Treaty of Riga 1921: the peace that ended the Polish-Soviet War

In March 1921 a war fought over the borderlands of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth ended not on a battlefield but at a conference table in Riga, the Latvian capital. The Peace of Riga, or traktat ryski in Polish, is far less famous than Versailles. Yet it drew the line between Poland and the Soviet state, and with it divided the lands of the Ukrainians and Belarusians between the two.²

This page follows the treaty from the battles of 1920 through the talks in Minsk and Riga to its terms, the quarrel it caused in Poland, the way Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians and the Soviet side saw it, and its end in 1939. It closes the story told in our guides to Polish independence, 1914 to 1921 and the Polish-Soviet War.

From the Battle of Warsaw to the peace table

In August 1920 the Red Army stood before Warsaw. The Polish victories in the Battle of Warsaw in mid-August and on the Niemen in September turned the war around, but they did not destroy the Red Army. Winter was coming, neither army was ready for a winter campaign, and most Poles, at war since 1914, wanted peace. Everything, argues Jerzy Borzęcki, author of the standard monograph on the treaty, pointed to a compromise.³

Talks had been arranged while Poland was still losing. A delegation under Jan Dąbski, the deputy foreign minister and a politician of the Polish People's Party "Piast", met the Soviet side in Minsk from 17 August. The Soviet delegate, Karl Daniszewski, put forward terms that would have cost Poland its sovereignty, among them an army cut to 50,000 men. Warsaw rejected them, and the delegations agreed to move the talks to Riga.⁴

The conference opened in neutral Riga on 21 September 1920, with the front now moving in Poland's favor.⁵

Who negotiated the Treaty of Riga?

Poland sent ten plenipotentiaries. Six were deputies of the main parties in the Sejm, there to make sure the Sejm would ratify what was signed, among them Stanisław Grabski of the National Democrats, Norbert Barlicki of the Polish Socialist Party and Władysław Kiernik of "Piast". Leon Wasilewski, an expert on the East, was the main voice of Piłsudski's federal idea, and General Mieczysław Kuliński was the delegation's soldier. Facing them was Adolf Joffe, an experienced Bolshevik diplomat, at the head of a joint Russian and Ukrainian delegation that included Dmytro Manuilsky for Soviet Ukraine.⁶

The first question at the table was also the most consequential. The Soviet side insisted that Soviet Ukraine take part as a separate state, and Poland's Council of State Defense had agreed on 11 September that Russia and Ukraine could be recognized as Soviet republics. The delegations of Symon Petliura's Ukrainian People's Republic and of the West Ukrainian People's Republic were not admitted. Accepting Soviet Ukraine as a party meant, in effect, abandoning Poland's alliance of April 1920 with Petliura.⁷

The preliminary peace and armistice of 12 October 1920

Joffe opened high. On 28 September he tabled a draft with a line close to Poland's present eastern border, and he used the question of Eastern Galicia as a bargaining chip, which Dąbski refused to discuss. The breakthrough came in private meetings of the two chairmen in the first days of October. Dąbski held out for a border that left the railway from Baranowicze through Sarny to Równe on the Polish side, and on 5 October the Soviet delegation accepted the Polish line.⁸

Moscow's haste had a reason. On 2 October Lenin wrote that the question of the border mattered little compared with ending the war fast, and Joffe was told to sign within days. The Red Army was needed in the south against the White army of General Pyotr Wrangel.⁹

The preliminary peace and armistice were signed in Riga on 12 October 1920 by Dąbski and the nine other Polish delegates and by Joffe, Sergei Kirov, Manuilsky and Leonid Obolensky. The fighting stopped when the armistice came into force on 18 October. Both sides recognized the independence of Ukraine and Belarus, fixed the line of Poland's eastern border, gave up claims to war costs and promised to respect minority rights. The ratifications were exchanged at Libau (Liepāja) on 2 November 1920.¹⁰

Why did Lenin make peace?

For the Bolsheviks the war had been more than a border dispute. In the summer of 1920 their leaders had hoped to carry revolution into Poland and beyond it to the west. The defeat at Warsaw ended that hope, and the party leadership decided to make peace and turn on Wrangel.¹¹

Lenin explained the choice on 15 October 1920 to a conference of chairmen of district, volost and village executive committees of Moscow province. The Soviet Republic, he said, had hurried "to conclude peace before the winter campaign set in", in "a realisation that it is better to have a worse frontier", with less Belarusian territory, than to impose another winter campaign on the peasants of Russia.¹²

The peace was not meant to be the last word. Mikhail Narinsky of MGIMO and Mirosław Szumiło of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) both cite Lenin as telling colleagues that autumn that an armistice would buy time to finish Wrangel, and in Narinsky's fuller version, to throw the peace over afterwards if that paid.¹³

Five months to the final treaty

The final treaty took longer than expected. Commissions argued over money, railways, property and archives. The Polish side first asked for about 300 million gold roubles as Poland's share in the wealth of the former empire, and the treaty in the end gave 30 million. As in October, deadlocks were broken in private talks between Dąbski and Joffe, the last of them, Katarzyna Łysak of the IPN notes, in February 1921.¹⁴

Both sides had reasons to finish by March. Poland wanted the treaty signed before the Upper Silesian plebiscite of 20 March 1921 and needed its strength for the struggle over Upper Silesia. Soviet Russia faced peasant revolts and the Kronstadt mutiny. The treaty was signed in the House of the Blackheads in Riga on 18 March 1921.¹⁵

What did the Treaty of Riga give Poland?

The treaty was published in the Polish Journal of Laws (Dziennik Ustaw 1921, no. 49, item 300). It was signed for Poland by Jan Dąbski, Stanisław Kauzik, Edward Lechowicz, Henryk Strasburger and Leon Wasilewski, and for the other side by Adolf Joffe, Jakub Hanecki, Emmanuil Kviring, Yurii Kotsiubynsky and Leonid Obolensky. Soviet Russia signed in its own name and on behalf of Soviet Belarus.¹⁶

In plain terms, the border ran from the Dvina in the north through Belarus, leaving Minsk on the Soviet side, and through Polesie to the Zbruch and the Dniester. Poland received western Belarus and western Ukraine, including western Volhynia and Polesie, far east of the Curzon Line that the Allies had proposed in July 1920. In return Poland recognized Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belarus.¹⁸

Why did Poland not take more of Belarus?

In Poland the treaty settled a long quarrel about the East. Józef Piłsudski's federal idea called for a ring of states between Poland and Russia, above all a Ukrainian state allied to Poland and a Belarusian territory linked to it. Roman Dmowski's National Democrats wanted to incorporate the lands where Polish culture was strong and to assimilate their other inhabitants.¹⁹

At Riga the incorporation line won. Most Poles now saw that defeating Soviet Russia outright was beyond the country's strength, and the National Democrat Stanisław Grabski carried great weight in the delegation. The sharpest question was Minsk. Grabski, the IPN historian Adam Hlebowicz writes, feared the city, the main Orthodox center of Belarus, would become a seedbed of Russian nationalism inside Poland. Piłsudski's camp later accused him of giving away land so that Poland would not hold more minorities than it could assimilate.²⁰

Historians now weigh this differently. Jerzy Borzęcki's research in the Soviet archives showed that Joffe's delegation, under orders from Moscow, never meant to give up Minsk or to make large concessions elsewhere, and Andrzej Nowak calls the story of Grabski's betrayal a legend that Borzęcki has disproved. Piłsudski did not protest the terms: he knew the country would not support more war. Szumiło, by contrast, still argues that a few more weeks of fighting in the autumn of 1920 could have won more.²¹

Petliura's Ukraine: the ally left out

For Ukrainians the treaty is remembered as a betrayal. Under the Warsaw agreement of April 1920, Polish and Ukrainian troops had fought the Bolsheviks together, and Petliura's army fought on beside the Poles in the autumn. At Riga Poland recognized Soviet Ukraine, and Article 5 barred both sides from hosting organizations that claimed to be the government of the other's territory. The government of the Ukrainian People's Republic thus lost the right to work legally in Poland. The Ukrainian historian Vladyslav Verstiuk calls the treaty a victory of Dmowski's ideas over Piłsudski's federal program.²² › The Kiev Offensive, 1920

Petliura's army fought on alone after the armistice and in November 1920 was pushed back across the Zbruch into Poland, where it was interned. Counts differ: the Encyclopedia of Ukraine gives about 20,000 men, Verstiuk about 40,000 people in five camps. The encyclopedia names the largest camps as Łańcut, Aleksandrów Kujawski and Kalisz, and notes that the Kalisz and Szczypiorno camps stayed open until 1924.²³

In 1921 Piłsudski visited the camp for interned Ukrainians at Szczypiorno near Kalisz and apologized to them, citing, in Hlebowicz's account, political necessity. The literature dates the visit to 15 May 1921, but the historian Jarosław Durka has shown that the date is uncertain. Later that year a protocol that Dąbski signed with the Soviet envoy Lev Karakhan required leaders of the anti-Bolshevik movement in Poland to leave the country, among them, Hlebowicz notes, Petliura.²⁴

Ukrainian scholarship also stresses that the treaty divided Ukrainian lands. The Ukrainian legal encyclopedia lists western Volhynia, western Polesie, the Kholm region and Podlachia among the lands that went to Poland, and notes that the treaty left the fate of Eastern Galicia, held by Poland since the Polish-Ukrainian War, undecided. It adds that Poland promised in Article 7 to respect the rights of its Ukrainian minority and argues that it did not keep that promise.²⁵

Belarus divided

Belarusians had no seat at all. The Polish and Russian-Ukrainian delegations agreed to leave the Belarusian question aside, and a delegation of the Belarusian People's Republic, Vaclau Lastouski among its members, that came to Riga was not admitted. Its protests were ignored, and Soviet Belarus was represented only through Soviet Russia. The Belarusian historian Uladzimir Snapkouski calls the result the partition of Belarus, and a two-volume study by the Institute of History of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences, published in 2014, judges the treaty anti-Belarusian at its core, as the Russian historian Yevgeny Kodin sums it up.²⁶

Lithuania and Wilno

Wilno (Vilnius) was not settled at Riga. On 9 October 1920, three days before the preliminary peace, General Lucjan Żeligowski's division, staging a mutiny but acting on Piłsudski's verbal order, seized the city. The treaty sidestepped the dispute: Article 3 says that where the lands west of the new border include territory disputed between Poland and Lithuania, its fate is a matter for those two states alone. The Lithuanian national encyclopedia notes that the Peace of Riga ended Lithuania's hope of regaining the lands assigned to it by its own peace treaty with Soviet Russia in 1920.²⁷ › The military history of Lithuania

Ratification and entry into force

Soviet Russia ratified the treaty on 14 April 1921, the Polish Legislative Sejm on 15 April and Soviet Ukraine on 17 April. The ratifications were exchanged in Minsk on 30 April 1921, the date from which the treaty counts as in force. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine gives 3 May for the exchange.²⁸

Exhausted by years of war, Poland wanted the peace. For the Poles left east of the new border it was a disaster: Szumiło puts their number at 1 to 1.5 million, and many of them were persecuted in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.²⁹

How the treaty was carried out

Some clauses worked. Under the repatriation agreement of 24 February 1921, which the treaty confirmed, about 65,000 Red Army prisoners went home from Poland in 1921. Between 1918 and 1924 more than a million people came to Poland from the former Russian Empire: about 1.1 million by Hlebowicz's count, 1,264,731 by the calculation of Cezary Żołędowski that Mariusz Wołos cites.³⁰

Others did not. Moscow never paid a rouble of the 30 million. Cultural property came back only in part: the Soviets returned more readily what concerned the former Kingdom of Poland, and the Lithuanian Metrica, the archive of the Grand Duchy, is still in Moscow, Wołos notes. Among what did return, Hlebowicz lists the Crown Archive, 7,193 manuscripts, among them from the Załuski Library and 136 tapestries of King Sigismund Augustus.³¹

Recognition in 1923 and the end in 1939

Recognition by the Allies came later. On 15 March 1923 the Conference of Ambassadors recognized the border drawn at Riga, together with Polish rule over Eastern Galicia.³²

The treaty lasted eighteen years. On 17 September 1939, as the Red Army invaded eastern Poland, the Soviet government declared that the treaty had lapsed.³³ › The Soviet invasion of Poland, 1939

Significance: the Versailles-Riga order

Polish historians speak of a "Versailles-Riga order": just as the Treaty of Versailles fixed Germany's eastern border, Riga fixed the Soviet state's western one. Borzęcki argues that this let Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia live as independent states for a generation, while Lenin, unable to carry revolution west, turned to building socialism in one country and kept the nominal statehood of Soviet Ukraine and Belarus inside the new Soviet Union.³⁴

Soviet historiography told a different story. Its document collections were chosen to show a peace-loving Soviet diplomacy, and the books of Prokhor Olshansky, Wołos writes, were filled with ideological propaganda. Russian historians today are more nuanced. Narinsky calls the peace one of the first steps away from the idea of a European revolution, and quotes Gennady Matveev, for whom it frustrated Piłsudski's eastern plans but left millions of Ukrainians and Belarusians inside Poland who would not be assimilated.³⁵

For Poland the treaty secured the gains of 1920 and a border that held until 1939. For Ukrainians and Belarusians it was a partition, and for the Bolsheviks a pause. Each reading has its evidence, which is why, a century on, the Peace of Riga is still argued over.³⁶