Kwestia polsko-czechosłowackiej współpracy wojskowej w Rosji (listopad 1917 – styczeń 1918). Koncepcje Tomáša G. Masaryka
The problem of Polish-Czechoslovak military cooperation in Russia (November 1917 – January 1918). Tomaš G. Masaryk’s ideas

Summary/Abstract: By the end of 1917, the leader of the Czechoslovak independence movement Tomaš G. Masaryk was keeping a close eye on the organisational development of the Polish corps in Russia. He had numerous talks with Polish politicians on military cooperation. In November 1917 there was in Kiev a Polish-Czechoslovak meeting during which the talks about cooperation were held. The main point of the meeting was the form of contacts between institutions and organisations of the two countries in Russia. A possible joint action of the forming Polish and Czechoslovak military formation was also brought up. During the talks Poland informed the Czechoslovak delegates that at that stage of developments the main demand of the Polish party was – apart from a collective declaration of the Entente states on the creation of the independent Polish state as their war aim – to obtain the approval of the Russian government for the formation of a Polish Army in Russia. After the Bolshevik coup, when the security of the Czechoslovak Corps was increasingly threatened, Masaryk tried to persuade the Polish leaders and General Eugene de Henning Michaelis who at that time was the inspector of the Polish military forces in Ukraine and Romania, to concentrate the Polish troops in the vicinity of the Czechoslovak forces. This was to increase security of the forming Polish corps and the Czechoslovak one. Also most of Czechoslovak commanders and members of the Czech and Slovak POW’s organisations were of the opinion that closer military cooperation was desirable. But, in the face of increasingly frequent conflicts between the Polish and Ukrainian units, and actions of the Polish troops defending the Polish property in Ukraine, Masaryk began to distance himself from closer cooperation with Poles, as he feared that the Czechoslovak troops could be accidentally involved in fights between Poles and Ukrainians or Bolsheviks. His fears prevented him from pursuing closer Polish-Czechoslovak cooperation in Ukraine at the end of 1917.

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