Adam Szostkiewicz: Poland ... 1920 And All That
Adam Szostkiewicz writes for Polityka weekly news magazine in Warsaw.
As I write, TV trailers for an epic historical drama by the veteran Polish filmmaker Jerzy Hoffman are enticing me to go and see (and in 3D) how we crushed the Bolsheviks who dared to invade Poland just two years after our young state had risen from over a century of imperial partition. Make no mistake: 1920: The Battle of Warsaw is going to be a box-office hit, even though (or perhaps because) the times are hard. There is no doubt that in cinematic terms the Battle - in fact an almost two-week-long military confrontation near Warsaw, the capital of the restored (and thus second) Polish republic - is a major achievement that does justice to a historic national event.
But what exactly was at stake in 1920: whose victory was it, and who today can best claim its mantle? The questions are more than ones of historical interest. For if the events of that moment are clear enough in Polish historiography, its high symbolic status has long ensured that it would be part of a contentious “battle of memory”. All the more so today, as the release of the film coincides with a divisive election campaign in which a political “battle of Warsaw” is currently underway.
Many Polish historians regard 1920 - when the Polish army, under the command of the nation’s founding father Marshall Józef Piłsudski, defeated the Red Army led by generals Tukhachevsky and Budyonny - as a key victory in national, European and even global terms. For as well as guaranteeing Polish independence, it halted a Bolshevik advance that would otherwise have been able to continue the revolutionary crusade far to the west of a continent ravaged by the 1914-18 war. In this narration, 1920 is regarded as among the most decisive battles of both Polish and world history.
But Catholic nationalists have long held a very different view...
But what exactly was at stake in 1920: whose victory was it, and who today can best claim its mantle? The questions are more than ones of historical interest. For if the events of that moment are clear enough in Polish historiography, its high symbolic status has long ensured that it would be part of a contentious “battle of memory”. All the more so today, as the release of the film coincides with a divisive election campaign in which a political “battle of Warsaw” is currently underway.
Many Polish historians regard 1920 - when the Polish army, under the command of the nation’s founding father Marshall Józef Piłsudski, defeated the Red Army led by generals Tukhachevsky and Budyonny - as a key victory in national, European and even global terms. For as well as guaranteeing Polish independence, it halted a Bolshevik advance that would otherwise have been able to continue the revolutionary crusade far to the west of a continent ravaged by the 1914-18 war. In this narration, 1920 is regarded as among the most decisive battles of both Polish and world history.
But Catholic nationalists have long held a very different view...