Latvia & Russia: One problem of the world-peace considered

LATVIA & RUSSIA ONE PROBLEM OF THE WORLD-PEACE CONSIDERED BY ARVED BERG ( Member of the National Council of Latvia )
1920 LONDON AND TORONTO J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
Map of Lines of Communication of LATVIA
LATVIA AND RUSSIA The World-Peace and the Civil War in Russia
No world-peace is possible before peace in Russia is re-established! Indeed, how can we talk of universal peace when 180 million men are still in the throes of a most disastrous and terrible war, a war which leads, not to victory, but to annihilation?
There will be no peace in the world if there is no peace in Russia, for the boiling lava in eruption may well submerge the whole of Europe at any moment. That is why the Paris Conference will remain powerless if it cannot terminate the civil war in Russia. All that the Conference has done and is doing at the present time will be brought to nothing and will be a waste of time unless a normal and peaceful state of things is established in Eastern Europe. Until the Peace Conference has settled these questions, humanity will continue to be overshadowed by the menace of such a catastrophe that the disasters of the four years of war will appear in comparison as mere child’s play.
The Peace Conference finds itself facing the Russian sphinx, whose problems a mind of western culture can neither comprehend nor solve.
The agglomeration of heterogeneous peoples in Russia leaves the ragged Hapsburg empire far behind. In Russia you have the complicated psychology of the Oriental, barely intelligible to his western brother. You have also the tangled economic questions and the centuries-old crimes of corrupt governments, the devastation of a world-war, and still more the material and moral destruction brought about by the awakening instincts of the half-barbaric masses which call themselves Bolsheviki. And all this is intermingling and boiling over in an indescribable chaos which even the liveliest imagination could not conceive.