the Polish nation. In July 1920 entire working-class neighborhoods were temporarily cordoned off. Also, the war between national Poland and imperial Russia exacerbated relations between ethnic Poles and Polish Jews, which had become increasingly tense since the 1880s. Doubts were raised about whether Polish Jews belonged to the Polish nation. They were suspected of espousing the tradition of the supranational empire. Representatives of the Jewish workers’ movement were taken into custody, Jewish soldiers were sent back from the front, and Jewish nurses were removed from field hospitals. A sizable number of Polish Jews were imprisoned—interned, rather tellingly, in a camp originally meant for Soviet POWs.101
Poland constituted itself as a “white” nation in face of its “red” military adversary, the Russian empire. This was to have dramatic consequences for the Polish Communists.102 In any case, they and their predecessor organization, the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, founded by Rosa Luxemburg, represented a tradition deprecated in Poland. It was alleged that they had placed the exigencies of class struggle above the nation’s desire for independence. The stigma of national treachery clung to them and would continue to do so. Reservations about the Communists were intensified by their sense of loyalty to Soviet Russia, a state nationally minded Poles saw as simply a newer version of the hated empire. In this way the Polish Communist effort to gain a solid foothold in Polish society was doomed to failure from the start.103
While national Polish contours were sharpened by a clear demarcation from imperial Russia, Communists familiar with the situation in the eastern border area tried to dissuade the Soviets from an offensive strategy vis-à-vis Poland. Karl Radek, secretary of the Comintern and a native of L’vov, warned Lenin not to harbor any illusions that the Polish workers were impatiently awaiting the Red Army’s onslaught in order to cast off their chains.104 And in fact, Warsaw’s workers formed battalions to defend the nation; poorly armed,they threw themselves against Tukhachevsky’s army.After the Soviet failure on the Vistula, Lenin could not avoid conceding that Radek had been right all along.105
The Polish-Soviet war had begun in 1919 with seemingly insignificant skirmishes, after the German Ober-Ost command began pulling back troops that had been kept mobilized on Allied instruction. The vacuum formed by the German withdrawal drew both Poles and Soviets into its vortex.106 The actual war began in May 1920 with the march of Pilsudski’s troops on Kiev, the Polish marshal thus trying to put his plans for a federation into action. The move proved a failure, provoking a Soviet counterattack that brought the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw in August. The counterattack’s director, Tukhachevsky, was a twenty-seven year-old Russian nobleman who enjoyed boasting that he was no older than Bonaparte had been when he was entrusted with the Italian campaign.107 However inflated this sense of self-esteem, as a convert to Marxism Tukhachevsky appears to have taken the idea of world revolution very seriously. He did not hide his objectives, proclaiming in daily commands that the operation’s final goal was Warsaw.108 It seemed that nothing could stop the general in his westward advance.
Precisely what the Soviet leadership thought about Tukhachevsky’s offensive tactics and world-revolutionary enthusiasm can hardly be reconstructed. But the evidence seems to point to the party, the Comintern, and the Red Army leaving the question of the assault on Warsaw open, waiting to see how the situation evolved and evading a strategic decision.109 The responsible authorities were thus inclined, it seems, to keep things hovering in the balance. From their vantage point, with Denikin having been defeated at Novorossysk, the civil war was nearing its end. Negotiations with England had been initiated for a trade agreement ending the Allied economic blockade and paving the way for Russia’s return to the world economy.110 On the Entente’s side, such an agreement was a pet project of British prime minister Lloyd George, who hoped to revive the flagging postwar British economy through trade with Russia while simultaneously “taming” the Bolsheviks. For the community of nations, Russia was to become a predictable quantity once again.111 Such intentions were incompatible with visions of world revolution.
For the Bolsheviks, negotiations with London were important in another way. It had long been understood that France and Britain, little liked as imperialist interventionists, were not pursuing common goals vis-à-vis Russia. France was intent on the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime. It recognized White general Wrangel, who had established himself in southern Russia, as the legitimate representative of the Russian state. The British were more wary.The anti-Bolshevist hardliner Churchill even suspected Lloyd George of harboring certain sympathies for the Soviets.112
Hence Tukhachevsky’s advance on Warsaw threatened Soviet Russia’s movement from a revolutionary condition to one of statehood. It threatened the negotiations with the British, raising the possibility of the renewal of the interventionist Entente coalition, now drifting apart, for a second anti-Bolshevik crusade. Lloyd George had already dispatched the Anglo-French military mission under Viscount Lord D’Abernon and French general Maxime Weygand to Warsaw.Their task was to stand by the hard pressed Polish state in face of the red onslaught.
As indicated, Tukhachevsky failed. Warsaw’s defenders held their ground, and the Soviets were forced to pull back. The end of hostilities led to peace negotiations and, in March 1921, to the Treaty of Riga. In the view of contemporaries, this extraordinary turn of events, was due to the help of French general Weygand, an analogy thus being drawn to the “miracle on the Marne.” But the Poles had fought the battle basically on their own and kept the Entente mission at arm’s length.113 It is in any case unclear if the confrontation between the Poles and the Soviets on the Vistula was an actual battle, the expected clash between enemy armies. Even Pilsudski was startled by the course of events. Tukhachevsky’s troops apparently had lacked sufficient striking force as they approached Warsaw, having become overextended. On the long march west, their lines had become increasingly stretched. It thus actually seemed that the Soviets had withdrawn before any real showdown. They had probably sought to avoid the showdown because their left flank had unexpectedly been left exposed. The armies from the southwestern front Tukhachevsky had demanded for cover had not been dispatched—this included the elite units of the First Red Cavalry under Semyon Budyonny, the konarmiya so richly described by Isaak Babel.114
The “miracle on the Vistula” was largely the result of internal Soviet differences. In retrospect, these can be easily rationalized as reflecting a basic conflict between the ideas of world revolution and “socialism in one country.” But a closer look reveals something more trivial. Stalin does not appear to have given any thought to releasing the konarmiya from his control. Rather, he used the indecisiveness of the Moscow leadership to withhold the cavalry and other troops from Tukhachevsky and thus from the western front—even though officially they had been placed under Tukhachevsky’s command. Instead, Stalin sent them against L’vov—in order, some have suggested, to keep them occupied there.115 For his part, Lenin shared Stalin’s view that a military operation against Wrangel in the south was far more important than a relatively hopeless thrust to the west.116 In the final analysis, the leadership in Moscow was simply not prepared to link up the western and southwestern fronts. The southwestern front was meant to bring the civil war in southern Russia to an end, which was achieved with the victory over Wrangel in November.
The internal Soviet wrangling during the Polish-Soviet war strengthened Stalin’s hand. The war’s results worked to the future general secretary’s advantage, the end of impassioned world revolutionary internationalism and the decline of the Comintern coming at the expense of Western-oriented intellectuals like Trotsky, furthering the party’s nationalization and Russification.117 Stalin also knew how to put the Polish-Soviet war to good use institutionally. In taking control of the armies on the southwestern front, he was able to establish a subservient political power base. Voroshilov, Timoshenko, Rokossovsky, Zhukov, and others were connected with the First Cavalry and later belonged to Stalin’s political clique.118 Tukhachevsky would eventually be accused of Bonapartism; along with other high-ranking Red Army officers, he would be liquidated in the 1936–38 Great Purge. His June 1937 death sentence, as well as that of other commanding generals and corps commanders, would be signed by the former commanding echelon of the southwestern front in the Polish-Soviet war: Voroshilov, Budyonny, and Yegorov.119
Mainly as a result of the corrosive problem of borders and nationalities, Poland’s international isolation intensified in the 1920s and 1930s. Relations with Czechoslovakia—a state that relied, like Poland, on France and its Central European policies—were extremely strained, since Prague had exploited the chance offered by the Polish-Soviet war to take possession of the disputed Olsa region around the Silesian city of Teschen (Cieszyn and Tesín), an important industrial and transport center. In October 1938, Poland, though not a revisionist power like Germany or Hungary (which both wished to cast off the peace conditions set in Versailles and Trianon), would itself use the opportunity presented by the September Munich Agreement and Germany’s subsequent takeover of the Sudetenland to annex the Olsa region.120
The ominous military and economic ties between Germany and the Soviet Union during the interwar period can be traced back to the Polish-Soviet war.121 Germany and Russia had been extremely reluctant to accept the existence of a Polish state; their border and nationalities conflicts with that state and the exclusion of these two powers from the evolving European security system were reason enough for a rapprochement. The1920–21 plebiscites aimed at demarcating the German-Polish border were accompanied by pronounced hostility toward Poland on the German side. The Russian march on Warsaw was greeted by Germans with great glee. In Gleiwitz (Gliwice) in August 1920, German demonstrators were exhilarated by rumors of a Soviet victory. They waved images of Lenin and Trotsky—though, of course, for reasons of nationalism, not class. The subsequent clashes between Germans and Poles, at the time Poles and Soviets were confronting each other at the Vistula, led to the second Silesian uprising.122 In their wish for an end to Poland, the German borderland population felt an inner bond with the Russians.123
The rapprochement between Germany and Russia, so important for the Weimar Republic, was thus largely due to their common animosity toward Poland. The first steps toward secret cooperation were initiated during the Polish-Soviet war.124 The Soviets requested intelligence from the Germans on Polish troop concentrations in the West. They also asked for military aid, which the Germans were unable to provide due to the international situation and their declared neutrality. The German authorities did agree, however, to impede the transport of armaments for Poland through the North Sea–Baltic Canal.125 And after the Soviet defeat, arrangements had to be made for returning the Soviet soldiers who had opted for German internment in East Prussia during the hasty withdrawal from Poland.
In the interwar period, two competing attitudes toward Germany were politically dominant in Soviet Russia. One, revolutionary, was espoused by the Comintern. The other, grounded in realpolitik, represented the state and was expressed through Soviet diplomacy. With the waning of revolutionary expectations, the second attitude gained the upper hand, especially since such expectations had always been illusory when it came to Germany. The prospect of a linkage between the Russian Revolution and a possible German revolution had evaporated with the end of the Polish-Soviet war at the latest. The idea of a revolutionized Poland functioning as a “red bridge” had foundered on the banks of the Vistula. In a detailed memorandum, Soviet special envoy Victor Kopp—a close associate of Trotsky sent to Berlin to arrange for the release of Soviet soldiers in German internment camps—cautioned against any revolutionary activity in Germany.126 Rather, Soviet policy was best oriented toward cooperation with Germany’s conservative forces, an assessment shared by Karl Radek, an established expert on the German situation.127 The reckless Communist uprising in central Germany and Hamburg in March 1921, which was sanctioned by the Comintern, and the activities of the German Communist Party in Saxony and Thuringia, are best seen as late reflexes of a revolutionary hope long since eviscerated. In this context, there was a powerful symbolic dimension to the fact that army commander Hans von Seeckt, an outstanding proponent of close German-Soviet cooperation against Poland and Versailles, had been responsible for smothering Germany’s last revolutionary flames. But whether it took the path of revolution or reaction, a German-Soviet community of shared interests was inevitably emerging, just as Radek had predicted.128
In this period, such commonality of interests was grounded mainly in a shared opposition to the order of peace and security laid down in Paris. While Germany was seeking, with Soviet help, to circumvent the Versailles provisos regarding armaments technology and the military, the Soviet Union was chiefly interested in breaking through an isolation inflicted by the cordon sanitaire. The political vector of this German-Soviet bond was shared enmity toward Poland, an enmity at work in the question of borders, of the German minority, and of the very existence of the Polish state.The intensity of this “companionship in misfortune” (to paraphrase Churchill) was inversely proportional to the closeness of the ties one or the other state assumed with the West, in other words with France and Great Britain, pillars of the League of Nations. For example, after the signing of the Treaty of Locarno in 1925, marking the onset of genuine peace between Germany and France, the German Reich had joined the League of Nations in 1926; but it would retain a certain balance between East and West through the Berlin Treaty concluded with Russia that same year. The latter treaty’s signing, together with German misgivings about the paragraph on sanctions in Article 16 of the League of Nations statutes, were signals to the Soviet Union that despite Germany’s co-optation into the system of collective security, it would not act against Russia.129 It had proved impossible to negotiate an “Eastern Locarno” providing international guarantees for Poland’s and Czechoslovakia’s western borders with Germany (in the same way the eastern borders of France and Belgium had been guaranteed).For this reason,German political parties and governments, especially those on the right, could nurture the prospect of a revision of the eastern frontier.130 Any realization of such a prospect naturally required good relations with the Soviet Union.
In May 1933, Reich Chancellor Hitler renewed the Berlin Treaty, despite his notorious anti-Bolshevism. He may have done so in acknowledgment of the Reichswehr’s desire to continue cooperating with the Red Army. To be sure, that cooperation would come to an end the following autumn. Arrangements to terminate the Rapallo policies had already been made under Hitler’s predecessor, Brüning; with his pro-French tilt, Papen had introduced an anti-Soviet tendency into German foreign policy. In contrast, the Schleicher government, on notoriously intimate terms with the Reichswehr, hoped to change course once again and intensify relations with Moscow. Such a strictly realpolitik-based orientation, driven by anti-Polish considerations, seemed self-evident to the Soviets. Realpolitik was apparent. In discussions with Schleicher, the Soviet foreign minister Litvinov could thus voice the view that it was only natural for Communists in Germany to be treated the same way as Russia treated enemies of the state.131 In any case, cooperation between the Red Army and the Reichswehr lost its raison d’être once Hitler decided to restore unrestricted German sovereignty in matters of defense and armaments.132 But despite constant tensions during the 1930s, economic exchange between Germany and Russia continued basically undiminished. The Soviet Union went on importing about half of its metal-processing machinery from Germany, while the Reich covered a sizable portion of its needs for oil, manganese, and wheat through Soviet imports.133
In 1934, a year after Germany’s departure from the League of Nations (and two years after the departure of Japan), the Soviet Union joined the organization. In their rapprochement with the Western powers, the Soviets endorsed the system of collective security; in May 1935 they signed a treaty of mutual assistance with France. To bolster this turn in foreign policy, which went hand in hand with increasing internal repressions that culminated in the Great Purge, Stalin made use of the almost-forgotten Comintern, an institution for which he had shown little liking. At its seventh “Brussels conference” in the summer of 1935, Stalin proclaimed the “popular front” strategy as binding Soviet policy for the Communist parties in the West. One motivation for this move was a particular desire to influence the French political scene. Although Stalin’s belated recognition of the need to cooperate with Social Democracy, previously denounced as the archenemy, helped to bolster the struggle against Fascism, this about-face also resembled a castling move in an international power-political game of chess. Within this game, Stalin would end up downplaying the ideological anti-Fascist antagonism with Hitler, instead placing weight on the more durable notion of an incompatibility between “imperialism” and the Soviet Union. In this respect, Moscow’s balanced relations with Fascist Italy during the 1930s undermined the notion of the centrality of ideological constants in Soviet foreign policy.134
After Chamberlain, Daladier, Mussolini, and Hitler came to an understanding about the Sudetenland in Munich in September 1938, thus consigning Czechoslovakia to its fate, Stalin believed any alliance was conceivable. Germany and the Western powers had worked out an agreement on a quandary of European politics, while leaving the Soviet Union—a Continental power actually allied with Czechoslovakia—outside in the cold. The policy of collective security had finally collapsed. Also, there were rumors that Britain and France intended to direct Hitler’s attention eastward. In Moscow, Hitler’s purported appetite for the Ukraine had become notorious; perhaps, it was felt, the Western powers were prepared to allow him a free hand in Central and East Central Europe.135 In light of such considerations, any difference in Stalin’s eyes between the “imperialist” regimes of the Western democracies and Fascist Germany was bound to evaporate. As an orientation point, what remained was the unshakable truth of history’s geopolitical constants. Coalitions were to be forged and alliances weighed according to traditional patterns of power management and diplomacy.136 The main concern was to exploit antagonisms in the “imperialist camp” to one’s own benefit. The end of the Polish state was one possible scenario. A shift in the European system of alliances involving a rapprochement between Germany and Russia would necessarily entail a renewed partition of Poland. Poland would thus turn out to have been a “seasonal state” within the fading Versailles order.
In terms of geopolitical givens and historical affinities, it seemed easier for Russia to forge a rapprochement with Germany than with the Western democracies. For in their autocratic decision making, dictatorships were not impeded by superfluous institutional rituals of legitimation and public support. Hence while in the democracies the August 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact may have taken faithful Communists by surprise, against the backdrop of such reasoning, despite initial consternation over the pact’s power political consequences, its signing could only confirm liberal, anti-totalitarian certitudes.
Nevertheless, Nazi German–Soviet cooperation could itself not manage without some legitimatizing embellishment or ideological underpinning. The Soviets thus halted their anti-Fascist propaganda; and in Germany, Soviet virtues were now praised profusely, even going so far as talk of a spiritual affinity between the two peoples. In a March 1940 communiqué to Mussolini, Hitler referred to the long path the Soviet regime had traveled from international Bolshevism to Russian nationalism.137 In April 1941, Stalin suggested to Georgi Dimitrov, chairman of the Comintern, that his organization be dissolved for the benefit of the national autonomy of the various Communist parties—for the sake of a kind of “national Communism.” The customary May Day slogans of class struggle needed to be replaced, Stalin indicated, by others extolling the value of nationalism and national liberation.138
The first intimations of possible Soviet rapprochement with Nazi Germany had surfaced in the spring of 1939. In March, speaking at the eighteenth party congress, Stalin informed the Western powers that in the event of a conflict he would not be the one to “pull the chestnuts out of the fire.” As early as May, Maksim Litvinov, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, a man of bourgeois Jewish origin—in the 1930s his name had been a byword for collective security and rapprochement with the West—was suddenly removed from power. Units of the secret police stormed into his offices, his private phone line was cut, and Stalin ordered his successor, Vyacheslav Molotov, to cleanse the bureaucracy, removing all Jews from office.139
The German-Soviet rapprochement had initially been driven by the Polish question. A historic fourth Polish partition would help align both regimes with their national destinies. Molotov’s October 1939 speech about the “bastard of Versailles” stood in the tradition of one approach to potential German-Russian relations. Even after Hitler had placed a damper on military cooperation, the common ground between both peoples had been repeatedly stressed by leading cadres in the Red Army. On all possible occasions, top-ranking Soviet military men had expressed their esteem for the Wehrmacht. Tukhachevsky, now vice-chairman of the Soviet War Council and a long-time admirer of the German military tradition, had praised the Red Army for emulating the example of the Reichswehr. At a reception at the Italian embassy in Moscow on 7 March 1936, he had seen nothing dishonorable in uncorking a bottle of champagne and drinking a toast with the German military attaché to the Wehrmacht’s successful occupation of the demilitarized zone in the Rhineland.140 In September 1939, during joint parades and processions by German and Soviet troops on the soil of a freshly conquered Poland, there had been unanticipated reunions between a number of old buddies from the days of cooperation on military matters and arms technology.141
In light of the approaching war, Stalin saw the pact with Nazi Germany in basically strategic terms. His stance was rooted in two indelible experiences, the Great War and the civil war. The constellation of the looming world war suggested that the “imperialist” powers would once again tear each other apart. And just as earlier on Bolshevik Russia had withdrawn from the great power struggle, now it was imperative to keep the Soviet Union out of the war between Germany and its traditional adversaries, England and France. As a neutral party, Russia would derive certain benefits from such an “imperialist” war. At the very least, it would regain control of those territories the Russian empire had temporarily forfeited.142 It seemed to be only a matter of time or opportunity until Russia, now in the form of the Soviet Union, could turn back to traditionally salient concerns linked with the old Eastern Question: the Balkans, the Straits, access to the Persian Gulf. In that region, it could only collide with Britain.
The Soviet distrust of Britain and France thus stemmed from memories of the Russian Civil War and Western intervention. It was intensified when London and Paris rallied in support of the beleaguered Finns in the Winter War of 1939–40. After attacking Finland on 30 November, the USSR was duly expelled from the Anglo-French–dominated League of Nations. Germany, on the other hand, had declared its disinterest in the Baltic and Finland, thus indirectly handing this area to the Soviet Union. When Moscow asked for German help in connection with the blockade of Finland, Germany agreed, and the Soviets then failed to further pressure the Reich to fulfill its promise.143 Aired in 1940, the French proposal to open an Allied front in the Black Sea and Caucasus regions, thus hindering German-Soviet cooperation and preventing armed hostilities from erupting in the west, was itself highly reminiscent of the civil war and Western intervention.144 Also, in March 1940 the British and the French were making preparations to bomb the strategic backbone of German-Soviet cooperation: the oil fields and refineries in Baku, which would involve flying from Iraq over Turkish and Iranian air space. After the fall of France, the plan was leaked by the Germans to further intensify Soviet suspicions of Britain.145
In the wake of Germany’s blitzkrieg against France in May– June 1940, Stalin’s expectations that the “imperialist” war would take a course similar to the Great War vanished. In the interwar period, France had gained the reputation of a formidable Continental military power. This same France had been crushed in a few weeks by the German war machine. Consequently, Stalin’s idea that the war would drag on endlessly as it had in World War I had turned out to be mistaken. The warm congratulations Molotov conveyed to Berlin on the occasion of the German victory probably corresponded little to the actual mood in Moscow. The hasty incorporation of the Baltic States into the USSR and the realization of German pledges regarding Bessarabia were palpable signs of a profound uneasiness.146
The changed assessment of the situation after the French capitulation left the Soviets with two options. The alliance with Germany could be strengthened and a long-term policy of spheres of influences could be pursued at the expense of the British Empire, an orientation in keeping with traditional Russian policy from the nineteenth century. Or the Soviets could look ahead to an unavoidable head-on confrontation with Germany. Of course, to emerge victorious from that collision would require enormous effort and sacrifice; what the Soviets would most need was time. According to a later statement by Molotov, the USSR could not have been prepared for war until 1943.147 A postponement by Hitler was unlikely. It was well known that he was in a hurry—a human life span racing against historical time.148
Hitler’s decision to attack the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 was based on several factors. First, it was in harmony with his worldview and the notion that Germany had a right to lebensraum in the East at the expense of the Slavic peoples. This racial-ideological viewpoint merged with a political anti-Bolshevism itself infused with racist elements. Even if the philosophical and ideological proclivities of the German dictator cannot be understood in a narrow, programmatic sense, they clearly embraced and radicalized certain circumstances and situations, thus influencing the conduct of the war in the East. In the first place, from the outset this war was waged as a racial-ideological war of annihilation and not, as on the western front and in North Africa, as a conventional power struggle in keeping with the rules of war.149 Second, Hitler’s decision to attack Russia emerged from the previous power constellation. Hitler’s campaigns before Operation Barbarossa can be seen as campaigns of revenge and hegemony. He could thus convince those around him that only a swift victory over the Soviet Union could shatter British hopes for a strategic alliance with the other Continental power on the eastern flank of Europe. From this perspective, the decision was something like a strategic chess move based on Napoleonic patterns.150 Third, the decision may have reflected the deterioration of German-Soviet relations in the wake of the Reich’s unexpected blitzkrieg victory over France. Beforehand, the Soviet grab of the Baltic and Bessarabia, Soviet claims to northern Bukovina, and the stationing of Soviet troops in Lithuania had already led to a certain ill will between the coalition allies. There were also disagreements regarding trade and the supply of goods. Shipments were irregular, doubtless the result of bottlenecks and technical problems, yet these repeatedly engendered doubts on each side about whether the other side was trustworthy.151
At the same time, an exceptionally explosive situation had emerged as Germany and Russia threatened to clash in the Balkans, following the classic pattern of European great-power rivalry in this region.152 Germany had entered the old trajectory of Hapsburg monarchy expansion, collecting the fragments of France’s collapsed southeast European interwar alliances. Under the Reich’s aegis, the territorial disputes between Hungary and Rumania had been resolved. When the Soviets, in consultation with the German Reich, requested a Bulgarian-Soviet agreement on the transit of Soviet troops for the “defense of the entrance to the Black Sea,” the request was promptly rejected.153 In November 1940, Molotov conveyed Stalin’s demands regarding Soviet air and naval bases in the Bosporus and the Dardanelles and Soviet territorial claims “south of Baku and Batumi.” The German response was a blunt no.154 When Bulgaria then granted transit rights to German troops in February 1941, relations between Germany and the Soviet Union reached a nadir. Germany had made the Balkans part of its sphere of influence, to Russia’s detriment. On 6 April, following a 27 March coup d’état in Belgrade and the conclusion of a friendship treaty between the new Yugoslav government and the USSR, Germany launched a two-pronged attack on Yugoslavia and Greece from Bulgaria.155 The step was inevitable, especially since Hitler was firm in his eminently ideological resolve to attack the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, such a dramatic decision required an acceptable form of rationalization, if only to satisfy his military and diplomatic entourage.156 This is not meant to suggest that Hitler followed a consistent ideological-philosophical program—that the elements of realpolitik were mere material for play. But in the fusion of extreme ideological components with a situation growing increasingly radical, the ideology came into play as if what was unfolding reflected a rigorous and consistent blueprint.
Stalin had not taken the Nazi worldview at face value. It did not correspond to his view of politics,in which political rule rested less on ideological consistency than on caprice: principles counted for little, and everything was subordinate to the overriding aim of preserving power. Given the primacy of geopolitics and historical lines of conflict, “imperialist” England was a far more serious adversary for the Soviet Union than Nazi Germany—and this even when developments in the Greek theater in the spring of 1941 offered hints of potential Anglo-Soviet convergence. On 13 April, the same day Belgrade fell to the Germans, Stalin demonstratively embraced German ambassador Schulenburg as they both saw off Japanese foreign minister Matsuoka at the White Russian train station in Moscow, thus seemingly putting the lie to all rumors of an imminent German-Russian confrontation.157 The fact that Hitler ultimately left no option but coming to an arrangement with England, in accord with the Great War’s constellation, was beyond Stalin’s control. But the alienation between the anti Hitler coalition’s partners, surfacing after Stalingrad and becoming acute after the defeat of Germany and the military exorcism of Nazism, reveals the durability of those conflicting lines of tradition to which Stalin and Churchill were both firmly attached.158
A historical continuum was not only apparent in the transition from World War II to the Cold War. It also strongly informed relations between postwar Poland and its neighbor states. Since 1920, hostility to Poland had been the starting point and practical foundation for German-Soviet rapprochement. In Polish memory, this juncture pointed to an even more distant past: to the end of the eighteenth century and the era that followed. In various configurations, a link emerges between Poland’s national independence and Europe’s freedom. In the aftermath of the January 1863 uprising in Poland, Karl Marx commented on this reality rooted in Poland’s fateful political geography, its location between Prussia and Russia.159 The Polish nation constituted itself against both Germany and Russia. It only developed its pronouncedly freedom-centered, antitotalitarian tradition because of the autocratic character of the two neighboring states in the nineteenth century and their dictatorial character in the twentieth century. Freedom from German and Russian subjugation was converted into one of the Polish nation’s defining features. German-Soviet agreement on the Polish question was thus always more than a mere correspondence of regimes. In this manner, the independence of the Polish nation was in confluence with the preservation of Europe’s freedom. This historical line leads straight to 1989.
Polish resistance was always equally directed against both totalitarian successor states of the partitioning powers, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Hopeless from the onset, the Warsaw uprising of August 1944 is emblematic for Polish history: aimed militarily at Nazi Germany, it was directed politically at Soviet Russia. The westward shift of the country’s frontiers after 1945 had done away with its notorious minority problem: the Jews had been in any case exterminated, the Germans expelled, and the White Russians and Ukrainians were now beyond the new eastern frontier, which in its basic demarcation corresponded to the ethnographic Curzon Line drawn by the Allies in 1919. But precisely this shift westward now bonded the new Poland to the Soviet Union. Understating themselves as the “United Workers’ Party,” the Polish Communists sought to link the national question as a territorial question with political and social values: equality versus freedom. No security for Poland, no territorial integrity, except in alliance with the Soviet Union on the basis of a common social order—that at least was the dictum. In 1955, as a response to West Germany’s entry into NATO, the Warsaw Pact was baptized in the capital of a Poland still considered territorially insecure; this fact did not lack symbolic resonance. In 1965, the 1945 Polish Soviet Friendship and Mutual Assistance Treaty was reaffirmed with explicit recognition of the “inviolability of the national border” on the Oder and Neisse rivers. In this manner, as long as the territorial question in the West remained unresolved, the position of the Polish Communists would remain by and large unchallenged. Against the backdrop of such a close intertwining of domestic and foreign, social and national concerns, any opposition to the Communist rulers could be considered akin to treason.
When the Bonn government under Willi Brandt signed the Eastern Treaties, thus recognizing the Oder-Neisse line and the inviolability of the Polish state, the intertwining strands of this structure, so significant for Polish history, could finally come undone. In the face of “normalization,” the Communist Party thus gradually lost the power monopoly in Polish society it had claimed—a monopoly based on its role as guardian of Poland’s national integrity, in fraternal alliance with the Soviet Union. To this extent, the increasing success of the Polish protest movement— ranging from the Committee for the Defense of Workers’ Rights (KOR) to Solidarity, which appeared on the scene not only as a trade union but also as a champion of Polish freedom—can be understood as a result of Brandt’s Ostpolitik. As a last step in the process Brandt had initiated, Poland’s western borders were recognized by a united Germany in 1990, the belated fulfillment of what could have been achieved in the interwar period with an “Eastern Locarno.” With German unification and the border treaty with Poland, Germany now had definite borders, recognized for the first time in its history both at home and by its neighboring states.