Russo-Polish Wars

Russo-Polish war (1920), short but violent war in which two outstanding military commanders, Polish Marshal Pilsudski and Russian General, later Marshal, Tukhachevskiy, clashed before Warsaw. The Poles' victory at Warsaw was seen at the time as the salvation of European democracy in the face of communism. Soviet historiography regarded the war as part of the final phase of the ‘civil war and military intervention in Russia’, which ended in November with the defeat of Wrangel in the Crimea. Poland had been part of the Russian empire during the 19th century but the 1919 Treaty of Versailles established an independent state with new borders, led by Pilsudski who had commanded the Polish Legion on the Austro-Hungarian side in the Great War. In January 1920 the Russian government began negotiations with the Poles on the new frontier. Conscious of their military weakness, the Russians were prepared to cede territory east of the Curzon Line, the frontier established by Versailles in December, but the Poles wanted all the territory which had belonged to Poland before 1772, and withdrew from the talks on 7 April.

On 25 April they attacked with five armies, organized and supplied with the help of the Great War Entente, which had unsuccessfully intervened in Russia itself. These armies were grouped in two fronts on a frontage of 311 miles (500 km): the north-east (First and Fourth) aimed at Belorussia and the south-east (Third, Second, and Sixth) at Ukraine, where the main attack was directed. The Poles planned to destroy the forces of the Soviet South-West Front (army group) first, capturing ‘right bank Ukraine’ (as seen from the north-west of the river Dnieper), and then turn north to take Belorussia. The Poles would be helped by forces loyal to the anti-Soviet Ukrainian leader Simon Petlyura, and their attack coincided with renewed activity by Wrangel's White Russian forces in the Crimea.

The Poles quickly pushed 124 miles (200 km) into Ukraine and took Kiev on 7 May. In June, Wrangel' broke out of the Crimea, and the Soviet Republic mobilized 1.5 million men and concentrated forces in right-bank Ukraine including the First Cavalry Army. On 12 June they recaptured Kiev and pressed forward to take Novograd-Volynsk on 27 June. The successful counter-attack in Ukraine then allowed the Soviet Western Front to go on the offensive in Belorussia and on 11 July the Soviets recaptured Minsk.

The Soviet Western Front commanded by the 27-year-old Tukhachevskiy, then drove on to Warsaw, reaching Grodno on the 23rd, the beginning of the ‘Warsaw operation’. The Soviet C-in-C, Sergey Kamenev, a former tsarist colonel, ordered Tukhachevskiy to pursue the Poles without pause, and he reached the gates of Warsaw on 13 August. It was a daring bid to seize the Polish capital, and almost succeeded, but was frustrated in what the British military theorist Fuller later recognized as one of the decisive battles of the western world. As Tukhachevskiy reached the end of his stretched communications, without supplies or reserves, the Soviet South-West Front was suffering heavily in the battle for Lvov, to the south. The Poles, helped by the French, managed to regroup and exploited the lack of co-operation between the western and south-west fronts. They managed to get between them and hit the Soviet Western Front forces, whom they outnumbered two to one, in the southern flank between 16 and 25 August. By now, the Soviet forces were exhausted and were forced to fall back to a line running roughly south of Grodno by 25 August and roughly level with Minsk by 12 October, when an armistice was signed at Riga. This enabled the Soviet government to switch their effort to the Crimea, which Frunze invaded after his breakthrough at the Perekop isthmus on 7 November and defeating Wrangel's forces in the peninsula itself during the following week.

A Polish-Soviet peace treaty was signed at Riga on 18 March 1921, establishing the frontier some 155 miles (250 km) east of the Curzon Line (the line which the Soviet Republic had been prepared to accept before the war). The armistice gave the Soviet Republic a breathing space to complete the destruction of ‘White’ forces deep in its own territory. Poland held western Ukraine and Belorussia for just eighteen years. In September 1939 the USSR invaded again.

Bibliography

• Fuller, John F. C., The Decisive Battles of the Western World, vol. 3 (London, 1956).
• Pilsudski, Marshal Jozef, Year 1920 and its Climax, Battle of Warsaw during the Polish-Soviet War 1920, with the addition of M Tukhachevskiy's March beyond the Vistula (London, 1972)

— Christopher Bellamy

From the 1480s to 1667 Muscovy fought a series of devastating wars along its western frontier, first with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and then with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Muscovy's wars with Lithuania had four principal causes: disputed claims over the right to collect tribute and taxes in border districts and competition for the fealty of influential Orthodox princes; the question of ecclesiastic jurisdiction over Lithuania's large Orthodox population; Muscovy's gradual absorption of the Republic of Novgorod; and involvement in the struggle between the Crimean Khanate and the Golden Horde over the Pontic Steppe.

The 1480s saw a series of border clashes between Lithuania and Muscovy, particularly along the Novgorod-Pskov front. The death of the Polish king and Lithuanian grand duke Casimir finally gave Muscovite Grand Prince Ivan III the opportunity to launch a major invasion of Lithuania (1492–1494). Casimir's successor was forced to renounce his claims to Novgorod, Pskov, and Tver' and to cement the peace by taking Ivan's daughter Elena in marriage. But the peace did not last. In the Second Muscovite-Lithuanian War (1500–1503) Muscovite armies seized about a third of Lithuania—most of the former principalities of Chernigov (Chernihiv) and Novgorod-Seversk and about half of the Smolensk region. One crucial objective eluded Ivan III, however: the capture of the Lithuanian fortress of Smolensk, which commanded the roads and waterways to Moscow, Kiev, and Riga. Grand Prince Vasilii III therefore resumed the struggle for mastery of Smolensk in a Third Muscovite-Lithuanian war (1512–1522). Smolensk fell to Muscovite forces in 1514, but the war wound down in stalemate.

The Muscovites invaded Lithuania again in the second phase (1563–1571) of Tsar Ivan IV's Livonian War. Ivan's objective was to seize control of the entire course of the Western Dvina in order to blockade Riga into submission, but he also hoped to force King Sigismund II Augustus of Poland to cede him the rest of Livonia in exchange for his withdrawal from Lithuania. The Muscovite invasion instead had the effect of finally pushing the Lithuanian nobility into accepting Sigismund's proposal for the union of Lithuania and Poland in a Commonwealth (1569). Sigismund's successor Stephen Báthory drove the Muscovites from Livonia and Lithuania (1579–1580) and invaded northwestern Muscovy, forcing Ivan to cede Livonia to the Commonwealth and Sweden in exchange for an armistice (1582, 1583).

Polish-Lithuanian intervention in Russia's Time of Troubles initially took the form of private adventurism by magnates and border governors who perceived in the political upheaval an opportunity to recover some of the borderlands lost in 1503 and 1522. They abetted the two False Dmitriis (1603–1606, 1607–1610). After the defeat of the second, his Muscovite supporters and some powerful boyars decided to overthrow Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii and place King Sigismund III's son Władysław on the Russian throne. Shuiskii's overthrow in July 1610 permitted Polish forces to enter Moscow, but the resulting Polish military dictatorship provoked several Muscovite provincial governors and gentry leaders to join with Cossack elements in a national liberation army, which defeated the Poles in October 1612. Three months later Michael Fedorovich Romanov was proclaimed tsar. Eventually the Treaty of Deulino (1618) established an armistice in exchange for the return of Smolensk, Chernigov (Chernihiv), and Seversk to the Commonwealth.

Michael's government, intent on recovering these territories, invaded eastern Lithuania in 1632 with an army of 33,000 men. This war (1632–1634) marked the largest experiment to date with Russian troops in reorganized Western-style "new formation regiments" trained and officered by Swedish, Dutch, and English mercenary officers. Some twenty towns fell to the Russian army, but their long siege of Smolensk failed and their commanders were forced to sue for armistice in exchange for safe evacuation.

From the mid-1630s Ukrainian churchmen and Cossack leaders had pleaded for Russian support for their rebellion against the Commonwealth. Moscow held back until 1654, when Bohdan Khmelnytsky agreed to place the Zaporozhian Host and the territories it held—Kiev and all Ukraine east of the Dnieper—under the tsar's protection. But the greater inducement to military intervention was the opportunity to recover Smolensk. The Treaty of Andrusovo, ending the Thirteen Years War (1654–1667), partitioned Ukraine along the Dnieper and restored the Smolensk region to Russia. This was the last great war fought between Russia and the Commonwealth, in large part because of the rising danger to both from the Ottoman Empire; the two signed an "eternal peace" in 1686.

Bibliography

Fennell, John Lister Illingworth. Ivan the Great of Moscow. London, 1961.

Ignatev, A. V., ed. Istoriia vneshnei politiki Rossii, konets XV–XVII vek: Ot sverzheniia ordynskogo iga do Severnoi voiny. Moscow, 1999.

Platonov, S. F. The Time of Troubles: A Historical Study of the Internal Crises and Social Struggle in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Muscovy. Translated by John T. Alexander. Lawrence, Kans., 1976.

—BRIAN DAVIES