Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe

A precondition of the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 had been the destruction of the Imperial Russian Army, which they achieved by systematically undermining every aspect of military service. The first step had been to incite mutiny. They followed this up by encouraging the wholesale murder of officers, by persuading the peasant conscripts to desert and go back to their villages (to ‘vote with their feet’, in Lenin’s famous phrase), and by getting trusted Bolsheviks elected to take command of the remaining troops. Not surprisingly, their attempts to create a new army once they had taken control were hampered by their success in destroying the old one.

As the forces of counter-revolution gathered against them, all the new rulers of Russia could count on were some regular Latvian rifle brigades left over from the Imperial Army and a collection of self-styled Red Guards and detachments of Bolshevik sailors. This motley force combined idealists with criminal elements, professional soldiers with mutineers, students with workers, and Russians with every nationality of the former Russian empire. The overall commander was a former Ensign of the Imperial Army, Nikolai Krylenko.

Desperate measures were called for, and in March 1918 Lev Davidovich Trotsky was appointed Commissar for War to implement them. Trotsky, the epitome of the fastidious intellectual, had no military experience whatsoever, but he was a good organizer. He was also pragmatic. Just as industry needed engineers, he argued, an army needed professional soldiers. He replaced Krylenko with Colonel Ioakim Vatsetis, a Latvian career officer of the Imperial Army, abolished elective command, set up an officers’ training school, reintroduced call-up and reasserted the notion of discipline.

While Trotsky did not bring back the old hierarchy of ranks, he introduced a new one, based on the command currently held, abbreviated in the Soviet manner: the commander-in-chief (Glav-nii Komandir) was titled GlavKom, while commanders of army groups, divisions and brigades were, respectively, KomandArm, KomDiv and KomBrig, and the man in charge of the SouthWestern Front assumed the less than mellifluous title of KomYug-ZapFront (KoMY3apPpoHT).

Brushing aside ideological reservations, Trotsky sought out former Tsarist officers, whom he re-designated from the status of ‘enemies of the people’ to that of ‘specialists’. He would reinstate 48,409 of them in field commands and a further 10,339 in administrative posts over the next two years, with the result that by the spring of 1920 over 80 per cent of the Red Army’s cadres would be former Tsarist officers.

This presented a number of problems. Elected commanders who had been demoted to make way for the ‘specialists’ often took the first opportunity to shoot them in the back. At the same time, many of the ‘specialists’ proved psychologically incapable of commanding mistrustful, undisciplined troops and adapting to the exigencies of ideological civil war. Others simply looked for the first opportunity to take themselves, and sometimes their units, over to the Whites.

Trotsky resolved these problems by giving each officer a guardian angel in the shape of a political commissar, both to protect him from his troops and to keep him in line. A twin hierarchy of these political officers, beginning with Trotsky himself, who stood behind the commander-in-chief, shadowed every single officer right down to the level of company commander. But while this provided an effective check on unreliable officers and gave the Commissar for War a measure of control over the armies in the field, it did impede military efficiency. It furnished limitless grounds for friction between officers, who resented the implied mistrust and the meddling in military matters, and the commissars, who saw themselves as the effective commanders and sniffed treason everywhere. It was largely thanks to Trotsky’s frequent personal intervention that the system worked at all, and with time, even quite smoothly.

Just as challenging for Trotsky was the question of how to recreate the necessary esprit de corps and sense of loyalty which the Bolsheviks had so successfully undermined in the former army. His solution was to disband all existing units and feed the men piecemeal into new formations, each of which contained a communist cell loyal to the party, a hard core of committed men who, unlike the conscripted peasants, who were apt to melt away into the countryside, were impervious to the ups and downs of war. The system worked less well in the cavalry: this was largely made up of Cossacks, whose sense of allegiance was volatile at the best of times, with the result that entire units did change sides with astonishing frequency.

For much of 1918 and 1919 Trotsky lived in his armoured train, continually on the move between one front and another, meting out cigarettes, encouragement and threats. In the event, his army proved more resilient and more adaptable in the difficult conditions of the Civil War than the more traditionally structured White armies, which it saw off one by one. But it was about to face a more difficult test, in the Polish army.

Unlike the Red Army, the Polish army was born of tradition. Not the tradition nurtured by most European armies, but one forged in the noble yeomanries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, enriched by the struggles for freedom of the late eighteenth, the Napoleonic wars and the nineteenth-century insurrections. Many Poles had been obliged to fight in the armies of the three partitioning powers during the First World War; others had volunteered to fight, usually under their own flag, either in Pilsudski’s Legion or in semi-autonomous Polish formations on the Allied side. But wherever they fought, they clung to the conviction that they were ultimately fighting for their country.

When Pilsudski declared the rebirth of the Polish state in November 1918, the only troops on hand were three regiments of Polnische Wehrmacht, a couple of squadrons of cavalry and a pool of cadets, 9,000 men in all. They were soon joined by units, such as the 1st Imperial and Royal Lancers of the Austro-Hungarian army, which were composed entirely of Poles. Within days men from the disbanded Legion and demobilized troops from the Austrian and German armies began to report for duty.

Inevitably, the various units of the nascent army took on the characteristics imposed by the origin of the volunteers. The former legionaries were reconstituted as the first three infantry divisions of the new Polish army, and retained their own ethos. A different kind of force evolved in the formerly German province of Poznan, out of the armed struggle that had broken out between the Poles and the German settlers as both groups returned home after demobilization. By the time the Germans had been ousted from the area, the Polish forces in the province had grown to three divisions. The men, who had all received their training in the German army, had a businesslike approach to soldiering.

The same could not be said of the large numbers of soldiers inherited from the disintegrated Russian and Austrian armies, or the volunteers coming forward from very diverse backgrounds. As well as Poles who had always lived in Poland, there were Poles whose families had lived in exile, sometimes for generations, in all corners of the world. There were also people of many other ethnicities, some polonized, others hardly speaking the language. There were Lithuanians, Tatars, Cossacks, Jews, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians and even many Russians. There were hardened professional soldiers, idealistic students, peasants, aristocrats and socialists. The fact that many were volunteers was a mixed blessing, for while it ensured a high degree of motivation, it also entrenched an element of individualism.

The range was further broadened by the arrival of other existing formations from distant parts. One such was the Siberian Brigade, formed by the Allies out of Poles, mostly prisoners of war, who had found themselves stranded in White-occupied Siberia, which would reach Poland via Japan in 1920. Another was General Zeligowski’s division, which had similar origins in the Kuban region of southern Russia, and had, at the insistence of the Entente, briefly fought for Denikin. Another, the most valuable single contribution to the Polish army, was the ‘Blue Army’. This had been formed in France in 1917 from Austrian and German prisoners of war of Polish nationality and Americans of Polish origin, recruited in the United States and Canada. It was well trained and equipped, smartly uniformed in French pale blue, and even supported by its own regiment of seventy tanks.

A French military mission of fifteen hundred officers under General Paul Henrys arrived in Poland in the spring of 1919 to train the nascent army on a uniform French pattern.‘Literally everything needs to be rebuilt, from the bottom to the top,’ one of them, a young major by the name of Charles De Gaulle, wrote to his mother. A few months later he was forced to admit that the mission was having an insignificant impact. A concurrent British military mission had no real role beyond observation and moral support. Its commander, General Adrian Carton de Wiart, a war hero of Belgian-Irish ancestry who resembled a stage pirate, having lost an eye and an arm, and won a Victoria Cross, in the Great War, was therefore free to indulge to the full his taste for game and wildfowl shooting and his capacity for adventure.

A good example of the state of the Polish army as a whole is provided by a description of the six regiments making up the 1st Cavalry Division, written by an artillery officer attached to it. ‘The 8th Lancers were entirely Austrian in character,’ he writes.‘Discipline was good, and the regiment’s external appearance singled it out from the rest. In no other were the saddles so smartly packed and the stirrups and bits so well polished. The next regiment, the 9th Lancers, was the product of the fusion of the 3rd Lancers of the Austrian Landwehr with the 2nd Lancers of the Legion. The fact that most of the officers were legionaries was evident from the external appearance of the regiment. There was less of the lordliness of the 8th and more of a sense of the citizen-soldier; less elegance, but more dash; less training, but more enthusiasm.’ The next regiment, the 14th Lancers, was nothing like the other two: the scruffily uniformed men who rode thoroughbred horses on short stirrups and carried lances, sabres and whips tucked into their boots struck the observer as ‘a pack of killers of the highest calibre’. Nothing in their bearing or that of their boyish twenty-eight-year-old commander, whom they addressed by his Christian name, betrayed that he was a full colonel and that during the Great War they had all served in the best regiments of the Imperial Russian Cavalry. The 1st Lancers had also served on the Russian side, as an all-Polish regiment. Like the 14th, they carried their lances with the nonchalance of familiarity. They looked down on the 2nd Light Horse, which had legionary origins, and the two regiments disliked each other. The last regiment of the division was the 16th Lancers, recruited in Poznan. ‘Its equipment, armament and tack were German. Everything was smart, new and solid. The men all wore tall four-cornered shakos with a triple silver tassel and a red rosette. They also wore Prussian-style uhlan jackets and tall German cavalry boots. Nearly all of them had served in the German army, and it followed that order and discipline were exemplary. They rode huge, bony, heavy horses overloaded with kit. They had everything: sabres and lances, bayonets and spades, gas-masks and canteens. Mounting up was a major performance on account of all this, and when they marched past at a trot, they rattled and clanked like a company of knights.’ To the observer, the six regiments were ‘like so many children born of the same mother, but conceived by different fathers’.

In the course of the war, cavalry regiments in particular acquired volunteers, either under-age patriots from the minor nobility who had run away from home, or defecting Russians or Cossacks, and these were allowed to serve alongside the regulars. There were also, fighting alongside the Polish army, a number of more or less independent irregular formations. There was a Ukrainian National Army. There was the army of Byelorussia, commanded by General Stanislaw Bulak-Balachowicz, whose own mixed Polish-Lithuanian-Tatar ancestry was reflected in its make-up. There were also a number of smaller units, of Cossacks and anti-Bolshevik Russians.

This pattern of diversity and improvisation was replicated in the Polish officer corps, inherited from various sources. Their training was either Russian, Austrian, German, French or ‘legionary’. The obvious differences of language, education and style concealed more fundamental rifts. Each of the various officer schools of the day favoured its own strategic theories, tactical methods and approach to a given situation. As a result, an officer trained in the old German army spoke a different military language to one who had been formed by the Russian Imperial Army, let alone a self-taught legionary officer. That they had all fought on different sides in the Great War did not help. The Poles did have one great asset in the shape of Pilsudski. As head of state and commander-in-chief he could dispense with discussion and follow his own instinct. And while many senior officers found it difficult to defer to an amateur, junior officers and the rank-and-file loved and trusted him. But the lack of a trial period which could have produced greater coherence placed the Polish army at a disadvantage.

While the former Tsarist officers who overwhelmingly led the Red Army may have been ideologically ill-suited, they did all share the same training and background. By the beginning of 1920 most of those intending to desert to the Whites had done so, and the less competent had been weeded out. Those who had come through the trials of the Civil War had proved their loyalty and their ability. The high rate of attrition had also given youth a chance: fronts and army groups were commanded by men in their thirties. The twenty-year-old Vassili Chuikov and the young Georgii Zhukov, both to become marshals in the Second World War, had already been given regiments to command. Semion Timoshenko, another future marshal, was commanding a division at twenty-four.

A similar pattern was discernible when it came to armament. As Poland was unable to produce arms at the time, she could equip her army only with inherited, captured or imported weapons. The Polish infantry were issued with rifles from half a dozen different countries. The Austrian Mannlicher, an accurate but delicate weapon vulnerable to difficult conditions and poor maintenance, was supplemented by German Mausers, British Lee-Enfields, low-quality French war-manufacture and even Japanese rifles. The supply of spare parts and ammunition to this collection severely tested the quartermastership. Units regularly ran out of ammunition and found themselves unable to borrow from their neighbours because they were using different rifles.

The artillery, which was equipped with everything from Canadian howitzers to Italian mountain-guns and antiquated French field pieces, also suffered from supply problems. Strong positions would fall silent at critical moments for lack of ammunition, and if a battery lost its guns it was unlikely to be issued with the same make, and this entailed retraining.

In this respect, the cavalry were the most fortunate. They carried French lances dating from the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and sabres from a multiplicity of sources, sometimes even the family home, but as long as the weapon was of good quality it could serve in any situation, and if not, a better one could be picked off the body of a slain Cossack.

The Red Army recycled the more up-to-date British and French arms captured from the Whites, but its basic weapon, the Lebel rifle, was of home production. Stocks had been inherited from the Imperial Army, and these were supplemented by a steady trickle from two factories. It was a straightforward, sturdy weapon ideally suited to the treatment it received. It was inaccurate, but this was of minor consequence, as the Russian soldier had little instruction in marksmanship, and anyway relied on the long bayonet which had been the staple weapon of Russian infantry for the best part of two centuries. The weapon that played the most important part in this kind of mobile warfare was the heavy machine gun. While the Poles were equipped with a variety of more or less sophisticated European models, the Maxim prevalent throughout the Red Army was almost unbreakable and could function on a minimum of care.

The Russians possessed as many aircraft as the Poles, if not more, but a shortage of pilots and ground crew, combined with the lack of reliable systems of supply and servicing, kept them on the ground. The Poles, on the other hand, were quick to become airborne, on a variety of old planes left behind by the Germans, as well as Breguet bombers purchased from France and Ballilas from Italy. There was no lack of pilots, as many Poles had served in the Austrian and German air forces in the Great War. These were joined in 1919 by a dozen American volunteer pilots, led by Major Cedric E. Fauntleroy and Captain Merian C. Cooper (who later turned to film-making and both co-directed and flew a plane in KingKong). They formed a squadron of their own named after the Polish American Revolutionary War hero Tadeusz Kosciuszko. But while planes exerted a powerful psychological influence, and were of enormous use for reconnaissance and to a lesser extent for liaison, they caused little actual damage to the enemy.

Of similarly limited value were the Renault tanks of the Polish army’s single armoured regiment. Built to operate over small distances and requiring frequent servicing, they proved a liability for the units they were attached to. The variety of armoured cars used by both sides — Austins, Fords and Renaults supplemented by home-made Polish Models And Russian Putilov Products — were of greater value, since they combined nearly as heavy firepower as the tanks with far greater mobility.

A useful improvised weapon was the armoured train — usually composed of an engine sandwiched between a couple of armoured railway carriages bristling with machine guns, a couple of trucks or platforms with heavy guns or even tanks on them, and platform cars carrying track-laying equipment. They would be operated by crews of anything up to 150 men, and could carry additional details as required.

The only really successful combination of firepower with mobility was the Russian tachanka. This consisted of a heavy machine gun mounted on the back of a horse-drawn open buggy, with one man driving the horses and two manning the machine gun. It could gallop up to a line of enemy infantry, veer round to deliver withering fire at close range, and gallop away, still firing, the moment enemy cavalry or artillery threatened it. Although the Russian infantry made use of the tachanka, its prime function was as an adjunct to cavalry, and it helps to explain why and how cavalry emerged as an arm in its own right, and a crucial one, during this war.

The Red cavalry had been formed to fend off the Cossacks, who had joined White armies such as Denikin’s in large numbers, and it bore the marks of improvisation. There was nothing elitist or dashing about it: it was composed of renegade Cossacks, former cavalrymen of the Imperial Army and just about anyone who could sit a horse. Its turnout was even shabbier than that of the infantry, and its equipment haphazard. The men wore various items of Imperial Cavalry uniform, embellished at will by baggy red or yellow breeches, captured cartridge-cases and sword-belts, and a variety of headgear ranging from fur caps and Tatar bonnets to peaked or pointed Soviet caps and the odd French helmet taken from a dead White soldier — one witness noted a Russian cavalryman wearing a bowler hat. Some rode on fine Circassian saddles, others on an old rug or cushion. Their basic weapon was the sabre, but each man also carried a carbine of some kind, a revolver, a long knife and a whip, and every troop had a couple of tachankas in support.

The Red cavalry’s principal strength lay in its uncanny speed of movement and its savage reputation as a kind of latter-day Mongol horde. It marched not in disciplined columns but in loose order, giving the impression of vast numbers on the move, and since it lived off the land, it left behind it a desert, as well as a trail of blood. But the lack of evident discipline hid a kind of organic harmony which gave its movements cohesion and a strong tactical sense when it came to fight.

The Polish cavalry was entirely different in character. It was made up of well trained, mounted and equipped regiments which prided themselves on being elite formations. The numbers were small, no greater than 10,000 fighting men or ‘sabres’ at the beginning of 1920, as much because of a shortage of good horses as because of the belief widespread following the Great War that cavalry was out of date. But they made up for their small numbers by their skill, and their handling of the lance gave them an edge over the Red cavalrymen.

The cavalry of the respective sides encapsulated the fundamental characteristics of the two armies facing each other: the less numerous Poles relied on smaller, trained and equipped units operating according to established rules of war, the Russians on vast numbers of often entirely unsuitable men, equipped with whatever was at hand, on improvisation and on ignoring received methods in order to exploit any situation. ‘The Russian army is a horde,’ wrote the man who would lead it into Poland,‘and its strength lies in its being a horde.’ This would prove an advantage, given the terrain.

The front across which the two armies faced each other at the beginning of 1920 was over a thousand kilometres long, but only about half of this could be used for military operations; the geographical configuration of the theatre was such that the range of possible manoeuvres was very limited.

The area is shaped like a triangle, with its western angle at Warsaw, and its other two at Smolensk and Kharkov. The northern edge is sealed by a swath of lakelands and forests along what were then the East Prussian, Lithuanian and Latvian borders. The southern side is defined by the Carpathian mountains and the river Dniester, which defined the Czecho-Slovak and Romanian borders. The eastern edge is open to Russia.

The centre of this triangle is taken up by another wedge, the great expanse of bogs, rivers and forests popularly known as the Pripet Marshes. This means that there are only two corridors along which all east-west movement must pass. The northern one bears the Warsaw-Grodno-Wilno-Smolensk-Moscow road, while the southern one runs from Lublin, through Równe and Zhitomir to Kiev.

Given this topography, it is evident that although it would be possible for one side or the other to press ahead along one of the corridors while remaining passive in the other, it would find its flank exposed if it advanced too far. If it advanced down both corridors, it would be in a problematic position when it passed the central obstacle. Russian armies moving westward down the two corridors would tend to converge and meet somewhere around Brzesc or Lublin, while Polish armies would radiate and move away from each other as they progressed eastwards. But the respective advantages and disadvantages of this situation were not what they seemed: the two Russian armies, based on Smolensk and Kharkov respectively, would have to keep operating independently even though their neighbouring units had come into physical contact on the ground. The Polish armies, on the other hand, while appearing to be more vulnerable as they moved eastwards, with a gap being created between them as they passed the Pripet, remained more cohesive, since they enjoyed the common base of Warsaw.

These considerations were given added weight by the distances involved and the nature of the terrain. It is a long way from anywhere to anywhere else, and the scarcity of good roads and towns combined with a profusion of rivers to make that distance problematic. Both Napoleon and Hitler discovered that it is not only the severe winter conditions that can destroy an army: the baking heat of summer and lack of water are just as inimical to the troops, and annul the defensive advantages of most rivers.

There were virtually no metalled roads in much of the area, only tracks that fluctuated between the status of boggy morass and dusty sandpit. Bridges were scarce — over 7,500 had been destroyed by the Germans before they left in 1919. Railways were the only reliable means of getting from one place to another, but the Germans had blown up 940 stations, and the mostly single-track lines were thinly spread over the area. The Poles had inherited three discrete railway networks, built with, respectively, Berlin, Vienna and St Petersburg in mind, which did not mesh comfortably around Warsaw. The Russians used a wider gauge than the rest of Europe, and as that part of their network which was on Polish territory had been converted to suit the others, this meant that with every advance by either side all the tracks had to be converted one way or the other so that supplies could reach the advancing army, unless an adequate quantity of suitable rolling-stock had been captured in the advance.

Means of verbal communication were just as limited. The telephone network was vulnerable to snipping by marauding cavalry. Radio communications were primitive and prone to breakdown. The use of aircraft for the delivery of orders was not favoured, as too many pilots had got lost and touched down in the middle of an enemy grouping. Orders in the field were often carried by mounted galloper. Yet liaison and intelligence were to play a decisive role in the events.

One of the most important weapons in the Bolshevik armoury had always been propaganda, aimed at subverting the population behind the enemy’s lines and even the troops in his ranks. Given the nature of the terrain and the scarcity of forces with which to seal its frontiers, Poland was permeable to Russian agents, who spread propaganda and disaffection, and to spies, who sent back information.

While the Poles did not indulge in propaganda behind enemy lines, they did have a valuable network of intelligence agents, mostly Poles stranded in Russia by the Revolution. They had also developed an efficient intelligence-gathering system based on listening in to enemy radio transmission. During the Great War all the combatants had developed receivers that could eavesdrop on the other side’s communications, none more so than the Austrians, who found it difficult to obtain intelligence on what was happening on the other side of their eastern front by more conventional means. They invested more resources than any other participant into developing their monitoring technology; and they employed officers of Polish origin, who were both more familiar with the Russian language and had a long tradition of encryption and decryption reaching back through a century of conspiracy and resistance. Polish officers had also served in the monitoring services of the Russian, German and French armies, and as a result the intelligence-gathering unit set up by the Polish army at the beginning of 1919 had a wide knowledge of existing techniques and an unsurpassed range of skills. By the summer of that year it had broken the Russian codes, and by the beginning of 1920 it was listening in to every radio station in western Russia, and intercepting and decrypting 50 per cent of all communications reaching and leaving the Red Army’s Western and South-Western Fronts. This was a valuable weapon in what was going to be an unequal contest.

The overall strength of the Red Army at the start of 1920 was five and a half million, which compared favourably with the Polish peak of just under one million. The balance was redressed to some extent as less than one seventh of the Red Army’s total were combat effectives, while the Poles managed to put a quarter of their overall strength into the field. The Red Army could only muster seventy operational divisions against the twenty the Poles could field, and they were, if anything, weaker than the Polish ones. That still left a considerable imbalance.

And the millions of men loitering in base camps all over Russia did constitute a vast stock of cannon-fodder which could be fed into the front line when required. So while the Red Army appeared to be incapable of concentrating more than a fraction of its forces against the Poles at any one time, it was able to keep that figure more or less constant. The Poles had no corresponding pool of manpower behind the lines. This meant that the Red Army staked very little in a game in which the Poles were forced to stake all, that it could afford to lose a campaign, while the Poles could not survive the loss of a major battle.

While the Polish army was formed on a conventional modern Western model, it lacked the equipment, the reserves and the technical resources to support it. And it was ill-prepared for the conditions under which it was going to fight. The entire theatre of operations lay well within the developed world and the ambit of European culture, but the infrastructure of modernity was stretched very thinly over it and, like thin ice, was liable to give way under strain, taking with it all vestiges of civilization, and plunging it back into the conditions of the seventeenth century. A soldier trained in the twentieth would suddenly find himself deprived of the support system he had learnt to rely on, operating in a primitive environment populated by an often feral peasantry motivated solely by the instinct for survival.

The Red Army, on the other hand, had grown out of revolution. It had evolved doctrines, strategy and tactics adapted to the worst conditions of the Russian Civil War and to the most exacting terrain. Being the numerically stronger of the two, and because it is easier to destroy a weak order than to uphold it, it was, sooner or later, bound to impose on the Polish army a type of warfare for which the latter was fundamentally unprepared.

The Russian Civil War was a vicious political war, and the rules that govern behaviour in international conflicts do not apply in such wars. Here, there was no room for notions such as respect for the enemy, who was perceived as a form of vermin which must be exterminated. As a result, rank, courage and loyalty, which might earn a soldier the respect of his captors in normal circumstances, only served to make his end more gruesome. This had some curious consequences.

While fanatics stuck to their guns, the majority of combatants caught up in the Russian Civil War saw it largely in terms of personal survival, manifest in a determination not to be on the losing side. Desertion was instinctive when things started going badly. Entire divisions changed sides, and some managed to change back again when the fortunes of war deserted their new ally. This meant that a minor setback, if unchecked, could turn a recently victorious army into a disintegrating rabble within a short space of time.

These conditions heightened tension and fear, which the soldiers of both sides relieved with drink and drugs — thanks to its proximity to Turkey and Afghanistan, the whole of southern Russia was liberally supplied with a wide range of narcotics. They also found relief in almost random brutality. They allayed feelings of insecurity by taking them out on someone else. Whites would do unspeakable things to captured commissars, Reds to officers, landowners or priests. Failing that, there were always the Jews, whom both sides slaughtered with profligacy.

The opponents of the Soviet regime gloatingly pointed to the Jewish origins of Trotsky and other prominent Bolsheviks, which, they claimed, gave substance to the cataclysmic theories contained in the Protocols of the Elders ofZion, a grotesque confection purporting to be the blueprint for a Jewish plot aimed at world domination. This did not prevent the Bolsheviks from preying on exactly the same anxieties and prejudices by pointing to the role of Jews in the great capitalist conspiracy to enslave the working class. The poor Jew trying to eke out an existence in some shabby shtetl who knew no more of Trotsky than he did of the Rothschilds was guilty by association in the eyes of both sides.

If the war with Poland was not technically a civil war, it was certainly regarded as an ideological one in many respects. The average Red Army ranker was a drafted peasant who might have survived a couple of murderous campaigns of the Great War, then been caught up in the barbarous maelstrom of the Civil War, who did not know what he was fighting for or why, who longed only to go back to his village, who was dressed in rags, covered in lice, suffered from chronic diarrhoea, was perpetually hungry and above all scared, and who expressed his fear and his sense of deprivation by raping and killing anyone he perceived as being with the enemy and defiling anything he could not possess. Priests and landowners unwise enough to remain in the path of the Russian advance were tortured and butchered, and the large Jewish population of the borderlands fell victim to much the same fate as their brethren in Russia, notwithstanding that they mostly welcomed the Red Army. Polish officers and those identified as volunteers were usually hanged or shot on capture, often after being tortured and having various parts of their body such as nose, ears, tongue and genitalia cut off.

While the Polish high command struggled to inculcate the principles of the Geneva Conventions in their men, their writ did not run very far in the field. And their behaviour deteriorated markedly as the contest grew more bitter and more critical. Captured commissars were often hanged, soldiers suspected of having committed atrocities shot, and, following the recapture of territory briefly occupied by the Red Army, those deemed to have collaborated, which usually included the Jewish population, roughly dealt with.