Before March 1923: The first trial of strength

The Bolsheviks were well aware of the potential latent in the nationality issue and the possibility to use it against Poland. The creation of Soviet “buffer” republics, with the right to self-determination confirmed in the Treaty of Riga, was an outcome of Moscow's need to satisfy Ukrainian and Belarusian aspirations, but from the very outset it also had a dimension which transcended the field of domestic affairs, and this was perhaps its most important aspect. The republics bordering on Poland were to become political and cultural magnets attracting the Slavic minorities living in Poland, and the anti-Polish sentiments prevalent in them were to be consistently nursed and nurtured from Kharkiv and Minsk, in the hope of destabilising the domestic situation of their western neighbour.

One of the first to notice the potential for such action was Emmanuil Kviring, the delegate of Soviet Ukraine to the Riga peace negotiations. In a memorandum dated 30th November 1920 he wrote, “The severance of a large part of Volhynia with a population of several million and the incorporation of Eastern Galicia in Poland confronts our Party and government with a new challenge – to take over the ideological leadership and the organisation of the revolutionary movement which will inevitably arise in those territories as a consequence of Polish occupation.” He suggested the launch and propagation of an insurrectionary propaganda campaign exploiting the national issue among the Ukrainian peasantry. “The movement's slogans should be formulated in a simple manner and linked inextricably with the national awareness of the peasant masses: ‘against the Polish lords,’ ‘land for the Ukrainian peasant,’ and ‘power for the soviets’ viz. for the Ukrainian peasantry.” The aim of the forthcoming uprising was to be the incorporation of Volhynia and the Chełm region in Soviet Ukraine and the creation of an independent Galician SSR, which would mean a return to the concept that could not be accomplished during the campaign against the “White Poles” in the summer of 1920. Kviring realised there would be problems with seizing control of the peasant movement and argued that appropriate measures should be undertaken as soon as possible to “prevent the chauvinists, who must already be very busy in these regions, from outrunning us.”