# The Polish-Soviet War 1920



## Foxbat (Jun 24, 2019)

With the anniversary of D Day recently, there have been some letters in The Scotsman regarding the omission of Russia from the comemoration (I am personally 100% convinced D Day would not have been possible or successful had the USSR not been absorbing the bulk of Nazi aggression on the Eastern Front). These letters inevitably led to arguments on the Soviet invasion of Poland (and I discovered when I visited Russia about twenty years ago that there's still an element of needle between the two countries). 

I think it's worth highlighting this little known conflict so that people understand that there was a bit of history between Poland and the USSR long before WW2. Indeed, some historians argue that Russia's failure in this conflict prevented Lenin from exporting his brand of Communism across the world.  Also, Pilsudski (the Polish leader) felt it was time to expand Poland's borders eastward (and this - to me - sounds remarkably similar to Hitler's ambition in the east).

It's also been argued that simmering resentment from this earlier conflict was a factor in Poland being carved up by the USSR  and Germany in september 1939 and made Poland's defeat inevitable given the strength of aggressors on either front.











						Polish–Soviet War - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org


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## Ursa major (Jun 24, 2019)

Foxbat said:


> some historians argue that Russia's failure in this conflict prevented Lenin from exporting his brand of Communism across the world


Given that Poland had only recently freed itself from the occupation of three empires (in alphabetical order, Austro-Hungarian, German and Russian), and given events elsewhere in the former Russian Empire (whose independent countries soon found themselves again part of the same state), I suspect that Poland believed that "exporting" Leninism would be synonymous with importing much if not all of the young Polish Republic back into what had become of that empire.

It did not help that Poland's borders were, at the time, also provisional, which provided opportunities for both Poland and its neighbours to move them to the extent that they were able.


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