“The worst thing would be an attempt to conquer Russia by means of Poles”. Poland’s hostility to Russia at the end of the Russian Civil war as reflected in the “Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939”

Abstract

The article covers the content and significance of the documents published in the British multi-volume edition entitled “Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919– 1939. First Series”, which was released by the Foreign Office after World War II. Those documents reflect all the variety and complexity of international relations in the period between the two world wars. For survey, the author selected the documents of the Paris Peace Conference and of some other summits convened by the Entente’s leading nations – the documents that manifest Poland’s hostility to Soviet Russia in 1919–1920. The documents also reflect a number of interrelated factors accounting for that hostility and, finally, Poland’s aggression against Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Byelorussia and Soviet Russia. The same documents, as shown in the article, reveal the varied and variable approaches of the ruling circles in Great Britain, France and Italy to the resolution of the “the Russian issue” as well as to using Poland as a means of “controlling” the Bolshevik Russia and the “containment” of the defeated Germany. The apparent value of the documents in question, as the author concludes, requires a solid archaeographical and source study of the multivolume edition of the “Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939. First Series”. This is bound to benefit the ongoing research of the relations between Russia and Poland during the Russian Civil War.