The Forum

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 the First World War bears strong similarities to what went on near Kyiv in 2022. After World War I, Russian Bolsheviks, and Lenin in particular, wanted to re-occupy 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 wasn't 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, Rajan Datar is joined by three distinguished historians: Dr. Pawel Duber, a Researcher at Nottin