Piip, Meierovics & Voldemaras

Conflict on the borders of the Russian Empire , whatever the complexion of the government controlling it, has been a constant feature of the past 90 years, most recently with Russia s brief war with Georgia in August 2008. In 1919, as the smaller nations on Russia s borders sought self-determination while the Civil War raged between the Whites and the Bolsheviks, the Paris Peace Conference struggled with a situation complicated by mutually exclusive aims.

CHARLOTTE ALSTON is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Northumbria. Her publications include Russia s Greatest Enemy? Harold Williams and the Russian Revolutions (2007), British Journalism and the Russian Civil War , Revolutionary Russia (June 2007), and The Suggested Basis for a Russian Federal Republic: Britain, Anti-Bolshevik Russia and the Border States at the Paris Peace Conference 1919 , History (Jan 2006).