The Soviet Union and Versailles

It may be a mistake to refer to Versailles and the other treaties made in Paris in 1919 as a “peace settlement.” The real legacy of Versailles was neither peace nor settlement, but rather “a seventy-year crisis” - marked by a continuing European civil war, the rise of communism and fascism as international movements, inflation, depression, the breakdown of the world economy, and a second world war yielding a divided Germany, an occupied eastern Europe, and an international system of bipolar tensions ending only in 1989. The most persistent elements of that crisis were “the German problem” and “the East-West conflict,” the seventy years of antagonism between Soviet Russia and the powers that wrote the Versailles treaty. The purpose of this chapter is to reexamine the beginnings of that antagonism - and perhaps to find in those beginnings some indication of why a conflict that ended so quickly lasted so long. It is an effort to look beyond the story of the civil war fought at the time of the Paris peace conference for an answer to this question. The first step is to examine the place of Soviet Russia in “the new world order” that emerged from the great international upheaval that began with the guns of August 1914 and ended with the preliminary treaty of Riga terminating the Soviet-Polish War almost exactly six years later.

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