Peace of Riga (1921)
리가 조약 (1921)
The peace treaty signed at Riga, Latvia, on 18 March 1921 between Poland on one side and Soviet Russia (acting also for Soviet Belarus) and Soviet Ukraine on the other, ending the Polish–Soviet War. It drew the border about 250 kilometres east of the Curzon Line, giving Western Belarus and Western Ukraine to Poland. It followed the preliminary peace and armistice of 12 October 1920 and fixed the frontier between the two states until the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939.
In depth
Peace talks opened in Minsk on 17 August 1920 and moved to neutral Riga on 21 September, with Jan Dąbski leading the Polish delegation and Adolph Joffe the Soviet one. A preliminary peace and armistice was signed on 12 October and took effect at midnight on the 18th. Beaten at Warsaw, the Soviet side offered large concessions reaching as far as Minsk, but the Polish delegation, dominated by the National Democrats, followed Stanisław Grabski in turning down about 100 kilometres of territory so as to limit the non-Polish population. The Soviet side succeeded in keeping non-Communist Ukrainian representatives out of the talks. As internal crises such as Tambov and Kronstadt deepened, Lenin instructed his delegates to finish the treaty. The treaty had 26 articles, and Poland abandoned its 1920 Treaty of Warsaw with the Ukrainian People's Republic and recognised Soviet Ukraine and Belarus. The Russian side was to pay 30 million gold roubles and return works of art, cultural treasures and archives taken since 1772, and besides this the English source records railway stock worth 29 million gold roubles and the Russian source property worth 18 million gold roubles to be handed over. Articles 6 and 7 dealt with the option of nationality and the rights of minorities. The Soviet side ratified on 14 April and the Polish Sejm on the 15th.
The Allies were at first reluctant to recognise a treaty concluded without them, and France, Britain, Italy and Japan recognised the frontier only in March 1923, the United States in April. Piłsudski called the treaty "an act of cowardice" and on 15 May 1921 apologised to Ukrainian soldiers at the internment camp at Kalisz. According to the English source Lenin too found the treaty unsatisfactory, since it forced him to put off spreading the revolution westwards. Trotsky recalled in My Life that after the Warsaw defeat he opposed the mood for a second war with Poland, warning that "repeating a mistake already made will cost us ten times as much", and that after his visit to the front the Politburo decided "almost unanimously" for immediate peace. He wrote that "the frontier fixed by the Riga treaty cut the Soviet republic off from Germany, which later had exceptional importance in the life of both countries." The Ukrainian and Belarusian independence movements saw the treaty as a heavy setback.