This detailed study traces the history of the Soviet-Polish War
(1919-20), the first major international clash between the forces
of communism and anti-communism, and the impact this had on Soviet
Russia in the years that followed. It reflects upon how the
Bolsheviks fought not only to defend the fledgling Soviet state,
but also to bring the revolution to Europe. Peter Whitewood shows
that while the Red Army’s rapid drive to the gates of Warsaw in
summer 1920 raised great hopes for world revolution, the subsequent
collapse of the offensive had a more striking result. The Soviet
military and political leadership drew the mistaken conclusion that
they had not been defeated by the Polish Army, but by the forces of
the capitalist world – Britain and France – who were perceived
as having directed the war behind-the-scenes. They were taken aback
by the strength of the forces of counterrevolution and convinced
they had been overcome by the capitalist powers. The Soviet-Polish
War and its Legacy reveals that – in the aftermath of the
catastrophe at Warsaw –Lenin, Stalin and other senior Bolsheviks
were convinced that another war against Poland and its capitalist
backers was inevitable with this perpetual fear of war shaping the
evolution of the early Soviet state. It also further encouraged the
creation of a centralised and repressive one-party state and
provided a powerful rationale for the breakneck industrialisation
of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s. The Soviet
leadership’s central preoccupation in the 1930s was Nazi Germany;
this book convincingly argues that Bolshevik perceptions of Poland
and the capitalist world in the decade before were given as much
significance and were ultimately crucial to the rise of Stalinism.
General
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