There are events, facts, and dates that should be not only marked on “jubilee” occasions (50th, 75th, 100th, 150th anniversaries), but also reconsidered constantly, on a systemic basis. For they have not only changed the political “landscape” of one country or another, but also identified something much more important – the civilizational vector of development (in our case, maybe, of the entire Europe).
It is about the Battle of Warsaw (August 14-17, 1920), referred to as “Miracle on the Vistula” in Polish historiography, when the troops of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski (actively assisted by European, above all, French advisors, including Charles de Gaulle, a 30-year-old line officer and World War One veteran), in conjunction with the UNR army’s combat units with Lieutenant-General Marko Bezruchko at the head, inflicted a crushing defeat on the Bolshevik Read Army formations of Komandarm Mikhail Tukhachevsky (the Front Commander at the time) and Semyon Budyonny’s First Cavalry Army. (Incidentally, it is Budyonny’s “invincible cavalrymen” who came under a precise and scathing attack of Bezruchko’s soldiers near Zamosc, which let the defenders of Warsaw win the time – three or four days so necessary at such a decisive moment.)
What makes the 97th anniversary of the battle on the Vistula important and topical for us today? Undoubtedly, the then geopolitical “reference frame” was about, neither more nor less than, the victory of the totalitarian Bolshevik worldwide revolution or about preservation of the perhaps relatively democratic setup in the European independent states, including the ones that emerged or were restored (like, for example, Poland) as a result of World War One. A Europe of independent states branded by Moscow as “bourgeois” or a forcible and repressive “Sovietization” was a choice for the Polish in August 1920. Not only Jozef Pilsudski personally and his inner circle, but also millions of Polish workers and peasants (genuine, without any inverted commas) for whose “happiness” and “liberation from the yoke of Polish nobles” Lenin, Trotsky, and Tukhachevsky “marched on Warsaw,” were very well aware of what the latter option meant – executions by firing squad, seizure of dwellers’ property, brutal confiscation of grain from peasants, and tortures of defenseless people… The Poles (both “the upper crust” and “the working people”) showed an example of national unity, knowing what will await them personally and the state in case of a defeat.
And here we take an extremely topical aspect of those events, which is directly connected with the dynamic Ukrainian present day. The question is: are we fully aware that only the national unity (let us not listen to the “sweet singing” about “Western deadly economic sanctions against Putin” that will stifle Moscow “slowly but surely” – it is an involuntary or a deliberate lie that disorients us) will give us a chance to defeat the Russian aggressor? A unity like the one that existed in the Poland of 1920: from nobleman to student, factory worker, or land-poor peasant. Otherwise, the Poles would not have held out – it is wrong and naive to think that Lenin’s plans of a worldwide revolution were an outright utopia. For the Bolshevik leader had never been a naive person, he saw Soviet-style revolutions in Hungary, Bavaria, and, to some extent, in all of Germany (1918, 1919, 1920) and knew like nobody else how to “catch a chance.” (Incidentally, the wave of pro-Soviet demonstrations reached even Scotland in 1919, which very few remember now.)
So nothing was decided beforehand at the time, as nothing has been decided so far now, in the period of a new barbarous invasion of not only Ukraine, but also Europe from the East. But here is what may perhaps resolve the matter: can what we really have but perhaps do not adequately feel today really substitute the true unity of Ukraine attacked by the aggressor? I mean oligarchic unity (to be more exact, “oligarchic consensus”) that implies an overwhelming “oligarchic” corruption (which has long penetrated almost all the “pores” of society), a caste-based feudal system, and total, toxic, lying. Is it not high time to understand that oligarchic consensus instead of a true national unity (in which the oligarchic top is not interested) is a direct way to a defeat in the war?
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In the spring of 1935, the incurably sick Pilsudski (he was aware of his condition) communicated very much with his secretaries. He said among other things that, in spite of all the mistakes he had made, he had done a historic thing: he rallied the nation in 1920 (but, unfortunately, the marshal did not recall Bezruchko without whom the “Miracle on the Vistula” would have been impossible). Incidentally, he had once been a convinced socialist with the underground pseudonym “Comrade Ziuk.” But he chose Polish statehood – without separating his personal interests (at such moments the dilemma “personality or state” is fallacious) from the interests of classes. This is why he won.
