It is doubtful that the Russian Political Conference and Admiral Koltchak are agreed. M. A. N. Briantchaninoff, the Chairman of the Slav Congress in Moscow and of the Russian National Committee in London, talks openly of the unheard-of inability of the Lvov-Kerensky and Co. government (Daily Telegraph, 24th May, 1919). And the All-Russian Constituent Assembly of the 5th January, 1918, under the famous presidency of M. V. Tchernoff, which included Messrs. Lenin and Trotsky? But M. Gregory Schreider proves that the members of the Constituent Assembly of 5th January, 1918, were shot by order of Admiral Koltchak (Daily Telegraph, 28th May, 1919). Koltchak would perhaps like to continue in the same way. In any case, before taking up the case of Latvia, the Constituent Assembly would have to decide the question of summoning Admiral Koltchak to judgment; and that might take up much time, considering the complexity of the question and the bias of the representatives of the Russian people, entailing debates of indefinite length. Consequently, whoever the candidate may be whose power will be recognised as expressing the free will of the Russian people, one may be quite confident that a violent struggle will ensue against him. For, to talk of free expression of the will of the people, either with or without the assistance of a foreign commission, in a country devastated by war and corrupted by Bolshevism, is naturally inadmissible until the most elementary order is established and the billows of political passion have subsided. And thus years will pass by, during which the question of the countries detached from Russia will remain without solution.
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.
A Definite and Immediate Solution of the Question of Latvia is necessary
The question of the formation of a State for the Lettish people must be settled definitely and as soon as possible. The Lettish people can claim it as a right, for it finds itself in the first rank of the peoples who have suffered from the war. The interests of the other nations also require it, for they will feel the greater security the fewer undecided questions there are, the fewer centres of trouble and disorder.
The definite solution can be arrived at in two ways: either by the reconstitution of Russia in her former boundaries, excluding perhaps Poland, which would find its ethnographic frontiers again, and that is the proposal of the Russian Political Conference, of M. A. Mandelstam, and other people and institutions pretending to represent the Russian people; or by the absolute recognition of the independence of the peoples which have separated themselves from Russia, and that is what their representatives are working for.
The Reconstitution of Russia
However, M. A. Mandelstam, the literary idealist of the Russian Political Conference, declares, in his Memorandum on the Delimitation of the Rights of States and Nations (Paris, 1919), that the interests of the countries detached from Russia, their right to free development of their economic and intellectual culture, will be guaranteed and can only be guaranteed by their reunion with Russia. This reunion, he adds, is necessary not only in the interests of Russia, but also in the interests of these same countries.