The Fall and Rise and Fall Again of the Baltic States

To answer those questions, one has to start with the past. For though the Baltic states share flat landscapes and culinary quirks (herring for breakfast, potatoes for lunch and dinner), what they really have in common is their tragic recent history.

For each Baltic state, Soviet rule effectively brought a cultural revolution. National elites were murdered or exiled. Hundreds of thousands were deported, executed, or starved to death. Collectivization destroyed the peasant farms that had been the backbone of Baltic economies and societies. Finally came the suffocation of national identity through mass immigration of Russian-speakers from other parts of the Soviet Union and the purging of books that might portray the era of Baltic independence in favorable terms. Estonia’s leading novelist, the late Jaan Kross, remembered watching books from his country’s main university library destroyed by an ax-wielding apparatchik.

What particularly aroused Russian ire (and still does) was that after the 1940-1941 Soviet occupation, Estonians and Latvians did not see the prospect of another one as "liberation." Indeed, from 1944 onward, many Baltic citizens fought hard against Soviet forces, even shoulder to shoulder with the Nazis at times. The bad blood still lingers, as seen two years ago when Estonia (or eSStonia, as Russian propagandists still call it) decided to relocate a Soviet war memorial from the center of Tallinn to a military cemetery on the outskirts of town. For Russians, the bronze statue was "Alyosha the Liberator”; for Estonians, it was "The Unknown Rapist." The result was a fierce diplomatic spat, the besieging of the Estonian Embassy in Moscow, and a mammoth cyberattack that briefly disrupted public services.

The bleakness of life inside the Baltic states during the occupation era was matched by overseas apathy, even hostility, toward their fate. Britain handed over to the Kremlin the Baltic gold reserves, which had been entrusted to the Bank of England for safekeeping. Dusty embassies in Washington and elsewhere maintained the vestiges of legal existence, and a dwindling band of elderly Baltic diplomats would gather for occasional meetings at the U.S. State Department, where their flags still hung in the lobby. It was a good way to annoy the Kremlin, but the cause of Baltic independence was all but dead. Those who persisted in raising it were seen as eccentric, out of touch, and irrelevant. Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish émigré poet and Nobel Prize winner, wrote in his seminal work on totalitarianism, The Captive Mind, that he could not stop thinking about the Baltic states, which he described as being "boiled down" in a pot with a "tightly closed lid." But he also said that others regarded his preoccupation as the epitome of futility: It would waste his life and awake the "wrath of Zeus."

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