388 GRANICE
The Lithuanians, in particular, must often have shaken their heads in dismay.
In the inter-war period, their sorry obsession with the question of Wilno (in
which hardly any Lithuanians were then living) precipitated not merely the
breach with the Polish government, but more seriously the rupture of plans to
establish a defensive bloc of border nations.^30 Furthermore, it drove them into
their dubious political alignment with the Soviets. The promise of Wilno was
the bait which drew the Lithuanians into the Soviet trap. The sad results were
seen in 1939-40. Soviet approval for the transfer of Wilno to Lithuania served
merely as a prelude to the entry of the Red Army in June 1940, and the violent
death of Lithuanian independence. To a certain extent, all the East European
nations were guilty of pursuing narrow selfish aims at the cost of good neigh-
bourliness and common security; but the Lithuanians were a classic case. They
escaped from the sizzling Polish frying-pan only to jump with both feet into the
raging Soviet fire.^31
The Byelorussians had less chance than the Lithuanians to influence their fate.
Their independent national republic (BNR) in Minsk lasted a mere nine months,
from March to December 1918. Overrun first by the Red Army and then by the
Polish Army, it was partitioned between the Soviets and the Poles at the Treaty
of Riga. The native intelligentsia was liquidated by Stalin. In 1939, the reunion
of the western and eastern partitions in a reconstituted Byelorussian SSR was
accompanied by the descent of the Red Army 'like a plague of locusts' and by
massive purges. In the opinion of one of Byelorussia's few independent histori-
ans, any comparison between Polish and Soviet policies towards Byelorussia
must be clearly unfavourable to the Soviet regime.^32
The Ukrainians, who once stood to gain most from a proper understanding
with the Poles, had most to regret. Like the Lithuanians, they demanded all their
national rights in full and at once, and ended up with virtually nothing. The
Ukrainian national movement with its slogan of 'Ukraine for the Ukrainians',
took an inflexible and uncompromising stand on the territorial issue. In this, it
closely resembled the equivalent position of Dmowski's National Democrats
within the Polish camp, whom it was bound to meet in head-on collision. In the
brief era of Ukrainian independence from 1918 to 1921, there was no significant
group to match Pilsudski's Polish federalists, or even the milder Polish conserv-
atives. The Ukrainians could not agree with the Polish nationalists because of
conflicting and mutually exclusive territorial claims; nor with the Polish feder-
alists, because of ancient resentments deriving from the feudal regime of the old
Rzeczpospolita; nor with the Polish conservatives, because of their recent expe-
riences in Galicia. As a result, they were left to fight against their principal
Russian adversaries, both Reds and Whites, in isolation.^33 Their unilateral
seizure of Lemberg, in November 1918, at a time when only a small Ukranianian
miority was living in the city, led to a nine-month war with the Polish Army, and
to the loss of Western Ukraine to Poland.^34 Their recovery of Kiev in May 1920,
in consequence of Ataman Petlura's improvised treaty with Pitsudski, was
undertaken too late to prevent the counter-mobilization of irresistible Bolshevik