At the end of the congress, on August 7, small red flags surrounded Warsaw on the map. But the Soviet offensive was stopped on the outskirts of Warsaw. After its stunning defeat on the banks of the Vistula, the Red Army was forced into a rapid retreat.
The two sides in the war, and many military historians since then, have meticulously analyzed the military operations in search of the causes for the Red Army's success and defeat. Trotsky and Tukhachevsky charged that defeat was the result of Stalin's behavior. They said that Stalin, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the southwestern front, had disobeyed orders. Stalin later blamed the "traitors" Trotsky and Tukhachevsky.
On a military level, the causes of the Red Army's defeat are evident: insufficient coordination of the two fronts, "underestimation of the enemy's forces, and overestimation of our own troops' successes."131 On the political level, things are even clearer: Lenin repeated Pilsudski's mistake. Pilsudski had imagined it was possible to bring independence to another nation on the point of a bayonet. Lenin was convinced that communism could be implanted the same way. But as a Soviet historian has put it, 'The Polish bourgeoisie and Catholic clergy succeeded in contaminating the minds of the Polish peasants and small handicraft producers, as well as some of the workers, with the poison of bourgeois nationalism."132 The Soviet com- mander-in-chief, Sergei Kamenev, commented that the Red Army had reached out its hand to the Polish proletariat but "did not find that proletariat's hand reaching out in response. Undoubtedly, the more powerful hand of the Polish bourgeoisie held that hand down and kept it deeply, deeply hidden."133
Great Britain and France had done their best to stop the initial Polish invasion of Russia. By granting Poland modest assistance in the form of money and arms, they exerted pressure for an armistice.134 After January 1920 the Entente's policy in regard to Russia was based mainly on Lloyd
George's views. While rejecting the Soviet system, as all other Allied leaders did, Lloyd George strongly opposed intervention in Russia's affairs, considering it a waste of time and money. On April 16, 1919, he declared he would rather see a Bolshevik Russia than a bankrupt Great Britain.
Lloyd George formulated the principles of a policy that was to become standard for the West vis-&-vis the Soviet Union: to smother bolshevism with generosity. He declared that trade with the Soviet Republic would allow Russia's economy to revive, put an end to its chaotic state, and help surmount the difficulties that had given rise to bolshevism. When Lev Kamenev arrived in London on August 4, 1920, to hold talks with the British, "he was given such a courteous reception by Lloyd George that it would not have been any better had he been sent by the bloodthirsty tsar and not by Russian proletarian democracy."135 Lloyd George was hoping to persuade the Soviet representative to accept peace on the basis of the Curzon line (the roughly ethnographic eastern frontier of Poland proposed at the Versailles peace conference in 1919). Unable to obtain any concessions from Moscow, which expected Warsaw to fall at any time, he set out to tame the Poles. An inter-Allied mission headed by British diplomat Lord D'Abernon left for Poland. France was represented by Ambassador Jus- serand and General Weygand. British diplomat Maurice Hankey, a member of the mission who left Warsaw after six days of talks, announced in his report that Poland could not be saved. He suggested that "suitable conditions" be obtained for Poland through a peace agreement and that Allied efforts be concentrated on trying to improve relations with Germany and, through it, with Russia.136 When Lloyd George, seeking to learn the real intentions of the French government, told Marshal Foch that Great Britain was ready to send its troops to Poland if France would do so as well, the marshal answered bluntly: "There aren't any troops."137
General Weygand, refuting the legend that he was the "father of the victory" on the Vistula, wrote in his memoirs: 'The victory was Polish, the plan was Polish, the army was Polish."138
The Riga peace treaty, signed on March 18, 1921, was satisfactory to both parties. The Poles obtained a border much farther east than the one proposed by Curzon in July. The Soviet government, fearing worse conditions, was forced to accept the proposal. The Allies were particularly pleased. With Poland's help and at little cost to themselves the Bolshevik advance into Europe had been stopped.
In his diary Lord D'Abernon quoted Gibbon's historical observation that if Charles Martel had not stopped the Moors at Сгёсу, the Koran would have been taught at Oxford. D'Abernon added: "It is possible that the battle of Warsaw saved Central Europe and part of Western Europe from a more perfidious danger: the fanatical tyranny of the Soviets."139 Historians today might modify this remark: the Polish victory on the Vistula postponed the Marxism-Leninism requirement in Eastern European schools for one generation.
The signing of the peace with Poland allowed the Soviet command to concentrate its efforts on Wrangel. By mid-October "a political and military" agreement had been reached between the Soviet government of the Ukraine and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army of Makhno.140 By then the Soviet army outnumbered Wrangel's by "more than four to one in infantry and almost three to one in cavalry."141 A few military successes by the Whites during the summer of 1920 could not alter the outcome of the struggle, nor did a few political reforms which Wrangel decided to institute. Wrangel, a conservative, found himself obliged to agree to reforms that even the liberal Denikin had rejected, but it was too late. During the first half of November, Soviet troops occupied the Crimea. The remnants of Wrangel's army boarded ships and sailed into exile. For the White movement defeat had come.
THE PEASANT WAR
The war between Reds and Whites, between the regular Red Army and the regular White armies, was only one aspect of the civil war. The other was the peasant war. Peasant wars had figured prominently in Russian history—especially those led by Stepan Razin in the seventeenth century and by Emelyan Pugachev in the eighteenth. The peasant war of the twentieth century surpassed both of those in area and numbers involved. The Decree on Land, adopted on October 26, 1917, legalized the peasants' seizure of the great landed estates, which were abolished without compensation. The peasants, having gained what they wanted, considered the revolution over. The party of the proletariat, however, having taken power, insisted that the peasants provide grain and soldiers for a revolution the peasants no longer wanted. Conflict was inevitable.
During the summer of 1918 revolts broke out in many cities. Among the rebels were not only supporters of the old regime but also some of the most politically conscious members of the working class—rail workers, printers, and metalworkers. These anti-Bolshevik outbreaks were especially widespread in the Urals region, an important industrial center. 'The Left SRs stirred up the backward elements of the working class against us in the factories of Kushva, Rudyansk, Shaitansk, Yugovsk, Setkino, Kaslino, and elsewhere," a Soviet historian acknowledges.142 In elections to the Izhevsk
Soviet at the end of May 1918, the Bolsheviks won only 22 seats out of 170. As always in such cases, they walked out of the soviet "in protest" and declared it "anti-Soviet." In August a rebellion broke out in Izhevsk. "The immediate pretext for the revolt," writes the historian Spirin, "was the worsening of the food situation in the city and some improper actions of certain individual leaders of party and government bodies" [emphasis added—M. H.]. But the main reason, in Spirin's opinion, was "social." "A large number of workers in Izhevsk, as is well known, were contaminated by a petit bourgeois mentality."143 The workers of neighboring Votkinsk joined the insurgent Izhevsk workers. Together they formed the People's Army of Izhevsk, more than 30,000 strong. Defeated after a hundred days of fighting near Izhevsk and Votkinsk, the soldiers of this army retreated eastward with their families and became one of Kolchak's toughest fighting units.