125 years, was comprised of pieces of the former Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires, a war-exhausted terrain with no easily defensible borders and no recent experience of self-government. Large numbers of Poles were themselves sympathetic to Communism, not least Jews, who had so often suffered under the previous empires. Some Poles had high positions in the Bolshevik hierarchy, including Feliks Dzierzynski, the ferocious head of the Soviet secret police, the Cheka, and Lenin had confidently set up a Red Polish government-in-exile to take power when Warsaw fell.

The progress of Tukhachevsky and the Red Army into Poland was extraordinarily rapid, and though his vast armed horde was poor and hungry it was effectively indoctrinated and inspired by the same fanatical, egalitarian morale and utopian hope that had animated FrenchJacobin army victories against larger, better-equipped monarchical armies from 1793 on, and on whose momentum and trajectory Napoleon built his military success. At a different level, the discrediting of the old empires and their class system by the horrific, fruitless carnage of World War I had left Europe with a moral-political vacuum that was felt from London and Paris to Milan, Rome, Istanbul, Vienna, Budapest, Munich, and Berlin. Even decent liberals and non-Marxist Socialists felt the pull of the utilitarian ideal of Communism, its apparently “scientific” understanding of history, its universal, trans-nationalistic moral appeal. Lenin and Trotsky were not alone in seeing 1920 as the miraculous year, the initiation into the final, progressive phase in which the Communist Revolution would spread like wildfire throughout the world. They thought