east, precipitating the Bolshevik revolution and Russian withdrawal from the war, were themselves forced into an armistice that became a surrender and led to the fall of the Kaiser.

Now, in 1920, the victorious, resurgent Red Army, a hungry horde effectively organized by Leon Trotsky and led by a brilliant young general, whom Zamoyski calls an “aristocratic Russian nihilist,” Mikhail Tukhachevsky, swept westward into what had been Byelorussian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Polish provinces of the old Russian, German, and Austrian empires. The north European plain that stretches from the Russian Ural Mountains to the English Channel and the Atlantic seaboard of France is a vast, flat stretch, with few defensible natural borders and some large but slow-moving and easily-fordable rivers. Mongols, Tartars, and Huns had swept across it intoEurope for hundreds of years, and then Napoleon’s armies had swept through it into Russia and then retreated ruinously back across it in 1812. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia had liquidated the old Kingdom of Poland in a series of partitions, concluded in the 1790s, that the courageous, renegade Austrian historian Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn called “the original sin of modern European history.”

In 1920 Europe was aflame and the appeal of the victorious revolutionary Lenin and Communism was immense throughout Europe, among the unemployed, the demobilized, and the intellectuals. Marxist ideas of “permanent revolution” and “historical inevitably” were widespread and the charismatic authority of fanatical but brave revolutionaries such as Lenin and Trotsky seemed to have world-historical significance.

The newly-revived Polish state, which had disappeared from the map of Europe for