Keeping the bear at bay

Who would think that a battle as decisive as Marathon or Waterloo took place at the gates of Warsaw in August 1920? Such is the question that Adam Zamoyski poses at the beginning of his account of the war between Lenin’s Soviet Russia and Pilsudski’s Catholic Poland, fought in the twilight between the first and second world wars. The author gives us the clue to the answer, not in the main title of his book, Warsaw 1920, but in its subtitle, ‘Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe’. Certain it is that Lenin saw his invasion of the recently re-created Poland as the gateway to Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and eventually, perhaps, Italy. Encouraged by sycophants sitting around him in the Kremlin and, no doubt, also by what we nowadays call the chattering classes plus some feeble-minded intellectuals in the west, he had come to believe that the masses in Poland, Germany and anywhere else the Red army could tread would rise in support of the Communist promise of liberation from the capitalist tyranny of Western societies.