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| Polish-Ukrainian Forces Parade in Kiev, 9 May 1920 |
After Germany's collapse, a national uprising broke out in Ukraine in November 1918. The National Directory, which took over Ukraine after a victorious uprising immediately understood the danger of the Bolshevik Revolution to its independence. War broke out when Lenin sent Red forces into Ukraine and southern Russia. Left alone as the Russian Civil War intensified on other fronts toward the end of 1919, the Nationalists sought an alliance with the newly created state of Poland, whose head, Marshal Józef Piłsudski also opposed the Bolsheviks' expansionist aims. Ukraine was also a tantalizing prize; its grain, coal, and industry would drive a Polish economic revival as part of an intended borderland federation; once again Poland would re-govern the vast lands once ruled by their powerful szlachta, or landed gentry.
In April 1920, Poland and Ukraine concluded a treaty in conjunction with a military convention. Piłsudski signed an agreement recognizing the Directory, headed by Semyon Petliura, as the legitimate authority of an independent Ukraine, in exchange for the return of eastern Galicia to Poland. Later conventions provided for combined military operations and the eventual withdrawal of Polish troops. Though operating at cross purposes, they were united in their goal of driving the Russians from Kiev, with their mutual obstacle being the Red Army.
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| The Red Army Recaptures Kiev, 13 June 1920 |
Two longstanding considerations drove Piłsudski's Ukrainian policy. First and foremost, no true state of Poland had existed from 1795 to 1918–the year Poland regained its independence at the end of the war. And second, as a consequence of the first issue, no legitimate frontier had separated the Russian-Polish borderlands for 123 years. Piłsudski was compelled to regain the Polish frontier territory lost to earlier partitions and wished to secure his new border with a Polish-dominated federation of states, which included Lithuania, Belarus, and an independent, though truncated, Ukraine. The coveted territory also included thousands of Jewish villages, known as shtetls, within a region that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea up to a depth of about 300 miles.
Suspecting a prompt Soviet attack on Poland, Piłsudski quickly organized and launched a preemptive strike into Ukraine on 25 April 1920. While pretending to entertain generous terms from the Soviets for settling the frontier dispute, Piłsudski gathered an army of roughly 300,000 soldiers along the eastern front and struck the Ukrainian capital with around 50,000 troops. His success in capturing Kiev was short-lived, though, as the invasion incited feelings of patriotism among Russian communists, liberals, conservatives, and ex-tsarist officers, who were willing to unite behind the Bolsheviks to drive their enemy from lands considered traditionally Russian. In early June, Semyon Budyonny's Red Cavalry penetrated the Polish lines, driving the Poles and Ukrainians from Kiev and eventually back to Polish territory toward Warsaw. The Ukrainian Nationalists resisted the expanding control by the Red Army until November 1921 when they were routed in a final action at Bazar. A new Polish government, without Piłsudski as head of state, abandoned its dream of an eastern buffer federation and the Ukrainian nationists.
The end of the Ukrainian-Soviet war saw the incorporation of most of the territories of Ukraine into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic which, on 30 December 1922, became one of the founding members of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
Sources: Library of Congress, CIA, and Wikipedia
This is a bit confusing in that it leaves out the story of the Polish Ukrainian War which preceded these events. As you note, the proper borders of former parts of the Russian Empire that had declared independence with the onset of the Russian Revolution were vague, and there was fighting almost everywhere as a result, reflecting the fact that there were no clear ethnic boundaries in these areas, and cultures mixed together in border areas. Ukraine and Poland fought a short but bitter war between them over where the border would be drawn which concluded in 1919.
ReplyDeletePoland was right to fear a Soviet attack, and in fact Ukraine was attacked almost as soon as the war with Poland was concluded as the civil war poured over its borders. The Poles did remarkably well in the early stages of the war with the Soviets, and then were thrown back almost all the way to Moscow, and then did remarkably well again, while the Ukrainians were overrun by the Red Army. In the process they not only were incorporated into the USSR, but lost a great deal of territory to other Soviet entities which they had claimed after 1918. They'd soon face, of course, an intense man made famine at Soviet hands as well.
The question of where to draw the border revived in the last couple of years of World War Two as Ukrainian guerilla forces attacked areas that had Polish populations, as well as attacking the Germans and the Soviets. At the end of the war the Soviets addresed the situatino by simply drawing new borders and then forcing the minority populations out, pushing Poles out of territory given to Belarus and out of territory that became part of Ukraine, and in turn pushing Germans out of what became western Poland. It was a brutal solution, but it did operate to elimiante the long running territorial disputes, which have not revived since World War Two. Of course Ukraine was not able to resume its independence until the fall of the USSR, and is struggling to retain it now.