Poles take Minsk

On 8 August 1919 Polish troops took Minsk. The attack began in the morning, and by evening the whole city was in Polish hands. The Bolsheviks lost the capital of the Lithuanian-Belarusian Soviet Republic (PL), whose authorities had moved there in April after losing Vilna, and the most important railway junction in Belarus. For the Poles it was the greatest victory of the 1919 campaign, eight months after the Red Army had entered Minsk on the heels of the Germans.

Preparations

After the capture of Vilna in April, operations in this direction were directed by General Stanisław Szeptycki, commander of the Lithuanian-Belarusian Front formed at that time. Through the spring and early summer the front stood still, because the Polish Army was still fighting the Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia, and the High Command did not want to advance further east before Germany signed the peace treaty. At the beginning of July the Poles took Molodechno, but they lacked the strength for the city itself. Moscow grew nervous: according to Russian accounts, in mid-July Joseph Stalin came to Minsk as plenipotentiary of the Bolshevik Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Defence and changed the command of the 16th Army defending it, but concluded that the city could not be held.

At the end of July reinforcements arrived from the west: the 8th Infantry Division (PL) and the Greater Poland troops of General Daniel Konarzewski (PL). According to some accounts about 12,000 infantry, 2,000 cavalry and 40 guns were concentrated for the attack. The plan was a wide pincer. The 2nd Legions Infantry Division (PL) was to advance on Minsk from the north-east, the Greater Poland troops from the north-west, and a regiment of Greater Poland uhlans was to cut the railway from Minsk to Borisov and the Bolsheviks’ line of retreat. From the south-west, from the Naliboki Forest, General Józef Lasocki’s group attacked. On 6 August the Poles took Slutsk.

The fight for the city

On 8 August the legionaries reached the suburbs at about ten in the morning. The fastest to advance was an assault battalion made up of volunteers from several Legions regiments. In places the defenders used armoured cars. By about noon the Poles held the western part of the city and had cut the railway to Bobruisk. According to the American report they already controlled the whole city by then; according to Russian accounts skirmishes in the streets went on until evening. About 500 Red Army men were taken prisoner, and the Poles captured eight locomotives and 90 wagons. Józef Piłsudski drove up to Minsk by car behind the attacking troops.

The capture of the city was accompanied by violence against Jews. The American mission of Henry Morgenthau, some of whose members were in Minsk at the time, found that despite the orders of the Polish commander forbidding violence against civilians, soldiers killed 31 Jews. Only one of them could be connected in any way with the Bolshevik movement. In the afternoon and evening soldiers, helped by some of the inhabitants, plundered 377 Jewish shops and many homes. Officers’ patrols restored order only the next morning. The Polish government told the mission that four Polish soldiers had been killed trying to stop the looting and that some of the culprits had been executed. The report concluded that in Minsk the blame lay above all with one officer.

On the Berezina

The loss of Minsk hastened the retreat of the 16th Army. The Poles pressed on eastwards and by mid-August reached the Berezina, and at the end of the month they took the fortress of Bobruisk. The Soviet republic of Lithuania and Belarus had in practice lost all its territory. On 19 September Piłsudski came to Minsk for the celebrations. He attended a mass celebrated by the Bishop of Minsk, Zygmunt Łoziński (PL), received several dozen delegations, among them Jewish and Belarusian ones, and promised that “this land itself will decide how it is to live”. The front on the Berezina was to remain almost until the summer of 1920.