Russia has always framed its invasion of Ukraine as essential to the defense of the nation. Vladimir Putin claims that NATO’s purposeful and violent incursion into a area that was once ruled by Moscow is to blame because the West wants to break up Russia.
By improvement, Ukraine is portrayed as little more than a slave in Washington’s wicked sport despite the fact that, according to Putin, it lacks organization and has been reduced to resembling an outpost of the NATO war.
There are some theories in Russian propaganda that come and go, such as the ridiculous assertions that the US had created bioweapons locations all over Ukraine. However, Putin has maintained that NATO and the” social West” pose an existential threat to Russia in his fundamental geopolitical analysis of the conflict.
Evaluations to the previous cold conflict are common given the notion of competing political alliances and the” no-limits friendship” between Moscow and Beijing. Researchers and critics are eager to examine different similarities and differences. However, there is an underappreciated contrast between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and another act of aggression committed a decade earlier, in 1920 under Vladimir Lenin, when the Red Army invaded Poland.
The Bolsheviks framed the conflict in words that are remarkably similar to the conspiracy theories that permeate Russian propaganda now, despite the fact that the former occurred more than a century ago.
The 1919 – 20 Soviet– Polish War was one of several interconnected conflicts that were sparked in the wake of the 1917 revolution and are simply referred to as the” Russian” civil war. In the summer of 1920, Lenin made the decision to turn a rolling Red Army assault into an all-out invasion of Poland as fighting between Finnish and Russian forces intensified starting in 1919 in Belarus, Lithuania, and afterwards in Ukraine.
Disaster resulted from Lenin’s bet that Finnish workers would rise up and support invading Red Army soldiers.
The idea was to take control of Warsaw and” sovietize” the nation, building a” revolutionary bridge” that would eventually reach all the way to Germany. This was a huge chance given how stretched the Russian military already was and how hostile Red Army soldiers would be treated if they invaded. Lenin was certain that Poland was about to experience a workers’ trend, despite the reservations of some top Bolsheviks, most importantly Joseph Stalin.
Nevertheless, unrecognized Polish Bolsheviks in Moscow supported Lenin’s fears that Finnish workers would rebel and part with advancing Red Army troops. Therefore, the Russian president chose to take a chance.
Lenin’s rude ultimately came crashing down in amazing beat outside the doors of Warsaw in the middle of August 1920, marking a turning point in modern history. Józef Pisudski, the supreme chief of Poland, quickly took advantage of the stretched-out Red Army causes.
The Polish Army broke through its adversary’s stretched-out lines, sending them into a humiliating defeat that would later become known as the” Miracle on the Vistula.”
Capitalist grouping
Not all Bolsheviks had concurred with Lenin that” sovietizing” Poland was a practical course of action prior to the Battle of Warsaw. Poland was not the main army, according to the party leadership, as well as the defense establishment, international and intelligence commissariats, and Soviet Russia.
Instead, they indicated the bourgeois West. The” Entente powers” at the time, Britain and France, were seen as coordinating, supplying, and occasionally giving direct orders to the Polish Army in an effort to thwart the revolution.
In actuality, Britain and France, which had been Poland’s closest friends since it was reconstituted as an independent state in 1918, provided much concrete assistance during the Soviet-Polish battle and had stopped interfering with Soviet Russia by 1920. However, the Bolsheviks greatly exaggerated the danger posed by the western power.
Lenin said at a main executive committee meeting in February 1920,” All the Entente claims are doing their utmost to inspire Poland to make war against us.”
Lenin’s people speeches can be tempted to be dismissed as deliberate advertising. However, the same conspiracies are spread throughout a great deal of domestic Russian correspondence. For instance, Stalin wrote in private in 1919 about how a” one unified order” was preparing operations against Soviet Russia using bases in Chișinău in Moldova, Warsaw in Poland, and Riga in Latvia, to the northeast.
Stalin later complained to Leon Trotsky, once more in private, that the Baltic States, Poland, and Romania were under the Entente’s” hypnosis ,” which was” extraordinarily strong.” Without any supporting evidence, general diplomat Georgy Chicherin asserted that British and French forces may start simultaneous assaults on Soviet Russia with the assistance of Finland, the Baltic States, and Italy.
A convoluted anti-Soviet plot loomed big in the minds of the Bolsheviks. In this fantasy, Poland was portrayed as having much independent agency and serving only as a puppet of capitalist France and Britain.
Bolshevik fears of international conspiracies were not unique to the Soviet-Polish war. “Capitalist grouping” was a deeply rooted conviction stemming from the international isolation of the 1917 Revolution. But the humiliating defeat by Poland in August 1920 – and the way the Bolsheviks explained it in conspiratorial terms – amplified an instinct to see “anti-Soviet blocs” everywhere.
Throughout the 1920s, Russian military intelligence continued to produce inaccurate information to this impact on a regular basis. Additionally, Stalin identified a fusion of Poland and the Baltic States, supported by Britain and France, as the main threat to Russian security before Adolf Hitler’s ascent to power in Germany.
Putin is obviously never a Bolshevik, and it’s difficult to tell how much of his own advertising he actually believes. Additionally, Ukraine nowadays cannot be said to have received as much support as Poland did in 1920.
However, it is difficult to ignore echoes of an earlier Russian worldview in Putin’s language and Russian propaganda, such as the exaggeration of interventionist blocs allegedly encircling Russia while refusing to acknowledge the agency of Ukraine, which is exactly how Lenin again saw Poland.
At York St. John University, Peter Whitewood teaches record as an associate professor.
Under a Creative Commons license, this essay has been republished from The Conversation. Read the article in its entirety.