Żeligowski's mutiny

On 9 October 1920 units of General Lucjan Żeligowski’s 1st Lithuanian–Belarusian Division marched into Wilno (Vilnius). The day before, the general had announced that he was “renouncing obedience” to the Polish High Command and was setting out to liberate his native region from Lithuanian rule. After a few skirmishes the Lithuanian troops left the city, and its Polish inhabitants greeted the soldiers with flowers. The government in Warsaw officially disowned the “mutineer”, but in reality the whole operation had been prepared and ordered by the Chief of State, Józef Piłsudski. He admitted this publicly only in August 1923. Out of the occupied Wilno region Żeligowski created Central Lithuania, which was incorporated into Poland in 1922. For the Poles it was the return of Wilno; for the Lithuanians, the seizure of their historic capital. For almost twenty years Poland and Lithuania became enemies that did not even maintain diplomatic relations.

Wilno between Poland, Lithuania and Russia

Wilno, the former capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, was in 1920 a predominantly Polish and Jewish city. According to the German census of 1916, Poles made up about half its inhabitants, Jews over 40 per cent and Lithuanians a mere 2–3 per cent. The villages around the city were inhabited mainly by Catholics speaking Polish or Belarusian. The Lithuanian national movement, however, regarded Wilno as the historic heart of the state, and most of its inhabitants as Polonised Lithuanians whose identity had to be restored to them. Neither side intended to give way.

Since the end of the First World War the city had changed hands several times. In January 1919 the Red Army took it; in April 1919 the Poles recaptured it; and in July 1920, during the Soviet offensive on Warsaw, Wilno again fell to the Bolsheviks. On 12 July 1920 Soviet Russia concluded a peace treaty with Lithuania in Moscow, in which it recognised Wilno as part of the Lithuanian state. In return the Lithuanians allowed the Red Army to pass through their territory, and in July their troops occupied Troki (Trakai) and other places behind the backs of the retreating Poles. After Tukhachevsky’s defeat in the Battle of Warsaw, the Bolsheviks, who could not have held the city in any case, handed it over to the Lithuanians at the end of August. Moscow counted on the dispute over Wilno to set Poland and Lithuania permanently at odds – and that calculation proved correct.

Poland was bound by commitments to the Great Powers. In July 1920, at the Spa Conference, Prime Minister Władysław Grabski, asking for help against the Bolsheviks, had agreed that Wilno should go to Lithuania and that Poland would withdraw to the line drawn by the Powers in December 1919. In the autumn, when the Polish–Soviet War had swung in Poland’s favour and peace talks were under way in Riga, an open march on Wilno would have meant war with Lithuania and a conflict with the League of Nations, which was then mediating between the two states. Under pressure from the League, the Polish and Lithuanian delegations signed an agreement at Suwałki on the night of 7–8 October 1920 on a demarcation line and a ceasefire, which was to take effect at noon on 10 October. The line ran only as far as Bastuny station and did not settle the question of Wilno, but Lithuanians maintain to this day that Poland broke the agreement.

Piłsudski’s plan

Piłsudski, himself born near Wilno, had no intention of giving up the city. At the same time he wanted to save his federal plan: a Lithuania linked to Poland and made up of three parts – a Kaunas canton with Lithuanian as its language, a Wilno canton with Polish and a Minsk canton with Belarusian. Since Poland could not act officially, he decided that Wilno would be taken by “locals” – soldiers native to Lithuania and Belarus – supposedly against Warsaw’s will. As early as the end of August an order of the High Command had divided the troops into “regular” and “irregular” units, and among the latter were precisely the 1st Lithuanian–Belarusian Division and several volunteer regiments.

To command the operation Piłsudski chose Żeligowski, a fifty-five-year-old general from the Oszmiana district and a former officer of the Russian army, who in 1918–1919 had brought a Polish division home from the Kuban. On 1 and 2 October the two men talked in the Commander-in-Chief’s train. Żeligowski later recalled that Piłsudski told him plainly that Poland could do nothing here because the Powers would not allow it, and that if Wilno were not saved now, history would never forgive them. Someone had to take the whole responsibility on himself. The general agreed but demanded larger forces than the 1,500 volunteers originally proposed. In the end he was given some 14,000 men, with his flanks covered by the regular 2nd and 3rd Armies.

On the evening of 6 October Żeligowski presented the plan to his senior officers, and on the morning of 7 October he announced that the division was “mutinying”. The announcement caused consternation. Officers who did not know that Piłsudski stood behind the general protested; some refused to take part and were sent away to Grodno. Żeligowski went through what he himself remembered as the worst moments of the whole operation. That evening he cancelled the order to march and reported to Piłsudski that he lacked the necessary authority and should be replaced. The Marshal decided to send the commander of the 3rd Army, General Władysław Sikorski, to take his place. Before Sikorski arrived, Żeligowski changed his mind and reissued the order.

The march on Wilno

At 6 a.m. on 8 October the units set off from the area of Woronowo and Bieniakonie, some 50 kilometres from Wilno. A proclamation was read out to the soldiers in which Żeligowski announced the liberation of Wilno and the convening in the city of a diet that would decide the fate of the Wilno region. The rank and file did not know they were taking part in a “mutiny”. They were simply told that they were marching on Wilno, and that was enough for them, since many came from those parts.

The Lithuanians knew of the concentration of Polish troops, but they had only three understrength infantry regiments in the area and were not prepared to defend it. The first skirmishes were fought on the edge of the Rudniki Forest, and a larger clash on the Mereczanka (Merkys) river near Jaszuny (Jašiūnai), where after two hours of fighting an entire Lithuanian company was taken prisoner. Żeligowski ordered the prisoners to be released and sent back to Wilno. He still believed in federation and did not want war with the Lithuanians, although he refused to talk to their envoys. In the evening the columns halted for the night less than 20 kilometres from the city. Casualties on both sides were light.

On the afternoon of 8 October the Lithuanian authorities ordered the evacuation of Wilno, and during the night the government and army withdrew to Kaunas, destroying telegraph lines and railway tracks behind them. On the morning of 9 October the Lithuanian government’s plenipotentiary, Ignas Jonynas, handed over authority in the city to the head of the French military mission, Colonel Constantin Reboul, as the representative of the Entente. This was meant to confront the Poles with a choice: stop, or openly defy the Powers. Reboul sent a messenger to Żeligowski demanding that he halt the march. The general replied that he did not accept the demand.

While skirmishes with Lithuanian covering units were still going on in the suburbs, Polish underground fighters took up arms in the city. They seized Castle Hill and the area around the Green Bridge and fired on the withdrawing Lithuanians. On the afternoon of 9 October the first Polish units entered Wilno. According to the plan, the Wilno Rifle Regiment was to have gone in first, but the units raced one another, and the first to enter were soldiers of the Minsk regiment and a squadron of mounted rifles. The Polish population gave them an enthusiastic welcome. In the Taryba building the Entente representatives asked Żeligowski by what right he had taken the city. He replied that he had come to defend the rights of the population and to give it the opportunity to express its will. The foreign officers soon left Wilno.

Central Lithuania

On 12 October 1920 Żeligowski issued a decree proclaiming himself supreme commander of the armed forces of Central Lithuania, a formally independent state, and appointed a Provisional Governing Commission as its government. The state had its own flag bearing the Polish Eagle and the Lithuanian Vytis (Pogoń), its own stamps, courts and army, but everyone understood that it was a creation dependent on Poland. Historians usually call it a puppet state. Lithuanian organisations, schools and newspapers were subjected to restrictions and censorship.

Fighting with Lithuania went on for several more weeks. Żeligowski proposed negotiations, but Kaunas rejected them. In November his units advanced north-west, and his cavalry got close to Kėdainiai and threatened Kaunas. On 19–21 November the Lithuanians counter-attacked at Giedraičiai and Širvintos and halted the advance. Through the mediation of a League of Nations military commission a ceasefire took effect on 21 November, and on 29 November an armistice was signed in Kaunas. The line on which the troops stood became, for twenty years, a border that Lithuania never recognised.

Throughout, Poland insisted that Żeligowski was acting on his own initiative. The League of Nations proposed a plebiscite, and then the plan of the Belgian politician Paul Hymans, which envisaged a federation of two cantons, Kaunas and Wilno. Both sides rejected successive versions, and at the turn of 1921 and 1922 the League abandoned further mediation. On 8 January 1922 elections were held to the diet of Central Lithuania. Lithuanians, Jews and a large proportion of Belarusians boycotted them. On 20 February 1922 the Wilno diet resolved, by 96 votes with 6 abstentions, that the Wilno region was part of the Polish Republic “without conditions or reservations”. In the spring of 1922 the Legislative Sejm in Warsaw accepted the resolution, and on 18 April 1922 Poland formally assumed power in Wilno at a ceremony there. On 15 March 1923 the Conference of Ambassadors recognised Poland’s eastern borders, including its possession of Wilno. In August 1923, in a speech in Wilno, Piłsudski admitted that Żeligowski had acted on his orders.

Reactions

In Poland the operation was greeted with almost universal joy, though opinions of it differed. The right-wing press, which disliked Piłsudski’s federalism, compared Żeligowski to Gabriele D’Annunzio, who a year earlier had seized Fiume in defiance of the Powers, and demanded the straightforward incorporation of the Wilno region. The Socialists saw Central Lithuania as a chance for federation. The government and diplomats worried about Poland’s reputation abroad. The operation also deepened the quarrel between Piłsudski and Ignacy Jan Paderewski, who as Poland’s representative at the League of Nations had to explain the inexplicable.

The Powers accepted the fait accompli with reluctance but did nothing to reverse it. France did not want to weaken Poland, a potential ally against Germany, and Britain had no intention of acting alone. Żeligowski’s mutiny was one of the first cases in post-war Europe in which a member state of the League of Nations used force to change the status quo in a dispute in which the League was mediating, and suffered no consequences. That helplessness on the League’s part would recur, but in the 1930s it was exploited by far more dangerous powers.

Significance

Żeligowski’s mutiny gave Poland Wilno but buried what Piłsudski had really been aiming at. A Kaunas Lithuania stripped of its historic capital could no longer join any federation with Poland. Throughout the interwar period Kaunas was formally only the “temporary capital”, the Lithuanian constitution named Vilnius as the capital of the state, and the border with Poland was called a demarcation line. There were no diplomatic relations and no rail or postal links. In December 1927 in Geneva Piłsudski asked the Lithuanian prime minister, Augustinas Voldemaras, whether it was war or peace, and was told it was peace, but in practice little changed. The dispute over Wilno pushed Lithuania towards Germany and the Soviet Union, which were happy to exploit it against Poland. In January 1923 Lithuania seized the Klaipėda (Memel) Territory, which the Treaty of Versailles had detached from Germany and placed under Allied administration, and which Lithuania was forced to hand over to Hitler in March 1939.

Only in March 1938 did Poland force the establishment of diplomatic relations by ultimatum. In September 1939 Lithuania did not take up German encouragement to strike at Poland and recover Wilno by force. It happened differently. After the Soviet invasion of 17 September the Red Army occupied Wilno, and under an agreement of 10 October 1939 Stalin handed the city to Lithuania, taking away in return its ability to defend itself: Soviet garrisons entered its territory. In October 1939 the Lithuanian army marched into Wilno and the Lithuanisation of the city began, and in June 1940 the whole of Lithuania was occupied by the USSR. During the German occupation of 1941–1944 tens of thousands of Jews, as well as Poles, were murdered at Ponary (Paneriai) near Wilno. In July 1944 the Home Army fought for Wilno alongside the Red Army in Operation Ostra Brama, after which the NKVD arrested its soldiers. In 1945 the city became the capital of the Lithuanian SSR, and most of its Polish inhabitants were forced to leave.

The memory of 1920 still divides Poles and Lithuanians. The tablets of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw bear the inscription “Wilno 19 IV 1919 – 9 X 1920”. In Vilnius posters have appeared linking Żeligowski’s name with those of Ribbentrop and Molotov as perpetrators of successive partitions of Lithuania.