My latest TL. Hope you like it.
Hammer and Sickle over Warsaw
Chapter I: The Polish-Soviet War, 1919-1920.
The Polish-Soviet War (February 1919-October 1920) was an armed conflict that pitted Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine against the Second Polish Republic and the Ukrainian People’s Republic over the control of Ukraine and Byelorussia. Ultimately the Soviets, following on from their Westward Offensive of 1918-’19, hoped to fully occupy Poland. Although united under communist leadership, Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine were theoretically two separate independent entities because the Soviet republics did not unite to form the Soviet Union until 1922.
Poland’s Chief of State, Jozef Pilsudski, felt the time was right to expand Polish borders as far east as feasible. This would be followed by a Polish-led
Intermarium federation of Central and Eastern European states as a bulwark against the re-emergence of German and Russian imperialism, which would stretch from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Lenin, meanwhile, saw Poland as the bridge the Red Army had to cross to assist other communist movements and bring about other European revolutions, chiefly in Germany, which after the events of 1919 looked ripe for the picking.
By 1919, Polish forces had taken control of much of Western Ukraine, emerging victorious from the Polish-Ukrainian War. The West Ukrainian People's Republic, led by Yevhen Petrushevych, had tried to create a Ukrainian state on territories to which both Poles and Ukrainians laid claim. At the same time in the Russian part of Ukraine Symon Petliura tried to defend and strengthen the Ukrainian People's Republic, but as the Bolsheviks began to gain the upper hand in the Russian Civil War, they started to advance westward towards the disputed Ukrainian territories, causing Petliura’s forces to retreat to Podolia. By the end of 1919, a clear front had formed as Petliura decided to ally with Pilsudski. Border skirmishes escalated following Pilsudski’s Kiev Offensive in April 1920. The Polish offensive was met by an initially successful Red Army counterattack.
The Soviet operation pushed the Polish forces back westward all the way to the Polish capital, Warsaw, while the Directorate of Ukraine fled to Western Europe. In August 1920 Soviet Cossack units crossed the river Vistula and planned to take Warsaw from the west while the main thrust came from the east. The Soviet Western Front commander, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, felt certain that all was going proceeding as planned. However, Polish military intelligence had decrypted enemy radio messages, and the Soviets were actually falling into a trap set by Pilsudski and his Chief of Staff, Rozwadowski. The Soviet advance across the Vistula in the north was moving into an operational vacuum, as there were no sizable Polish forces in the area. On the other hand, south of Warsaw, where the fate of the war was about to be decided, Tukhachevsky had left only token forces to guard the vital link between the Soviet northwest and southwest fronts.
Budyonny’s First Cavalry Army – which was occupied by the battles around Lvov and was much feared by Pilsudski and other Polish commanders – would prove pivotal. At Tukhachevsky's insistence the Soviet High Command had ordered the First Cavalry Army to march north toward Warsaw and Lublin. However, Budyonny was tempted to disobey the order due to a grudge between Tukhachevsky and Yegorov, commander of the southwest front. In the end he complied and Budyonny’s forces moved to the crucial theatre south of Warsaw and enabled a Soviet breakthrough that was the beginning of the end for the short-lived Second Polish Republic. Despite heroic Polish resistance, Warsaw had fallen by the end of August and the Soviets fortified their positions on the Vistula in preparation for a final offensive toward Krakow that would cut Polish territory in half and finish off the Poles. After 123 years of foreign rule from 1795 to 1918, Poland had achieved its independence, but now it seemed like it was on the verge of being snuffed out again by the latest incarnations of the Russian Empire: Soviet Russia. By September, it didn’t look like Polish forces would be able to hold off, never mind push back, the Red Army.
Meanwhile, Germany had experienced a communist uprising in early 1919 and had seen the establishment of a Bavarian Soviet Republic in April of that year, though it lasted only one month. Besides that, the Hungarian Soviet Republic had been proclaimed by Bela Kun in March 1919 and lasted until August, when it collapsed and Bela Kun went into exile in Soviet Russia. After their victory at Warsaw, the Soviets openly started to foment a revival of communist Hungary in order to create a beachhead from which to spread communism to Central Europe as well as the Balkans. Besides that, large parts of Italy were under socialist control at present and a revolution there was feared by many as well.
In reality the Red Army was exhausted and the German and Hungarian communists lacked the power to reignite the revolution, but Western governments didn’t know this. As far as they could tell Poland would be the Soviets’ stepping stone to Germany and if it fell to communism they feared a domino effect that would lead to a lot of Europe going red. They were strengthened in that conviction when the Baltic States indeed fell like dominoes to the Red Army later that year and another failed communist uprising took place that briefly held parts of Germany until the Reichswehr and the Freikorps successfully subdued them. The dread caused by the spectre of revolution was almost palpable. What were Western leaders to do?