AHC: Communist Poland post-WWI

As the title says. The challenge is to have revived Poland turn communist soon after WWI. Cookie if you manage to make commie Poland the primary communist state in Europe. The whole cookie jar if you manage to include Lithuania.
 
As the title says. The challenge is to have revived Poland turn communist soon after WWI.

Poland won't turn communist on its' own, communism needs to be imported by a victorious enemy. A Polish defeat in the Polish-Soviet war is the only option which is merely quite unlikely and not outright absurd.

Cookie if you manage to make commie Poland the primary communist state in Europe. The whole cookie jar if you manage to include Lithuania.

Hmm ... non-communist Germany/Russia rearms and wins a war against Poland. It decides that imposing communism on it by force is the best way to keep Poland permanently weak and isolated, and proceeds to do so. Poland becomes the only communist state in Europe, and thus by definition the primary one.
 
Hmm ... non-communist Germany/Russia rearms and wins a war against Poland. It decides that imposing communism on it by force is the best way to keep Poland permanently weak and isolated, and proceeds to do so. Poland becomes the only communist state in Europe, and thus by definition the primary one.

That's incredibly ASB. Keep in mind at the time communist movements had at least some power in nearly every major European country, and absolutely none of them wanted a communist state anywhere, even in Poland.
 
That's incredibly ASB. Keep in mind at the time communist movements had at least some power in nearly every major European country, and absolutely none of them wanted a communist state anywhere, even in Poland.

And imposing communism as a punishment is just silly, why on earth would they go for the option that by necessity means Polish resources are run by someone other than them.
 
Hungary did.

It was completely different situation. For making country turn communist you need a total collapse and moral compromitation of ruling elites and established authorities in this country. Something like that happened in Russia, in Germany and in Austro-Hungary. Hungary was not only associated with the Central Camp which was defeated but in Trianon it lost 2/3 of its historical territory and population.
Poland was a different case. It was a state which reemerged after long period of non-existance. The western, southern and northern borders were either fixed or liley to be fixed. Only in the east the situation was fluid. The elites were quite vibrant. The curch was strong. The red Army reached in 1920 the outskirt of Warsaw in but became overextended, exactly like Polish Army few months earlier when it went to Kiev. Even if RA conquer Warsaw, the counteroffensive would remove it, just with more difficulties. In worst case the border of new Polish state would reach Bug and Nemen, but this is better than nothing.
The Bolsheviks managed to alienate the peasantry by treating them as enemies (and the peasants were afraid of ungodly hordes). The workers were patriotic, they fought for independent Poland. The socialist movements were also the independence movements.
For turning Poland communist after WWI you need to change these factors. In OTL it took 20 years for Sanation to show weakness and corruption and then 6 years of nightmare of WWII with almost total destruction of elites by two enemy regimes to give communism a small foothold in Poland. And even then the ideology was not embraced, it had to be introduced by bayonets and maintained by force.

I cannot imagine how fresh Polish state could turn communist just after it's conception.
 
Somehow make the Soviet-Polish war succeed? Wasn't Lenin on top of that? He liked exporting communism. Unfortunately I know little about that war but it seemed the Soviets were on the edge of their logistical tether?
 
Somehow make the Soviet-Polish war succeed? Wasn't Lenin on top of that? He liked exporting communism. Unfortunately I know little about that war but it seemed the Soviets were on the edge of their logistical tether?

Think of Operation Bagration but 24 years earlier, without trucks, heavy artillery and tanks, without air force, against the enemy applying scorched earth tactics, operating on internal lines, having it's own air force and really good intelligence (soviet security was at that time abysmal, they didn't even cypher their depeches and war orders). Basically Napoleon's Moscow Campaign in reverse.
Yes, Lenin wanted to export communism. The question is: did he have means to achieve this? For Soviet to succeed you need to remove Polish leadership but if you remove Polish leadership you remove whole rebirth of Polish State.
 
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