Post by Jaga on Mar 15, 2008 16:16:04 GMT -7
This is quite interesting historical account, but we could not talk about it during communism:
www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/03/15/bozam115.xml
Christopher Silvester reviews Warsaw 1920: Lenin's Failed Conquest of Europe by Adam Zamoyski
The Soviet invasion of Poland in the summer of 1920 as a prelude to its proposed conquest of Europe, in particular Germany, is so little known and discussed by historians that Adam Zamoyski refuses to call it the Polish-Soviet War. Only one of the works in English listed among his sources uses this name in its title.
Coming so soon after the First World War, it has been overlooked by everyone except the Poles and, given the upheaval that would befall them 20 years later and the pall that descended on them thereafter, Zamoyski admits that "the events of 1920 seem not only irrelevant, but quaint".
This war looked forwards and backwards. Remarkable for the mobility of troop formations in a large theatre, it foretold the strategy of deep thrusts and encirclement battles that would be fought by tanks in the Second World War. The battle of Czesniki, on the other hand, harked back to Napoleon's time. It was, says Zamoyski, "an epic struggle of a kind not witnessed in Europe for over a century, and the last major cavalry-to-cavalry engagement in the continent's history".
Zamoyski's sub-heading is important. Few realise that Lenin wished to conquer Poland to create a revolution in Germany; even fewer realise that he wrote to Stalin, the chief political commissar attached to the Red Army in Ukraine, suggesting a simultaneous attack through Romania, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, to provoke revolution in Italy. Stalin responded that "it would be a sin" not to try.
Pilsudski, the Polish head of state and commander-in-chief, though in his early fifties, was no expert in military strategy. He was racked by self-doubt, yet proved himself a master of circumstances. His counterpart, Tukhachevsky, was only 27, a nobleman who imagined himself a Napoleon in the making, and a nihilist who hated Jews, Christians, capitalists and socialists. He was later shot in Stalin's purges, as were all the senior Red Army commanders who failed to take Warsaw in 1920 (apart from Stalin's cronies in the South).
www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/03/15/bozam115.xml
Christopher Silvester reviews Warsaw 1920: Lenin's Failed Conquest of Europe by Adam Zamoyski
The Soviet invasion of Poland in the summer of 1920 as a prelude to its proposed conquest of Europe, in particular Germany, is so little known and discussed by historians that Adam Zamoyski refuses to call it the Polish-Soviet War. Only one of the works in English listed among his sources uses this name in its title.
Coming so soon after the First World War, it has been overlooked by everyone except the Poles and, given the upheaval that would befall them 20 years later and the pall that descended on them thereafter, Zamoyski admits that "the events of 1920 seem not only irrelevant, but quaint".
This war looked forwards and backwards. Remarkable for the mobility of troop formations in a large theatre, it foretold the strategy of deep thrusts and encirclement battles that would be fought by tanks in the Second World War. The battle of Czesniki, on the other hand, harked back to Napoleon's time. It was, says Zamoyski, "an epic struggle of a kind not witnessed in Europe for over a century, and the last major cavalry-to-cavalry engagement in the continent's history".
Zamoyski's sub-heading is important. Few realise that Lenin wished to conquer Poland to create a revolution in Germany; even fewer realise that he wrote to Stalin, the chief political commissar attached to the Red Army in Ukraine, suggesting a simultaneous attack through Romania, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, to provoke revolution in Italy. Stalin responded that "it would be a sin" not to try.
Pilsudski, the Polish head of state and commander-in-chief, though in his early fifties, was no expert in military strategy. He was racked by self-doubt, yet proved himself a master of circumstances. His counterpart, Tukhachevsky, was only 27, a nobleman who imagined himself a Napoleon in the making, and a nihilist who hated Jews, Christians, capitalists and socialists. He was later shot in Stalin's purges, as were all the senior Red Army commanders who failed to take Warsaw in 1920 (apart from Stalin's cronies in the South).