WI the Red Army won the Soviet-Polish War? Poland could have ended up an SSR.
I once had a soc.history.what-if post on this:
Here's another question: does Red Poland join what will soon be the USSR
or does it remain an (at least nominally) independent soviet republic?
As Robert Service notes in his *Stalin: A Biography* (pp. 179-80) this
question was being debated in the summer of 1920--not only for Poland but
for Germany as well--by Lenin and Stalin:
"Stalin and Lenin also undertook preliminary planning for the kind of
Europe they expected to organise when socialist seizures of power took
place. Their grandiose visions take the breath away. Before the Second
Comintern Congress, Lenin urged the need for a general federation
including Germany, and he made clear that he wanted the economy of such a
federation to be 'administered from a single organ.' Stalin rejected this
as impractical:
'If you think you'd ever get Germany to enter a federation with the same
rights as Ukraine, you are mistaken. If you think that even Poland, which
has been constituted as a bourgeois state with all its attributes, would
enter the Union with the same rights as Ukraine you are mistaken.'
"Lenin was angry. The implications of Stalin's comment was that
considerations of national pride would impel Russia and Germany to remain
separate states for the foreseeable future. Lenin sent him a 'threatening
letter' which charged him with chauvinism. It was Lenin's objective to
set up a Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. His vision of
'European socialist revolution' was unchanged since 1917. But Stalin held
his ground. The Politburo had to acknowledge the realities of nationhood
if the spread of socialism in Europe was to be a success.
"These discussions were hypothetical since the Red Army had not yet
reached Poland, far less set up a revolutionary government in Warsaw..."
So suppose it had succeeded in doing so. Whose views would prevail--
Lenin's or Stalin's? In what I regard as the unlikely event of a
successful German revolution, I have very litle doubt that Stalin's view
would prevail--integrating as huge a state as Germany into a union with
Russia was just not practical. Poland is a closer case, but my guess is
that Stalin and the rest of the Politburo would prevail on Lenin to
"delay" the full integration of Poland into the Soviet Union--and that
after Lenin's death that integration would never come about.
Does it matter? I would say Yes. Even if the leaders of the new Poland
were selected in Moscow and dependent on Red Army bayonets, even if they
were people whose careers had been primarily in the all-Russian Bolshevik
movement and who for a long time had little contact with the Polish
working class--even granted all these things, still, being an even
nominally independent nation has important psychological effects,
especially for a country that already had as strong a nationalist tradtion
as Poland.