A Brief History
On August 25, 1920, the Polish army prevailed over the Russian-Soviet army at The Battle of Warsaw, actually a series of battles that the Poles would later call their victory “a miracle.”
Digging Deeper
The so called Polish-Soviet War was fought between late 1918/early 1919 and 1921, with the Second Polish Republic trying to resist a creeping land grab by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic that sought to recover lands lost by Imperial Russia during World War I, as well as land previously governed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Meanwhile, between November of 1918 and July of 1919, Poland was involved in another war, this time with Ukraine, over the same sort of attempts to settle post-World War I European borders. The Polish-Ukrainian War led to the establishment of the Second Polish Republic and set the stage for the Polish-Soviet War.
The outcome of the war led to the establishment of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic and territorial concessions by the Soviets and Ukrainians to Poland. Of course, animosity remained and the Soviet and Russian hunger for more and more territory never went away.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Davies, Norman. White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War 1919-1920 and The Miracle on the Vistula. Pimlico, 2003.
Zamoyski, Adam. Warsaw 1920. HarperCollins Publishers, 2014.
The featured image in this article, a map by Nicolas Eynaud of the Polish–Soviet War, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.
