the meantime, however, the Russian Provisional Government's obvious weakness, its half-hearted declaration of the right of nations to self-determination and Germany's promises of autonomy in occupied Poland stirred up long suppressed nationalist feelings among ethnic Poles living within the Russian Empire. Roughly 700,000 of them were serving in the Russian military by 1917 and they began forming a Polish army to fight for a "united and free Poland" with the assent of the Provisional Government. In August, the newly formed Main Polish Military Executive Committee appointed Dowbor-Muśnicki Commissar of the Petrograd Military District and on August 23 (Old Style) he was appointed commander of the newly formed Polish 1st Corps in Russia. The reorganization process was complicated by the October Revolution of 1917, which brought Bolsheviks to power, but Dowbor-Muśnicki was able to take advantage of the new government's weakness and general anarchy to form 3 divisions in Belarus by January 1918. Against the Bolsheviks (1918) On , Dowbor-Muśnicki refused an order by the Soviet government to disband the Corps, which quickly led to clashes with the newly formed Red Army and Red Latvian riflemen under Jukums Vācietis. After sporadic fighting in late January, on January 31 Dowbor-Muśnicki's Corps had to retreat to Bobruisk and Slutsk, where he was surrounded by German forces. After the temporary breakdown of the Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations on February 10, Dowbor-Muśnicki joined the German offensive against the Bolsheviks on February 18 and took Minsk. After the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty, which gave all of Poland and Belarus to Germany, Dowbor-Muśnicki's corps remained in Belarus for 3 months, regrouping and performing police duties under German occupation authorities. In May 1918, Dowbor-Muśnicki was forced to sign an agreement with Germany that led to the disarmament and effective dissolution of the Corps by July 1918, at which point he moved to Poland. The agreement was criticized by some pro-independence Polish politicians, but it preserved the core of the Polish military, which proved decisive later that year. Against the Germans After the armistice that ended World War I in November 1918, Dowbor-Muśnicki helped organize a new Polish army around the disbanded 1st Corps and its officers. On January 6, 1919 he was nominated by the Supreme People's Council, the temporary ruling body of the province of Greater Poland, as the new commanding officer of all the Polish forces in the area. Two days later he arrived to