Armistice of Riga

On 12 October 1920 in Riga the delegations of Poland and of the Russian and Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republics signed an agreement on a preliminary peace and armistice. The parties agreed to stop the fighting at midnight on 18 October and drew a provisional eastern border of Poland, from the Dvina to the Dniester. After almost two years of fighting, after the Battle of Warsaw and the Battle of the Niemen, the Polish–Soviet War was coming to an end. The armistice was not yet a peace, but it settled its most important terms.

From Minsk to Riga

The first talks began in August in Minsk, when the Red Army stood before Warsaw. The Soviet delegation then demanded, among other things, that the Polish army be limited to 50,000 men and that a workers’ militia be created. After Tukhachevsky’s defeat the Poles rejected these terms, and the talks were moved to neutral ground, to the Latvian capital. They began there on 21 September, while the battle on the Niemen was under way.

The Polish delegation was led by the deputy foreign minister, Jan Dąbski of the Polish People’s Party “Piast”. Most of its members were nominated by the parliamentary clubs. The greatest say belonged to the National Democrats’ representative, Stanisław Grabski (PL), an opponent of Piłsudski’s federal plans. Their chief supporter in the delegation was Leon Wasilewski. The Soviet side was represented by the experienced diplomat Adolph Joffe, who had negotiated at Brest-Litovsk in 1918. The Bolsheviks wanted a quick armistice. In southern Ukraine General Pyotr Wrangel’s White army was on the attack, and on 20 September Vladimir Lenin said that an armistice had to be “bought” from the Poles so as to finish off Wrangel at all costs.

At the beginning of the talks the Polish delegation accepted as a party the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, and not the allied Ukrainian People’s Republic of Symon Petliura, with which Poland had concluded an alliance in April. The most important decisions were made in talks between Dąbski and Joffe. On 5 October an agreement on the armistice line was announced.

The terms

The provisional border ran from the Dvina through Belarus and Polesie to the Zbruch and the Dniester. Minsk remained on the Soviet side. Eastern Galicia, whose independence Joffe had still tried to raise, stayed with Poland. Poland gave up some of the land that its troops held at the time or could have taken. On Vilna, taken three days earlier by Żeligowski’s units, the parties agreed that the fate of the territories disputed between Poland and Lithuania would be decided by those two states alone. Until 18 October the armies could still advance. In those days the Poles took Molodechno and Minsk, and Colonel Juliusz Rómmel’s cavalry group carried out a raid on Korosten.

A disputed verdict

Prime Minister Wincenty Witos told the Sejm on 14 October that the peace “does not fully satisfy the aspirations of the Polish nation and leaves a great number of Poles outside Poland’s borders”, but gives the country a breathing space in the east. Landowners from the eastern borderlands received it bitterly. Edward Woyniłłowicz wrote in his diary of a “fourth partition”, because the delegation had not wanted to claim Minsk from the start. The Sejm ratified the agreement on 22 October. The troops of Petliura and of General Stanisław Bułak-Bałachowicz, which had fought on the Polish side, had to leave Polish territory by 2 November.

The dispute over Riga continues to this day. Some historians believe that the Polish delegation threw away the fruits of victory and abandoned its Ukrainian ally. Others point out that Poland was exhausted by the war and that the Western powers opposed Ukrainian independence. The British historian Norman Davies wrote that neither side achieved its aims, and that the outcome of the war was not a compromise but a stalemate.