In the last year of the World War the Bolshevist movement failed to carry with it Finland, the Baltic provinces, Poland, and Bessarabia. The Ukraine was a battle-field for nearly two years. In this the largest, wealthiest, and most populous of the republics that proclaimed their separation from the empire following the 1917 revolution, the Bolshevists, from the beginning of their rule, managed to keep a close connection with Moscow. The fiction of separate national existence was maintained, and Ukrainia had her own delegations at peace conferences and in whatever dealings Russia had with the outside world. But, as in the Caucasus, the term “Federated Soviet Republics” did not mean real independence. Moscow came more and more to dominate as Petrograd had done in Czarist days. This held true also in Siberia as the Bolshevists gradually won back for Russia the vast regions from Samara to Vladivostok.
Throughout 1919 Soviet Russia was at war with Finns, Esthonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians. The Finns were in a fortunate geographical position, and had behind them a separate national existence which made comparatively easy the formation of their state. The principal difficulty with the Soviets, once the Bolshevist insurrection had failed in the interior of Finland, was the fixing of the frontier. Conditions in the other three Baltic provinces were complicated because there were no historic frontiers, and Lithuanians and Poles were both claiming the district of Vilna, the majority of whose inhabitants were neither Lithuanians nor Poles but White Russians. Also, the Entente Powers tried to use Esthonia and Latvia as bases for fomenting and launching counter-revolutionary movements. Russia would probably have succeeded in Bolshevizing Esthonia and Latvia, and in winning the support of Lithuania, had it not been for the hostility of these Baltic races to Bolshevist economic doctrines and for the failure of the Bolshevist armies to subdue Poland. Moscow concluded treaties with her four former Baltic provinces, recognizing their independence, and concentrated her attention upon Poland.
The one great military disaster of Soviet Russia has been the sudden change from victory to defeat in the drive against Warsaw in the summer of 1920. Polish delegates had already appeared at Minsk to conclude peace upon favorable terms when the fortune of arms changed. The Russian armies were routed, and Moscow changed rôles with Warsaw. The would-be dictators of peace had to accept harsh terms. The Treaty of Riga, signed on October 12, 1920, is discussed elsewhere. It gave Poland a boundary far east of the line proposed at the Paris Conference, which the friends and allies of Poland had so drawn as to include all the territory that might be regarded, on the most liberal calculations, as having “an indisputably Polish ethnic majority.” Poland exacted of Russia fifty-five thousand square miles, inhabited by seven million people, of whom only 4 per cent were Poles. In addition to this loss of territory, the Russians were required to reimburse the Poles with gold for requisitions made during the war and to return to Poland historic treasures, archives, pictures, and manuscripts that had been in Russian state museums since 1772.