➡ 23 July 1920: the Bolshevik revolution is spreading westward. The Red Army’s western front, commanded by Mikhail Tukhachevsky, and the south-western one under Alexander Yegorov, are advancing, pushing Polish armies and gaining terrain.
➡ It’s not just Poland’s fate at stake but the whole of Europe’s life or death. In Warsaw, one government is about to resign, having failed to secure foreign assistance at the Spa Conference, and the next coalition cabinet to deal with the Bolshevik invasion is about to form.
➡ There’s one more executive body – on the same day, 23 July, the Bolsheviks bring Poland a brand new government, made up of Polish communists. The Political Bureau of the Bolshevik Party – Lenin, Stalin, Kamenev, Krestinsky and Trotsky – in their wisdom give it to the Poles.
➡ Polrevcom – Polish Revolutionary Committee – rules only in the captured lands, but hopes to sit in Warsaw within a couple of weeks. For the time being, Markhlevsky, Dzerzhinsky, Kon and other Polrevcom members spread propaganda and terror wherever they can.
➡ They issue a manifesto to Polish working classes – similar to the one that in 1944 another government imported from the Soviet Union will produce – calling for Poland to become another Soviet republic. They wait anxiously for the Red Army to make that happen.
➡ But it doesn’t happen. It is the Poles who kick the Red Army’s backside, and the Polrevcom has to go back to Moscow: no Polish Soviet Republic for its members, no more propaganda and terror, no chance to control the country that could become the gate for the worldwide revolution.
➡ A few years go by and the revolutionaries start dying: in the Political Bureau of the Bolshevik Party Stalin prevails, and murders all the other members. He murders six out of nine Polrevcom members. He murders both front commanders, Tukhachevsky and Yegorov.
➡ And what good did the Polish enterprise do them?
***
Pictured, Polrevcom members in early August 1920

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