National and Ethnic Challenges 969Empire, as the Treaty of Versailles did not concern itself with the nationali
ties of Russia, ostensibly a victorious power, although now transformed into
a Communist state. In the north, Finland finally gained its independence
after having been for centuries subject to Swedish and, since the beginning
of the nineteenth century, to Russian rule. The three Baltic states of Latvia,
Estonia, and Lithuania also became independent of Russia (see Map 24.1).
The largest of these successor states were Yugoslavia in the Balkans and
Czechoslovakia and Poland in Central Europe. Referring to the new states
and redrawn boundaries, Winston Churchill complained, “The maps are out
of date! The charts don’t work any more!” The creation of smaller national
states (which Lloyd George referred to as “five-foot-five nations”), whose
boundaries were largely determined by ethnicity, added to the number of
independent states in Europe. This number had decreased since 1500 as
absolute monarchies had expanded their territories, and with German and
Italian unification in the nineteenth century. But after the war, that trend
was suddenly reversed. In 1914, there had been fourteen currencies in
Europe; in 1919, there were twenty-seven.
The signatories at Versailles also had the strategic containment of com
munism in mind when they recognized the existence of the new nation
states as buffers—or what Clemenceau called a “cordon sanitaire” that
would help contain the spread of Bolshevism from the Soviet Union.
After the armistice, the Allies allowed German armies to remain inside
Russia, Ukraine, and Poland to prevent the Red Army from carrying the
Russian Revolution into Central Europe. German troops held railway lines
in the Baltic states in order to thwart any attempted Bolshevik takeover
there.
Seeking collective security against Hungary, which demanded revision of
the Treaty of Versailles in order to win back territory lost to its unwanted
new neighbors, as well as against Germany, the three nations of Czechoslo
vakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia formed the Little Entente by signing
alliances in 1920 and 1921. (Poland sometimes worked with these states to
achieve mutually beneficial goals but did not formally join the alliance.)
Moreover, all three states depended on a series of defensive alliances that
each had signed with France—Czechoslovakia in 1924, Romania in 1926,
and Yugoslavia the following year. (Poland had signed a treaty with France
in 1921.) The French government viewed such alliances with the Eastern Eu
ropean states as a means of countering a revival of German power, as well
as a check on the Soviet Union. In 1934, Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, and
Turkey signed a Balkan Entente, intended to counter any revisionist territo
rial claims by Bulgaria.
The Allies applied Wilson’s idealized formula of “one people, one nation”
unequally when it came to those states that had fought against them in the
war. The “Polish Corridor” dividing East Prussia from the rest of Germany
contained a sizable—but not majority—German population. Mineral-rich
Upper Silesia, claimed by Poland and with a large Polish population, was