THE OCCUPIED TERRITORY.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LII, Issue 54, 4 March 1918, Page 4

THE OCCUPIED TERRITORY.

BEFORE touching upon the causes of disunion within the Central Russian race, which formed the nucleus of the empire, it would be. well to note briefly the constituents of the western fringe of non-Russian nationalities, for it is in the territories occupied by them that Germany is seeking to set up her own suzerainty under tne terms of peace she is exacting from the Bolshevik Government at Petrograd. Firstly, there is Russian Poland with an area of nearly 60,000 square miles, say, twice the size of Tasmania, with a population before the war of about 12,500,000, a land with great industrial possibilities and considerable agricultural and pastoral resources. It constitutes Russia's share of the dismembered Polish kingdom, but it was not incorporated as an integral part of until 1868r Prior to that, from 1830 to the rising of 1863, it had been a separate government, while earlier still, from 1815 to 1830, it had enjoved a Constitution of its own under the tßussian Crown. Its inhabitants, who are predominantly Polish and Catholic, have always been restive under Russian rule, and resented bitterly the efforts made by the Russian bureaucracy to . destroy their nationality by compulsory "Russifi cation. They have never lost the desire to reinstate the old Polish State in full independence • .by union of Russian Poland with the Polish of Austrian Galicia and the Polish provinces of Prussia. The Poles are certainly second, only to the Russians as the leading Slav people; but they have through their culture a closer affinity with Western. Christendom than with "the semi-Oriental civilisation and creed of Russia.. During the war the Russian Poles seemed to forget for the moment. old and sided with Russia against a Prussia which had oppressed their brethren more cruellv even than the Russian bureaucacy had at its worst oppressed themselves. The future of Poland now depends upon the military issue of the war, but iii any case it is not likely to become in future a part of Russia, even of a sobered Russia reunited in the looser. bonds of a federal policy. The next in importance of the elements in the Western fringe is the Finnish nation, which also is probably destined to. severance from Russia. None of the Baltic coast peoples are Russian in nationality, and they form the rest of the Western fringe. Each of them had a,, distinctive history of its own until the Russian'annexations which took place in the 18thcentury. The Lithuanians, who occupy the districts of Kovno, Suvalki, and Vilna —names with which we all became familiar in the early stages of the war on the JEastenr front —are not Slavs, but speak a primitive form of the common Indo-European language, from which both the .Slav and Teutonic languages of to-day descend. When they were converted to Christianity they acquired the Latin, and not the Eastern, form of the faith, and they remain Roman Catholics to the present day. They were politically associated with the Poles, and with the Poles formed the main body of the Polish empire at the height of its former glory r Neither language, religion, nor long historical connection binds them to Russia. The Letts of Courland and Livonia to the north are close akin to the Lithuanians, but they were converted by the Teutonic knights, and at the .Reformation followed their masters into the Protestant fold. For a while, before it became Russian, the Lett country was divided between Poland and iSweden. *lts German aristocracy, the so-called "Barons of the Baltic," are descended for the most part from the secularised knights of the old Teutonic order. The Esthonians, v north ( of the Letts, have had a similar history, "but their language is a Ugro-Finnish dialect. Relying upon the non-Russian nationality of these northern provinces, Germany now wishes to make them provinces or vassal States of''her own empire, whereas in the event of a strong democratic Russia having emerged from the revolutionary crisis they would doubtless have formed to their own satisfaction autonomous States in a federated Russian republic or constitutional monarchy.