Dowbor-Muśnicki takes command of the I Polish Corps

On 6 August 1917 Lieutenant General Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki, until then commander of the XXXVIII Army Corps of the Russian army, took command of the I Polish Corps, according to the historian Rafał Sierchuła. The post had been offered to him on 13 July by the Supreme Polish Military Committee (PL), known as the Naczpol. At the turn of July and August the general travelled with the committee’s president, Ensign Władysław Raczkiewicz (PL), to General Headquarters at Mogilev, where the new commander-in-chief had just been appointed: Lavr Kornilov. Kornilov gave his verbal consent, and according to Mieczysław Wrzosek the order of appointment, together with permission to form the corps, was issued on 8 August. Some works give 24 July as the date the corps was created. Either way, in the summer of 1917 the Poles of the Russian army got a corps of their own, and its commander was a professional general staff officer who until then had had little to do with Polish politics.

The congress in Petrograd

After the February Revolution and the Provisional Government’s appeal, which recognised the Poles’ right to independence, Polish servicemen began to organise in unions. Whether to create a Polish army in Russia was to be decided by a general congress. It sat in Petrograd from 7 to 22 June 1917. According to Adam Miodowski it was attended by 374 delegates and 77 representatives with an advisory vote. The hall was sharply divided. The Social Democrats and the PPS-Left, opposed to any national army, walked out on the third day. The pro-independence left, which had secured the election of Józef Piłsudski as honorary chairman, wanted the authorities at home to decide on an army. On 19 June its motion was defeated by 175 votes to 115, with 38 abstentions, and it too left the congress. The remaining delegates, the centre and the right linked to the National Democrats, resolved to create a Polish Armed Force within the Russian army and set up the Naczpol. A few weeks later Piłsudski and his legionaries on the other side of the front refused the oath of brotherhood in arms with Germany.

From division to corps

A Polish formation already existed in the Russian army. At the beginning of 1917 the Polish Rifle Division began to be formed near Kyiv from the Polish Rifle Brigade. In July it joined the 7th Army during the Kerensky Offensive and came under heavy fire near Brzeżany, and some of its soldiers gave way to agitation and deserted. Its cavalry squadron, expanded into an uhlan regiment, charged at Krechowce. The failure of the offensive pushed the war minister, Alexander Kerensky, who disliked national units, into concessions. According to Miodowski, on 17 July the General Staff issued an instruction to group willing Poles into separate companies and detachments, which were later to pass into Polish formations.

The regulations drawn up by the Naczpol and approved by Kornilov on 21 August intended the corps solely for fighting on the Eastern Front. It was to be subordinate to the Russian command, while political direction was to rest with the Naczpol, which the Russian war minister never formally recognised. The plan provided for three rifle divisions, two artillery brigades and auxiliary units, about 70,000 men in all. According to other calculations it was to number 67,790 soldiers. The corps was to absorb the existing division with its reserve regiment and the uhlan regiment, and to find the rest of its men through voluntary enlistment. Kornilov, in agreement with Kerensky, however, allowed only a quarter of the Poles serving in front-line units to be taken from them.

An army of the old style

The corps headquarters was set up in Minsk. According to Wrzosek, Dowbor chose his commanders carefully, even those recommended by the Naczpol, and made a Russian, General Agapeyev, his chief of staff. He promised “good training, iron discipline and obedience”. Order no. 9 of 16 August kept the cut and colour of the Russian uniform but introduced Polish insignia. The enthusiasm of the spring, however, was already fading. A transfer from a Russian regiment required the commander’s consent and an opinion from the local union of Polish servicemen, and the Polish left called for the sabotage of volunteer recruitment. In December the corps numbered about 29,000 soldiers, roughly half its planned strength.