Secret Soviet-Polish Peace Talks in 1919
In: Slavic review: interdisciplinary quarterly of Russian, Eurasian and East European studies, Band 24, Heft 3, S. 425-449
ISSN: 2325-7784
History sometimes has its simple moments, and it is tempting to draw the early struggle between the Bolsheviks and the Poles in terms of a clash between Red Russia and White Poland. Most Soviet and some Western historians see it only as a fragment of the general conflict between revolution and reaction. Closer scrutiny, however, belies the seeming simplicity of dialectics. The story is tortuous and involved; moves behind the scenes accompanied the fighting at the front. The gulf which separated the Bolsheviks from the Entente and from Poland did not preclude clandestine contacts, and Poland's leader Józef Piłsudski played his own game with the Soviet regime.
