The Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921 was a direct consequence of the ideological objectives pursued by the belligerents. Ideology shaped the political agenda and the diametrically opposed war aims of both states, and was implemented through the foreign policy, diplomatic negotiation and military engagements pursued. This proved to be the principal obstacle to the establishment of cordial relations. As western democracy and Russian Marxism battled it out, war was inevitable. Externally, the Paris Peace Conference provided the necessary conditions for the resumption of traditional Russian-Polish hostilities, whilst the Allied States consistently demonstrated their absolute inability to directly influence either the development, or outcome, of the conflict. Redressing the balance of historiography, this thesis includes a greater examination of the conflict from the perspective of the Soviet regime. This firmly controlled the Russian decision-making process. By charting the war, it becomes clear that both states deliberately pursued a dual offensive: traditional diplomatic negotiation and military campaign as conditions dictated. However, in addition, Soviet Russia developed a unique and innovative, revolutionary, agit-prop, diplomatic medium. This enabled adept Soviet diplomats to win the majority of diplomatic battles during the conflict, although often negotiating from a militarily weak position. Nevertheless, the regime ultimately failed in its objective: to ignite socialist revolution in western Europe. The mistaken Soviet decision in July 1920 to cross the ethnographic border to forcefully sovietise Poland, in opposition to Marxist doctrine, irreversibly altered the complexion of the war and proved its pivotal turning point. This culminated politically with the short-lived establishment of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee in Białystok, and militarily, with the decisive defeat of the Red Army at the Battle of Warsaw. It is now certain that the Red Army offensive into Poland in July 1920 aimed not only at the sovietisation of Poland, but at spreading the socialist revolution to Western Europe and overthrowing the Versailles settlement. The European revolutionary upsurge had largely extinguished during the previous year and in August 1920, Communist ideology ultimately failed to inspire the vast majority of the Polish population. Thus, by utilising the Soviet military to secure its war aims, Lenin and the Politburo inadvertently signed the death-warrant of socialist revolution in Poland at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This study examines Polish-Jewish relations during the pivotal eight months between the declaration of Polish Independence on November 11, 1918 and the formal re-establishment of the Polish state by its recognition by the Allied and Associated Powers at the Paris Peace Conference on June 28, 1919. The thesis explores the background to Polish-Jewish relations in the years immediately preceding the period under investigation in order to place the events in their political and socio-economic context. The key to the present study is a detailed examination of the controversial anti-Jewish outrages that occurred in the disputed Russo-Polish-Ukrainian borderlands, namely in Lwów in November 1918, and at Pińsk in April 1919. It is important not only to scrutinise these events in detail, but furthermore to place them in their full international perspective. The direct result was the imposition of a Minorities Treaty upon Poland, which was largely drafted during the final months of the Peace Conference. Polish anti-Jewish violence was not the only factor that influenced the Allies gathered at Versailles, yet the peacemakers felt compelled to treat Poland as a special case. The Treaty further strained the interdependent links between Poles and Jews, both in Poland and the west, as the dominant group saw it as an unfair limitation on its sovereignty. Polish resentment at the perceived influence of ‘international Jewry’ further heightened tensions between the two, yet the drafting of the Minorities Treaty was emphatically not as a result of the ‘Jewish lobby’ (which was in fact divided) that had gathered in the French capital in an attempt to further Jewish demands in both Eastern Europe and Palestine. The damage done to Polish-Jewish relationships during the crucial period of 1918-1919 not only strained interaction between those groups in the months covered by the thesis, but also exacerbated the Jewish ‘problem’ during the course of the Second Polish Republic and beyond.