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during the partition period (1772-1919) with additionalcontempt, hatred, and fear of the Russian autocracy,after 1815 in possession of the solidly Polish centralVistula lands. When the Revolution replaced theRussian empire by the Soviet Union these feelingswere transmuted into the idea of the new independentPoland as the upholder of civilization against the newbarbarism of Bolshevism. The Bolshevik challenge ofclass revolution and interpretation of self-determinationseemed to deny the independence even of ethnographicPoland and to make her eastern lands a strategicalnecessity even apart from other grounds.The result of this combination of fear, pride, and hopewas the Polish-Soviet war of 1920, begun by Pilsudski,himself from the eastern lands and always a fighteragainst all things Russian, when the Bolsheviks were inthe trough of the Civil War, though they had just beatenKolchak in the east and Denikin in the south. Thewar brought the Poles to Kiev, then their defeat andheadlong retreat; the Bolsheviks to the gates of Warsaw,then in turn their defeat and headlong retreat. Apeace treaty was finally concluded in March 1921, butthe war inevitably had deepened the antagonisms betweenthe two countries. Poland, if no longer a spearhead,was to be the centre of a cordon sanitaire againstBolshevism, the consolidation of which in the new SovietUnion it had proved impossible to prevent, doublysuspect to Poles as Communist and as Russian. Tothe Soviet regime Poland was equally suspect both onsocial, national, and historic grounds and as the ally ofFrance and, in general, of the counter-revolutionaryWest. Nor were there any economic connexions whichmight cut strands in the barbed-wire barrier betweenthe two countries.Russia and Germany, the two great losers of the FirstWorld War, the two historic enemies of the Poles, stoodon either side of the Poland that had been restored solargely at their expense, again as in the past a compositestate, with at the least one-third of her subjectsUkrainians, White Russians, Germans, Lithuanians, orJews. For fifteen years they had been weak: by 1934