Abstract
The Kiev Offensive was a joint Polish-Ukrainian attack against Soviet forces in Ukraine in late April/early May 1920. Poland’s commander in chief, Józef Piłsudski, strove to preempt a Red Army offensive against the newly independent Polish Republic by forcing a battle in Ukraine. He also wished to deny this strategic country, the "breadbasket of Europe," to the Bolsheviks by creating a Ukrainian state allied with Poland. Piłsudski’s plan seemed to materialize as the Poles and Ukrainians swept the Soviet forces before them and liberated Kiev. The Reds soon counterattacked and drove the Poles all the way to Warsaw, where the Soviets suffered a crushing defeat. Communist expansion was temporarily halted and the independence of Poland and the Baltic states secured, at least for two decades, but Ukraine remained under Soviet rule. The communists immediately portrayed the Polish-Ukrainian push for Kiev as imperialist aggression by Polish landlords, allegedly intent on regaining their estates. Some Western historians have also depicted the Kiev Offensive as an opening shot in the Polish-Bolshevik War, in spite of the fact that the Poles and the Soviets had been wrestling for the control of the lands between the Bug and the Berezyna Rivers for over a year. Why did the distorted Soviet propaganda version weave its way even into Western history books?
