ИСТИНА

On his return to Britain in June 1919 after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, D. Lloyd George experienced a sense of triumph, but during his absence the country had changed: economic decline had begun, caused by falling demand amid the European post-war chaos, and the peace conquered on the military and diplomatic battlefields was again threatened. The Soviet-Polish War was an inconvenience to D. Lloyd George, leading to a strategy of avoiding intervention because of the non-permanent character of borders and the difficulty of making decisions about aid. At the conference in Spa in July 1920, D. Lloyd George decided to temporarily retreat from the policy of non-intervention, having realised the impossibility of leaving Poland without military support from the Great Powers. The meeting of Polish Prime Minister W. Grabski with the Allies in Spa allowed D. Lloyd George to regain temporal control of the situation; the establishment of the Interallied Mission in Poland was more a means of subduing Poland than a real instrument of peace settlement in the region, and the clash with the strengthened positions of J. Piłsudski forced him to look for an alternative in decent terms of peace with Soviet Russia. Eventually Lloyd George, forced to choose a side in the controversy between Soviet Russia and Poland, supported the latter, rejecting Soviet armistice terms and favoring military support, which helped him to maintain his own leadership position for another two years.