Pilsudski decided to strike first. On April 17, 1920, he ordered an offensive against Kiev. On April 21 he signed a treaty with Petlyura, recognizing his directorate as the supreme authority in the Ukrainian People's Republic and proclaiming the total independence of the Ukraine.
Kiev fell on May 7. The Soviet troops, aware of their weakness, withdrew without offering any serious resistance. It proved easier to conquer the Ukraine, however, than to govern it. The Poles, who wished to appear as liberators, were regarded as invaders. The Ukrainians did not want the kind of independence that was imposed from abroad. Petlyura proved incapable of establishing any stable political structures.
On June 12 the Soviet army, strengthened by fresh reserves, reoccupied Kiev. The speed of Poland's initial victory was now matched by the speed of its defeat. Pilsudski's armies withdrew in haste to the boundaries of ethnographic Poland.
The Polish invasion gave rise to a new political phenomenon in the Soviet Republic, a burst of government-sanctioned patriotism. Patriotism, which
Lenin had denounced at the beginning of the world war as a bourgeois concept and which after the revolution was persecuted and ridiculed, suddenly became part of the Communist party arsenal. On April 29 the party's Central Committee appealed not only to the workers and peasants but to "the respected citizens of Russia" to defend the Soviet Republic. This marked the resurrection of a concept of Russia that had been discredited by the revolution. The Central Committee referred to age-old enmities between Poland and Russia and recalled earlier invasions of Russia, in 1612, 1812, and 1914. It expressed certainty that "the respected citizens" would not allow the Polish "pans" (landlords) to impose their will on the Russian people. The Ukrainian Communists, who for three years had fought ruthlessly against Ukrainian nationalism, called on the Ukrainian people as a whole to rise up in defense of their homeland.
The appeal to Russian patriotic feeling produced immediate results. General Brusilov, former commander of tsarist armies in the world war, published a statement in Pravda calling on his fellow generals and officers to forget their grievances and do their patriotic duty—defend their beloved Russia from the foreign yoke, even at the cost of their lives.
This excess of patriotism disturbed the Soviet leaders, and measures were taken to curb it. The newspapers published a spate of articles emphasizing the class character of the Polish—Soviet war. Trotsky temporarily closed down the magazine of the General Staff, which had carried an article contrasting "the inherent Jesuitism of the lyakhs" (an insulting term for Poles) to "the honest and open souls of the Great Russians."124
Karl Radek discovered a formula which was typical of the way dialectics is used to reconcile the irreconcilable. "Since Russia is the only country where the working class has taken power, from now on the workers of the world must become Russian patriots."125
A concrete result of this use of patriotic slogans was a successful mobilization of former officers and NCOs. By August 15, 1920, there were 314,180 of them in the Red Army.126
After the Polish withdrawal from Kiev, the Soviet Republic concentrated the bulk of its forces on a single front and made ready, for the first time in its history, to invade another country. In command of the offensive was Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a twenty-seven-year-old former tsarist officer. All the army commanders under him—Kork, Lazarevich, Sologub, and Ser- geev—had been colonels in the tsarist army.
The question of whether to cross the Polish border was discussed in the Politburo. The opinions of the Polish Communists, the "experts," were divided. Karl Radek warned of the dangers of such an action, which he said most Poles would perceive above all as an invasion by Russians. The majority of the Polish Communist leaders, however, warmly supported the plan to Communize Poland with the help of the Red Army. Most importantly, Lenin was resolutely in favor of invasion.
On Lenin's insistence the Politburo voted to invade and rejected an armistice proposal from British Foreign Minister Curzon, although Trotsky supported it. For Lenin, the fact that in March 1920 a general strike in Germany had foiled a right-wing attempt to seize power (the Kapp putsch) was irrefutable proof that the German working class was ready for revolution. By crossing Poland the Red Army would be able to lend a fraternal hand to the German proletariat. The miracle of the October revolution would be repeated as the miracle of the world revolution. Tukhachevsky, in his marching orders for the western front signed on July 2, proclaimed: "On our bayonets we will bring peace and happiness to toiling humanity. Forward, to the West!"
On July 23 a Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee (the Polrevkom) was organized in Moscow, with Marchlewski as titular head. Its real leader was Dzerzhinsky. The Polrevkom was the first attempt to use foreign Communists living in Moscow to staff a Soviet government that would be installed beyond the borders of the Soviet Republic. Experience in this field was still lacking, and the activities of the Polrevkom were improvised following the Moscow model. Stalin, however, foresaw that the Polish experiment could be repeated. On June 16 he wrote Lenin a letter presenting theoretical arguments for a proposed confederation of such future Soviet states as Poland, Germany, and Hungary. These populations, he argued, could not be treated like Bashkirs or Ukrainians and simply included in a federation of Soviet republics.127
Bialystok, the first major Polish city to be taken, fell on July 28. The Red Army offensive rolled on, even though negotiations between Polish and Soviet representatives were proceeding in a desultory way and despite the fact that the last of the White armies, the army of Wrangel, had begun military operations aimed at breaking out of confinement on the Crimean peninsula. Lenin swept aside the fears of Central Committee members who suggested a halt in the Polish offensive in order to deal with Wrangel. Lenin knew that the Whites and the Poles would not coordinate their actions. During the negotiations with Marchlewski, Pilsudski's personal representative had stated clearly that it was central to Pilsudski's policy "not to allow the Russian reactionaries to triumph in Russia."128 Wrangel by himself did not pose a serious danger.
On August 6 Tukhachevsky was named commander of the entire Polish front, combining the western and southwestern fronts. On August 14 Trotsky signed an order that ended: "Red armies, forward. Onward, heroes. On to
Warsaw!"129 Soviet troops were expected to enter Warsaw on August 16. Along with the war cry, "Give us Warsaw," another now was heard: "Give us Berlin!" By mid-August Gai's cavalry corps was only ten days' march from Berlin. The delegates to the Second Congress of the Comintern, held in Moscow July 19 to August 7, could follow the progress of the Red Army on the map hanging at the front of the hall. The world revolution was coming to Europe on the points of swords and bayonets. Lenin was categorical in his conversations with the French delegates: "Yes, Soviet troops are in Warsaw. Soon Germany will be ours. We will reconquer Hungary. The Balkans will rise against capitalism. Italy will tremble. Bourgeois Europe is cracking at all its seams in this storm!"130