Victory has compelling power. It grants the victor a monopoly on the truth, telling the defeated to look for those guilty of failure. The winners receive the glory of yesterday without obligation to reflect on tomorrow. Poland, triumphant in the war with the Bolsheviks, could not enjoy such luxury. Polish victory contained a bitter note of menace. Piłsudski undertook the Kiev campaign believing that there was no free Poland without an independent Ukraine. The forces of the young state proved sufficient to defend and strengthen its own independence, but they were not enough to achieve the strategic goal of the campaign - the consolidation of an independent Ukrainian state. When the Polish soldier put an end to the Soviet plans to wholesale export of the revolution on a European scale, Stalin decided that its smuggling across the border was not the worst substitute. The long Polish-Russian border has become a place of confrontation of different concepts of man, state and actually - everything. When Henry Stimson, taking over as U.S. Secretary of State, was closing in 1929 the “Black Cabinet”, which had been providing significant services to the country's politics to date, he stated that "Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen’s mail". Poland could not respect this principle, largely due to a deficit of gentlemen in the region.