GalleryPOLISH ANNEXATIONS
Fighting on a dozen fronts, exhausted by six years of war, revolution, Civil War, and intervention, the Soviet State was finally compelled to sign a compromise peace with Poland1, surrendering the western part of White Russia and the western part of the Ukraine. Says the Encyclopedia Britannica of this infamous Treaty of Riga:
"On March 18, 1921, a treaty was signed on terms favorable to Poland which placed some four million Russians under the Polish flag (exclusive of another four million Russians in East Galicia which were not included in this transaction). Again (as at Brest-Litovsk) the Soviet Government had paid a heavy price for peace."
About the same time little fellow-Catholic Lithuania suffered the same fate as Soviet Russia at the hands of the intoxicated new Polish imperialism. Vilna, its traditional capital, had been awarded to Lithuania by the same Curzon Line decision which also denied Western White Russia, Western Ukraine and East Galicia to the Poles. The day before the date set by the League of Nations for Lithuania to reoccupy its ancient capital, Polish General Zeligowski staged one of those "non-interventionist" affairs that Hitler was later to perfect, and seized the whole Vilna district.
This very first defiance of the League of Nations, antedating by eleven years Japan's aggression against China and by fifteen years Mussolini's aggression against Ethiopia2, created such anti-Polish sentiment in the Allied world that Poland was constrained to nominally disavow the Zeligowski coup. Zeligowski nevertheless continued to occupy Vilna and three years later, when the world's conscience had lost its sensitivity, the Council of Ambassadors sanctioned the Polish seizure of Vilna. Lithuania refused to recognize this annexation of her capital. She severed all relations, including rail and postal, with Poland and for eighteen years considered herself in a state of belligerence with her neighbor until 1938, when a Polish ultimatum forced her to make "peace."3
| 1 | These fronts were of the Bolsheviks' own making as they spread their forces thin in their attempt to communize the Baltics and Poland as bridges to communizing Western Europe. The presentation of borders herein and, inferred, Polish annexation victimizing Russians, ignores that the border agreed to by treaty in 1921 essentially restored the 1793 boundary, after the second partition of Poland—and which had been the product of specific Russian territorial demands: in the 1793 partition, Prussia annexed an additional 57,100 square kilometers (22,000 square miles) of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; however, Russia annexed 250,200 square kilometers (96,600 square miles, larger than current-day Romania or the United Kingdom)—that resulting post-Russian annexation frontier with Poland of 1793 now being described as an act of Polish aggression and annexation. |
| 2 | Notably absent is the Soviet Union's invasion of Finland which led to the expulsion of the USSR from the League of Nations. |
| 3 | This account ignores that the animosity between Lithuania and Poland was one of the consequences of Baltic and Polish forces being engaged against the invading Bolsheviks—including Polish forces advancing well into Latvia and Lithuania. The historical dispute over control of the Vilnius (Vilna, Wilno) territory could only deteriorate in a theatre of armed conflict. |
