Żeligowski's mutiny

On 9 October 1920 units of General Lucjan Żeligowski’s 1st Lithuanian-Belarusian Division entered Vilna. The Lithuanian authorities had begun to leave the city the day before, and that day, after brief fighting in the suburbs, the Poles took control of all of it. Officially Żeligowski was acting on his own, as a commander who had mutinied against the high command. In reality the “mutiny” had been staged by Józef Piłsudski, who wanted to win Vilna for Poland without making the government answerable to the Great Powers.

The dispute over Vilna

The Poles had taken Vilna in April 1919, but in July 1920, during Tukhachevsky’s offensive, the Red Army occupied it. On 12 July Soviet Russia concluded a treaty with Lithuania in which it recognised Vilna as part of the Lithuanian state. At the end of August, when the Red Army withdrew from the city after the Battle of Warsaw, Lithuanian troops moved in. The Poles, who made up the majority of its inhabitants, regarded Vilna as a Polish city. For the Lithuanians it was the historic capital of their state.

The Polish government could not take the city openly. The commitments made at Spa in July and British pressure ruled out Polish troops crossing the provisional demarcation line. After the victorious Battle of the Niemen the Poles and the Lithuanians sat down to talks in Suwałki. The agreement, which fixed a demarcation line on part of the front, was signed on the night of 7–8 October. Poland held that it did not settle the question of Vilna; the Lithuanians, that it left the city with Lithuania.

A staged mutiny

Piłsudski decided to use units made up of men from the lands of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. He received their commander, Żeligowski, who had been born near Vilna, in his train on 1 and 2 October. The general was to take responsibility for the action, and the government was to disown it. At Żeligowski’s insistence the forces assigned to the action were increased from the planned 1,500 volunteers to about 14,000 men.

On 7 October Żeligowski announced to his officers that he was renouncing obedience to the high command and marching on Vilna. Some of them refused to take part, and the general himself wavered for a while and asked to be replaced by another commander. In the end the units set off at six in the morning of 8 October. The weaker Lithuanian troops, unprepared for defence, fell back, and the only larger clash was fought on the river Mereczanka near Jaszuny. For the night the division halted about 20 kilometres from Vilna.

Entering Vilna

On the afternoon of 8 October the Lithuanian authorities ordered the evacuation to Kovno. The Lithuanian activist Viktoras Biržiška remembered streets jammed with carts loaded with official belongings. Before leaving the city, the Lithuanian government’s plenipotentiary handed power to a representative of the Entente, the head of the French mission, Colonel Constantin Reboul. Reboul demanded that Żeligowski halt his march. The general refused.

On the morning of 9 October the Polish units moved on. In the suburbs there were still skirmishes with Lithuanian battalions, and in the city Polish residents took up arms and seized Castle Hill and the area around the Green Bridge. The Minsk regiment and a squadron of mounted rifles were the first to enter the city, and the Vilna regiment paraded through the streets in the evening. Captain Wacław Kotowski of the 1st Vilna Uhlan Regiment recalled crowds at the city gates who embraced the soldiers and showered them with flowers.

The next day Żeligowski met the representatives of the Entente in the Taryba building. Asked by a British general by what right he had taken Vilna, he replied that he wanted to give the population the chance to decide its own fate. The Lithuanian government protested to the League of Nations, and the Polish government officially disowned the general’s action. In Warsaw few believed it. “Why this stupid comedy that Żeligowski took it against orders, out of disobedience?” the landowner Juliusz Zdanowski wrote in his diary.

On 12 October Żeligowski proclaimed the creation of Central Lithuania (PL), formally a separate state under his rule. The dispute over Vilna poisoned Polish–Lithuanian relations for many years.