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- Title
DEFENSE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION OR "POLISH IMPERIALISM?".
- Authors
STYRNA, PAWEŁ
- Abstract
The Kiev Offensive was a joint Polish-Ukrainian attack against Soviet forces in Ukraine in late April/early May 1920. Poland's commander in chief Jozef Pilsudski, strove to preempt a Red Army offensive against the newly independent Polish Republic by forcing a battle in Ukraine. He also wished to deny this strategic country, the "breadbasket of Europe," to the Bolsheviks by creating a Ukrainian state allied with Poland. Piłsudski'c plan seemed to materialize as the Poles and Ukrainians swept the Soviet forces before them and liberated Kiev. The Reds soon counterattacked and drove the Poles all the way to Warsaw, where the Soviets suffered a crushing defeat. Communist expansion was temporarily halted and the independence of Poland and the Baltic states secured, at least for two decades, but Ukraine remained under Soviet rule. The communists immediately portrayed the Polish-Ukrainian push for Kiev as imperialist aggression by Polish landlords, allegedly intent on regaining their estates. Some Western historians have also depicted the Kiev Offensive as an opening shot in the Polish-Bolshevik War, in spite of the fact that the Poles and the Soviets had been wrestling for the control of the lands between the Bug and the Berezyna Rivers for over a year. Why did the distorted Soviet propaganda version weave its way even into Western history books? At least a part of the answer may lie in the media coverage of the Kiev Offensive at the time. To verify this hypothesis, the author analyzed newspapers and other important periodicals, such as weekly magazines and quarterly or annual journals, published in the United States, Great Britain, Belgium, Poland, and Bolshevik Russia. This investigation has revealed that the various national periodicals were divided in their attitudes toward the Kiev Offensive primarily along political-ideological lines. In general, right-of-center publications depicted Poland as a strong bulwark defending Western Civilization against barbarous Bolshevism. Left-of-center papers, by contrast, treated the Poles as bellicose and reckless invaders disrupting the peace to do the bidding of the sinister Entente. The degree to which ostensibly noncommunist Western leftist outlets echoed the official narrative of the Kremlin is quite striking. Sometimes, however, ethnic or national mirror-imaging cut across ideological lines, as in the case of the Belgian-Flemish Christian Democratic press, which viewed the Poles through the prism of its own struggle with the Walloon domination in Brussels. In the case of Poland, the situation was even more complex, with Jozef Pilsudski's supporters themselves an ideologically diverse groupcheering on the offensive, and the conservative nationalists (Endeks) criticizing it as foolhardy messianism that could only backfire.
- Subjects
POLISH Wars of 1918-1921; WAR in the press; HISTORY of newspapers; PILSUDSKI, Jozef, 1867-1935; SOVIET military history; UKRAINIAN military history; UKRAINIAN history; TWENTIETH century
- Publication
Polish Review, 2013, Vol 58, Issue 4, p3
- ISSN
0032-2970
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.5406/polishreview.58.4.0003