Józef Piłsudski, Polish commander-in-chief, determined that regaining control of Vilnius, whose population consisted mostly of Poles and Jews, should be a priority of the renascent Polish state. During the month and a half that the Lit-Bel controlled the city, the new communist government turned Vilnius into a social experiment, testing various applications of left-leaning governmental systems on the city's inhabitants. The Lit-Bel became the 8th government to control Vilnius in two years. Vilnius, the historical capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, became part of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic and was soon proclaimed capital of the short-lived Lithuanian–Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (Lit-Bel) on February 27, 1919. Four days later January 5, 1919, the Polish forces were forced to make a hasty retreat when the Russian Western Army marched in from Smolensk to support the local communists as part of the Soviet westward offensive. Samoobrona rule of Vilnius did not last long. Their aim was to defeat the pro- communist Vilna Soviet of Workers Deputies, a rival faction within Vilnius seeking to govern the city. On January 1, Polish officers, led by generals Władysław Wejtko and Stefan Mokrzecki, attempted to take control of the city by establishing a Samoobrona ("Self-Defense") provisional government. It promptly became the scene of struggles among competing political groups and experienced several internal revolutions. In the first weeks of 1919, following the retreat of the German Ober-Ost forces under Max Hoffmann, Vilnius found itself in a power vacuum. Piłsudski discerned an opportunity for regaining territories that were once the part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and now belonged to the Russian Empire, which was shaken by the 1917 Revolution, the ongoing Russian Civil War, and the Central Powers' offensive. Józef Piłsudski envisioned a revived Commonwealth in the form of a multinational federation consisting of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and perhaps Latvia – a plan which was in direct conflict with the Lithuanian wishes of creating the independent Republic of Lithuania. However, by 1919, this concept of Polish borders was already considered unrealistic and was used by Polish politicians merely for tactical purposes during the Versailles Conference. Throughout the 19th century, Poles saw the boundaries of their territories as lying much farther east and sought to reestablish the 1772 borders of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Soviet Russia, while at the time publicly supporting Polish and Lithuanian independence, sponsored communist agitators working against the government of the Second Polish Republic, and considered that the Polish eastern borders should approximate those of the defunct Congress Poland. In the aftermath, the Vilna offensive would cause much turmoil on the political scene in Poland and abroad. The Soviets briefly recaptured the city a year later, in spring 1920, when the Polish army was retreating along the entire front. The Red Army launched a series of counterattacks in late April, all of which ended in failure. During the offensive, the Poles also succeeded in securing the nearby cities of Lida, Pinsk, Navahrudak, and Baranovichi. After three days of street fighting from April 19–21, the city was captured by Polish forces, causing the Red Army to retreat. The Polish army launched an offensive on April 16, 1919, to take Vilnius ( Polish: Wilno) from the Red Army. The Vilna offensive was a campaign of the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921. Polish–Soviet & Lithuanian–Soviet Wars in 1919: Polish & Lithuanian counterattacks.
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