Historical Events
Poland · Events 14
Ukraine’s revolution and wars
The Central Rada formed in Kyiv in March 1917 began by seeking autonomy within a federal Russia and declared independence in January 1918, but over the next four years Kyiv changed hands more than ten times. Soviet troops, the German occupation and Hetman Skoropadsky, the Directory of Vynnychenko and Petliura, Denikin's Whites and the Polish army held the city in turn, while the peasant armies of Hryhoriv and Makhno fought a war of their own that belonged to no state. Some 1,500 pogroms killed tens of thousands of Jews. The Warsaw agreement of 1920 and the Treaty of Riga of 1921 ended the Ukrainian People's Republic's war of independence, leaving the contradiction between Soviet Ukraine's formal statehood and the real control of the Bolshevik centre.
The Civil War and Foreign Intervention
From 1918 to 1922 the Soviet republic fought for its survival, encircled by White generals and intervention forces from more than a dozen foreign powers. The Red Army that Trotsky organized grew to five million soldiers and defeated the armies of Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich, and Wrangel in turn, as the majority of workers and peasants preferred Soviet power to the return of the landlords and the old order. Yet victory came at a terrible price: millions died from war, famine, and epidemics, while the terror practiced by both sides and the emergency rule of wartime left deep marks on the character of the Soviet state that followed.
Baltic wars of independence and border settlements
After Germany's collapse in November 1918 the new governments of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had to build states between three forces: the Red Army, the Russian Whites and the German Freikorps. Estonia, backed by the British fleet and Finnish volunteers and having won its peasants with land reform, drove out the Red Army in early 1919; when Yudenich's Northwestern Army, launched from Estonian soil, broke before Petrograd, Estonia disarmed it and in February 1920 signed at Tartu Soviet Russia's first treaty recognizing a state's independence. Latvia defeated in turn Stučka's Soviet government, von der Goltz's German troops and Niedra's pro-German government, and Bermondt-Avalov's attack on Riga; Lithuania saw off Litbel but lost Vilnius to Poland. The treaties of Tartu, Moscow, Riga and Tartu (Finland), all signed in 1920, drew Soviet Russia's north-western frontier, but the Polish-Lithuanian dispute remained.
The Soviet-Polish War
The Soviet-Polish War was fought from 1919 to 1921 between reborn Poland and Soviet Russia in the borderlands of three collapsed empires. Begun without declaration in Belorussia in February 1919, it became full-scale war in April 1920 when Pilsudski, allied with Petliura, drove on Kiev. Budyonny's cavalry and Tukhachevsky's July offensive reversed the tide, and the Red Army marched on Warsaw under the banner of exporting revolution, only to be decisively beaten in the Battle of Warsaw in August. The Peace of Riga in March 1921 drew the border far east of the Curzon Line, partitioning Belorussia and Ukraine; it stood until 1939. The defeat before Warsaw proved in practice the last attempt to export revolution by bayonet, and turned the Soviet state onto the road of building in one country.
The Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Partition of Eastern Europe
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed on the night of 23 August 1939 in the Moscow Kremlin by Soviet Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Alongside public non-aggression clauses, it contained a secret additional protocol carving Eastern Europe into Soviet and German spheres of influence. With Anglo-French collective-security talks deadlocked by Poland's refusal to admit Soviet troops, Stalin chose the German option. Germany invaded Poland a week later; on 17 September, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. On 28 September the two powers sealed the partition with the German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, revising the secret protocol to transfer Lithuania to the Soviet sphere in exchange for handing Lublin and parts of Warsaw to Germany. The pact served as the platform for the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states, the Winter War against Finland, and the seizure of Bessarabia, remaining in force until Germany tore it up on 22 June 1941.
The Great Patriotic War
The Great Patriotic War, opened by Nazi Germany with a surprise invasion in June 1941, was the largest land war in human history. Recovering from the catastrophic losses of the first year, the Soviet Union moved its industrial base bodily eastward and rearmed, reversed the tide at Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk, and drove on to Berlin in 1945 to bring down Nazi Germany. Roughly 80 percent of the ground combat power of the Wehrmacht was destroyed on the Eastern Front, and it was the multinational Soviet people who bore the overwhelming burden of defeating fascism.
Warsaw Uprising
The Warsaw Uprising was an armed rising by the Polish Home Army from 1 August to 2 October 1944 against German occupation, intended to liberate the capital and assert Polish sovereignty before Soviet forces and a Soviet-backed authority took control. The approaching Red Army, German evacuation measures, and the unresolved dispute between the London government-in-exile and the Soviet Union over Poland’s borders and government pushed the decision forward. The Home Army seized parts of the city and built an underground administration, but German reinforcements and mass violence against civilians turned the battle into a siege. Western airdrops were limited, while Soviet forces remained east of the Vistula and offered only restricted assistance in September. After 63 days the Home Army capitulated, and Germany deported the population and systematically demolished Warsaw.
The People's Democracies of Eastern Europe
From the summer of 1944, coalition governments with communist participation were formed in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary as the Red Army arrived, in the Soviet zone of Germany, and in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Albania, which had been liberated largely by their own forces. Each country passed through land reform and the nationalisation of major industry. The elections of 1945–46 produced divided results in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, while in Poland and Romania the official counts diverge from records published later. In 1947 the other coalition parties were pushed out through dissolution, splits and trials, and between 1946 and 1948 the social democratic parties were merged into the communist parties. Over the same years "people's democracy" was explained first as a "new road" distinct from the Soviet system and then, in December 1948, redefined as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. By 1949 constitutions and single-list elections had fixed the new order in every country, and trials and purges had begun inside the parties themselves.
Poland: From the Lublin Committee to the United Workers' Party
When the Soviet-sponsored Polish Committee of National Liberation installed itself in Lublin in July 1944, Poland had two governments: the exile government in London and the committee in Lublin. Under the Yalta agreement a Provisional Government of National Unity was formed in June 1945, Mikołajczyk returned as deputy prime minister, and the United States and Britain recognised it. Land reform and the nationalisation of major industry were passed by several parties of the coalition together. The Ministry of Public Security and the Soviet NKVD faced the underground successors of the Home Army, and there were two amnesties, in 1945 and 1947. The official results of the referendum of June 1946 and the election of January 1947 were landslides for the government bloc; the tallies published after 1989 show different figures. Mikołajczyk left Poland in October 1947. Gomułka's "Polish road" was condemned as a "rightist-nationalist deviation" in September 1948 and he was removed; in December the Workers' Party and the Socialist Party merged into the Polish United Workers' Party.
The Founding of the Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Pact (formally the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance) was a collective-defense alliance signed on May 14, 1955, in Warsaw by the Soviet Union and seven Eastern European socialist states. The immediate trigger was the October 1954 Paris Agreements, which set West Germany on course for rearmament and NATO membership. The Soviet Union began preparing the alliance at the November 1954 Moscow Conference; the treaty was signed four days after West Germany entered NATO. The preamble identified a remilitarized West Germany in NATO as a threat to peace-loving states, and Article 4 committed signatories to render immediate assistance, including armed force, in the event of armed attack in Europe. Marshal Ivan Konev was named supreme commander, and a Political Consultative Committee was established. Yet the Warsaw Pact was more facade than substance: the USSR already controlled Eastern Europe through bilateral treaties and stationed troops, and Nikita Khrushchev conceived the new organization as a bargaining chip, to be traded for a pan-European collective security system that would also dissolve NATO.
The Poznań Uprising
The Poznań Uprising was an armed workers' revolt against the Stalinist regime of the Polish People's Republic, erupting in the industrial city of Poznań from 28 to 30 June 1956. It began as a strike at ZISPO (the former Cegielski works), Poznań's largest factory, after the central government in Warsaw reneged overnight on promises to raise wages and refund punitive payroll taxes. On the morning of 28 June, tens of thousands took to the streets, soon swelling to a crowd of roughly 100,000. What began with economic demands turned into an armed uprising after the authorities refused to negotiate: demonstrators seized the party committee headquarters, the security police building, and a prison, capturing weapons. Defence Minister Konstantin Rokossovsky dispatched General Stanislav Poplavsky, who deployed some 400 tanks and 10,000 troops to crush the revolt by 30 June. At least 57 people were killed and hundreds wounded.
The Prague Spring
The Prague Spring was a reform movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968 led by Alexander Dubček. Its “socialism with a human face” — easing censorship, widening freedom of expression and movement, and economic reform — won broad popular support. But the Soviet Union defined it as a break from the bloc and, in August 1968, occupied Czechoslovakia with the armies of five Warsaw Pact states.
Solidarity and Martial Law in Poland
In the summer of 1980, a strike at the Gdańsk Lenin Shipyard against food price rises grew into a self-organised workers' movement issuing 21 demands, and the agreement signed on 31 August with the government created the Eastern Bloc's first recognised independent trade union: Solidarity (Solidarność). Within months the union enrolled 10 million members, and over sixteen months it grew from a trade union into a social movement demanding a self-governing republic. Under Soviet pressure and facing economic collapse, First Secretary Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law on 13 December 1981, installing a Military Council of National Salvation and outlawing Solidarity. Tens of thousands of troops cut communications and interned the leadership; at the Wujek coal mine, special riot police shot dead nine striking miners.
The Revolutions of 1989
In 1989 one-party communist systems fell in quick succession across Eastern Europe. Hungary opened its border, Poland reached free elections through round-table talks, the Berlin Wall came down, and in Romania Ceaușescu was executed. The decisive difference was that Gorbachev, unlike in 1956 and 1968, renounced armed intervention.