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 Paris Conference faced by the Russian Sphinx
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.
The Representatives of Russia
There is no lack of amateurs ready to solve the riddle of the Russian sphinx. Each government represented at the Peace Conference possesses its own point of view on the Russian question; each political party, each organ of the Press has its own remedy for saving Russia. Nor is that all, for there are Orientals who have come to plead on behalf of their Fatherland before the world’s Forum. Russia teems with people and opinions, so each group of the crowd assembled in Paris brings forward a programme of salvation. There is the Russian Political Conference, consisting of Sazonoff, Tzarist ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs; the prince Lvoff, ex-Premier; Tchaikovsky, President of the North Russian Government, and Maklakoff, ex-Ambassador of Russia under the Provisional Government. This Conference has a theorist, an ex-director of the Juridical Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia under the Provisional Government, M. André Mandelstam, who has published a series of pamphlets in which he sets forth the theoretical and practical bases of the views of the Russian Political Conference. Outside this Conference, Kerensky, ex-Premier, is busying himself; and with him, Avksentieff, Zenzinoff, Argounoff, Rogovsky, Minor, Sokoloff, Slonin, all members of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly. We find also the Paris Section for the Regeneration of Russia and the Russian Republican League. Add to these the representatives of the government of Admiral Koltchak and of General Denikin. From the South of Russia comes Schreider, ex-mayor of Petrograd, at present the president of the “Committee of the South,” who was compelled to leave the four other members of his delegation behind on the Prinkipo island. Finally, to close the name-list, there is A. N. Briantchaninoff, “Chairman of the Slav Congress in Moscow and of the Russian National Committee in London.” In the Pages Modernes are collaborating Savinkoff, L. Andreeff, Strouve, etc. Briefly, the Russian chaos is completely enough represented, and the plans of salvation are not lacking.
Relations Between Russia and the Borderland Peoples
The problems which the following pages deal with are somewhat more modest in comparison with the Russian imbroglio. They are those concerning the so-called “borderland peoples of Russia,” i.e., nationalities which have for a long time suffered under the Russian domination, which have been relegated to second and third class, and which, quite tired of this intolerable position, are looking for a better lot and greater possibility of development in an independent national life, by means of separation from Russia.
They have formed, for that purpose, a series of small independent States desirous of getting their independence recognised by the Peace Conference, which, in solving the riddle of the Russian sphinx, will have to pronounce the decisive word on this question. Every one, be he Russian or a representative of the nationalities, is trying to solve this question in accordance with his point of view. The aim of the following pages is to elucidate it from the point of view of Latvia.[1]