Quoting Jeffrey Veidlinger’s In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust, pages 288–289:
In April 1920, Polish and Ukrainian forces advanced toward Kyiv from the north, beginning what came to be known as the Polish–Soviet War. Their goal was to challenge Bolshevik ascendency in the region and reclaim the historic lands of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Petliura, who was then in exile in Warsaw, had agreed to an alliance with Piłsudski in which Poland would support Ukrainian independence in the provinces of the former Russian Empire in exchange for Petliura’s renunciation of Ukrainian claims to Eastern Galicia.¹ Polish forces had already made gains in Belarusian territory, conquering Mazyr and Kalinkavichy in March.
The Red Army was completely unprepared for the assault. Polish soldiers were amazed at the bedraggled appearance of the Bolsheviks. “Some were barefoot, some had shabby soft shoes, others had rubber galoshes,” wrote Franciszek Krzystyniak, “while on their heads they wore a variety of headgear—some even had women’s hats—and winter caps or kerchiefs, and some were even bareheaded, their hair flying in the wind. They looked like ghouls. Their rifles were either suspended on string, or without any straps—but they did have plenty of ammunition in their pockets and their aim was good.”²
The Bolsheviks’ tenuous hold over Ukraine seemed to be evaporating just as it had in the face of the Whites eight months earlier.
(Emphasis added.)
Maybe I should have known this far sooner than I did, but I was always under the impression that the Red Army had simply invaded Poland unprovoked!
Indeed, it’s rare that liberals look at a map of Poland in the '30s and ask in what fucking universe Lvov or Baranovichi are rightful polish territory. That in turn means it’s one of those things every communist has to learn by themselves. Maybe this post will inform other comrades as well.
At any rate, we’re reminded that the western narrative on the USSR (and all AES) is a house of cards standing on a foundation of a warped reality. Prodding at a few details shows easily it all comes down. If Poland were a fascist, expansionist power, the Soviets weren’t empire-building, they were reuniting their people. Then they wouldn’t be partners in crime with the Nazis, at worst they’d be people making best use of a bad situation, meaning they aren’t “allies with” or “as bad as” the Nazis and suddenly you’re left with the realisation that the man who said “we fought the wrong enemy” should’ve been shot before he could finish the sentence. There are far too many details of this sort in the period leading to WW2 in Europe, which is exactly why in the global north the history of WW2 isn’t a history of people or even nations, it’s of cool tanks and battles.