During the past year two things had happened to strengthen his convictions. One was the murder of his only son, a Red Army commander whose cavalry regiment had been captured by the Whites in the battle for Orel in September 1919. No one knew for certain how Alexei died but Brusilov was convinced that he had been executed on Denikin’s orders when the Whites found out who he was. Denikin was thought to despise Brusilov for having overseen the ‘destruction of the army’ during 1917. The fact that Alexei had only joined the Reds in the hope of persuading the Cheka to spare his father’s life left Brusilov full of remorse. He blamed himself for Alexei’s death and was determined to avenge it.74 Blood, if not class, had made him Red.
So too had Russian nationalism. The Polish invasion of the Ukraine was the other vital factor behind Brusilov’s conversion to the Reds. Since its partition in the eighteenth century, Poland had lived in the shadows of the three great empires of Eastern Europe. But suddenly with the Versailles Treaty it found itself with a guarantee of independence and a great deal of new territory given to it by the victorious Western powers as a buffer between Germany and Russia. It often does not take much for a former nation-victim to behave like a nation-aggressor; and as soon as Poland gained its independence it began to strut around with imperial pretensions of its own. Marshal Pilsudski, the head of the Polish state and army, talked of restoring ‘historic Poland’ which had once stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. He promised to reclaim her eastern borderlands — the ‘Lithuania’ cherished by Mickiewicz and other Polish patriots of the nineteenth century — that had been lost to Russia in the partitions. These were ethnically intermingled regions — Polish and Jewish cities like Lvov, Polish former landowners and Ukrainian or Belorussian peasants — to which both Russia and Poland had a claim. As the Germans withdrew from the east, Polish troops marched in to the borderlands. Pilsudski led the capture of Wilno in April 1919. During the summer the Poles continued to advance into Belorussia and the western Ukraine, capturing Minsk and Lvov. Fighting halted for a while in the winter as the Poles and Russians haggled over borders. But these negotiations broke down in the spring of 1920, when the Poles launched a new offensive. Largely supplied by the Allies, and having signed a pact with Petliura, Pilsudski led a combined force of Poles and Ukrainian nationalists in a mad dash towards Kiev, then held very tenuously by the Bolsheviks. It was a desperate bid to transform the Ukraine into a Polish satellite state. The roots of this adventure went back to the previous winter, when Petliura, forced out of the Ukraine by the Reds, had settled in Warsaw and signed a pact with Pilsudski. By this agreement Petliura’s Ukrainian nationalist forces would help the Poles to re-invade the Ukraine and, once they were reinstalled in power in Kiev, would cede to Poland the western Ukraine. It was in effect a Polish Brest-Litovsk. The Poles advanced swiftly towards Kiev, whilst the Reds, who were also facing the Whites in the south, broke up in confusion. On 6 May the Poles took Kiev without much resistance. It was less an invasion than a parade. The residents of Kiev watched their new rulers march into the city with apparent indifference. This, after all, was the eleventh time that Kiev had been occupied since 1917 — and it was not to be the last.fn10
For Russian patriots like Brusilov the capture of Kiev by the Poles was nothing less than a national disaster. This was not just any other city but the birthplace of Russian civilization. It was inconceivable that the Ukraine — ‘Little Russia’ — should be anything but Orthodox. Brusilov’s ancestors in the eighteenth century had given up their lives defending the Ukraine against the Poles, and as a result the Brusilovs had been given large amounts of land there. Having spent the war and millions of Russian lives defending the western Ukraine from the Austrians, Brusilov was damned if he would now let it pass to the Poles without a fight. He thought it was ‘inexcusable that Wrangel should attack Russia at this moment’, even more so since the Whites had clearly planned their attack to coincide with that of the Poles. The Whites were placing their own class interests above those of the Russian Empire — something Brusilov had refused to do. On 1 May he wrote to N. I. Rattel, a Major-General in the imperial army and now Trotsky’s Chief of Staff, offering to help the Reds against the Poles. ‘It seems to me’, he wrote, ‘that the most important task is to engender a sense of popular patriotism.’ The war against Poland, in his view, could only be won ‘under the Russian national flag’, since only this could unite the whole Russian people:
