Building a Nation Through Imagining the Enemy: Soviet Russia in Polish Public Culture during the Polish-Bolshevik War (1919-1921)

The aim of the work was to analyze the specificity of the image of the actual Polish nation and Soviet Russia in anti-Bolshevik films of 1919-1921. To do this, firstly, the prerequisites and results of the war were reconstructed, indicating a multiplicity of historical assessments. Secondly, internal social contradictions are indicated, first of all ethnic and confessional. And, thirdly, the selected sources were analyzed (Polish films and newspaper articles devoted to them) taking into account the multiplicity of images of Poles and Russians. The work resulted in the coverage of the multifaceted model of Polish society at the beginning of the interwar period, where by 1921 the influence of the socialist party and, in particular, Jozef Pilsudski, became predominant. The relevance of the work lies in the weak coverage of the Polish-Bolshevik war in historiography, as well as in the predominant consideration of selected films exclusively in the propaganda key, without regard to stylistic, symbolic details and the influence of the context of their creation. The study is a contribution to the history of Polish cinema, the history of Polish-Russian relations, as well as the study of nationalism.