4th Rifle Division (Poland)

The Polish 4th Rifle Division (Polish: 4. Dywizja Strzelców Polskich) was a Polish military unit, forming, together with the Polish 5th Rifle Division of the Blue Army, the only part of the Polish military which took part in the Russian Civil War. Under the command of General Lucjan Żeligowski, it operated as an ally of the White movement from autumn 1918 to August 1919 in southern Russia and Bessarabia.

The 4th Rifle Division could trace its origins to the Polish 2nd Corps in Russia. The 2nd Corps was formed from various Polish units, but primarily the 2nd Brigade of the Polish Legions in World War I, which rebelled against the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and decided to join the newly-forming Polish army and help secure the territories inhabited by the Poles in the Kresy region. The Polish 5th Rifle Division found itself fighting in the northern territories of the former Russian Empire; the 4th, in its southern regions.

The ever-changing and chaotic currents of the Russian Civil War, coupled with the weak chain of command of the newly reborn Polish Army, meant that the local commanders had much autonomy; thus the 2nd Corps found it most useful to ally itself with the forces of the White movement, even though Polish commander-in-chief Józef Piłsudski declined to support the Whites with any other units after he had established firm control over the Polish forces in 1919. Nonetheless this meant that the soldiers of the 2nd Corps were fighting the Bolsheviks and their Red Army even before the Polish-Soviet War began in 1919.

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