Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Initially, however, Red commanders were taken by surprise when a combined Polish and Ukrainian force launched an offensive toward Kiev, capturing it on 7 May 1920. A huge Red counteroffensive soon obliged them to retire, though, and Soviet forces were at the gates of Warsaw by mid-August. Then this seesaw conflict tilted again, as, reinforced by tens of thousands of volunteers eager to oppose “the Russians” and resupplied from Allied stocks, Polish forces thrust eastward, breaching and dividing the Red fronts and marching on into Ukraine and Belorussia as the Soviet forces fled. At this point, with the Soviet armies scattered, exhausted, and seemingly more intent on pogroms than fighting the Poles (and with recriminations flying back and forth over Stalin and Budennyi’s failure to move troops from the South-West Front against Warsaw), plans in Moscow to export the revolution, which seemed to have been realized in August, were shelved. An armistice with the Poles was duly arranged in September–October 1920, and the following year the Treaty of Riga (18 March 1921) formally brought the war to an end. Under the terms of that agreement, Poland shifted its eastern border about 100 miles east of that accorded to Warsaw by the Allies in 1919, but recovered, in effect, only those eastern borderlands lost to Russia in the third partition of Poland of 1795. Other territories and populations in the east, however, including those around Kiev and Minsk, had to be recognized by Warsaw as now lying within the new Ukrainian SSR and Belorussian SSR, respectively. Warsaw was also obliged to cut off its links with the UNR (sealed at the Treaty of Warsaw in April 1920), thereby scuppering the cause of Ukrainian nationalism for generations. To some extent, therefore, Lenin was justified in writing of the Riga settlement “We have won. Anyone who examines the map will see that we have won, that we have emerged from this war with more territory than we had before we started it.”167 Nevertheless, he must have written that through gritted teeth: Warsaw, Berlin—even Prague, Budapest, and Vienna—had been, conceivably, within the grasp of the Red Army in August 1920. They would not again be so until April 1945, and then in very different circumstances. Peace with Poland was a necessity, though. Lenin was always a pragmatist more than an idealist and was aware that civil-war struggles had brought the Soviet economy to its knees by mid-1920. He, and war commissar Trotsky, also knew that internal security was under threat from the peasant revolts discussed above, and that there was still a lot of fighting to be done in Transcaucasia, in Central Asia, in Siberia and the Far East, and most immediately, once again in White-held regions of South Russia.

Unfortunately for Moscow, the 35,000 Whites evacuated from Novorossiisk in late March 1920 had not sailed away into the sunset, but had merely made the short hop to the Crimean peninsula, to regroup under a new commander, General Wrangel, who was selected to succeed Denikin by a conference of AFSR commanders at Yalta on 4 April 1920. Wrangel vowed that his regime would privilege order, obedience, and justice and would expunge all memories of Denikin’s ochlocratic “Grabarmiia.” To this end, he ordered the shooting of all looters; retired a number of miscreant generals (including, eventually, the now unhinged General Slashchev); formed a cabinet (the Government of South Russia) that included some notably moderate elements (including the liberal, former Marxist, P. B. Struve, as minister of foreign affairs); and summoned back from Paris, to be his prime minister, the joint architect of the prewar Stolypin peasant reforms, former tsarist minister of agriculture A. V. Krivoshein. The latter helped draft laws for a radical land reform in Russia, come the dreamt-of White victory.168 That outcome would remain a dream, however. Despite a landing of Cossack forces in the Kuban and a surge out of Crimea by his redubbed Russian Army in June–July 1920 that took White forces briefly beyond the Dnepr, Wrangel’s offensive was nothing more than a noble gesture of defiance: his active army never numbered more than perhaps 25,000 men, and against him were ranged forces of the Reds’ Southern Front under the brilliant commander M. V. Frunze, who was able to deploy 188,000 infantry, cavalry, and other front-line troops (with 3,000 machine guns, 600 artillery pieces, and 23 armored trains, as well as several hundred tachanki), and who could syphon reinforcements from the Western and South-West Fronts following the armistice with Poland.169 The Allies, meanwhile, having concluded that the White cause was lost and that rather than fight the Bolsheviks it was better to hem them in behind a cordon sanitaire of the Baltic States, Poland, and Romania, offered scant support to Wrangel and even threatened to cut off all aid should he continue offensive operations against the Soviet regime.