If You’re a Pole, Grab Your Bayonet! Propaganda From the Time of the Polish-Bolshevik War

komu_sluzysz_zolnierzu_polona.jpg, default, ‘Whom do you serve, soldier bearing the emblem of the white eagle’ (Komu służysz, żołnierzu z pod znaku orła białego), Zachodnia Dywizja Strzelców Pol, center, #000000

#photography & visual arts

The dust of World War I had barely settled when the citizens of the newly born Second Polish Republic had to take up arms in the war against the Soviets. It turned out to be a test not only of the military but also of the propaganda power of the young state.

From the ballroom to the front

Thumbnail — ‘Help!’ (Na pomoc!), Polish poster, 1920, photo: pamiecpolski.archiwa.gov.pl

The Polish poster was essentially born only a few decades before the war with Soviet Russia, at the end of the 19th century in Galicia [then under Austro-Hungarian rule, ed], where, unlike the Russian and Prussian partitions, the political climate was liberal enough for the art of the Polish-language poster to flourish without major obstacles. In Kraków during the Young Poland period, posters announcing exhibitions and balls were designed on the margins of painting activity by artists such as Józef Mehoffer and Wojciech Weiss.

In reborn Poland after the end of the Great War, Polish poster art gains momentum, but this wind of change is now blowing from a completely different direction – invitations to exhibitions and balls are being replaced by dynamically developing propaganda. At the same time, the centre of gravity shifts from Kraków to Warsaw, and the Department of Hand Drawing is established at Warsaw’s University of Technology by Edmund Bartłomiejczyk, a dynamic poster artist whose designs, however, remain quite archaic in form and ponderous, using an excess of realistic detail straight from book illustrations and a narrow colour range.

Despite the rather archaic language, Bartłomiejczyk managed to design one of the most famous posters from the period of the Polish-Bolshevik war. Above the slogan ‘Na pomoc! Wszystko dla frontu! Wszyscy na front!’ (Help! Everything for the front! Everyone to the front!), we see a pair of Polish soldiers expending great effort to hold up a barrier, behind which invaders with deathly pale skull-like faces swarm, holding a red banner with a black star, although one that is not in the form of a Red Army star but a pentagram. The image, reminiscent of stills from films about the zombie apocalypse, uses the characteristic rhetorical devices of the propaganda of the time, presenting the enemy as a horde of inhuman monsters destroying all that’s holy, although compared to some projects from 1919–20, it is still quite tame.

All the heads of the red hydra

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‘His program’ (Jego program), Polish poster, 1920, photo: Biblioteka Narodowa Polona

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The young state spared no resources on propaganda campaigns to mobilize the fight against the Soviets – a number of institutions were established, such as Oddział II Informacyjno-Prasowy Generalnego Inspektoratu Armii Ochotniczej (2nd Information and Press Department of the General Inspectorate of the Volunteer Army), Biuro Propagandy Wewnętrznej (Internal Propaganda Office) and Centralny Komitet Propagandy (Central Propaganda Committee). Leading artists were also involved in propaganda work, although the authorship of most posters from this period is a mystery to us today. However, there was also the other side of the coin: chaos resulting from dispersion, which was completely different from the centrally coordinated Bolshevik propaganda. In the face of this lack of coherence and coordination in propaganda creation, posters printed without prior approval were sometimes put up on the streets and then ordered to be removed.

In 1919, Towarzystwo Straży Kresowej (Border Guard Association) reported from the east of the country, where the fighting was taking place:

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The borderlands are flooded with Bolshevik literature. Communist agitation uses brochures, proclamations, newspapers and posters. The latter particularly, being colourful and appropriately signed, clearly appeal to the primitive peasant psyche.

The rhetoric of this alarming report reflects the actual difference between Polish and Soviet propaganda around 1920 – although both sides did not shy away from brutal bluntness and demonization of the enemy, they pointed their blades in slightly different directions. On the Polish side, the creators of poster propaganda competed with each other in giving their enemies horrible faces, appealing to a whole range of fears. Fears of an anti-Christian front were fuelled by images of Trotsky the devil, fear of ‘eastern barbarism’ by depictions of Red Army soldiers with Asian or anti-Semitically suggestive, caricatured features. And when this was not enough, the Bolsheviks turned into quasi-mythological monsters, red hydras or horses with several heads furiously foaming at the mouth. As Karol Irzykowski wrote in Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny (Illustrated Daily Currier):

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For the Polish soldier, a Bolshevik is not a representative of some new social order, or rather, disorder […] – for him a Bolshevik is an inferior species of man, something close to an ape.

The Soviet side responded to this daring visual cannonade with much more precise sniper shots fuelled by class fear – the Polish soldier took the form of a fat, lazy and brutal nobleman with a bloated, red and moustached face, wearing a Sarmatian robe or an uhlan uniform. Marshal Piłsudski was also willingly caricatured in a similar way, although, of course, he appears paradoxically much more often, as a villain, in Soviet propaganda than in Polish propaganda. This regularity has a mirror image when it comes to depictions of Trotsky, who almost never appeared in Soviet propaganda, but Poles eagerly portrayed him as a monster.

Whom do you serve, soldier bearing the emblem of the white eagle?

Not all Poles were subjected to caricature in Bolshevik propaganda – peasants and workers were being persuaded to support the Soviet side, invoking class tensions and encouraging them to point their bayonets not at the Red Army but at their Polish masters. The Western Rifle Division of the Red Army, composed of Poles, also addressed Polish soldiers in its propaganda, this time casting the Western powers in the role of the villain:

Poland must be defended. But not from us but from them, from the international capitalist gang that rules Poland today, from this government that is a humble servant of capital. By fighting against us, you are betraying your own cause, soldier, you are betraying the Polish working people. Shake off this yoke, wash away this shame! Join us!

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ROSTA anti-Polish propaganda poster by Vladimir Mayakovsky, May 1920, photo: Wikimedia Commons

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On the eastern border, where the demarcation lines between the Polish, Belarusian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian peasants were determined not so much by a sense of national belonging as by religion and language, such targeted propaganda – only a few dozen years after the abolition of serfdom – could actually raise considerable concerns. As Stefan Krzywoszewski admitted bitterly in Świat (World):

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Our enemies knew much better than we how to influence public opinion and shape it according to their interests. […] As long as the front was far away, Warsaw was so far removed from experiencing the war that it forgot the urgency of agitating among broad social strata […].

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‘Poles! Help the tormented Polish soldier in battle’ (W bitwach umęczonemu żołnierzowi polskiemu nieście pomoc Polacy) by Felicjan Szczęsny Kowarski, Polish poster, 1919, photo: Biblioteka Narodowa Polona

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On the Soviet side, in addition to unsophisticated caricatures, there was also no shortage of artistically outstanding posters designed by the creators of the constructivist avant-garde, which at that time was still developing freely under state patronage before a socialist-realist course correction was decided upon in the 1930s. Even Vladimir Mayakovsky himself designed avant-garde anti-Polish posters in 1920 (and in exceptionally large numbers – we know of dozens of them today). The Bolsheviks often undoubtedly fared better on the visual front than in military engagements.

Basilica on fire

If the images of hordes of barbarians were insufficient, Polish poster artists also showed the potential consequences of the Bolshevik army’s incursion into the lands of the Vistula River, which could be summarized in three words: conflagration, sacrilege and enslavement. The religious note was played with particular emphasis. In the most unceremonious version, it meant a group of drunken Red Army soldiers looting and destroying the interiors of temples (‘If you don’t want the Bolsheviks to desecrate your churches and murder your priests, join the army as a volunteer!’ [Jeśli chcesz, by bolszewik nie bezcześcił ci kościołów i nie mordował kapłanów, idź do wojska jako ochotnik!]).

In a slightly more subtle and metaphorical version, we see on a poster designed by Franciszek Nieczuja-Urbański the ruins of a Polish village bathed in infernal red, with bodies buried under piles of bricks, and, in the centre of the composition, a small fragment of the wall of a demolished church on which a crucifix with the figure of martyred Jesus remains, who will soon, as it were, die again, licked by the flames of the candles fallen at his feet. In the artistically most interesting version – and the most modern in its expressive conciseness – the same rhetoric is illustrated in a poster by an anonymous artist depicting Kraków’s St Mary’s Basilica in flames. Its black silhouette against the background of the navy-blue sky pierced by fiery bullets is illuminated only by blood-red flames.

‘Soviet freedom’ was also eagerly caricatured, showing the defeated population handcuffed and held at gunpoint. The depictions of the yoked Polish people were also accompanied by slightly more elaborate rhyming captions than elsewhere:

Gee-up! Pull on, drudges!

The lord of Sovdep orders

That you crawl at his feet.

It’s not far to the gates;

For your blood and toil you’ll garner

Brotherhood – in a brotherly grave!

Or:

Comrades! Soon freedom will shine

We’ll give you land and bread

(But in the meantime, dare utter a peep:

A bullet to the head!).

Uncle Haller

Demonizing the enemy in propaganda from the Polish-Soviet war is intertwined with calls to mobilize and reinforce the ranks of the army. On the one hand, you can see in them glimpses of the 19th-century insurrectionist imagination; on the other – more modern conventions from recent times in the Great War. Posters with an almost Grottger-like insurgent iconography include, for example, quotations from Warszawianka 1831 – a patriotic song written during the November Uprising. ‘Hey! If you’re a Pole, grab your bayonet,’ Kamil Mackiewicz called in a poster he designed.

So while on the Soviet side the figures of peasants and workers deal with Polish lords in the name of the internationalist revolution, on the Polish side images of the social cross-class unification of peasants, townspeople, intelligentsia and workers are not based on promises of a new social order but on insurgent sentiment. In the figure of a peasant with an upright scythe depicted by Mackiewicz, history is intertwined with the present in its own way – members of the Samodzielny Batalion Robotników (Independent Battalion of Workers) actually went into battle armed with scythes in 1920, like scythemen during the Kościuszko Uprising over a hundred years earlier.

Remaining within the boundaries of the uprising iconography, posters calling for mobilization rarely depicted heroes leading to the front – even the leader Piłsudski (whose stern, moustached face would look out at citizens from numerous Sanation posters a few years later) appears relatively rarely in the propaganda of 1919–20. One of the exceptions is a poster designed by the outstanding graphic artist Władysław Skoczylas, known for his fascination with and references to highlander woodcuts (also clearly resonating with the convention of highlander folk art), with the image of the marshal as a warrior on a white horse defending a Polish family with his own sabre against a Cossack Red Army soldier.

While the marshal remained a statuesque hero straight from chivalric epics in a few representations, Józef Haller – the frontline commander of the Polish Army in France during the First World War and commander of the Northern Front during the war with the Bolsheviks – was the link between the military elite and citizens encouraged to join the army in a characteristic poster by Stanisław Sawiczewski. ‘Join the army, defend your homeland’ encouraged the caption under the image of the general extending his hand. Sawiczewski’s poster brings to mind the most famous work of the American illustrator James Montgomery Flagg: a poster from 1917 with the image of Uncle Sam, the personification of the USA, calling for enlistment in the ranks of the US Army. However, while the figure of Uncle Sam – his piercing gaze, his finger pointing straight at the viewer and his silhouette clearly visible on a flat white background – was impossible to ignore, Sawiczewski’s poster, three years later, seems slightly less convincing, not only because of the accumulation of distracting background details but also because of the indecision emanating from Haller’s figure – the general is supposed to be turning to the viewer, but in fact he is gazing apathetically and looking slightly to the side, as if avoiding eye contact.

Second war, second life

The victory over the Soviets gave additional impetus to Sanation propaganda – especially on the tenth anniversary of the Battle of Warsaw, coinciding with the so-called Brześć elections: the posters created at that time featured, among others, the image of Piłsudski as a defender of the homeland who stopped the Soviet invasion at Warsaw. And although in the subsequent years of the Second Polish Republic most of the propaganda from the war with the Soviets must have looked somewhat anachronistic compared to the new posters that boldly used solutions close to formalism and expressionism, their rhetoric clearly did not lose its relevance. A grim epilogue to the history of posters from the war with the Soviets was written two decades later by the Nazis.

In the propaganda distributed in the General Government of the Reich, the Nazi occupiers used a wide range of rhetorical means, including a terrifyingly Bolshevik anticlericalism, barbarism and looming enslavement, and were also particularly willing to use ethnic caricatures. In 1944, one of the 1920 posters was even reprinted, showing Trotsky with a revolver and a bloody knife sitting on a mountain of human skulls. Although Trotsky had already been dead for four years at that time after the assassination ordered by Stalin, a poster by an unknown Polish artist appropriated by the occupiers outlived Lev Davidovich himself.

Written in Polish by Piotr Policht, 14 August 2020, updated 13 August 2021

Translated by Michał Abel Pelczar

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