Start of the Polish–Soviet War

On 14 February 1919, in the lands from which the Germans were withdrawing, regular units of the Polish Army and the Red Army clashed for the first time. According to IPN publications, the skirmishes that day took place near the small town of Mosty (PL) on the Niemen and at Bereza Kartuska (PL) in Polesie. Nobody declared war on anybody, and for many months neither side regarded this front as its most important one. Historians therefore date its beginning differently. Some point to 5 January 1919, when the Red Army took Vilna, driving out the Polish self-defence force. Others, like the IPN, choose 14 February, when the armies of the two states came face to face.

Between the Germans and the Bolsheviks

After the armistice of Compiègne the Germans had to leave the lands they occupied in the east, but their troops withdrew slowly. The Red Army followed close on their heels. After the annulment of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk it took one town after another: Minsk in December 1918, Vilna on 5 January. On 12 January the Soviet command ordered, as Polish and English accounts put it, a “reconnaissance in depth” as far as the Niemen and the Shchara.

Poland, which was fighting the Ukrainians for Lviv at the time and had the Greater Poland Uprising in the west, could not simply march through the belt of German occupation. It had to come to terms with the Germans. On 5 February 1919 in Białystok representatives of the two governments signed a secret agreement on the withdrawal of the German Tenth Army and the Kiev group. The Polish plenipotentiary, Professor Ludwik Kolankowski (PL), undertook that the Poles would neither hinder the evacuation nor disarm German soldiers. In return the Germans agreed to let Polish military transports through Białystok and on to Grodno and Wołkowysk (PL). Polish units relieved the German garrisons: according to the IPN they took Brest-Litovsk on 9 February, Kobryn on 10 February and Wołkowysk on 13 February. Two armies, until then kept apart by the Germans, now stood facing each other.

Mosty and Bereza

Neither side had many troops there. The Poles had about 12 infantry battalions, 12 cavalry squadrons and three artillery batteries on this front. In the south, from the Pripyat, stood the Podlasie Group of General Antoni Listowski (PL), concentrated near Antopol and Bereza Kartuska; in the north the Lithuanian-Belarusian Division of General Wacław Iwaszkiewicz around Wołkowysk. The Red Army could not commit much here either, because its main forces were fighting the Whites.

On 14 February at Mosty Polish units halted a Soviet advance guard that was moving up behind the withdrawing Germans. At Bereza Kartuska a small Polish detachment, 5 officers and 57 men under Captain Mienicki, attacked the Bolshevik garrison of the town at dawn and took about 80 prisoners. Accounts date this raid to 13 or 14 February. The British historian Norman Davies (PL) regarded the clash at Bereza as the first engagement of the Polish–Soviet War.

A war without a declaration

The February skirmishes were no great battle, but they began a war that was to last until the autumn of 1920. The two sides had conflicting plans for these lands. The Bolsheviks wanted to seize as much as possible of the territory the Germans were leaving and to establish Soviet power there. On 27 February they merged Soviet Lithuania and Belarus into the Lithuanian-Belarusian Soviet Republic (PL). Józef Piłsudski, on the other hand, wanted to push Russia as far east as possible and to decide the fate of the former lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania together with their inhabitants.

The Poles soon went over to the attack. At the beginning of March they took Slonim (2 March) and Pinsk (5 March), and in April they marched on Vilna. Throughout 1919 the war ran in parallel with talks. In the autumn the two sides held secret negotiations at Mikashevichy, but neither was ready for peace on the other’s terms.