Would Poland be better off if it had lost in the Polish-Soviet War?

Well, Western Civilization did move upward from South to North rather than the opposite way:-)
While the ancients in the Fertile Crescent, for example, were building great, impressive nearly full-service metopoli for their time, Mesopotamia etc. you Northern Europeans were often still sitting around in loin cloth, eating mead, and throwing bones at one another.LOL

Someone alerted me that some Polish or Poland lovers (which are basically Russians who want to be west) are trying to say how superior they are or more western than other europeans particularly those geographically east of them. To whomever is trying to spread these lies and Polish history revionism, it will not work on anyone besides maybe your Polish friends or Polonia abroad (who are very uneducated in general and clean toilets in the Uk among other countries). Cyryllic alphabet and Orthodox faith is just as much european and spread across a number of european countries much more westernized than poland ever was (Bulgaria for one and Greece, the father of western civilization for two). Here is some reading for the uneducated toilet cleaners:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script

According to the article above it actually is Bulgarian in origin and a modification of the byzantine (Roman Empire thus second father of western civilization after the Greek empire hence Greco Roman wrestling among other terms showing this is where west comes form not Poland or Polonia.)


Also Bulgaria among other actual western european countries (unlike Poland) are orthodox so your stance Orthodox is less wstern or inferior to your two faced Catholic faith is also wrong. Thirdly, there is nothing west about Poland and the way the people act how unfriendly they are at customer service or their communist mentality is even less western than former Soviet Union countries.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_Orthodox_Church

Here is a whole article talking about the fake westernization of Poland form the west (like pushing consumerism and malls on them) and how Poles were never accepted as truly west nor ever will by those countries (lol I even dont think germany is west just look at its violent and barbaric istroy there was never enlightenment there either):

iwm.at/transit/transit-online/poland-and-the-west-in-or-out

But I do not get why Polish consantly look at their own history like the battle of Vienna and constantly add to it and somehow add europe to make themselves notice. Like their statements how Turks would have rolled across europe have been debunked and are just as much gibberish as Lenin being able to militaristically go through the west just because Poland would lost the battle of Warsaw in 1920. Both those things have nothing to do with the rest of europe which had far suprrior military and logistics (as well as geography pver extending both those empires in those times) than Poland. Much more likely is Poland never mattered that much except when it was really living off the back of the Lithuanian empire and taking even their credit for great battles such as Voytutas exploits in the east.

Goddammit.... My precious thread has become derailed... once again.

Folks! Distilled - the question boiled down to: "Would Poland be better off if it never gained independence in 1921?" Not whether or not Hitler would attack anyway, as suggested by Lyzko. Not whether or not Poland belongs to the West. Not even regarding the geographic origins of the Enlightenment, and so on and so forth. Bah!

That's like asking if the world would be better off without WW1. It would've saved countless lives, that's for sure. No USSR, no Holodomor, no WW2, no Holocaust, no gulags, no Soviet occupation of eastern Europe - take your pick. If you ask the citizens of countries which gained independence after the Great War, I'm pretty sure they will tell you it was all worth it. What do you expect?

Gotta admit though, Bobko, the broadness of your thread question does lend itself conveniently to a bit of digression at best.

Haven't Poland gained independence in 1918? In my opinion Soviet Russia (there was no USSR in 1920) could not assimilate such a huge chunk of territory, back then. The Soviet rule still was very shaky and by swallowing entire Poland which also included Western Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania (populated by population who's attitude towards Bolsheviks was skeptic at best) it was at very serious risk of getting a big lurch to the Western side and collapse. Citizenship war in Russia ended largely in 1922 only, and in 1920 Soviet rule was on verge of collapse. This is the map of the fronts in 1920:

grandars.ru/shkola/istoriya-rossii/grazhdanskaya-voyna.html

Territory controlled by Bolsheviks is shown in red. So, as you see at some points of 1919-1920 they controlled just a territories around Moscow and St-Petersburg and were on the verge of collapse.

The Bolshies did though try to spread their influence throughout Europe, among other countries, England.

In very early 1919 perhaps, but by the beginning of 1920 the Bolsheviks had defeated their enemies on practically all fronts.

The Whites had been crushed by the Reds in the South, and no longer presented a credible threat. The British, French, American and Czechoslovak forces of the "Allied Intervention" also gave up and started pulling out through the port of Vladivostok. Peace was made with Estonia and Lithuania. Central Asian separatist movements were crushed.

By the Spring of 1920 Poland had become the main focus of the Bolsheviks. They were able to put together a front consisting of more than 700,000 men and thousands of pieces of artillery.

Basically, I want to point out that this was a much closer call than you describe. Indeed, at one point Poland's fortunes in the war looked so bad that Pilsudski's government was teetering on the verge of collapse, as Roman Dmowski's opposition grew in power. They don't call it "The Miracle on the Vistula" because it was a miracle how the Soviets made it so far, but because it was a miracle Poland survived.

Dmowski though, including Paderewski while acting premier, was known to be both an ultra-nationalist as well as an anti-Semite. Lest we forget!

Sorry to say, Pilsudski was not a huge fan of Jews either, and was only slightly less Nationalist than Dmowski.

To a great extent it was the noises that Pilsudski was making about building an Intermarum that provoked the Soviets to act on the scale they did.

Pilsudski is nonetheless admired by many Jews, for some reason.

Paderewski was an artist and, moreover, he produced wines in his vineyard.

And a hotelier too.

An interesting person.

Because when he was alive and in power, antisemitic Poles felt constrained and didn`t dare to attack Jews. Piłsudski died in 1935. Next year, fascist nationalists attacked Jews in Myśłenice.

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