The Man of Steel
The night was cold and it rained.
In that damned city, it seemed to be always raining; at least, he never remembered having been in a city where it rained so much. It was likely that it rained at the very least every other day. At least it seemed the weather was more moderate in Lwow than it had ever been in Tsaritsyn, where the Politburo (and by that it was meant Lenin) had dispatched him, by the shores of the Volga River. He had never fully forgiven Lenin for that; that city was a war-torn ruin, and he was really at his element in the politics of Moscow. War was means to an end.
Lwow was different from the Volga; it was a foreign land, no matter what the propaganda said; he too was a foreigner in Russia, having been born in Georgia, by all means a Russian colony. The Polish people seemed to resent the Red Army, to look at them as conquerors. If it was up to him, since they were seen as conquerors they should simply act like that. Yet the orders had been clear in that he should make the pretence of liberation.
He wondered if they truly thought of themselves as liberators; he wondered if his colleagues at the Politburo honestly saw the best for all, the publicized revolution, or if they, like him, were attempting to fulfil their own goals, and to climb up to power as he had been for years. He remembered having faith in the revolution for its own sake, but he was young and stupid. Since then, his heart once soft had become rigid to the needs of others, towards humanity. He liked it, living for himself. Perhaps the capitalists had it right, if not for their staunch Christianism.
From the rain, he heard steps approaching. They were too close; the rain obfuscated his senses; he could not avoid them now even if he wanted. He didn’t even know who it was that was approaching, he only began to saw a figure emerging from the darkness.
- Commissar Josef Stalin? – the voice questioned. It was in perfect Russian.
- Yes. – It was wisest not to risk it; there was a curfew put in place. He had given orders for his soldiers to shoot anyone who didn’t obey to it. That, of course, not counting himself.
He heard the hammer clicking at the cocking of the gun his pursuer held. He sighed. Of course this would happen eventually. He had known since the beginning that the city was crawling with Polish insurgents. He had called for a thorough search and apprehension of the known popular leaders and dangerous individuals, but they had called him “paranoid and delusional”. He held his arms high; his best shot now was to cooperate and use the skills he had learned in Moscow to survive two revolutions – deceit, evaluate and manipulate others.
They put a bag over his head. It was they as it wasn’t the one who had called him who did it, that man was still pointing a gun in front of him. He was then taken inside a building, sat down in a room in a basement and tied to the chair before the sack was taken out of his head. His assailants didn’t wear masks. That was not a good sign. It meant they weren’t planning on letting him live.
He did recognize one of them. He had read through the report made of him by his agents, when he had made sure to have anyone suspect of being active in resistance groups or who might be knowledgeable on such organizations, so he could later interrogate or get rid of them at need. He was young, 20 years old, had fought in the Great War and against the Ukrainians. It seemed he had some nationalistic and right-wing tendencies as well.
Stanislaw Piasecki, 20-year-old Polish war veteran who was involved in the kidnap of Josef Stalin
They began by asking them a series of questions; they wanted to know plans, positions, and strategies of the Red Army in Poland; no doubt that meant they had connections, ways to contact agents of the Polish Army. Such information would be useful if he wasn’t himself a captive of those militants. He refused to answer each one of them, of course. It had to be given the impression of a commander of the revolution, who would not betray it for fear.
After questioning peacefully failed, and questioning under the threat of torture failed as well, the Polish resorted to various methods of torture; they pierced his body, branded him with hot irons, hammered and nailed pieces of metal into his flesh, with the miracle of electricity made him quiver and feel his body boil like meat in a cooking pot. Nothing too original; in his years of massacring and torturing the enemies of himself and of the revolution, he had thought of all those methods, tried them all, evaluated them, made some new ones, which he wasn’t going to share with his enemies though.
It seemed that this Stalin truly was of steel. He still did not answer anything, being absolutely silent about the secrets he held of the Red Army and the Revolution; it would be a decrease in prestige to fall to enemy torture and prestige was power and power was needed.
Through the questioning and torturing, he was persistent in continuing to plague his hosts with questions and proposals of his own – trying to find the weakest link, trying to find who would be the first who accept an offer to betray his friends. Perhaps it was money, Man likes money. They did not respond. Freedom? There must have been at least one who thought of their cause as a hopeless one, an amnesty promise could be enough. It did not work. In the end, he resigned himself; among extremists, only their mad dream was acceptable, and he couldn’t give them Poland. That was lost by now.
In the end, he still looked at the eyes of his kidnapper as he pressed the trigger of the gun pointed directly to his forehead. The last sound he heard was the shot resonating through his ears before everything turned dark and consciousness swept away.
The next morning, the sun shined; it was warm, as if the world was celebrating the end of a great evil; a rainbow marked the sky, the old signal that the goodness of God was in alliance with the acts of Man. As the people of Lwow left for their jobs, they quickly returned home, in fear. It was only when the Red Army left their barracks they understood why the quietness.
Josef Stalin had died on the 15th August 1920; on the morning of the 16th, his body was found by the people of Lwow and the Red Army occupation force he led hanged on a light post in front of the Dominican Church the Red Army had occupied and defiled.
Alexander Yegorov was quickly installed as the new commander for the occupation forces in Lwow. His immediate actions were the swift investigation of those who had killed his predecessor, linking them to a group named the All-Polish Black Movement; its prominent members, along with several others known Polish nationalists in the city, were arrested and executed, to end the resistance. He would later abandon the city to a delegate, going with the bulk of his troops north, answering to orders from his commanders to send troops to the battle that was brewing in Warsaw
The Miracle at the Vistula
For Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who was leading the Red Army as it approached Warsaw, his plans to capture the city were certain to succeed; his strategy was near infallibility and with his armies had already been organized and set in the positions he had planned for with weeks of advance. Taking Warsaw seemed imminent to him.
What he had failed to take into account, since he actually wasn’t aware of the fact, was that the Polish military had decrypted the messages sent by radio by the Red Army, were aware of his plans, had studied them for weaknesses and were now preparing a trap to walk him in his approach against Warsaw. If he continued with the plan, the Red Army would still walk in to a massacre by the Polish.
Tukhachevsky had left the link between his north-western and south-western vulnerable, with only a small force assigned to it. The infamous 1st Cavalry Army, whom the Polish greatly feared, was expected to be tied in Lwow, as the death of the commander Josef Stalin would require their presence to eliminate the threat of upheaval, and delay them long enough to allow for the Polish trap to succeed.
The Red Army managed to reach and occupy a village only 13 kilometres from Warsaw, but the Polish plan was still on; they advanced at full strength against the weak link between north and south on the offensive. Only then did the Red commanders see the flaw in their plans. As the Polish counteroffensive crushed the Soviets, doom seemed close.
Then it all changed. From the south came the 1st Cavalry Army and the remaining forces from Lwow, led by Alexander Yegorov; their unexpected arrival hindered the Polish efforts. The counteroffensive fell back, the Polish Army fleeing in a disorganised fashion against the Red Army, whose exhaustion was beat back by the morale boost of imminent victory. The Red Army charged ahead, ever so more confident of their own ability to win the battle on 20 August.
The Soviet 1st Cavalry Army, whose contribution to the Battle of Warsaw is undeniable, marching with the Red Flag
Named ‘The Miracle at the Vistula’ by the Soviets, the surprising advance of the 1st Cavalry Army on time to participate in the battle, and ‘The Disaster at the Vistula’ by the Polish nationalists, for the utmost failure in prevent the fall of Warsaw, the capture of the city would result in the collapse of all Polish fronts.
In Warsaw, the Red Army marched in triumph, with its leaders being acclaimed as victors and heralds to the people. The names of Leon Trotsky, Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Alexander Yegorov are acclaimed as heroes to the proletariat, heroes to the soldiers. Red banners flew all over the city, and their names were engraved into various Polish monuments.
Throughout August and early September, what remained of the Polish government struggled as well as it could to re-establish a front against the Soviet offensive that continued to march, now virtually unopposed, through the nation. What remained of the Polish government was the Council of the Defence of the Nation; if there was a Polish leadership it was around the Marshall of Poland, Josef Pilsudski. He was, however, a shadow of his former self. With his reputation ruined, considered by all foreign and domestic voices a failure as a military leader and a failure as a political leader. The Polish situation seemed dire.
It didn’t last long, however. On the 13th September, the Council of the Defence of the Nation announced the death of Marshall Pilsudski; the official version was the Marshall had committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. The new leadership of the Council, headed by Prime-Minister Wincenty Witos, approached the Soviet authorities to negotiate terms.
In the end, the negotiations were quick; there wasn’t much that the Polish had that the Soviets felt a need to the negotiate with; the leaders of Poland were able to secure their leave for Britain via sea, and for some in the Polish Armed Forces, in exchange of cooperating with the complete surrender of the Polish Republic to the Red Army. This was the event known as the Fall of Poland, as red flags flew all over the country, Lwow and Warsaw the main centres of Soviet occupation.
The Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee in 1920. This would be the basis of the government of the Polish Socialist Soviet Republic
A pro-Soviet government, appointed and chosen by the Politburo in Moscow, was placed in Warsaw, to rule over the Polish and rebuild the nation; a Polish Red Army started recruiting, to replace the Red Army in occupation duties. The Polish people were rapidly adhering to the Soviet occupation and rule, having been under Russian rule for a few centuries already; propaganda associated the brief independence as a show to designate a period of anarchy and ownership of Poland by interests in the Western Allies.
In Warsaw, Leon Trotsky administrated the Red Army occupying the country; while placing troops in the important Polish locations, such as Warsaw, Krakow and Lwow, he focused a great number of units from the Red Army on the border with Germany; camps from the Red Army were placed in Posen, in Silesia and in the vicinities of the Free City of Danzig.
Each passing day, it was imminent to both the Soviets and the Western Allies that, eventually, the revolution must continue forwards, beyond the border between the Poles and Germany. It seemed that once more the German Republicans would have to fight Reds