1919 Парис буюу дэлхийг өөрчилсан 6 сар 1-р хэсэг

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.”140 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 down. The Russian Revolution sometimes provided encouragement—and a vocabulary.

“Bolshevism is having its day,” wrote Borden in his diary, but he was talking about labor unrest, not revolution. “Bolshevism” (or its