A century ago the West fumbled a geopolitical standoff for Eastern Europe and threw its ally under the bus. Can we learn something from it this time?

On August 15 last year Donald Trump met with Vladimir Putin to once again try to mediate a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine – a tortuous process that a year later is still incomplete. As Poland’s leaders were quick to point out, it was an unintended irony that the meeting happened on the anniversary of a Polish victory over Bolshevik Russia that in 1920 paved the way for a peace deal to end a different, but altogether similar war in Eastern Europe. Back then, a Western coalition nominally supporting the side fighting Russia was also simultaneously trying to broker peace. In the process, those leaders of the past, notably Britain’s prime minister David Lloyd George, almost squandered the entire post-1918 European order in ways that should seem shockingly delusional, if they weren’t completely forgotten. The Polish historian Andrzej Nowak correctly dubbed it “The Forgotten Appeasement” in a monumental monograph on this topic. One should interrogate reasons behind their folly especially closely now that a new geopolitical struggle is once again taking place over the shape of Eastern Europe – one in which a Western coalition again strives to be an involved peacemaker.

The First World War ended on the Western front on November 11, 1918, but it would continue in the east of Europe for almost another two years. The collapse of the Russian empire opened a Pandora’s box of political passions and violence in which older political communities sought to reestablish their lost states, new national movements asserted their right to statehood, revolutionaries fought for a new social order and great powers sought to advance their interests. On the day of armistice Polish troops took control of Warsaw, and Poland reemerged as an independent state, 123 years after the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was wiped off the map. Its borders once stretched far into lands inhabited by Ukrainians and Belarusians, nations now possessing their own aspirations, whom Russia (White and Bolshevik alike) regarded, after over a century of lordship, as its own sacred property. The Versailles treaty of 1919 reserved for the Entente powers, on paper at least, the right to determine borders in Eastern Europe. In reality, however, Polish and Bolshevik troops were fighting a low-intensity war on those lands throughout the year, in a simmering conflict the stakes of which included the borders of Poland and Russia, the independence of Ukraine, and the geopolitical order of Eastern Europe writ large. The winning powers of the Great War, most notably Britain, France and the United States, saw it as their interest and right to shape its outcomes.

In January 1920 Warsaw was seriously exploring options for a permanent peace with the Bolsheviks that would put an end to the Great War in the East and establish the eastern half of the Versailles order. Poland, struggling with reestablishing state administration after a century of bondage, exhausted with war, economic dislocation, pandemics and communist agitation, was not in a great position to continue fighting. Had the Western powers unanimously thrown their weight behind peace and promised to recognize the resulting Polish eastern frontier in a form that would guarantee a viable existence for Poland, the Polish leader, Marshal Józef Piłsudski, would have likely acquiesced to it. The alternative, representing a serious dilemma of Polish strategy, was to go for a decisive offensive against Russia with the aim of imposing a favorable geopolitical order in Eastern Europe before the Bolsheviks could slowly grind down Poland’s ability to resist.

The anticipated Western resolve never came. The United States had, by that time, removed itself from European affairs. Crippled by the Senate’s rejection of the League of Nations, and by Wilson’s own feeling of impotence to further influence Europe, Washington stoically stood by. Italy felt in no position to drive Entente’s grand strategy and prime minister Francesco Nitti chose to defer to the majority position, or lack thereof. France had its own conflicting priorities. On the one hand, it was determined to restrain defeated Germany as much as possible, and for that it needed an eastern ally. Paris would have preferred to reignite the prewar alliance with Russia, but the Bolshevik triumph over the White Russian armies complicated the picture. There was a powerful pressure group in France not to recognize the Bolsheviks, who represented a dangerous revolutionary ideology and, more importantly, nationalized property and renounced debts held in huge quantities by French investors in Russia. As long as skeletal remnants of the defeated White Russians held on in Crimea, it was a tough sell in Paris to accept the Bolshevik new order. While Paris opted to support Poland as an anti-German bulwark, it was not prepared to give Piłsudski what he needed – politically and militarily – to impose a lasting peace in Eastern Europe on the Bolsheviks.

That left Entente powers with a single decision-making center capable of leading the West in the showdown over Eastern Europe – David Lloyd George’s Britain. The British prime minister, however, had radically different views on the postwar order. Lloyd George had abandoned the cause of White Russia already in November 1919, and by January next year he was clearly pushing for an accommodation with Lenin’s Russia. Over the objections of his ministers, Winston Churchill and George Curzon, both of whom wanted to push back on Bolshevik expansionism, Lloyd George forced through a policy of aspiring partnership with the Soviets. In the words of his closest advisor Philip Kerr, written to the British ambassador in Washington in July 1920, “the P.M. has been trying for a long time to pave the way for a settlement with Russia, partly because he thinks that food and raw materials from Russia are necessary for the reconstruction of Europe, partly because he thinks that peace in Eastern Europe is necessary to the world, and partly because he is sure that the quickest way to killing Bolshevism is to put an end to war, and to give the Russian people a chance of resuming normal business and let Western influences once more into Russia”.

It was, therefore, a bet that business-as-usual with Russia can be restarted as soon as the Polish nuisance is overcome and a belief in a policy of Wandel durch Handel (“Change through Trade”) a century before the Germans made it infamous, that drove Lloyd George to stonewall attempts to give Poland what it needed. In January 1920 the Polish foreign minister, Stanisław Patek, journeyed between London and Paris to sound out if the Entente would underwrite a Polish peace deal with Bolshevik Russia. He was rebuffed. On January 26 Lloyd George told Patek that Poland ought to seek a peace deal on its own, and emphasized that Britain would only accept as just a deal in which Poland renounces “considerable territories which contained large Russian majorities”. By that, he meant the lands inhabited by Ukrainian and Belarusian majorities and Polish minorities which had been taken by Russia in the partitions of the Commonwealth a century earlier, and whose reincorporation into Russia would have left independent Poland indefensible vis a vis its threatening neighbor. Adding insult to injury, Lloyd George reserved the right to withhold support for Warsaw if Poland refused to give up land, maintained a defensive posture, and was attacked by Soviet Russia anyway.

Seeing that Entente policy was putting him in an untenable position, Piłsudski resolved on a gambit – an offensive against Russia that was to impose a peace on Moscow. He entered an alliance with his erstwhile adversary, the Ukrainian People’s Republic under Symon Petlura, who agreed to cede the contested region of Eastern Galicia to Poland in exchange for Polish help in establishing an independent Ukrainian state in Kyiv. In the end, despite formal readiness on both sides, no Polish-Bolshevik peace talks materialized. The Bolsheviks were preparing an offensive on Poland through Belarus, while Piłsudski and Petlura geared up for a march on Kyiv. On April 25 during an Entente summit in San Remo, Lloyd George pushed through a concept of formal Western talks with a “Russian trade delegation” designed as a way to pull the Bolsheviks into the Versailles system through the back door. The same day, Polish and Ukrainian troops started their offensive against Russia.

The next four months saw Piłsudski and Lloyd George upping the stakes in a rivalry for their opposing visions of postwar Eastern Europe. Piłsudski wanted to deal a crippling blow to the Russian armies, forcing them to accept peace and establish Ukrainian control over the “granary of Europe” which would have paved the way for Western acceptance of Ukrainian independence. Lloyd George publicly lambasted Poland for its “imperialism” while looking forward to a Polish-Ukrainian defeat which would have paved the way for a direct peace deal between the Entente and Bolshevik Russia – with Ukraine obliterated, Poland as a rump state, and Red Russia resuming the role which tsarist Russia played in the prewar international system. Even before the Polish-Ukrainian offensive collapsed in June, Lloyd George and significant parts of the British political establishment, with Churchill being a notable exception, were pushing for Russia as the Entente’s future partner in the East, while decrying Poland as a rouge state and Ukraine as its puppet. While the war was ongoing, the British prime minister was busy using the talks with the Soviet “trade delegation” approved on April 25 as a pathway to recognizing Bolshevik Russia and building order in Eastern Europe with its support, much to France’s chagrin. Lloyd George and his advisers were so obstinately bent on pushing their vision of postwar order that they isolated themselves from dissenting voices. A 47-page report from the British ambassador in Warsaw, Horace Rumbold, laying out in detail the strategic prospects of Poland laid unread in the drawer of Cabinet Secretary Maurice Hankey until after the hostilities were over.

In mid-July 1920 the war had turned into a disaster for Piłsudski, threatening the very existence of the Polish state. The Poles and their Ukrainian allies, having failed to enlist much popular support in Ukraine for their cause, were retreating towards Warsaw before an advancing Red Army. Lloyd George decided to use this opportunity to force Polish acceptance of his vision for postwar Europe. At a conference in Spa on July 11 the British prime minister, with quiet French acquiescence, forced his Polish counterpart, Władysław Grabski, to accept crushing peace terms in exchange for his support and mediation, which would have removed the Polish obstacle to Western-Bolshevik talks to construct an eastern appendage to the Versailles order. The Bolsheviks were to gain not only all of imperial Russia’s former Polish possessions, except Congress Poland, up to what became known as “the Curzon line” but also Eastern Galicia which had never belonged to Russia before.

Then, surprisingly to all but the Poles and Ukrainians, the Soviets said “no” and decided to pursue a maximalist strategy. On July 17 the foreign affairs commissary, Georgy Chicherin, sent a note to London questioning Britain’s position to act as an impartial broker, set a condition that the Poles must ask for peace themselves and negotiate in a place of Moscow’s choosing, and alluded to the full incorporation of Poland into the Soviet state. Three days later, Lloyd George argued to his ministers that his peace initiative was still viable despite the rebuff, and even if Poland succumbed to Soviet conquest this would have only meant a “postponement” of a general peace on his terms. While Moscow continued to play a game of diplomatic stalling for weeks, in reality the Soviet government had already decided to cross the Curzon line, conquer Poland and explore the possibilities for spreading the revolution further into Europe. On August 3, Hankey submitted a dim report to the prime minister, which predicted Poland falling and Britain losing influence on the affairs of Central Europe. He concluded by stating that “it is probably too late to use Germany as a military barrier against Russia.”

By mid-August 1920 Lloyd George’s foreign policy yielded a looming geopolitical catastrophe for the Western powers. Not only was there no peace, but the entirety of the young Versailles order was under threat. With Bolshevik troops advancing westward, opportunities opened up for Germany to break free of the Entente’s dictate with Russian cooperation, and the possibility of further revolution and Sovietization was there not only in Berlin, but also Budapest and beyond. Stalin, attached as commissary to the Bolshevik southern front, was already planning a revolutionary foray into the former Habsburg lands. Had the Poles not defeated the Red Army at the gates of Warsaw on August 15, 1920 in a battle that changed the course of the war, the entire European order worked out the previous year in Paris would have been undone. Peace was finally achieved, but without Entente mediation and entirely on the basis of a military stalemate and negotiation between Poland and the Soviet Union. The deal signed in Riga the following year established an international order in the Eastern half of Europe for the following 18 years. By blundering through the crucial first months of 1920, the Entente effectively lost the possibility of extending its designs for postwar Europe beyond the eastern German border. For this reason, what came to exist on the European continent during the interwar period should rather be known as the “Versailles-Riga order”.

Thus, Lloyd George and his acolytes almost blew the entire edifice that the Entente worked for since the end of Great War hostilities in 1918 in ways that should seem shockingly delusional, if they weren’t completely forgotten. Moreover, one could imagine a scenario in which Piłsudski and Petlura, with more Western support or at least no active hinderance, succeeded in establishing independent Ukraine, depriving Stalin of the resource base for the Soviet Union’s future totalitarian industrialization and creating a more effective pressure mechanism on German revisionism than Poland alone turned out to be in the following decades.

The fallacy behind Lloyd George’s strategy was threefold, and each point lost none of its relevance a hundred years later. The basic problem that the Entente powers faced was one of deeply held perceptions of Russia, as well as the lands and peoples in its vicinity. When the multinational Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned out of existence in 1795 the leaders and intellectuals of Europe saw this as a morally reprehensible act, even if few lifted a finger to stop it. A hundred years of Russian dominance on those conquered lands had imprinted a Russian great power status on the consciousness of the contemporary political and cultural leaders so much, that Russian domination over Eastern Europe gained not only strategic acceptance, but a moral legitimacy. To view Russia as it really was – an overextended colonial empire suffering through the pangs of decolonization – became an impossible mental stretch.

Two years after peace was finally achieved, Piłsudski reflected on this problem as follows: “The [mental] concepts of the world were based on relatively recent past, which was stacked against us. The whole world was convinced that all Polish claims to lands beyond the Bug river are an aggression, that these lands would be a loot on the body of Russia. One hundred years of enslavement which we suffered have made their mark not only on us, but also on the rulers of the world.” A century later, Russia continues to cash in on its established image of a great power with reasonable rights to a sphere of influence, and the Ukrainians, who have successfully challenged it, have to swim against the current to convince the rest of the world of their case.

The problem of perception was accentuated by modern ideology. The Russia of 1920 clad itself in the robes of revolutionary socialism – an ideology popular in the West for the preceding several decades but nowhere quite yet realized. Fellow travelers and radicals in Britain, France, or the United States simply felt more sympathy for the Bolshevik experiment than for Poland or Ukraine, projecting on a distant country, and what turned out to be a murderous regime, their dissatisfactions and aspirations for their own societies. This pattern is not unrecognizable in an age when Putin’s Russia projects a false image of piety and family values to well-meaning conservatives in the West.

The second rationale driving the appeasement of 1920 was economic in nature. Lloyd George saw in Russia a trade partner and a source of food and raw materials necessary for the reconstruction of Europe. Whether or not Bolshevik Russia was capable and willing to fulfil those needs was not seriously interrogated, and neither was the possibility that an independent Ukraine established with Polish help could have played that economic role just as well, if not better, as the German high command already recognized two years prior in the “Bread Peace” of 1918. In the 21st century Russia continues to enjoy the benefit of the doubt from those who would lay their hands on its resources, never mind the political price.

The final, and perhaps the most inexcusable blunder for a leader of a great power, was the complete misunderstanding and wishful thinking with which Lloyd George and his allies treated Bolshevik Russia’s regime and its intentions. Every private and public communication aired by Lloyd George in early 1920 blatantly stated that he hoped for communist Russia to simply take the place tsarist Russia played in the prewar international system. If only the obstinate French and his short-sighted ministers like Churchill let him take charge of matters, and the troublesome Poles, Ukrainians and others kindly receded into obscurity, he would set matters straight. It did not seem to cross the British prime minister’s mind that Lenin and his allies saw global affairs from a completely different standpoint to his own, and were truly committed to a radical revision of the prewar international order – ultimately seeing “imperialist Britain” as the target of their offensive, if only sometime “after the corpse of White Poland”.

The most pertinent lesson of the forgotten appeasement, war, and peace deal of 1920 is therefore as follows: if your adversary acts like he wants to revise the entire international order which you underwrite, but says that he is only interested in marginal concessions at the expense of smaller third parties, take him at his deeds, not his words. Otherwise, you might end up like Lloyd George, but without a Battle of Warsaw to save you.