POLISH CASE AND THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION

If someone wants to recognize what does it mean to win a hegemony in Gramscian sense of the
word, she needs to look at radically anticommunist public discourse in Poland after 1989,
especially at the mainstream narratives about contemporary history. Dominant right-wing,
national-conservative discourse rewrites the past – and the most important issue from this past
for them is of course the history of communism (or being more precisely of the real socialism).
The event, which is described as the most catastrophic for the course of the whole century – the
source of the evil – was the October revolution, or as right historians like to emphasize, not the
accurate revolution (that was in February) but the Bolshevik coup. That is the typical example
of how they want to totally discredit the heritage of the October events and the people who were
engaged in it, described as power-hunger bandits lead by brutal and cruel Lenin. Interestingly,
this hegemonic narrative is a simple reversal of the official propaganda of Polish People’s
Republic, where revolution was celebrated as the most glorious event in the history of mankind.
But during that period – because of the relevance of the revolution – many comprehensive and
well-documented studies about October and Soviet Russia were conducted. That is the reason
why I take them into consideration examining the influence of the Bolshevik revolution on
Poland. The nowadays anticommunist, rightist propaganda is completely blind to its possible
positive impact, but those studies from the past expose that this influence is much more
complex, and I want to present some of these complexities. Therefore, I will focus on three
issues:
1. Mass Poles participation in October Revolution (something which is often forgotten today);
2. The influence of revolution on Poland – a. on the question of independency and b. on the
Polish class struggle;
3. The impact of Polish-Soviet war of 1920 on the revolution itself – or how Poland changed
the course of the revolution. (additional)
1.
Imperial Russia in 1917 was a multinational state with 180 million inhabitants, which includes
about 4 million of ethnic Poles (i.e. people who identified themselves with Polish nation and
used Polish language – because Poland as a country did not exist). Most of them were civilians
but there were also 600 thousand Poles – mostly peasants – in tsarist uniforms. During the
Russian defeats on Eastern Front in First World War they became more and more radicalized;
these soldiers with workers from Petrograd and Moscow factories (that were moved from the
Congress Poland over the wartime) were the main Polish force in Russian Revolutions: both

1
February and October. Poles (including Polish Jews) where – beside Russian, Ukrainians and
Belarusians – on of the most active national group engaged in those events, especially in the
Bolshevik upheaval. Party program with distribution of land to poor peasants and immediate
peace were attractive for former serfs and soldiers exhausted by wars’ disaster. The exact
number of Poles participating in October Revolution is the subject of controversy between
historians, the Marxist one suggests that it was a least 100 thousand people, and 200 thousand
more joined to the Reds during the civilian war against the Whites; on the other hand, right-
wing authors try to underestimate the size of polish engagement in revolution to about 20
thousand participants. Probably the true is somewhere in between.
If the scale of polish masses approval for Bolshevik is still ambiguous, the support of
polish professional revolutionaries for the socialist transformation in Russia is unquestionable.
The two-main polish leftist political parties in Russia, Polish Socialist Party – Left
(internationalist, Marxist faction of Polish Socialist Party) and Social Democracy of the
Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (the former party of Rosa Luxemburg, which program
represents her hard-liner Marxist internationalism), fully supported the October Revolution and
their members took active part in it. They formed for example the 1st Polish Revolutionary
Regiment and in summer of 1918 had begun the organization of the largest Polish revolutionary
formation – the Western Rifle Division. The SDKPiL even made in 1917 an official access to
the Bolshevik Party – next year there were at least 4 thousand polish communists with the
Bolshevik party card. The direct influence of socialist revolution from 1917 on polish radical
left was the unification of those two parties into one Communist Workers Party of Poland (first
communist organization in the newly reborn polish state, which agenda focused on two main
issues: supporting the Bolsheviks and anticipating the proletarian revolution in Germany). What
is interesting, the centrist, social democratic and patriotic Polish Socialist Party (the former
party of Józef Pilsudski; also known as Old Faction or Revolutionary Faction) at the beginning
presented moderate enthusiasm about October Revolution (some of its members event fought
in Red Guard in those days) because their activists counted that Bolsheviks could support polish
independency – according to their agenda on national self-determinations. And indeed, they
supported it strongly, but before I explain it, I would like to mention some of the most influential
polish Bolsheviks from the revolutionary period:
Feliks Kon, who was fighting in Kharkov during the upheaval, and became the member
of the CC of The Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine; Stanisław Pestkowski, member of
the CC of Bolshevik Party in 1917, Stalin’s deputy commissar (in Peoples Commissar for
Nationality Affairs) and for the moment central bank governor; Józef Unszlicht member of the

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Petrograd Military-Revolutionary Council, one of the organizers of the Red Army and soviet
power in the Belorussia. Unszlicht with other two – best known – ethnic Poles in revolutionary
Russia were the founding fathers of the soviet secret police – Cheka (Wsierossijskaja
czriezwyczajnaja komissija) and then GPU (State Political Directorate – Objedinionnoje
gosudarstwiennoje politiczeskoje uprawlenije). The other two was Felix Dzierżyński and
Wiaczesław/or Wiesław Mienżyński – director of Cheka and his first deputy. Mienżyński was
on of the most mysterious members of the soviet nomenklatura, he spoked in 12 languages,
played the piano well, and Lenin called him “my decadent neurotic.”
Dzierzynski “The Iron Felix”, who had been born in 1877 near Minsk in the borderlands
of Lithuania-Belorussia, one of eight children in a family of Polish nobility landowners. He was
orphaned, and zealously studied for the Catholic priesthood. As a schoolboy, he converted to
Marxism, was expelled two months before graduation from the Wilno gymnasium and, became
agitator. But he ended up spending eleven years all told in tsarist prisons, in internal exile, and
at hard labor in penal colonies, and he became consumptive (suchotnik). “His eyes certainly
looked as if they were bathed in tears of eternal sorrow, but his mouth smiled an indulgent
kindness,” observed the British sculptor Clare Sheridan, who in 1920 made a bust of him.
Dzierżyński had a certain political vulnerability, having joined the Bolsheviks only in April
1917 and then opposed Lenin over Brest-Litovsk (1918) and workers opposition (1921), but he
won plaudits as the scourge (skerdż) of counterrevolutionaries and for living like a
revolutionary ascetic (asetik), sleeping in his unheated office on an iron bed, subsisting on tea
and crusts of bread. He reported to Lenin personally and once Lenin became incapacitated, got
still closer to Stalin. But he was not a Stalinist avant la lettre, embodiment of the communist
evil like many authors claim today. Sylwia Frołow in her well-balanced biography of
Dzierżyński provides a good argument against these simplified judgments (unfortunately this
book is only in polish, but is quite extraordinary, that such books – critical but not blindly
reproducing anticommunist clichés – are still published in my country).
2.
A.
Now, I will turn to the second point of my presentation, that is the influence of October
Revolution on Poland. First of all, this influence concerns the issue of Poland independency.
Already in 1913, Lenin in his “Theses on the National Question” wrote: “From this point of
view the following circumstance must be given special attention. There are two nations in
Russia that are more civilised and more isolated by virtue of a number of historical and social
conditions and that could most easily and most “naturally” put into effect their right to

3
secession. They are the peoples of Finland and Poland”. Four watchwords had accompanied the
Red October in 1917: peace, land, and bread, but also national self-determination, the latter
notion had been in the Bolsheviks program since 1903. It was not ungrounded declaration,
because Lenin at 8 November 1917 proposed and signed famous “The Decree on Peace’, which
outlined measures for Russia's withdrawal from the First World War without “payment of
indemnities or annexations”. This idea of just and democratic peace was captured by all, not
only revolutionary, democratic forces in Poland – the official announcement of Pilsudski’s PPS
about peace treaty was similar to Bolsheviks decree. It is well known in Poland, that the
internationalization of the polish independency issue – i.e. the alliance recognition of Polish
independent and autonomous state as a condition for the peace in Europe – was a result of
Woodrow Wilson's memorable “Fourteen Points” (the 13th was about Poland) of January 1918,
but hardly anyone admits, that his speech was a direct respond to Lenin’s decree.
New Russian government go even further and at 15 November promulgate “The
Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia”, which proclaimed equality and sovereignty
of peoples of Russia, and their right of a free self-determination, including secession and
formation of a separate state. Some historians treated this document as one of the main bases
for the liberation of Central European states, including Poland. However, it is to be noted that
Poland was of course on the other side of the Eastern Front – not under Soviet jurisdiction –
and, for that reason, Bolsheviks policy could affect it only symbolically. But there is no doubt
that one of the consequences of the October Revolution was full internationalization of the
Polish affairs. The Entente countries partially due to soviet standpoint in this case accepted the
idea of self-determination of Polish nation; to quote polish right-wing journalist from that time
(certainly not the Bolshevik supporter) Juliusz Górecki: “Russian revolution as a first one
decidedly and unreservedly recognized the right of Polish nation to independency”.
However, maybe the most important aspect of revolution from the polish perspective
was peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk at the turn of 1917 and 1918. There was big hope at
the beginning that Russian side would realized the concept of peace without annexations – what
could guarantee independency for Poland – but the ultimate result of this negotiations was a
huge disappointment. Bolsheviks capitulated under the German conditions that included the
acceptance of the annexation of Polish territory. Polish state, constituted about a year later, will
never forgive Bolsheviks that decision – that was the prelude for the polish-soviet antagonism,
erupted in war at 1920. Nevertheless, there was one decisive aftermath of the Treaty of Brest-
Litovsk for the polish future – soviet government officially renounced its right to the Kingdom
of Poland and the outcome was the cancellation of treaty legitimized polish partition at 29

4
August 1918. That event for Marxist historians of polish way to independency has a crucial
impact for the formal and legal status of Polish statehood, because soviet Russia as a first one
delegitimized the very concept of the partition of Poland, what somehow opened up the
possibility for the existence of the free country. It is interesting to examine the reaction of polish
leftist parties to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. As an act of protest against this agreement PPS –
both its left and right faction – abandoned the Commissar of Polish Affairs, soviet institution
within Stalin’s Commissar of Nationalities that represented interests of Pole’s in Russia. The
only party, which remained in it was SDKPiL but their leadership also strongly condemned the
treaty, although for another reason than PPS; if the first saw in it betrayal of polish right to self-
determination, the latter agreed with “Left Communists” opposition against the peace, led by
Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek (by the way, another top Bolshevik with Polish origins). They
were sure that Germany, Austria, Turkey, and Bulgaria were all on the verge of revolution, and
wanted to continue the war with a newly-raised revolutionary force while awaiting for these
upheavals. Ultimately upheavals did not come, and after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk there was
no real prospect of the revolution spreading to the West.
B.
Despite the Red Army in 1918 did not manage to organize the revolutionary rally to the West,
polish people (mostly proletarians) organized from the bottom their Workers' Councils, polish
soviets - representative organs of workers and peasants. The first council was established in
January 1918 in Warsaw and during the whole year in the former Kingdom of Poland more
than one hundredth of such soviets emerged. Their structure, organization and goals were
directly inspired by Russian revolutionary councils, it was an attempt to constitute the dual
power on the polish territories. The main organizations behind the initiative were the Social
Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania and the Polish Socialist Party – Left, which
soon – as we already know – merged to form the Communist Workers Party of Poland. Other
workers' organizations and parties competed for influence within the councils as well, including
the Polish Socialist Party, the Bund in Poland (anti-Zionist Jewish socialist movement) and the
National Workers' Union (democratic nationalist party). Due to significant disputes over the
political and economic future of the newly independent Poland, the councils failed to create an
executive committee. Nevertheless, over 100 workers' councils operated in Poland in years
1918–1919, assembling around 500,000 workers and peasants. The most numerous and radical
councils were located inter alia in Lublin, Warsaw, Zamość and Zagłębie Dąbrowskie
(Dąbrowa Basin – the most industrial region on the polish lands); some of them even set up
their own military self-defense units, the Red Guards and People’s Militia (with their political

5
commissars exactly as in their Russian sisters). At the turn of 1918 and 1919 those units, council
representatives and trade unionist (I’d like to mention that there was maybe first in Europe
united socialist and communist federation of trade unions in Poland) organized the biggest, in
that time, fight strikes, unemployed demonstrations and solidarity manifestations with Soviet
Russia (for example huge demo on the first anniversary of the October Revolution was taken
in Warsaw).
Furthermore, the events behind the eastern border inspired curious social experiment, I
mean the ephemeral Republic of Tarnobrzeg. The idea of the Republic had its roots in mass
demonstrations of peasants, which were taking place almost on daily basis in the fall of 1918.
Additionally, dissolution of Austro-Hungarian Empire (which Tarnobrzeg was part of) created
a political unrest. On 6 November, after a demonstration with some 30,000 people, local
peasants decided to take advantage of it and seize the power. Its main organizers were two
socialist activists - Tomasz Dąbal (he later become a member of communist party) and Father
Eugeniusz Okoń, a progressive Roman Catholic priest. As news of the Bolshevik Revolution
came to Tarnobrzeg, the people decided to follow Communist ideas. They demanded
liquidation of capitalist government and introduction of a land reform, which would result in
taking away land from rich owners and giving it to the poor peasantry. Also, the peasants
directed by Okoń and Dąbal, started to organize their local administration as well as a peasants'
militia. Unfortunately, The Republic of Tarnobrzeg was crushed by units of the freshly created
Polish Army at the beginning of 1919.
These examples show how the idea of polish soviet power was very vivid in those
stormy years. What happened then to the Workers Councils? They were dismantled around
July 1919, following the withdrawal of the Polish Socialist Party (which in many cases had a
council majority), and suppression by the Polish government, which saw the councils as a
barrier to the formation of a Polish bourgeois state. We can also indicate the internal
predicaments, that was the weakness of polish proletarians caused by the catastrophic condition
of polish industry after First World War (production level decreased about 90 percent) and
insufficient level of revolutionary class consciousness of workers (communist where strong
only in Silesia and in some more developed parts of Congress Poland). However, the period of
polish councils had important impact on newly established Polish state. In the November 1918
Piłsudski was forced to entrust the government to the socialist Jędrzej Moraczewski in order to
protect Poland from the possible revolution – as we know very well from the example of post-
second-war period in Western Europe, the social democracy was a vaccine to communist threat.
Indeed, Moraczewski’s office introduced progressive pro-workers and welfare policy like: 8-

6
hour labour day, universal suffrage (also for the woman), right to strike, legality of trade unions,
public medical insurance, labour inspection and so on. In a word, fear of the socialist revolution
in Poland lead the first polish independent government to the adoption of a wide range social
policy, that was already initiated by the activity of Workers' Councils.
3.
I don’t time to analyze the complex context and socio-political reasons of Polish-Soviet war,
for example, why Piłsudski in 1919 did not support Denikin during the Russian Civil war and
year later commanded Kiev Offensive, that sometimes is considered as the inauguration of the
war1. Instead of this, I will like to concentrate on the outcome of the war to the Soviet Russia,
to the very idea of exporting revolution.
Having driven the Poles back from Kiev, in mid-July the Reds crossed the Curzon Line
— where the Allies drew the Polish-Russian border — and continued to advance towards
Warsaw. As liberal historian Orlando Figes argues (and I agree with his thesis) that, the
Bolsheviks viewed the invasion of Poland as a likely catalyst to the revolution not just in Poland
but throughout Europe. Following the Red Army to Warsaw was a Provisional Polish
Revolutionary Committee led by Dzierżyński, which would hand over power to the
Communists once it arrived in the Polish capital. The Bolsheviks believed that the Polish
proletariat was revolutionary enough and will unite with them to fight against Piłsudski. This
was the height of the Bolsheviks' optimism in the exportability of Communism. Their
expectations had been raised by the Spartacist Revolt in Berlin and the short-lived Soviet
Republics in Hungary and Bavaria during 1919. In that spring, when the Comintern was formed,
Grigory Zinoviev had predicted that “in a year the whole of Europe will be Communist”. The
Second Congress of the Comintern, which met in Moscow at the height of the advance towards
Warsaw, aimed to create a single European Communist Party under Moscow's guidance. Lenin,
who had insisted on the offensive on Warsaw against the advice of both Trotsky and Stalin, was
convinced that the European revolution was just around the corner, to quote him: “The Kapp
Putsch of March 1920 was a 'German Kornilov affair'; Estonia was 'passing through its
Kerensky period'; while Britain, with its Councils of Action, was in 'its period of Dual Power”.
He also did not listen to Dzierżyński and Radek – both well informed in polish affairs – who
argued that this invasion could never succeed unless the Polish working class rose in rebellion,
which was a remote prospect. Contrary, Lenin was convinced that the Polish campaign would

1
Right-wing historians argues that the actual beginning of Polish-Bolshevik war, was soviet trespassing to Wilno
at 4 January 1919.

7
be a blow against the whole Versailles system – the international coordinated blockade of
socialism in Russia, and suppression of it in Western and Central Europe.
But it is a long way from this to argue that Lenin was planning to impose his revolution
on Western countries by the bayonet like some historians, such as Norman Davies and Richard
Pipes (by the way, the biggest authorities on the subject of polish-soviet war in my country)
like to prove, risking their scholarly reputations. It was not a question of Bolsheviks were
painfully aware that their own workers-peasant army, and even more so their exhausted
economy, could not sustain a winter offensive, especially one in a foreign field. That was why
they were so quick to make peace with Poland during the autumn of 1920, even though it costed
them a territorial foothold in Galicia which, in Lenin's own words, could have “opened up a
straight road of revolution ... to Czechoslovakia and Hungary”. So as Figes asked, why then did
they bother to attack Poland at all? A newly published speech by Lenin to the Ninth Party
Conference in September 1920 provides the most convincing answer so far. It suggests that the
offensive against Warsaw was not supposed to be the start of an invasion of the West — as
Pipes has misleadingly suggested — but on the contrary a deterrent to the West against invading
Russia. Lenin believed that Pilsudski's Poland had been built up by the Western powers as a
weapon against Soviet Russia.
What was then the lesson from Polish-Soviet war to the Bolsheviks? As Tariq Ali
suggest, the polish working class after a long history of revolutionary upsurges, was
demobilized by the war and emergence of a Polish state under the protection of the Versailles
Treaty. There was no popular response to the call of the Soviet armies to rise up against
Pilsudski. The military defeat of the Polish campaign was avoidable: the political defeat of the
conception behind it – the Tukhachevsky’s doctrine of “revolution from without” – was not.
This doctrine assumed the offensive proletarian war against neighboring bourgeois states – to
overthrow capitalism and install the local working class in power (the idea of International
General Staff of the proletarian revolution). The polish case in 1920 shows clearly, that Trotsky
was right when he criticized Tukhachevsky arguing: “Military intervention may hasten the
denouement (dej-niu-mon) and make the victory easier, but only when the political
consciousness and the social conditions are ripe for revolution”. This principle was precisely
what Tukhachevsky (and also Lenin during Polish campaign) had ultimately ignored. The
socialist revolution is by definition only socialist if it involves the masses of the population
taking their lives into their own hands and overthrowing existing society from top to bottom
themselves. In 1920 there were no chances for such revolution in Poland.

8
Notes:
•Wiaczesław Mienzynski, another Pole, had become Dzierzynski’s first deputy and,
because his boss was simultaneously railroad commissar (and from 1924 would
concurrently chair the Supreme Council of the Economy), ran the secret police. He had
been born in St. Petersburg, the son of a Polish nobleman and teacher who converted to
Eastern Orthodoxy, and graduated from the St. Petersburg law faculty. He lived in
European emigration for 11 years, working as a bank clerk (in Paris) or teaching at a
Bolshevik school (in Bologna), while painting and publishing sonnets. In Smolny in
1917 he was said to play Chopin waltzes on the grand piano of the former girls’ finishing
school, and came across as a banker or a dandy in his three-piece suit. After his brief
stint as the original commissar for finance and then some diplomatic work—Mezynski
knew a dozen or so languages—Dzierzynski promoted him in the Cheka, considering
him unfailing in operational instincts. The two lived in the Kremlin and had dachas near
each other in Arkhaneglskoe (Gorki-6). Legends about Mezynski abounded: that he
conducted interrogations lying on a settee draped in Chinese silks, dyed his finger- and
toenails red, wore gold-framed pince-nez, and married a former governess to the Nobel
family (she left him and took the children). Lenin called him “my decadent neurotic.”
In fact, Mezynski did receive people while lying on a couch. An automobile accident in
Paris had severely damaged his hearing and nerves, leaving him with degenerative
osteoarthritis of the spine. In addition, he had contracted scarlatina and diphtheria in his
youth and typhus at age 28, and suffered acute angina, arteriosclerosis, an enlarged
heart, migraines, breathing arrhythmia, and an infected kidney. He stood 5΄9˝ but
weighed 200 pounds, smoked 50 to 75 cigarettes daily, and managed no more than 5
hours of sleep because of insomnia. Although Mezynski had warned Trotsky during the
civil war about Stalin’s incessant intriguing behind Trotsky’s back, Stalin and
Mezynski, both former poets, got along. In any case, Mezynski’s profusion of ailments
rendered him unthreatening, while enabling Stalin to work around him.
• Apart from the 1918–1919 period, workers' councils in Poland had also been set up in
Congress Poland during the Revolution of 1905, in 1944–1947 in the aftermath of World
War II (see: Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–
1950). and in the Polish People's Republic during the Polish October of 1956. Strike
committees and councils appeared during the “Solidarność” strikes of 1980–1981 as
well.
Communist Party of Poland:
• The KPRP was founded on 16 December 1918 as the result of the fusion of the Social
Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) and the Polish Socialist
Party-Lewica (Left) on the basis of the program of the former group. Elections for the
Workers Councils which sprang up in 1918 revealed that the new party had a level of
support almost equal to that of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). However this support
was undermined by both national feeling and due to the party being driven underground
by reactionary legislation. The KPRP would be illegal for the rest of its life but took
part, in the shape of Józef Unszlicht, in the founding of the Communist International in
March 1919.
• Despite the immense difficulties facing the new party the KPRP promoted the
unification of the trade union movement and opposed the war against Soviet Russia on
the country's eastern frontier. Clashes in this unsettled region became a full-scale war

9
 with Russia in April 1920 as Józef Piłsudski, in alliance with Symon Petliura, launched
a successful attack into the Ukraine. This was successfully repulsed and the Red Army
advanced to the gates of Warsaw only to be pushed back in its turn and defeated on the
banks of Vistula. The war ended with the Peace of Riga in March 1921.
• The war posed problems for the KPRP as its opposition to Polish nationalism ranged it
alongside the invading Red Army, which to many patriotic workers appeared traitorous
to the newly established nation-state of Poland. Due to the support of the government
by the nationalist PPS, efforts by the KPRP to agitate for workers' solidarity with the
Red Army were forestalled, and with the retreat of the Red Army the possibility of
Poland becoming a bridge to revolutionary Germany faded. However, at the height of
the Red Army offensive a Provisional Revolutionary Committee formed on August 2,
1920 consisting of Julian Marchlewski, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Feliks Kon, Józef Unszlicht
and Edward Próchniak. Established as a cadre for a future workers-council state in
Poland, its establishment was politically fruitless but for its abandonment of the
traditional Marxist position on the land question as understood by the Polish Marxists
in favour of Vladimir Lenin's more tactical position.
• The period 1921-1926 saw relative political freedom in Poland and the KPRP took full
advantage of all legal avenues offered it. Initially gains were made from the ranks of the
reformist workers' organisations, and in late 1920 a left opposition from the PPS, led by
Stanislaw Lancucki and Jerzy Czeszejko-Sochacki, joined the KPRP, giving the party
representation in the Diet. Gains were also made from the Bund (General Jewish Labor
Union) when a faction led by Aleksander Minc joined, and also from two smaller Jewish
Socialist groups Poalej Zion and the United Jewish Socialist Workers Party
(Fareynikhte). Rapid gains were also made in the eastern borderlands at this time; see
the entry for the KPZU.
• The Party's third Conference in 1922 saw the consolidation of the leadership around the
"Three W's" - Adolf Warski, Maksymilian Horwitz and Maria Koszutska. The party was
able to assume a stable organisational form and founded Red Factions within the unions.
An electoral list was constructed called the "Union of Town and Country Proletariat".
Yet the party only managed to win 130,000 votes and two seats in the November 1922
elections. In general the idea of the "United Front" - recently made policy by the
Communist International (Comintern) - provided a guide for the party's activities.
• The Party's Second Congress gathered in Moscow in August 1923 and the leadership
took the opportunity to overhaul the Party's program - particularly with regard to the
land and national questions, where more Leninist policies were adopted. Autonomous
sections of the Party were also recognised as being needed in Poland's borderlands
which were inhabited by non-Polish groups. In accordance with party decisions,
Communist Parties were then organised both in the Western Ukraine and in Western
Belarus. Within the Communist International, the Polish leadership of the Three W's
aligned with Grigory Zinoviev and therefore opposed to the embryonic Left Opposition.
• Although aligned with Zinoviev within the Comintern, the Polish party was
independently minded and made efforts to defend both Leon Trotsky and Heinrich
Brandler, the leader of the Communist Party of Germany, in the Polish Commission
convened at the Comintern's Fifth Congress. The main persecutor in the case against the
Polish leadership was Julian Leszczyński "Lenski", but the Chair of the Commission
would wield the decisive blows and the Chair was Joseph Stalin. Lenski's reward was
his appointment to a new party central committee, appointed without reference to a Party
Congress. His task - to "Bolshevise" the KPRP.
• The Party's Third Congress gathered at Minsk in March 1925 with the slogan
"Bolshevisation of the Party". This meant that the basic party unit was to be a workplace

10
 cell and the construction of an all-powerful party apparatus which decided policy -
marked by the banning of all factional tendencies from the party. Significantly the
Party's name was changed, with its contraction to "Communist Party of Poland". Despite
being endorsed by the leadership of the Comintern, Lenski's leadership group was
independently minded enough to adopt positions on Germany, Bulgaria and France
contrary to those of the Comintern - and yet another Polish Commission removed it
from office. Warski returned to the leadership and the party again embarked on attempts
to build a United Front with the PPS.
• With rising unemployment and a rapidly deteriorating economic situation Pilsudski
staged a coup d’etat in May 1926. Confused as to the meaning of this the KPP engaged
in street battles with troops loyal to the Witos government, which it called fascist, in
Warsaw and called a general strike with the PPS on May 13. In practice they aided
Pilsudski’s power grab and were to pay the price. Having turned a blind eye while events
were in progress Stalin would now denounce the Polish leadership and condemn "The
May error". In the mean time former leading figures of Polish Marxism passed from the
scene or were demoted, which coincided with Stalin’s final elimination of his rivals for
power. The KPP was to function from here to the time of its dissolution as little more
than a border guard for Russia, as was made clear when it was condemned for failing to
realise the danger that Pilsudski posed to the Soviet Union.
• The debate over "The May Error" was to grow venomous up to the party’s Fourth
Congress in September 1927 in Moscow. The left minority still led by Lenski argued
that Pilsudski’s coup was fascist while the right minority claimed it was military
dictatorship evolving toward fascism. Finally the victory was to go to the left, although
they were not to reap the gains of their victory in full as two representatives of the
Comintern were placed on the Central Committee, the Finn Otto Wille Kuusinen and
the Ukrainian Dmitry Manuilsky. The party had been beheaded and any independence
of thought and action was at an end.
• Yet despite internal factional struggles the party was to grow during this period
attracting support from the minorities and among the working class outdistancing the
PPS in the last more or less free elections held in March 1928. Replacement of the
Warski leadership group however would see the party plunged into isolation as it
embarked on the "Third Period". Endorsed by the Party’s Fifth Congress in 1930 the
"Third Period" saw the party routinely describing the PPS as fascist and revolution was
claimed to be imminent. As the country fell victim to the worldwide depression, the
KPP found a new internal struggle as layers of the party membership having seen the
"Three W’s" finally removed turned to the critique of the Comintern personified by
Trotsky. The emerging oppositional grouping was swiftly expelled from the ranks of
the KPP forming the Polish wing of the International Left Opposition.
• The Nazi seizure of power in Germany forced the removal of the KPP center from that
country and made party units within the country harder to communicate with. It also
caused a major reversal of policy on the part of the Comintern as unity was sought with
any and every force opposed to fascism. This Popular Front strategy meant in Poland
the KPP pressed both the PPS and Bund for unity, which both rebuffed, it also saw the
communists infiltrate organisations alien to the workers movement such as the Peasant
Party and even Catholic groups. Unity remained an impossible goal however but the
militants of the KPP did write one last chapter in their party’s history as many joined
the International Brigades in Spain to fight fascism. The Dabrowski Battalion, named
for the hero of the Paris Commune, would count among its members many non-KPP
workers among them members of the PPS but the Brigade was firmly led by the KPP.

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 • Despite that the KPP was now to be swept into the maelstrom of paranoia and suspicion
that culminated in the Moscow trials and purges. First a number of its members were
accused of being agents of the Polish regime, now led by the Colonels since Pilsudski's
death in 1935, and liquidated as a result. Next almost the entire leading cadre of the
party were enveloped by the Purges and murdered. Among those killed were: Albert
Bronkowski, Krajewski, Józef Unszlicht, Adolf Warski, Maria Koszutska, Maksymilian
Horwitz, Lenski, Stanisław Bobiński, Ryng, Józef Feliks Ciszewski, Henrykowski,
Sztande, Bruno Jasieński and Witold Wandurski. And still Stalin could not trust the
Polish Communists, and so finally the leaderless party was declared dissolved as a
hotbed of Trotskyite agents. Most of the activists perished in the Great Purge, but some
lower level figures including Bolesław Bierut remained.
Polish-Soviet war:
• Genesis: Officially, however, the Soviet Government denied charges of trying to invade
Europe. As Polish-Soviet fighting progressed, particularly around the time Poland's
Kiev Offensive had been repelled in June 1920, the Soviet policy-makers, including
Lenin, increasingly saw the war as a real opportunity to spread the revolution
westwards. Before the start of the Polish–Soviet War, Polish politics were strongly
influenced by Chief of State) Józef Piłsudski, who wanted to break up the Russian
Empire and to set up a Polish-led "Międzymorze Federation" of independent states:
Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and other Central and East European countries emerging
out of crumbling empires after the First World War He hoped that this new union would
become a counterweight to any potential imperialist intentions on the part of Russia or
of Germany. Piłsudski argued "There can be no independent Poland without an
independent Ukraine", but he may have been more interested in Ukraine being split from
Russia than in Ukrainians' welfare. He did not hesitate to use military force to expand
the Polish borders to Galicia and Volhynia, crushing a Ukrainian attempt at self-
determination in the disputed territories east of the Southern Bug River, which contained
a significant Polish minority, who made up the majority of the population in cities like
Lwów, in contrast to the Ukrainian majority in the countryside. Piłsudski decided to
ignore the Soviet proposals, to sign an alliance with Symon Petliura of the Ukrainian
People's Republic, and to prepare the Kiev Offensive. During the war, Polish decryption
of Red Army radio messages made it possible to use small Polish military forces
efficiently against the Soviet Russian forces and to win many individual battles, most
importantly the 1920 Battle of Warsaw.
• Piłsudski viewed their westward advance as a major issue, but also thought that he could
get a better deal for Poland from the Bolsheviks than their Russian civil war contenders,
as the White Russians – representatives of the old Russian Empire, partitioner of Poland
– were willing to accept only limited independence of Poland, likely in the borders
similar to that of Congress Poland, and clearly objected to Ukrainian independence,
crucial for Piłsudski's Międzymorze, while the Bolsheviks did proclaim the partitions
null and void. Piłsudski thus speculated that Poland would be better off with the
Bolsheviks, alienated from the Western powers, than with the restored Russian Empire.
B y his refusal to join the attack on Lenin's struggling government, ignoring the strong
pressure from the Entente, Piłsudski had possibly saved the Bolshevik government in
summer–fall 1919
• The Warsaw Treaty, an agreement with the exiled Ukrainian nationalist leader Symon
Petlura signed on 21 April 1920, was the main Polish diplomatic success. By concluding
an agreement with Piłsudski, Petlura accepted the Polish territorial gains in Western
Ukraine and the future Polish–Ukrainian border along the Zbruch River. In exchange,

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 he was promised independence for Ukraine and Polish military assistance in reinstalling
his government in Kiev.
• Course: The Soviet High Command planned a new offensive in late April/May. Since
March 1919, Polish intelligence was aware that the Soviets had prepared for a new
offensive and the Polish High Command decided to launch their own offensive before
their opponents. The plan for Operation Kiev was to beat the Red Army on Poland's
southern flank and install a Polish-friendly Petlura government in Ukraine.
• On 30 May 1920 General Aleksei Brusilov, the last Czarist Commander-in-Chief,
published in Pravda an appeal entitled "To All Former Officers, Wherever They Might
Be", encouraging them to forgive past grievances and to join the Red Army.[67]
Brusilov considered it as a patriotic duty of all Russian officers to join hands with the
Bolshevik government, that in his opinion was defending Russia against foreign
invaders. Lenin also spotted the use of Russian patriotism.
• Gaj-Chan and Lithuanian forces captured Vilnius on 14 July, forcing the Poles into
retreat again. In Galicia to the south, General Semyon Budyonny's cavalry advanced far
into the Polish rear, capturing Brody and approaching Lwów and Zamość. In early July,
it became clear to the Poles that the Soviets' objectives were not limited to pushing their
borders westwards. Poland's very independence was at stake.
• The Soviet Southwest Front pushed the Polish forces out of Ukraine. Stalin had then
disobeyed his orders and ordered his forces to close on Zamość, as well as Lwów – the
largest city in southeastern Poland and an important industrial center, garrisoned by the
Polish 6th Army. The city was soon besieged. This created a hole in the lines of the Red
Army, but at the same time opened the way to the Polish capital. Five Soviet armies
approached Warsaw
• Meanwhile, the Soviet leadership's confidence soared.[73] In a telegram, Lenin
exclaimed: "We must direct all our attention to preparing and strengthening the Western
Front. A new slogan must be announced: 'Prepare for war against Poland'." Soviet
communist theorist Nikolay Bukharin, writer for the newspaper Pravda, wished for the
resources to carry the campaign beyond Warsaw "right up to London and Paris".
General Tukhachevsky's order of the day, 2 July 1920 read: "To the West! Over the
corpse of White Poland lies the road to worldwide conflagration. March on Vilno,
Minsk, Warsaw!" and "onward to Berlin over the corpse of Poland!" The increasing
hope of certain victory, however, gave rise to political intrigues between Soviet
commanders.
• At the height of the Polish–Soviet conflict, Jews had been subject to anti-semitic
violence by Polish forces, who considered Jews a potential threat, and who often
accused Jews as being the masterminds of Russian Bolshevism; during the Battle of
Warsaw, the Polish government interned all Jewish volunteers and sent Jewish
volunteer officers to an internment camp.
• On 6 August 1920, the British Labour Party published a pamphlet stating that British
workers would never take part in the war as Poland's allies, and labour unions blocked
supplies to the British expeditionary force assisting Russian Whites in Arkhangelsk.
French Socialists, in their newspaper L'Humanité, declared: "Not a man, not a sou, not
a shell for reactionary and capitalist Poland. Long live the Russian Revolution! Long
live the Workmen's International!”
• Conclusion: Soon after the Battle of Warsaw the Bolsheviks sued for peace. The Poles,
exhausted, constantly pressured by the Western governments and the League of Nations,
and with its army controlling the majority of the disputed territories, were willing to
negotiate. The Soviets made two offers: one on 21 September and the other on 28
September. The Polish delegation made a counteroffer on 2 October. On the 5th, the

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 Soviets offered amendments to the Polish offer, which Poland accepted. The
Preliminary Treaty of Peace and Armistice Conditions between Poland on one side and
Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Russia on the other was signed on 12 October, and the
armistice went into effect on 18 October. Ratifications were exchanged at Liepāja on 2
November. Long negotiations of the final peace treaty ensued.
• The war and its aftermath also resulted in other controversies, such as the situation of
prisoners of war of both sides, treatment of the civilian population and behavior of some
commanders like Stanisław Bułak-Bałachowicz or Vadim Yakovlev.

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