How Poland saved us from Communism

The video below tells us something I hadn’t known and should have. In the summer of 1920 Lenin sent 200,000 soldiers into Poland with the objective of reaching Berlin - and spreading Communism beyond.

Help from the West was not whole-hearted.

Postwar Germany was very weak at this time. Only a year earlier thousands of its people had starved to death as the Royal Navy continued its blockade during the 1919 peace negotiations. The Left was stirring: Communist revolts were put down by the Weimar government but who knows where a successful Red invasion could have led?

In Britain also there was much socialist unrest. Urged by the British Communist leader Harry Pollitt, organiser of the Hands Off Russia campaign, dock workers in London prevented the loading of arms onto the SS Jolly George for Poland.

Russia also had its sympathisers in France - only a few months later the French Section of the Workers’ International voted to join Lenin’s Comintern. For political and other reasons the help France provided to Poland, though crucial as it turned out, was limited.

Lenin’s attempt failed because intelligence reached the Polish military that the enemy’s forces, split into two, had a weakly defended centre through which the Poles managed to drive and harry the supply lines in the rear.

Here’s to Poland and the 1920 Battle of Warsaw.