Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Prologue: 1919-1945-1989
- PART ONE PEACE PLANNING AND THE ACTUALITIES OF THE ARMISTICE
- PART TWO THE PEACEMAKERS AND THEIR HOME FRONTS
- PART THREE THE RECONSTRUCTION OF EUROPE AND THE SETTLEMENT OF ACCOUNTS
- PART FOUR THE LEGACY AND CONSEQUENCES OF VERSAILLES
- 18 The Soviet Union and Versailles
- 19 Versailles and International Diplomacy
- 20 The League of Nations: Toward a New Appreciation of Its History
- 21 A Comment
- PART FIVE ANTECEDENTS AND AFTERMATHS REFLECTIONS ON THE WAR-GUILT QUESTION AND THE SETTLEMENT
- Bibliography
- Index
18 - The Soviet Union and Versailles
from PART FOUR - THE LEGACY AND CONSEQUENCES OF VERSAILLES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Prologue: 1919-1945-1989
- PART ONE PEACE PLANNING AND THE ACTUALITIES OF THE ARMISTICE
- PART TWO THE PEACEMAKERS AND THEIR HOME FRONTS
- PART THREE THE RECONSTRUCTION OF EUROPE AND THE SETTLEMENT OF ACCOUNTS
- PART FOUR THE LEGACY AND CONSEQUENCES OF VERSAILLES
- 18 The Soviet Union and Versailles
- 19 Versailles and International Diplomacy
- 20 The League of Nations: Toward a New Appreciation of Its History
- 21 A Comment
- PART FIVE ANTECEDENTS AND AFTERMATHS REFLECTIONS ON THE WAR-GUILT QUESTION AND THE SETTLEMENT
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
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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- The Treaty of VersaillesA Reassessment after 75 Years, pp. 451 - 468Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998
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