At the peace conference which followed, the established nations of the West took it upon themselves to help re-draw the borders of the region according to what, at the time, were held to be rational principles. Peoples with sufficient national consciousness were to be recognised; those without were to be incorporated into others. Rules were drawn up, plebiscites held, exceptions made for history or expedience.
But in the end, borders in the borderlands were drawn by force. During the five-year course of the Russian civil war, no less than eleven armies — from the forces of the independent Ukrainian Republic to the White Russians to the Bolsheviks to the Poles — fought for possession of Ukraine. During the 1919–1920 war between newly independent Poland and newly established Soviet Russia, a million men marched back and forth across a thousand miles of territory, and at the final battle — the last grand cavalry battle in European history — 20 000 horseman charged back and forth at one another, sabres flashing.
The borders which emerged from the battles and the negotiations hardly satisfied anyone. The Germans disliked the strip of Poland which lay between East Prussia and Germany proper; the Lithuanians were furious that the Poles had claimed Wilno, their Vilnius. The Ukrainians still wanted their own state, and a handful of Belarusians felt the same way. Some of these grievances helped fuel the Second World War: territorial ambitions led Germany to invade first Czechoslovakia, then Poland. Rather than banding together to fight Germany, Poles, Lithuanians and Ukrainians quarreled and argued throughout the 1930's, and failed to come to one another's assistance during the war itself.