The collapse of the Habsburg Empire was attended by a number of serious conflicts, but none more serious than in Hungary. The Soviet Republic of Hungary lasted for five months, from March to August 1919. Many European communist parties were founded at that time; but Budapest was the only city outside Russia where a communist regime managed to take power for any length of time. The short career of the first ‘Hungarian Revolution’ is very instructive. It was given its chance when the initial, liberal government of independent Hungary resigned in protest against the punitive nature of the peace settlement. Most Hungarians were appalled by the prospect of losing both Slovakia and Transylvania, which they saw as cradles of their civilization. The communist leader, Béla Kun (1886–?1939), a Jewish ex-prisoner of war freshly returned from Russia, exploited the nationalist fever. The Hungarian communists took power with the support both of the social democrats and the old officer corps, promising to drive the Slovaks and the Romanians from the disputed lands. In June 1919 a Hungarian army actually invaded Slovakia. At the same time a new Constitution was passed by delegates of workers’ and soldiers’ councils on the Soviet model, and radical reforms were decreed. All industry was nationalized; church property was confiscated; priests and peasants were subjected alike to compulsory labour.
B.N.R.
U
NTIL
recently, most Western historians were totally unaware of the Byelorussian National Republic (BNR), which was proclaimed in Miensk (Minsk) on 25 March 1918. Indeed, most Westerners were unaware that Byelorussia or
Belarus’
was anything other than a district of Russia,
1
Before 1918, squeezed between Poland and Russia, Belarus’ had never known a separate political existence. Once known to the outside world as ‘White Ruthenia’, it had formed a major part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, but had been submerged since the Partitions in the Tsarist Empire where it was renamed ‘White Russia’ (see pp. 655, 663).
German support during the First World War greatly strengthened the country’s separate national consciousness. In 1914–15 Byelorussian schools, bookstores, newspapers, and publishers began to operate in Vilna (Wilno) and Minsk. On 1 January 1916, a decree signed by Field Marshal von Hindenburg recognized Byelorussian asan official language in territories occupied by the German army. In 1916–17 Byelorussian theatres, seminaries, pedagogical institutes, and eventually political parties were free to organize.
The initiative was taken by a democratic socialist grouping, the
Hramada
. A Byelorussian National Congress assembled in Minsk in December 1917, only to be dispersed by the Bolsheviks. But the further advance of German forces in February 1918 expelled the Reds, and enabled the locals to take charge. The BNR, which was pledged to the welfare of all nationalities—Ruthenian, Polish, Jewish, Lithuanian, and Tartar—functioned until the end of the year. It was forcibly suppressed in 1919 by the return of the Red Army, which created first a joint Lithuanian-Byelorussian SSR and then a Byelorussian SSR.
During the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–20 (see pp. 934–7) most of Byelorussia was occupied by the Poles. The Treaty of Riga (1921) partitioned the country without reference to the population’s wishes. Under Soviet rule, the eastern sector was subject to repressions whose recipients regard them as ‘genocide’.
2
The horrors continued in 1939–45 through Nazi murders and Stalinist deportations. But the memory of the BNR lived on. In 1992, when the Republic of Belarus’ was restored, the visiting doyen of the European Parliament expressed the firm conviction that Belarus’ had every right to be a candidate for future membership of the European Community.
3
He was rather more sanguine on this point than many of the local population, whose administrative and managerial class had been almost completely sovietized and russified. The appalling modern history of Belarus’ had ensured that it was far more dependent on Russia than any of the other ex-Soviet republics.
At this point Hungary awoke to the monster it was feeding. Strikers were met by bullets. Armed peasant risings faced mass executions. A group of dissident officers formed at French-occupied Szeged. They were joined by Nicholas Horthy de Nagybánya (1868–1957), a former Habsburg admiral, and a government was created. The Romanians exploited the situation, and it was a Romanian army that entered Budapest in August and brought the Hungarian Soviet Republic to an end.
The Red Terror was now answered by a White Terror. Indiscriminate vengeance was wreaked on Kun’s followers, especially communists and Jews. In 1920 Horthy was declared Regent, and instituted a dictatorship that lasted for 24 years. Two attempts by the ex-Emperor Charles to. recover his Hungarian throne were rebuffed, as were attempts by the parliament to shake off military control. Although the ‘Fascist’ label was not yet used, and may not be entirely appropriate, Admiral Horthy is sometimes counted as ‘Europe’s first Fascist’. Not for the last time, however, an extreme communist adventure had provoked a strong anti-communist reaction (see Appendix III, p. 1318).
11
The Polish-Soviet War
of 1919–20 had implications for the whole of Europe. Contrary to the Bolshevik version of events, it was
not
organized by the
Entente;
it was
not
part of Allied intervention in Russia; and it did
not
begin with Piłsudski’s attack on Kiev in April 1920. Of course, a territorial dispute did exist. But the main source of conflict lay in the Bolsheviks’ declared intention of linking their Revolution in Russia with the expected revolution in Germany, and hence of marching through Poland. This course of action was quite explicit in early Bolshevik ideology, and was a necessary step if the Soviet experiment in Russia was to be brought into line with Marxist doctrine.
The Bolsheviks first thought of marching across ‘the Red Bridge’ to Germany in the winter of 1918–19. At that time they ordered the Red ‘western army’ to probe the Polish borderlands. However, such were the demands of the civil war that the necessary million-strong strike force could not be assembled until a year later. Trotsky always expressed caution; and despite public utterances about the ‘infantile disease of leftism’, it was Lenin who became the enthusiast for revolutionary war.
12
Regular fighting between Poles and Soviets began in February 1919, almost by accident, and continued for 20 months. It started when the German army evacuated the intervening area of the
Oberost
. Polish and Soviet forces were drawn into the vacuum from either side. The initial clash took place in Byelorussia at 6 a.m. on the morning of 14 February, when a Polish cavalry patrol disturbed a Bolshevik encampment at breakfast. At the time, Piłsudski was hoping to organize a federation of all the border republics, from Finland to Georgia. His scheme was repeatedly spiked by Poland’s dispute with Lithuania. But by August 1919, having taken both Wilno and Minsk, he was standing on Poland’s historic frontiers. He was tempted to help Denikin (see above), but in the event opened negotiations with the Bolsheviks.
For the Poles, the problem lay in the discrepancy between Bolshevik slogans
and Bolshevik deeds. All the time that Lenin was making extravagant speeches about peace with Poland, the Red Army’s strike-force on the Berezina was steadily growing. So the Poles waited. In January 1920 Piłsudski made a foray across the frozen Dvina to confirm the independence of Latvia. Then he received the signal which he most feared: the command of Soviet forces on the Polish front had been given to the most successful Red general, the young Mikhail Tukhachevsky (1893–1937), conqueror of Siberia and theorist of revolutionary warfare. Convinced that the Bolsheviks’ long-postponed offensive was about to be launched, Piłsudski patched up a belated alliance with one of the Ukrainian factions and struck the Bolsheviks at their weakest point, in the south. The Poles and Ukrainians marched into Kiev, and were welcomed as liberators. Tukhachevsky’s preparations were interrupted. In the West, people who understood neither the politics nor the geography took up the Bolshevik shout of ‘Hands off Russia’.
The campaign of 1920 was no border skirmish. It was a vast war of movement, which inspired the young adviser to the French military mission in Warsaw, Col. Charles de Gaulle, to formulate his new ideas on modern warfare. Up to a million men on either side marched the best part of a thousand miles and back in six months. The arrival of the Red cavalry drove the Poles out of Ukraine in May-June. Their commander boasted of ‘clattering through the streets of Paris before the summer is out’. On 4 July Tukhachevsky finally launched his offensive with the order: ‘To the West! Over the corpse of White Poland lies the road to world-wide conflagration.’ The speed of his advance was phenomenal. In mid-August his cavalry reached the bend of the Vistula near Thorn, only five days’ march from Berlin. Dzierżyński stood by in the rear, ready to assume power in Poland with a ‘Polish Revolutionary Committee’. Lenin cabled him to shoot more landlords. In Warsaw the papal legate, the future Pius XI, prepared to brave the hordes of Antichrist in person. Volunteers, including many Jews, flocked to defend their homeland. The Western governments despatched several generals, but no reinforcements, [
KONARMYA
]
The ‘Miracle on the Vistula’ occurred on 15–16 August. Piłsudski had secretly prepared a counter-attack from the southern flank. Tukhachevsky had failed to protect his extended lines of communication. When Piłsudski struck, five Soviet armies were decapitated. Three of them were annihilated; another took refuge in East Prussia. The rout was complete. On 31 August in the south, in the ‘Zamosc Ring’, the Red cavalry finally met its match. In the last great cavalry battle of European history, 20,000 horsemen charged and counter-charged in full formation, until the Polish uhlans carried the day. The Red Army had lost its first war. Lenin sued for peace. An armistice was signed on 10 October, the Treaty of Riga on 18 March 1921.
The wider significance of the Polish victory has not always been appreciated. Poland’s independence was secured, and with it the Versailles settlement. The British Ambassador to Berlin, who had viewed some of the action near Warsaw from his Rolls-Royce coupé, summed it up in Gibbonian tones:
If Charles Martel had not checked the Saracen conquest at Tours… the Koran would now be taught at the schools of Oxford…. Had Piłsudski and Weygand failed to arrest the triumphant march of the Soviet Army at the Battle of Warsaw, not only would Christianity have experienced a dangerous reverse, but the very existence of western civilisation would have been imperilled.
13
KONARMYA
I
N
the summer of 1920 Izaak Babel’ (1894–1941) was serving on the Polish I front as a war correspondent of Yug-ROSTA, the South Russian Press Agency. He was attached to Budyonny’s 1st Red Cavalry Army, whose political commissar was J. V. Stalin (see p. 959). He later wrote up his experiences in
Konarmiya
(Red Cavalry, 1926), a masterful collection of short stories which throb with the immediacy of historical realism:
Crossing the River Zbrucz
The Divisional Commander reported that Novograd-Volhinsk had been captured at dawn. The Staff advanced from Krapivno, and the noisy rearguard of our train was stretched out all along the eternal road which Nicholas I once built from Brest to Warsaw on the bones of peasants …
1
In this, the first paragraph of the first story, the reader might be forgiven for imagining that real events were being reported as they really happened.
Anyone familiar with the Polish-Soviet war, however, must soon smell a rat. There was a town called Novograd-Volhinsk, of course. In 1920 it was the headquarters of Semeon Petliura’s Ukrainian Directory. Yet it lies not on the Zbrucz but on the Slucz; and it was captured not by the 1st Cavalry but by the Soviet 14th Army. There was indeed a high-road from Warsaw to Brest built by serfs under Nicholas I. But it lay 200 miles beyond Novo-grad, and could not possibly have been cluttered by the rearguard….
Numerous such examples show that Babel’ was not simply making mistakes. He was deliberately jumbling dates, names, places, and events in order to create a precisely calculated effect. He was engaged in a form of literary collage, whose appearance is often more ‘historical’ than history itself’. ‘He is quite content to burgle history, so long as the resulting haul is artistically satisfying.’ The same can be said for his cult of violence.
Red Cavalry
is written in a special brand of ‘faction’, which is not historically accurate.
2
Yet, taken in isolation, many of the facts can be verified. In
Squadron Leader Trunov
Babel’ tells the story of a macho Cossack commander who went out one day to shoot down one of the American volunteer pilots who were fighting for the Poles. The memoirs of the American ‘Kościuszko Squadron’, under Col. Cedric E. Fauntleroy, agree exactly with Babel”s account. They relate how a foolhardy Soviet machine-gunner kept firing at the American planes from an unprotected clearing, and how one of them peeled off, executed a low-level run, and shot him to pieces.
3
In the long run, Babel’ fared no better. The author who perhaps did most to spread the fame of the Red Army died in Stalin’s Gulag.
Yet the impact on the Bolsheviks was equally great. The defeat of 1920 killed their strategic hopes of linking up with a revolutionary Germany. They were forced to retreat from internationalism. Soviet Russia had no option but to turn itself into the base for what Stalin was soon to call ‘socialism in one country’. Lenin retreated quickly from his leftist fervour. War communism was abandoned. In the same week in March 1921 that peace was signed with Poland, Lenin introduced his tactical compromise with capitalism—the New Economic Policy, known as NEP.
What is more, once Byelorussia and Ukraine were partitioned with Poland, the Bolsheviks were free to reorganize their state on federal lines. The formation of the USSR—which consisted initially of Soviet Russia, Soviet Byelorussia, Soviet Ukraine, and the Soviet Caucasus—could not have been undertaken until the Polish war had settled the fate of the borderlands. In reality, the Poles had won no more than a breathing-space: the Soviets’ advance into Europe had been repulsed, but not abandoned (see Appendix III, p. 1316).