The Peace of Riga

At about half past eight on the evening of 18 March 1921, in a hall of the House of the Blackheads in Riga, the head of the Polish delegation, Jan Dąbski, and the head of the Soviet delegation, Adolph Joffe, signed a peace treaty between Poland on the one side and Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine on the other. Russia also acted on behalf of Soviet Belarus. The treaty formally ended the Polish–Soviet War, in which the fighting had stopped five months earlier, and fixed the eastern border of the Polish Republic. Poland kept Grodno, Pińsk, Równe and the whole of Eastern Galicia with Lwów (Lviv), but gave up Minsk and Kiev, as well as the plan for a federation for which Józef Piłsudski had fought the war. The treaty did not settle the question of Wilno (Vilnius): Soviet Russia renounced its claims to the lands west of the new border, while the city itself was the subject of a separate Polish–Lithuanian dispute. From October 1920 Wilno belonged to Central Lithuania, and it was incorporated into Poland in 1922. The Riga border lasted eighteen years. It was erased by the Red Army, which entered Poland on 17 September 1939 in agreement with Hitler.

From Minsk to Riga

Negotiations began while Poland was still in the gravest danger. On 17 August 1920, as the battle for Warsaw was being fought, the two delegations met in Minsk. The head of the Soviet delegation, Karl Danishevsky, laid down terms that would have meant a de facto loss of independence: the Polish army was to be cut to 50,000 men, its weapons handed over and a workers’ militia created. The Red Army’s defeats on the Vistula and the Niemen swept these demands away. On 21 September the talks moved to neutral ground in Riga, capital of the recently independent Latvia, and the Soviet delegation was taken over by Joffe, an experienced diplomat who had negotiated the armistice at Brest in 1917 and in 1920 had signed peace treaties with Estonia and Lithuania.

The Polish delegation was made up of representatives of the government and of the parties in the Sejm. It was led by the deputy foreign minister, Jan Dąbski of the Peasant Party, and its members included Piłsudski’s associate Leon Wasilewski and the National Democrat ideologue Stanisław Grabski. Most of the delegates did not share the vision of the Chief of State. Roman Dmowski’s camp wanted to annex only those eastern lands it considered capable of being Polonised, and feared that too many Belarusians and Ukrainians would weaken the Polish character of the state. To them a federation with an independent Ukraine and Belarus was a pipe dream, and a border pushed far to the east a source of future trouble.

Soviet Russia, beaten and weary of war, was ready to make large territorial concessions. According to participants’ accounts, the Bolsheviks offered a border further east, with Minsk on the Polish side. Under pressure from Grabski, the delegation turned these lands down. On one point, however, the Soviet side stood firm: it would not allow the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic under Otaman Symon Petliura, Poland’s ally of spring 1920, to take part in the talks. At the beginning of October, in a private conversation with Joffe, Dąbski agreed to recognise Soviet Ukraine as a party to the negotiations and settled the ceasefire line. On 12 October 1920 a preliminary peace and an armistice were signed in Riga; the armistice came into force at midnight on 18–19 October. Three days before it was signed, General Lucjan Żeligowski’s division had seized Wilno after staging a mutiny against its own command. The Bolsheviks, who had handed the city to Lithuania in July, protested but did not break off the talks.

Five months of bargaining

Five months passed between the preliminaries and the final treaty. The two sides argued over minor border adjustments, compensation, the return of property removed from the Polish lands by Tsarist Russia, and the exchange of prisoners and refugees. Poland demanded 85 million gold roubles; Russia offered 30 million. The Bolsheviks played for time, hoping that Poland would weaken internally or fall out with the great powers.

At the beginning of 1921 the situation turned against Moscow. Peasant revolts swept the country – the largest, in the Tambov region, tied down tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers – the cities were short of bread, and on 1 March the sailors of Kronstadt rose against Bolshevik rule. At the Tenth Party Congress Vladimir Lenin announced the retreat from War Communism and the switch to the New Economic Policy. He needed calm in the west and instructed the delegation to conclude the negotiations quickly. The treaty was signed on 18 March 1921, the day the Red Army was finishing off the last defenders of Kronstadt.

For Poland the treaty was signed by Dąbski, Stanisław Kauzik, Edward Lechowicz, Henryk Strasburger and Wasilewski; for the Soviet side by Joffe, Jakub Hanecki, Emmanuel Kviring, Yuri Kotsiubynsky and Leonid Obolensky. In mid-April the Sejm ratified the treaty, on 16 April Piłsudski signed the ratification, and on 30 April 1921 the instruments of ratification were exchanged in Minsk. With that the treaty came into force.

What was agreed

The treaty had 26 articles. The border ran from the Daugava (Dźwina) in the north through the eastern parts of the Wilno and Nowogródek regions, west of Minsk, and across Polesie and Volhynia to the Zbruch. For much of its length it followed the line of the German trenches of 1915–1917, roughly the border of the Second Partition of 1793, with adjustments in Poland’s favour in Polesie and Volhynia. Russia and Ukraine renounced their claims to the lands west of this line, including Eastern Galicia, formerly part of the Habsburg monarchy. Poland renounced the lands east of it. The disputed question of Wilno was left to Poland and Lithuania.

Both sides undertook not to interfere in each other’s internal affairs, not to support armed organisations fighting the other party and not to allow such organisations to operate on their territory. This provision was aimed above all at Petliura’s Ukrainians and at the White Russians who had taken refuge in Poland. National minorities on both sides of the border were promised freedom of cultural development, language and religion. Inhabitants of the former Polish lands who found themselves in Russia could opt for Polish citizenship within a year and move to Poland.

Soviet Russia undertook to pay Poland 30 million gold roubles as compensation for the Polish lands’ contribution to the imperial economy, to return rolling stock and other property worth 29 million roubles, and to hand back cultural treasures removed since the partitions: archives, book collections and works of art. Mixed commissions were set up to carry out these provisions. From the autumn of 1921 the Soviet side on the re-evacuation commission and the special commission was represented by Pyotr Voykov, who did all he could to delay and limit the returns. Poland recovered, among other things, the Wawel tapestries, the coronation sword Szczerbiec, part of the Załuski Library collections and Jan Matejko’s painting Battle of Grunwald, but much of the property never came back, and Poland never saw the gold.

Allies abandoned

The most painful side of the peace was the fate of Poland’s allies. By recognising Soviet Ukraine, Poland in effect abandoned Petliura’s government, with which it had concluded an alliance in April 1920 and which had committed itself not to make a separate peace. Ukrainian soldiers who had fought alongside the Poles in the defence of Zamość and in Podolia were interned in camps in Kalisz, Szczypiorno and other towns. Belarusian and Russian units that had fought on the Polish side met a similar fate. According to tradition, when Piłsudski visited interned Ukrainian officers in May 1921, he told them: “I apologise to you, gentlemen. I apologise most deeply. It was not meant to be like this.”

Piłsudski regarded the treaty as an act of short-sightedness, and his supporters blamed the National Democrats for handing the Bolsheviks what the army had won. The National Democrats, for their part, were satisfied with the border but feared the reaction of the great powers, which still regarded the Curzon Line as the fair ethnographic boundary. Among the Bolsheviks the discontented were those who still hoped the revolution would pass through Poland into Germany. Most Poles, exhausted by six years of war, greeted the peace with relief.

People on both sides of the border

The new border cut through ethnically mixed lands. Several million Ukrainians and more than a million Belarusians found themselves within Poland, and roughly one in three citizens of the Second Polish Republic was not Polish. Tensions with the minorities, especially with the Ukrainians of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia, weighed on the state until the end of its existence. On the other side of the border remained, by various estimates, between 1.2 and 2 million Poles. The Soviet authorities obstructed their departure and in 1924 ended the repatriation programme. Their fate was tragic: in the 1930s they lived through collectivisation and famine, and during the Great Terror of 1937–1938 the NKVD shot more than 100,000 people in the so-called Polish Operation.

The Western powers were initially reluctant to recognise a border fixed without their participation. Only on 15 March 1923 did the Conference of Ambassadors confirm Poland’s eastern borders, including Wilno’s status as part of Poland. The Soviet Union replied that the sole basis of the border was the Treaty of Riga and that no other body had the right to decide on it.

Significance

The Peace of Riga closed the period of fighting over Poland’s borders and settled the order in Eastern Europe for almost twenty years. It divided the Belarusian and Ukrainian lands between Poland and the Soviet state, which in December 1922 took the name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. For Moscow the Riga border was what the Versailles border was for Berlin: a dictate imposed at a moment of weakness, to be revised one day. For Poland it meant that there was no buffer between it and two powerful neighbours, each of which regarded its border with Poland as temporary. Piłsudski’s federal concept collapsed, and for years to come Polish foreign policy tried to keep a balance between Germany and the USSR.

The treaty became the foundation of Polish–Soviet relations and was reaffirmed by the non-aggression pact of 1932. In the early hours of 17 September 1939 the deputy people’s commissar for foreign affairs, Vladimir Potemkin, tried to hand the Polish ambassador in Moscow, Wacław Grzybowski, a note stating that the Polish state had “ceased to exist”, and with it all the agreements concluded with it, including the Riga treaty. Grzybowski refused to accept it. That same day the Red Army crossed the border drawn at Riga. The line that the Soviet Union drew together with Germany in the autumn of 1939, and later the Polish–Soviet border of 1945, ran roughly along the Curzon Line. Grodno, Lwów and Pińsk, which Poland had kept at Riga, as well as Wilno, ended up in the USSR.