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Poland Formative Years, 1918-21
From its inception, the Second Polish Republic
struggled to
secure and maintain its existence in difficult
circumstances. The
extraordinary complications of defining frontiers
preoccupied the
state in its infancy. To the southwest, Warsaw encountered
boundary disputes with Czechoslovakia. More ominously, an
embittered Germany begrudged any territorial loss to its
new
eastern neighbor. The 1919
Treaty of Versailles (see Glossary)
settled the German-Polish borders in the Baltic region.
The port city of Danzig, a city predominantly German but as
economically
vital to Poland as it had been in the sixteenth century,
was
declared a free city. Allied arbitration divided the
ethnically
mixed and highly coveted industrial and mining district of
Silesia between Germany and Poland, with Poland receiving
the
more industrialized eastern section. These terms would be
a
primary incentive to the German aggression that ignited
World War
II.
Military force proved the determinant of Poland's
frontiers
in the east, a theater rendered chaotic by the
repercussions of
the Russian revolutions and civil war. Pilsudski
envisioned a new
federation with Lithuania and Polish domination of western
Ukraine, centered at Kiev, forming a Polish-led East
European
confederation to block Russian imperialism. Vladimir I.
Lenin,
leader of the new communist government of Russia, saw
Poland as
the bridge over which communism would pass into the labor
class
of a disorganized postwar Germany. When Pilsudski carried
out a
military thrust into Ukraine in 1920, he was met by a Red
Army
counterattack that drove into Polish territory almost to
Warsaw.
Although many observers marked Poland for extinction and
Bolshevization, Pilsudski halted the Soviet advance before
Warsaw
and resumed the offensive. The Poles were not able to
exploit
their new advantage fully, however; they signed a
compromise
peace treaty at Riga in early 1921 that split disputed
territory
in Belorussia and Ukraine between Poland and Soviet
Russia. The
treaty avoided ceding historically Polish territory back
to the
Russians.
Data as of October 1992
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