LETTONIE - RUSSIE, Traités et documents de base

Excerpt from President Dwight P. Eisenhower's Address to a Joint Session of Congress, January 6, 1957.

Excerpt from President Dwight P. Eisenhower's Address to a Joint Session of Congress, January 6, 1957.

International Communism, of course seeks to mask its purposes of domination by expressions of good will and by superficially attractive offers of po1itical, economic and military aid. But any free nation, which is the subject of Soviet enticement, ought, in elementary wisdom, to look behind the mask.

Remember Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In 1939 the Soviet Union entered into mutual assistance pacts with these then independent countries; and the Soviet Foreign Minister, addressing the Extraordinary Fifth Session of the Supreme Soviet in October 1939, solemnly and publicly declared that "we stand for the scrupulous and punctilious observance of the pacts on the basis of complete reciprocity, and we declare that all the nonsensical talk about the Sovietization of the Baltic countries is only to the interest of our common enemies and all anti-Soviet provocateurs." Yet in 1940, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union.

Soviet control of the satellite nations of Eastern Europe has been forcibly maintained in spite of solemn promises of a contrary intent, made during World War II.

Stalin's death brought hope that this pattern would change. And we read the pledge of the Warsaw Treaty of 1955 that the Soviet Union would follow in satellite countries "the principles of mutual respect for their independence and sovereignty and non-interference in domestic affairs." But we have just seen the subjugation of Hungary by naked armed force. In the aftermath of this Hungarian tragedy, world respect for and belief in Soviet promises have sunk to a new low .

Source:
The Department of State Bulletin, Vol. XXXVI, No. 917, Jan. 21, 1957. cit� dans American Latvian Association in The United States, "Lettonie, en comm�moration du 50�me anniversaire de la D�claration d'Ind�pendance de la R�publique de Lettonie" , Washington D.C., 1968, p.71