Right of the Russian People to participate in the Solution of the Lettish Question
Outside the purely practical reasons, there is a matter of principle; and looking more closely at the proposal of the Russian Political Conference, one cannot but be amazed by it. By what right do they claim that the question of the Lettish people “cannot be solved without Russian knowledge and consent”? Who made the Lettish people Slaves of the Russians? Who made the Russians guardians of the Letts? President Wilson has declared the equality of nations and their equal right to dispose of themselves. The second paragraph of President Wilson’s message of the 22nd January, 1917, says: “The equality of nations on which peace must be founded in order to be durable, must imply the equality of rights; the exchanged guarantees must neither recognise nor imply a difference between the big nations and the small, between those that are powerful and those that are weak.” In the speech delivered on the 27th September, 1918, Wilson declares: “The impartial justice we want should not make any difference between those in regard to whom we are willing to be just and those in regard to whom we are not willing to be just. It should be a justice not knowing any favouritism, but only the equal rights of the different peoples.” Then, after such clear declarations on the part of President Wilson, can one who declares himself in agreement with this theory and expresses (like the note of the Russian Political Conference) his sympathy with the peoples detached from Russia, can he require the other nations to wait and not proceed with the restoration of their affairs until the Russian people has had the leisure to manifest its opinion? And, after the Lettish people have got rid of Bolshevism at the price of inconceivable efforts and have, with the assistance of the Allies, liberated Latvia from the German armies of occupation, and when they have finally succeeded in restoring their economic and intellectual life, by what right would the Russians, recovering themselves and facing a problematical future, arrogate to themselves the authority to possess and rule a people for the regeneration of which they have not moved a finger? Granted the right of the nations to dispose of themselves, how could the Russian Constituent Assembly or the government of Admiral Koltchak be competent to decide the fate of the Lettish people and yet the Lettish Constituent Assembly or the Peace Conference be incompetent—the latter having already decided the destiny of many races?
To all these painful questions there is only one possible answer: Would not the Russian Political Conference admit that at the bottom of its proposition there shows itself all too clearly a point of view habitual to the old Tzarist régime, according to which the borderland peoples have no other right than to be the object of the dominant nation’s rights? But with such opinions, borrowed from the old Tzarist régime’s domestic habits or home-policy, it would simply not be safe to appear before the Peace Conference, which has proclaimed a just and happy future for all peoples, inaugurating a new era of international justice. Undoubtedly, the Russian Political Conference is cruelly deceived, both in regarding their proposition as “a practical way out of the present situation,” and even in thinking they have given “a real proof of the new spirit of Russia.” In point of fact, there is neither a new spirit nor a practical solution of the question.