Richard Overy
A SHORT, SHARP WAR
Warsaw 1920: Lenin's Failed Conquest of Europe
By Adam Zamoyski (HarperPress 224pp £12.99)

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Anyone vaguely familiar with the early history of the Russian Revolution will recall the one or two lines in every textbook about Marshal Pilsudski's legionaries stopping the Red Army before the gates of Warsaw in August 1920. The outcome is almost taken for granted. The Soviet forces, embroiled in a civil war of immeasurable savagery, were perhaps too weak to do much more; Poles were defending the independence so recently won in the Versailles settlement and fought with a stubborn nationalism. Some of this is true, but as Adam Zamoyski reminds us in this crisp account of an almost unknown war, the outcome was far from pre-ordained. If it is difficult to believe that the Soviets would have established an early version of the Cold War bloc had they won, it is also difficult to see who could have ejected them once they straddled Eastern Europe.

The story told here is a straightforward account of a short, sharp war which took place from April to October 1920 between two infant states, Polish and Soviet. The hero of the story is one of the great names of modern Polish history, Joseph Pilsudski. The son of minor Polish gentry who became an ardent nationalist, he engaged in acts of terrorism against the Russian and German occupiers of Poland and from 1904 organised a small Polish 'army', the Polish Legion, which fought alongside the Austrians against Russia during the First World War. In 1918, with Germany defeated and Russia in chaos, Pilsudski became Poland's commander-in-chief. With a raggle-taggle army of 9,000 he set about building a larger Polish force using Poles who had fought in every army during the war. He began liberating areas on Poland's eastern frontiers from Bolshevik takeover. Soon Lenin realised that something would have to be done about 'bourgeois' Poland, which barred the path to a possibly revolutionary Germany, and battle lines were drawn up.

Zamoyski makes clear that this war was unlike any fought by the main combatants between 1914 and 1918. It was a war that turned the clock back: poor supply lines, desperate shortages of modern equipment, soldiers without complete uniforms who fought barefoot, and above all large cavalry units which used lances, sabres and knives to cut an old-fashioned swathe through the enemy's ranks. On the Soviet side, the horde of horsemen who followed the young Armenian Gai, whose tactics were so savage he was generally known as Gai Khan, were like a latter-day Tartar horde, murdering, looting and raping as they went. They reached far into Poland towards the German frontier, an almost unstoppable force. When the Red Army leader Mikhail Tukhachevsky finally launched his main assault in August 1920 towards the Polish capital, the brutalised soldiery he led inspired terror in the soldiers and civilians in their path. Zamoyski tells the subsequent story of how Pilsudski, with Poland facing almost sure defeat, plucked victory from the Soviet grasp by a stratagem so daring that a comparison with Napoleon would not be out of place. Polish forces then pushed the Red Army back until it sued for an armistice in October. It would spoil the plot to say much more. The book reads like a Boy's Own yarn and is well worth it for that alone.

The wider implication of the brief Soviet-Polish war is that the Polish armies before Warsaw turned the tide of history by stopping another invasion of Europe by Asia. This is a case that rests on flimsy ground. There were effective and better armed anti-Bolshevik forces in Hungary and Romania which had rudely ended the brief communist rule of Béla Kun in Budapest. The Soviet armies still had large White forces to defeat, while Belorussian and Ukrainian nationalists still snapped at their heels. Lenin hoped that the southern wing, whose chief political officer was none other than Joseph Stalin, might force a way through to Italy. Zamoyski makes no attempt to assess whether this was the sheer fantasy it seems to have been and uses these crude ambitions to give greater historical significance to the Warsaw battle. Much more is needed about the political context in Europe (the struggle between communists, Catholics and fascists in Italy or the vicious civil war between communists and Freikorps vigilantes in Germany) before the place of Pilsudski's triumph can be properly assessed. What can be said with certainty is that it was essential for the Poles, and has become (and despite fifty years of communism, has remained) a founding myth of the modern Polish nation.

There is a grim footnote to the story of the Soviet failure in Poland. Stalin played a major part in preventing the southern wing of the Red Army that faced Poland from supporting Tukhachevsky and in later accounts it is assumed that Warsaw would have been won had Stalin not misjudged. Zamoyski makes it clear that Tukhachevsky, who himself had dreams of a Napoleonic future, was quite happy to win victory over the Poles for himself. Nor was the southern wing, after much mauling by the Poles, in good enough shape to help a great deal. After the debacle, however, Tukhachevsky blamed his failure on everyone but himself. Years later Stalin took his revenge. In the military purge of 1937 all the commanders of the Red Army before Warsaw who had not died a natural death were arrested, tried and shot. The men under Stalin's command in the south remained in his favoured circle, old scores settled.

By this time Pilsudski was dead and within a few years Polish forces would be trying vainly to hold Warsaw again against an enemy of an altogether different mettle. It is tempting to say that Poland's rejection of compromise with Germany in 1939 owed something to the Pilsudski legend. Poland was always forced to punch above her weight, a victim of geopolitical accident, and so, like Belgium, raked for centuries by the ebb and flow of war. Here at least is a Polish triumph, told simply as it was by a master storyteller.

Richard Overy's 'The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia' was awarded the Wolfson Prize for History 2005 and is available in paperback from Penguin.