What was the Kiev Offensive of 1920?
The joint campaign of Poland and the Ukrainian People's Republic in the Polish-Soviet War. Launched on 25 April 1920 under the Piłsudski-Petliura alliance, it took Kyiv without a fight on 7 May. Budyonny's cavalry broke the front on 5 June, the allies left Kyiv between 10 and 13 June, and the Red Army advanced west.2
Why Piłsudski turned to Ukraine
In 1920 Józef Piłsudski, Poland's chief of state and commander-in-chief, wanted a Poland strong enough to survive between Germany and Russia, and he believed that meant weakening Russia by separating Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania from it. Ukraine was to be an independent state bound to Poland by a close alliance. Roman Dmowski's National Democrats rejected such plans and wanted a smaller Poland built on the Polish nation alone.3
His partner was Symon Petliura, head of the Directory of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR) and supreme commander of its army. By late 1919 the UNR had lost almost all of Ukraine. On 5 December 1919 Petliura left for Warsaw to seek allies, while his army set out on a guerrilla Winter Campaign behind enemy lines. An alliance had become possible only after the fighting for Eastern Galicia ended in July 1919, a war Poland had fought against the other Ukrainian state, the West Ukrainian People's Republic, described in our page on the Polish-Ukrainian War.4
Both Poland and Soviet Russia spent the winter preparing for a spring campaign. After their victories over General Denikin's Whites, the Bolsheviks could move large forces toward the Polish front. Polish intelligence followed the build-up, and by early spring the Soviet command had approved a plan for an offensive against Poland.5
Piłsudski decided to strike first. As the IPN historians Mirosław Szumiło and Juliusz Tym describe his plan, Polish and Ukrainian troops would beat the weaker Soviet forces in Ukraine and give the Ukrainians time to build a state and an army; the Ukrainian army would then hold the front there, while most Polish troops moved north to Belarus, where the main Soviet blow was expected. The Museum of Polish History and the Lithuanian national encyclopedia also describe the operation as a strike meant to forestall the Soviet offensive.6
The Warsaw agreement of April 1920
After months of secret talks, the political agreement between Poland and the Ukrainian People's Republic was signed in Warsaw in the night of 21 to 22 April 1920; the document itself is dated 21 April. Jan Dąbski signed for Poland and Andrii Livytsky for the UNR. The talks had been hard. The Galician members of the Ukrainian mission protested in December 1919 when it accepted the Zbruch River as the border, and the Encyclopedia of Ukraine writes that the Poles put heavy pressure on a militarily and politically weak Ukrainian delegation.7
Under Article I Poland recognized Ukraine's right to independent statehood and the Directory under Petliura as the supreme authority of the UNR. Article II drew the border along the Zbruch, then along the old Austro-Russian frontier and north across Volhynia to the Pripyat, which left Eastern Galicia and most of Volhynia in Poland. Article III gave Ukraine the lands east of that line, up to Poland's frontier of 1772, that Poland held or would win back from Russia. Neither side would sign agreements aimed at the other, each promised the other's minority the same national and cultural rights, and the land question in Ukraine was left to a Ukrainian constituent assembly.8
The agreement was secret. Article VIII allowed only Article I to be made public, and on 28 April the official gazette Monitor Polski printed a Foreign Ministry communiqué in those terms: Poland recognized Ukraine's right to independent statehood and the Directory with Petliura at its head.9
On 24 April a military convention followed, which the agreement itself called an integral part of it. The Polish and Ukrainian armies would fight as allies under the overall command of the Polish Army; the Ukrainian government would run the administration in the lands taken from the Bolsheviks; Poland would arm and equip three Ukrainian divisions, at the Ukrainian government's expense; and Ukraine would supply food for the Polish troops in Ukraine.10
For many Ukrainians the price was too high. The leaders of the Galician Ukrainians protested, and dzieje.pl notes that Galician politicians saw the treaty as a betrayal of Ukrainian interests. The Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine, published by the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, concludes that Ukraine paid for its independence with large territorial concessions.11
The offensive opens, 25 April 1920
The offensive began on 25 April 1920. Three Polish armies took part: the 3rd Army of General Edward Rydz-Śmigły, which struck for Kyiv through Zhytomyr, the 2nd Army of General Antoni Listowski and the 6th Army of General Wacław Iwaszkiewicz.12
Cavalry raids on the railway junction of Koziatyn and fast blows on Zhytomyr cut the Soviet 12th Army apart, and within three days the Poles held Zhytomyr, Koziatyn and Chornobyl. The Red Army in Ukraine was also weakened by the revolt of its Galician Ukrainian brigades, some of which surrendered to the Poles.13
On 26 April Piłsudski issued a proclamation “To all the inhabitants of Ukraine”. Polish troops, he wrote, would stay in Ukraine “for the time needed for a lawful Ukrainian government to take power”, and would go home once a national government had set up state authorities and Ukrainian troops could guard the frontier. Petliura's appeal “People of Ukraine!” promised that after the fight with the Bolsheviks the Polish army would return to its own country. Both texts appeared in Monitor Polski on 28 April.14
Kyiv taken, 7 May 1920
The Red Army would not give battle. It fell back across the Dnieper with much of its strength intact, and on 7 May 1920 troops of Rydz-Śmigły's 3rd Army, together with Ukrainian units, entered Kyiv, which the Soviets had abandoned. The city was taken without a fight.15
Soviet and Russian works date the capture to 6 May; the Polish, Ukrainian and Lithuanian works used here give 7 May.16
The advance stopped at Kyiv and the Dnieper, where the Poles held a bridgehead on the eastern bank.17
The new Ukrainian state found little support. Petliura's call for volunteers met a weak response and the Ukrainian army grew too slowly. In his 1937 study Kutrzeba describes a people worn out by war and far less eager than the Poles; Szumiło adds that many peasants were swayed by Bolshevik propaganda, and Beata Wolszczak of the Museum of Polish History writes that the few Ukrainian elites had no support among the population.18
The Ukrainian People's Army
Petliura was the supreme commander of the UNR army. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine and the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine both describe the campaign as a joint offensive of the UNR army and its Polish ally, which took Kyiv on 7 May and had to retreat in June.19
Two Ukrainian divisions formed with Polish help on Polish-held territory went into action with the Polish armies: the 6th Sich Rifle Division of Colonel Marko Bezruchko, formed in Brest, with the Polish 3rd Army, and the division of Colonel Oleksandr Udovychenko, formed in Podolia, with the 6th Army. Polish works number Udovychenko's unit the 2nd Rifle Division; the Encyclopedia of Ukraine calls it the revived 3rd Iron Rifle Division.20
In the south the UNR army of General Mykhailo Omelianovych-Pavlenko, back from its Winter Campaign behind Soviet lines, reached the allied front.21
The UNR army remained small: only two weak Ukrainian divisions took part in the march on Kyiv. Szumiło explains why the army did not grow: mobilization was not declared in time, the peasants hung back, and many Polish officers, who remembered the fighting in Galicia, did not see the point of the alliance.22
The Soviet counteroffensive and Budyonny's breakthrough
A week after Kyiv fell, on 14 May, Mikhail Tukhachevsky's Western Front attacked in Belarus. The Poles stopped it, but only by sending reserves from Ukraine to the north.23
In Ukraine the Soviet South-Western Front of Alexander Yegorov, with Joseph Stalin as its political commissar, struck back at the end of May; accounts date the start to 26 or 27 May. Its main striking force was the 1st Cavalry Army of Semyon Budyonny, the Konarmiya, brought from the south after the fighting against Denikin's Whites.24
Its strength is given in different ways. Polish intelligence in April 1920 expected 10,000 to 12,000 sabers, as Kutrzeba records, while the Museum of Polish History puts the cavalry army at about 16,000 men.25
On 5 June 1920 Budyonny's cavalry broke through the Polish front south of Kyiv and came out behind the Polish 3rd Army. Within days it was in Zhytomyr, cutting the 3rd Army off from the neighboring Polish armies.26
Leaving Kyiv, 10 to 13 June
Who ordered the retreat is told in two ways. Szumiło writes that Rydz-Śmigły ordered the city abandoned; Kutrzeba prints an order of the Polish Supreme Command of 8 June that told the 3rd Army to fall back to the Teteriv River and to begin the retreat by 10 June at the latest. Rydz-Śmigły led his army north-west toward Korosten, away from the main body of Budyonny's cavalry; Szumiło judges that he saved his troops but did not carry out Piłsudski's wish for a decisive battle with the Soviet cavalry.27
The Poles and Ukrainians left Kyiv on 10 and 11 June. Polish and Ukrainian works date the departure to 10 June, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia says Soviet troops entered the city on 12 June, and the Lithuanian encyclopedia gives 13 June as the day Kyiv was lost.28
On the way out the 3rd Army had to force a passage near Borodianka, where Soviet troops who had crossed the Dnieper cut the railway to Korosten; the fighting lasted from 11 to 13 June. The army escaped encirclement without heavy losses and joined the Polish forces to the north.29
What it meant for the summer of 1920
The retreat from Ukraine was the beginning of a much larger one. On 4 July Tukhachevsky's Western Front opened its decisive offensive in Belarus, with an order to march “over the corpse of White Poland”, and by August the Red Army stood before Warsaw. How Poland stopped it is told in our pages on the Polish-Soviet War and the Battle of Warsaw.30
The Kiev Offensive also cost Poland abroad. Davies judges that few people in the West knew that Kyiv was no longer part of Russia. In Britain dockers and trade unions moved to block or delay military supplies for Poland, strikes by railwaymen and dockers elsewhere in western Europe held up arms deliveries, and in July 1920 the Polish government, seeking Allied help at the Spa conference, had to agree to seek an armistice and to pull its troops back behind a line along the Bug, the Curzon Line.31
The Ukrainians fought on beside the Poles. In late August Colonel Bezruchko's 6th Sich Rifle Division helped defend Zamość against Budyonny's cavalry, in the days before the Battle of Komarów.32
At the peace talks the alliance came to an end. When the talks resumed in Riga on 21 September, Soviet Ukraine sat at the table and the UNR did not; Szumiło calls the Polish delegation's acceptance of the Soviet Ukrainian delegate a breach of the April alliance. The armistice of 12 October, in force from 18 October, ended the alliance itself.33
The UNR army fought on alone in Podolia. On 21 November 1920 it crossed the Zbruch into Polish-held territory and was interned; for its strength at the end the Encyclopedia of Ukraine gives 23,000 men and Szumiło 40,000. IPN historians date the end of Piłsudski's federal plans to the Peace of Riga of March 1921, and dzieje.pl writes that the defeat in Ukraine had already ruled them out.34
How Poles, Ukrainians and Russians remember it
Polish historians at the IPN and the Museum of Polish History see the Kiev Offensive as a preventive strike that failed: Szumiło calls the outcome a defeat, and Wolszczak writes that Piłsudski's plan failed for military and political reasons, because the Red Army withdrew without heavy losses and the small Ukrainian elite had no support among the people. Our ranking of the battles that won Polish independence weighs it against the Soviet counteroffensive that followed.35
Soviet works told it as aggression. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia speaks of the troops of “bourgeois-landlord Poland” and of “Polish interventionists” whose defeat in June began their expulsion from Soviet soil, and Szumiło notes that Russian propaganda still presents the campaign as Polish aggression against Soviet Ukraine and the “third campaign of the Entente”. The Russian historians G. F. and V. S. Matveev, in a 2011 study summarized by the Russian Academy of Sciences, describe the events in neutral terms: an offensive of Polish and Petliura's troops that took Kyiv without a fight.36
In Ukraine the memory is divided. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine writes that since the mid-1920s Petliura has personified the struggle for independence, though his central role in the Treaty of Warsaw at first turned some émigré circles, particularly Western Ukrainian ones, against him, while the Soviet authorities portrayed him as a traitor. The Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine judges that only the catastrophic position of the UNR and the Polish government's “open political blackmail” forced Ukrainian diplomats to make such concessions.37
Davies, who called the whole war the Polish-Soviet War, sums up the campaign with the words of one veteran: “We ran all the way to Kyiv, and ran all the way back.” The wider story of these years is told in our guide to Polish independence and its border wars, 1914 to 1921.38
