Peace of Riga historiography
리가 조약 historiography
Peace of Riga historiography refers to the scholarship and debate that interpret the 1921 treaty and its border through differing national experiences and political aims. Polish accounts often treat it as a compromise that surrendered wartime gains or created an unstable eastern frontier, Soviet and Russian accounts as a defensive peace that halted the export of revolution, and Ukrainian and Belarusian accounts as a partition of independence and territory made without their effective consent.
In depth
Issues
The Treaty of Riga was signed on 18 March 1921 by Poland, Soviet Russia, and Soviet Ukraine, while Soviet Belarus was represented by the Russian side. Because non-communist Ukrainian representatives were excluded from the talks and Poland abandoned its alliance with the Ukrainian People's Republic, Ukrainian scholarship has often read the settlement as an abandonment of an ally. The new border left large Ukrainian and Belarusian populations in Poland and produced contrasting later experiences of Polonization and Soviet national repression.
Interpretations also divided within Poland. Piłsudski's supporters condemned the abandonment of a federation project and the Ukrainian alliance, while National Democrats accepted a more westerly border amid war-weariness and domestic political calculation. Soviet leaders regarded the treaty as an unsatisfactory defensive peace that postponed the prospect of revolution in the West, whereas Western scholarship often treats it as a settlement that ended the war and stabilized the frontier for two decades while examining minority questions and excluded actors. The term therefore names no single national justification, but a framework for comparing the tension between the border's legal formation and the national self-determination and class and state power relations beneath it.
Sources
- Wikipedia (EN) supports the treaty’s signatories, date, border settlement, exclusion of non-communist Ukrainian representatives, and divergent Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Soviet interpretations and consequences.
- mieroszewski.pl supports the existence of distinct Polish, Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Latvian scholarly perspectives and the treaty’s contested status as a missed opportunity.
- enrs.eu supports the treaty’s basic terms, participating Soviet republics, and the durability of the border until the Second World War.