I Polish Corps against the Bolsheviks

At noon on 25 January 1918 (12 January in the Julian calendar) the deadline that General Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki, commander of the I Polish Corps, had set the Bolshevik command expired. The day before, he had demanded by telegram an end to the disarming and detaining of Polish transports: “I inform you that no transport will allow itself to be disarmed without bloodshed, for which I have the soldiers’ resolution. I request that all orders concerning the disarming and detaining of transports en route be revoked without delay, for otherwise I shall consider that from twelve o’clock on 25 January you have begun hostile action with the use of arms against the Polish Army.” According to Henryk Bagiński’s study of 1921, the telegram went to the commander-in-chief of the Western Front, who at the time was the Bolshevik Alexander Miasnikian; some accounts speak of the supreme commander Nikolai Krylenko. The orders were not revoked. The Soviet historian Sergei Ventsov wrote in 1924 that on 12 January Old Style the Polish corps “declared war” on Soviet Russia. In Polish tradition this day opens the first fighting between the Polish army and the Bolsheviks.

The corps had been formed in the summer of 1917 on the initiative of the Supreme Polish Military Committee (PL), known as the Naczpol, from Poles serving in the Russian army. Its headquarters was in Minsk, and its units were spread over a wide area between Minsk, Smolensk and Gomel. In mid-January 1918 the corps numbered about 29,000 men in three rifle divisions, with uhlans and an Officers’ Legion formed in December from supernumerary officers. It was meant to fight the Germans alongside Russia and the Allies. After the October Revolution Dowbor-Muśnicki announced that he would not meddle in Russia’s internal disputes, but there were no revolutionary committees in his army and the officers kept their authority. Krylenko, who took over the supreme command after the murder of Dukhonin, demanded the “democratisation” of the corps, that is, elected commanders. Dowbor refused. In January the Bolsheviks arrested some members of the Naczpol in Petrograd, cut the corps off from supplies and ordered it to be disbanded.

In mid-January Dowbor-Muśnicki decided to concentrate his scattered units in the triangle Rogachev–Zhlobin–Bobruisk. According to Ventsov, the transfer had originally been agreed with the Bolsheviks, who wanted to place the disciplined corps on the Brest axis in place of the disintegrating Special Army, because at Brest the Germans were taunting the Russians with the chaos at the front. Now, however, the Soviet authorities were stopping and disarming Polish trains. The transport of the 5th Rifle Regiment was derailed and surrounded, and after a fight lasting several hours the regiment capitulated. A similar fate befell the 8th Regiment at Vyazma. The Bolsheviks also succeeded in disarming the corps’ heavy artillery, which had been sent last.

In those days the 1st Rifle Division stood at Rogachev on the Dnieper, with outposts near Toshchitsa station and cavalry on the road from Mogilev, the seat of the Bolshevik General Headquarters, to Bobruisk. The 2nd Division held positions between Rogachev and Zhlobin, but the Zhlobin railway junction itself was occupied by a detachment of the Petrograd Red Guard. The 3rd Division was fighting its way on foot from near Smolensk and reached the rest of the corps only in March. The 1st Uhlan Regiment covered the concentration from the west at Dukora near Minsk. The Poles halted traffic on the Gomel–Minsk railway, along which Ukrainian grain flowed to the troops of the Western Front. For the Bolsheviks this was the revolt of a “counter-revolutionary” general, supposedly backed by the Entente and the Ukrainian Central Rada. For Dowbor it was the defence of the only cohesive Polish force in the east against disarmament.

The fighting quickly spread. Against the Poles the Bolsheviks threw Latvian riflemen, sailors from Helsinki and Reval, and the remnants of regiments of the old army. According to Russian accounts, on 26 January (13 January Old Style) Colonel Jukums Vācietis became their commander. Krylenko’s order declaring Dowbor an outlawed “enemy of the revolution” and ordering resisting officers to be shot without trial appears in some Polish accounts even before the telegram of 24 January, but the text published by Ventsov is dated 22 January Old Style, that is, 4 February, and already mentions the taking of Bobruisk. For on the night of 2–3 February the Poles had seized the Bobruisk fortress with its great depots. After losses and desertions the corps shrank, according to some authors, to about 12,000 men, but it held out. When the Germans moved east in the second half of February, Dowbor concluded an agreement on neutrality with them, and in May 1918 he had to disband the corps. Most of its soldiers, the “Dowborczycy”, returned to the Kingdom of Poland and in the autumn joined the reborn Polish Army.