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By Root 784 0

uprisings, a cycle of atrocities, retribution and more atrocities: the last tsar and his family murdered and their bodies thrown down a well; the mutilated body of a British naval attaché lying unburied on a St. Petersburg street. Russian soldiers had shot their officers, and sailors had commandeered their ships. Across the huge Russian countryside, peasants, driven by an ancient hunger for land, were killing their landlords. In the cities, teenagers swaggered with guns and the poor crept out of their slums to occupy the great mansions. It was hard to tell how much was true (most of it was) because Russia had become an unknown land. The new regime was under a virtual blockade. The powers had cut off trade with the Bolsheviks and had withdrawn their diplomats by the summer of 1918. Almost all foreign newspaper correspondents had gone by the start of 1919. The land routes were cut by fighting. Telegrams took days or weeks, if they got through at all. By the time the Peace Conference assembled, the only sure conduit for messages was through Stockholm, where the Bolsheviks had a representative. During the conference, the peacemakers knew as much about Russia as they did about the far side of the moon.2 As Lloyd George put it: “We were, in fact, never dealing with ascertained, or perhaps, even ascertainable facts. Russia was a jungle in which no one could say what was within a few yards of him.”3 His shaky grasp of geography did not help him; he thought Kharkov (a city in the Ukraine) was the name of a Russian general.

Legally, perhaps, there was no need to invite Russian representatives. That was Clemenceau’s view: Russia had betrayed the Allied cause, leaving France to the mercy of the Germans.4 The Bolshevik leader, Lenin, at once a realist and a fanatic, had given away land and resources to Germany at Brest-Litovsk (today Brest in Poland) in return for peace so that he could conserve the vital spark from which the Marxist millennium would come. Germany gained access to the materials it so desperately needed and the chance to switch hundreds of thousands of its troops to the Western Front. Lenin’s action, certainly for Clemenceau, released the Allies from all their promises to Russia, including the promise of access to the vital straits leading from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.

On the other hand, Russia was technically still an Ally and still at war with Germany. After all, the Germans had been obliged to renounce the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the peace treaty they had signed with Russia, when they made their own armistice in November 1918. In any case, Russia’s absence was inconvenient. “In the discussions,” wrote a young British adviser in his diary, “everything inevitably leads up to Russia. Then there is a discursive discussion; it is agreed that the point at issue cannot be determined until the general policy towards Russia has been settled; having agreed to this, instead of settling it, they pass on to some other subject.”5 Finland, the emerging Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Poland, Rumania, Turkey and Persia all came up at the Peace Conference, but their borders could not finally be set until the future shape and status of Russia were clear.

The issue of Russia came up repeatedly during the Peace Conference. Baker, later an apologist for Wilson, claimed that Russia and the fear of Bolshevism shaped the peace. “Russia,” he cried, “played a more vital part at Paris than Prussia!” This, like much of what he has to say, is nonsense. The peacemakers were far more concerned with making peace with a still intact Germany and with getting Europe back onto a peacetime footing. They worried about Russia just as they worried about social unrest closer to home, but they did not necessarily see the two as sides of the same coin. Destroying the Bolsheviks in Russia would not magically remove the causes of unrest elsewhere. German workers and soldiers seized power because the kaiser’s regime was discredited and bankrupt. Austria-Hungary collapsed because it could no longer keep itself afloat and its nationalities