ON THIS DAY ·
Peace of Riga
18 Mar 1921 — Poland and Soviet Russia split the borderlands between them; the line holds until 1939. Millions of Ukrainians and Belorussians wake up on the wrong side of somebody’s new border.
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The moment in context
The Polish-Soviet war of 1920 mixed a border conflict with two much larger political projects. Piłsudski hoped to build a federation of nations between Poland and Russia, and took Kiev in May toward that end, while the Bolshevik leaders came to see a march west as the road to revolution in a Germany they still believed was ripe for it. The Red counteroffensive drove hundreds of kilometers toward Warsaw, but each advance stretched its supply lines thinner, and Tukhachevsky’s northern armies lost contact with the south-western front, leaving a gap between them. The dream of carrying the revolution into central Europe on bayonets was about to meet its limit.
From Polish–Soviet War, chapter 12 of The Russian Revolution, 1855–1924 (OCT 1920).
The place: Peace of Riga — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — Two enemies the Reds could not fight at once. Wrangel survived as long as he did precisely because the Polish war pinned the Red Army in the west. A last illustration of the whole war’s logic of…
- The turn — The Miracle on the Vistula, August 1920. The battle that stopped the revolution at Europe’s door. Tukhachevsky’s exhausted, overextended armies were split by Piłsudski’s flank counterstroke…
- What it changed — A border drawn to 1939. The Peace of Riga split the contested borderlands between Poland and Soviet Russia and held for eighteen years. Until, in September 1939, two…
Then ask the room: The Miracle on the Vistula — Piłsudski’s genius or Tukhachevsky’s blunder? And what did stopping the Red Army at Warsaw decide? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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