Cavalry and code-breaking: The Polish-Soviet war

A Russian army stands at the gates of the capital of another country, a country that Russia has previously occupied and one that, according to Russian politicians, has no right to independent existence. Sounds familiar? That capital city was Warsaw and the year was 1920. But what happened in Poland just after the end of World War One bears strong similarities to what went on near Kyiv in 2022.

After the First World War, Russian Bolsheviks, and Lenin in particular, wanted to reoccupy Poland, and indeed Ukraine, Belarus and some other countries, so that they could serve as a bridge for exporting communist revolution to Western Europe. The Poles resisted even though at first they were outnumbered and outgunned by the Russians. The result was the Polish-Bolshevik war which was not fully resolved until 1921 and which had a big impact on the future shape of inter-war Europe.

To guide us through the Polish-Bolshevik war are three distinguished historians: Dr. Pawel Duber, researcher at Nottingham Trent University whose work focuses on Poland in the first half of the 20th Century; Anita Prazmowska, professor of International History at London School of Economics and the author of many publications on Polish history in the last century and beyond; Robert Service, emeritus professor of Russian history at Oxford University, whose books cover Russia from the Mongol conquest to Putin.

(Photo: Red Army on the Polish front, c.1920. Credit: Photo 12/Getty Images)