A pig trained in Paris. 1920

Artist: Victor Deni

On the poster  “A Pig Trained in Paris” we can see a French general embracing a jasnowielmożny pan (a noble gentleman) depicted as a pig wearing a Polish confederate cap. The pig holds a scroll with a date – 1772 – the year when the partition of Poland began.

On November 11, 1918 (the day the armistice was signed between Germany and the Allied countries), a state called Poland reappeared on the map of Europe. The borders of the reborn Poland were established at Versailles in 1919 — the new country received a large portion of German lands and was granted access to the sea (again, at Germany’s expense). While in the West, Poland had to negotiate its borders with the victorious powers of the recently concluded world war, in the East it could try to resolve territorial issues on its own.

Poland’s new rulers decided to recreate the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth within the borders of 1772. In 1919, this prospect did not please Soviet Russia – the country was in the midst of a Civil War, and this opened up yet another front and brought in another participant.

In the course of the war, known in history as the Soviet- Polish War, Poland was well-fed and armed to the teeth by the Entente powers (or, in today’s terms, NATO) – managed to reach as far as Kyiv, from where it was swiftly thrown back by the bloodied and starving Red Army, despite the fact that well-armed White troops under Wrangel were stationed in Crimea at the time. It’s worth noting that the “Reds” were halted and pushed back by the Poles only near Warsaw.

After the Red Army’s defeat near Warsaw, the Treaty of Riga was signed (on March 18, 1921), according to which Western Belarus and Western Ukraine became part of Poland. The Poles failed to create a “Greater Poland from sea to sea,” but the Reds also failed in their march “through the corpse of White Poland to a global blaze.”