The Lenin—Stalin Telegrams and Budenny’s Failure to Aid Tukhachevsky

Abstract

If any Soviet citizens had been eager for news about the Red Army’s Warsaw operation in mid-August, they would have been hard-pressed to find out much about it from reading their government’s official daily. On 15 August, for instance, although kvestiia published Trotsky’s order of the previous day under the usual banner: ‘Defence of Worker-Peasant Russia’, there were no corresponding items describing developments on the battle-field around Warsaw.³ No more attention was devoted to events on the Polish front than to events on other fronts. The featured articles dealt with an armistice recently signed with Finland, a report by President Kalinin on economic problems facing the re-public, and a long biographical sketch of the deposed Hungarian communist, Bela Kun. If Soviet leaders were preparing to risk total confrontation with the West by occupying Poland’s capital, they were certainly not preparing public opinion in Russia for such an all-out struggle.

‘We have decided in the Politburo that the fronts shall be separated, so that you will deal exclusively with Wranzel.’

— Lenin to Stalin ^l

(2 August)

‘The only bright spot on my horizon was the disappearance of Budenny’s cavalry. . .’

— Pilsudski²