March 18, 1921. The Peace of Riga

 Belarusian cartoon protesting the Treaty of Riga.

The Treaty of Riga officially settled the conflict between Soviet Russia and Poland.  In doing so, it drew borders through regions that were neither Russian nor Polish.

Ironically, Polish negotiators, fearing growing Soviet power and also fearing the internal strife that the situation was leaving itself with, chose to omit territories that Russia would have ceded to Poland that contained Polish populations. These populations would suffer under Soviet rule.  Some Poles likewise wished to omit Ukrainian territories offered to them and sought to back an independent Ukraine, but in the end regions of Ukraine were annexed and in future years would undergo Polanization.  Territory in Belarus was divided between Soviet Russia and Poland.

The treaty reflected the state of many former imperial regimes.  The Wilsonian concept of national self determination had failed to really appreciate that long existing empires had allowed for ethnic populations to blend on their maps, rather than retain precise territories, something that indeed reflected their pre imperial states.  There was typically a multi ethnic frontier of sorts in which populations of various ethnicities occupied the same territories but did not really mix.  This was very common as to German populations, which had expanded into the Baltic regions and Russia during prior centuries, and it was likewise common with Polish populations, which had expanded into Russia and the Baltics, as well into German regions a bit.  Poland, additionally, had been a major Medieval kingdom which stretched far beyond its 20th Century territorial claims, and at one time had been the largest western European state.

To complicate the matters further, the Poles were a closely related ethnicity to some populations on their borders, and in some periods of the past ethnicities that regarded themselves as distinct had regarded themselves as Polish, even when from very distinct groups.  Nonetheless, coming out of the Russian Revolution almost every culturally distinct group that had territory sought to become independent of Russia and treaties such as this ignored those aspirations. That would have to wait until after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It's easy to look back and criticize treaties such as this, but in reality, the Poles took less than they could have and they had real reason to fear Soviet Russia, as 1939 would prove.  If they'd taken all that they could have, 1939 would probably not have worked out for them, but what that would have meant in terms of the survivability of the Polish state, and the ability to influence things in the Stalinist starvation period of the late 1920s and early 1930s in the Soviet Union, is something at least worth pondering.