Beyond mere strategic positioning, the unspoiled Baltic States were treasured by Moscow’s VIPs as beachfront vacation getaways: high-ranking comrades built mansions, tucked away in woods along the sea, and Baltic capitals were adored as architectural gems and for the creativity and beauty locked within. Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania brimmed with artists, dancers, fashion designers, and lovely women—many, including Latvian dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, plucked by Soviets to showcase as their stars to the world.
The loss of Moscow’s pearls is still a sore point for Russia, which mourns their absence with growls, economic backstabbing, and constant threats to yank them back. And that’s one reason why Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, upon regaining their independence in 1991, all joined both the European Union and NATO: one provided economic stability, the other defense.
The recent appearance in these parts of Vice President Dick Cheney—who blasted Russia and (says the Russian media) rekindled the Cold War—is one show of the growing Baltic stature. With Russia at their border, these countries are now NATO’s ears to the East—and Lockheed Martin is setting them up with fancy spying equipment. It’s fitting that Latvia is flexing her muscle as host of the 2006 NATO summit, during which member countries are discussing NATO’s extending reach. What’s more, this trio is right in the heart of Russia’s energy politics. Russia uses Latvia’s port to ship oil and Lithuania’s refinery to refine it—activities that provide billions to Baltic treasuries—and lately Russia has made moves to strangle these assets, apparently wanting to control them again. Russian natural gas company Gazprom is the sole supplier to the Baltic countries and prices for Russian energy are skyrocketing. Gasoline prices shot up 25 percent in 2006, which locals see as a deliberate move to hurt them. It was intentional when Russians excluded these countries when drawing up the deal with Germans to build a gas pipeline across the Baltic Sea—and now the Baltic countries and Poland are screaming that they deserve transit fees.
MEET THE BALTIC COUNTRIES
Lost in the blurry backwater dangling between Russia and Poland, the Baltic States are three distinct countries grouped together solely because of location and unfortunate history. They share a few similarities: stomping grounds for Teutonic knights and occupied by assorted rulers, they were first created as independent countries in 1920. Their independence, however, was yanked away after World War II, when they were marched into the Soviet Union. After rebelling for years—Lithuania most loudly—they regained independence in 1991, and all immediately flipped off Moscow and turned their gaze to the West, joining the two clubs that most matter (the EU and NATO). However, their ethnicities are as different as their languages—so dissimilar, in fact, that when an Estonian talks to a Latvian or Lithuanian, they have to speak English or Russian. The trio also have different “personalities.” Generally speaking:
Estonia is the least populous of the three with 1.6 million, a quiet beauty. Known for supermodels, well-educated ambassadors, and the fabulous medieval old town in capital Tallinn, Estonia is more closely linked to Finland than to any Baltic neighbors.
Latvia is artistic and expressive: sizzling capital Riga is an art-nouveau paradise and the region’s biggest tourist draw. Latvia has the biggest East Baltic port, and under the stable leadership of President Vaira Vike-Freiberga, Latvia is becoming the most prominent Baltic state.
Lithuania is the wild child—she most daringly mouthed off to Moscow and kicked off the independence movement in the 1980s; Lithuania was the first Soviet republic to declare independence, triggering independence calls across the Soviet Union. Thanks to Soviets, she also holds perhaps the world’s scariest nuclear plant (currently being decommissioned). Historically linked to Poland (and predominantly Catholic), Lithuania is plagued with political scandals even though pretty capital Vilnius is quiet—when Dick Cheney’s not in town.
“There’s no Baltic identity with a common culture, common language, even a common religious tradition.”
—Former foreign minister of Estonia Toomas Ilves2
The Baltic States fell off the world’s mental map for the second half of the twentieth century—and that wound still lingers. Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians are legitimately bummed. First they were ignored when they were ravaged during World War II—invaded first by Russia, then by Germany, then by Russia again. By the end of that ordeal, over one-half of the region’s residents were dead or had fled. Worse, the Baltic States vanished from Western memory when the Soviet Union dragged them in. While the United States was preaching about the Evil Empire and Western Europe formed NATO (with the U.S. and Canada) to fight back against encroaching Communism, residents of Baltic States were waiting for the democracy-wavers to rescue them from Communist shackles. They waited, hiding in forests. They waited, slaving in Siberian gulags. They waited for someone to back up their frequent protests. But the West never came. “Nobody believed that [the Baltic States] would, for decades and decades, be left in the hands of the Soviets,” says former Estonian prime minister Mart Laar. “That wasn’t even a possibility. ‘It’s only a question of time,’ everybody thought. But after decades went by, the idea about the West coming to their aid disappeared.”3
THE FOREST BROTHERS
The dense stands of pine and birch that cover the Baltic countries are more than a lumber resource. Haunted by tales of witches and magic trees, these woods also served as home to a brave resistance community, when over 100,000 Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians fled the Soviets who returned near the end of the Second World War. Some preferred nature’s hardships to those inflicted by Russians, but most of the “Forest Brothers” were guerrillas who slipped into cities to cut Soviets’ power lines, sabotage their vehicles, and sometimes assassinate local Soviet leaders. Living in crude shacks during brutal winters, most Forest Brothers had been captured, killed, or had died by the time the Soviets made a final sweep in the mid-1950s. Those who remained were packed off to Siberian work camps; only a few returned in the 1970s to tell the story,4 but you can still find their rusty weapons in the woods.
Now celebrating their independence and a sudden influx of European tourists, the Baltic countries are rebounding—recently, their economies are galloping, often growing by 10 percent a year—and they’re awaiting the arrival of travelers from even more distant parts. Even though few Americans can find them on a map, at least some know one thing: the Balts can sing. In these countries, song signifies more than just the cheesy Eurovision contest, which both Latvia and Estonia recently won. Music was also the weapon of their revolt against the Soviet Union—the Singing Revolution. And for centuries, song was a vehicle to keep the language and cultures of these often-occupied countries alive.
History Review
The creation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as independent countries is a remarkable occurrence that for centuries just didn’t seem to be in the cards. For 800 years, these northeastern coastal lands didn’t have distinct political identities, being yanked back and forth between competing empires. First discovered by Vikings, the territories were later ruled by Teutonic and Livonian knights, whose castles still cover the countryside; Germanic merchants, who trailed the knights, made Baltic ports valuable trading posts in the Hanseatic League. The local people, mostly farmers who typically were treated as rightless serfs, just went along with the valuable property that changed owners every century or two, being handed off as war booty to ethnic Germans, Poles, Danes, Swedes, and Russians. The last group—the Russians—were always the most cruel, even back when they were led by czars.
THE BALTIC CONNECTION
Neither Europe’s largest nor deepest aqueous body, the forked Baltic Sea that divides Scandinavia from Eastern Europe was once the steely wind-tossed waters upon which medieval trade flourished. The Hanseatic League—a profoundly important fourteenth- and fifteenth-century trading union of merchants that linked ports across northern Europe—made this region Europe’s richest, as ships hauled grain from the Baltic States, wood and fish from the N
ordic countries, and cloth and wool from Germany. After the mid-twentieth century, however, the Baltic Sea became a symbol of economic and political divide, cleaving the wealth and freedom of Scandinavia in the north from the poor, Soviet-occupied republics to the southeast.
Sweden, which ran Estonia and Latvia in the seventeenth century, launched education campaigns, opened schools, abolished serfdom, and even established peasant rights. By the time Swedes shoved off in 1721, handing the keys to Russia, most locals were literate and a printing trade had emerged, further shaping national identities. Russia, however, tried to “Russify” the locals, blotting out their languages and cultures.
When Europe was remapped after the First World War, the Baltic countries politically forged their own separate identities. Baltic leaders slipped off to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where Europe was being reconfigured, and successfully lobbied the cartographers of the day. In 1920, the Baltic lands that had once been in Russia’s empire were redrawn as three separate, independent countries—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—carved from Russia’s western frontiers.
Latvia and Estonia prospered from agriculture after independence, becoming richer than Sweden, the neighbor who had once been the overlord. Lithuania, however, was distracted after Poland snatched her capital away. (See “Poland,” page 287). Freedom was brief. The trio, each puffed with national pride, refused to forge together as one regional military power, and were easy prey for the neighborhood vultures. By 1939, Russia and Germany were scheming to take back the strategic lands. Throughout the Second World War, the Baltic States were devastated in a violent tug-of-war between Russia and Germany, and were ultimately nabbed by Russia, which held them prisoner in the Soviet Union for the five decades that followed.
DIRTY WORDS: MOLOTOV-RIBBENTROP PACT
To Balts the three words “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact” are synonymous with “ripped-away freedom.” The 1939 “non-aggression pact,” signed by emissaries of Hitler and Stalin, secretly divided the Baltic States and Poland into German and Russian “spheres of influence.” Germany and Russia, then allied, divvied up the territories before sending in their armies to take over. Initally, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were dished out to Russia, which invaded in the fall of 1939; Poland was attacked by both Germany and Russia, one from each side. The pact didn’t hold up. Soon Germany and Russia were battling each other over control of the Baltic lands. Their territorial pissing matches and poor treatment of the residents killed a third of the population.
Poland was falling to Nazis, and the Allies had just declared war, when residents of the Baltic countries looked up in the fall of 1939 to see Russia’s Red Army rolling in. The return of their historical tormentors horrified the Baltic peoples, all the more so when Soviets shoved millions—first intellectuals, aristocrats, and politicians, then commoners, farmers, and children—into trucks and trains and hauled them to Siberian work camps. Two years later, Hitler declared war on the Soviet Union, and Nazis marched in to cut the Baltic States loose from the Russian yoke. Nazis were initially greeted as liberators, but they too began shipping out dissidents and the region’s many Jews. In 1944, the Soviets returned to push out the Germans. As the Red Army barreled in yet again, some 500,000 Balts escaped, the Russians bombing and torpedoing their ships as they fled. Another 100,000 Balts ran into the woods.
Nazis killed 300,000 Jews, almost the entire Jewish population living in Baltic countries. Nazis also killed non-Jewish Balts, but the majority of the 2 million Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians who died during World War II did so at the hands of the Russians.
The next forty-six years were a tragic rerun. The Russians reoccupied the Baltic countries, this time transforming them into Soviet republics with centralized planned economies. Communal housing was the rule: six or more families were crammed into one house, where they shared one kitchen and bathroom, in a forced program of equality.
The United States government never recognized that the three countries were part of the Soviet Union, but that made little difference to the locals, who could be shot on the spot if they questioned it.
Once-productive private farms were collectivized (production plummeted) and once-pristine waters were polluted by rapid industrialization as the Soviets transformed the Baltic States into the unglamorous egg, radio, and pharmaceutical centers of their Communist union. Farmers initially rebelled against collective farms, but after tens of thousands were shipped off in 1949, remaining agrarians caved in to the idea.
Due to emigration and war deaths, less than half of the original population was left. Ethnic Russians were hauled in to repopulate and industrialize the countries. Another reason Russians were sent: Soviets wanted to dilute the homogenous populations. Russian became the language of business and politics, and the only way to make headway in the Soviet world. The Balts rebelled, but quietly. They kept their languages and cultures alive, they formed secret societies, and they waited in vain for the West to release them.
In the 1980s, the second generation came of age and a defiant spirit rose up again. Simultaneously, the Soviet Union was falling apart. The war in Afghanistan was draining the military, and in 1986, Chernobyl spewed radioactive gases, creating an international furor. Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev unveiled his ideas for perestroika (economic restructuring) and glasnost (openness, or freedom of the press) in the 1980s, thinking that intellectuals would suggest subtle ways to reform. Not fully grasping the deep hatred of Russians who had long bulldozed the Baltic people and cultures, his ideas took a different course than intended. The younger generation wanted to open up and restructure the place, all right—by shoving the Soviet Union right out.
THE SINGING REVOLUTION
It started in 1987: first Lithuania’s government, then Estonia’s and Latvia’s, declared that Soviet rule was invalid. Across the Baltic countries, calls for independence grew louder, and people marched in peaceful demonstrations a million strong. Music became a tool of defiance: Balts belted out their national songs, their native languages now voiced loudly and with nationalistic pride. Another symbolic act: in August 1989, Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians linked hands across three countries and 400 miles from Estonia to Lithuania on the fiftieth anniversary of the malevolent Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Lithuania first declared full independence from the Soviet Union in 1990—and underscored it again with a referendum in February 1991. The other two proclaimed independence in August 1991. Their announcements were met with hand-wringing by much of the world. Only Iceland immediately recognized them as independent and sovereign; almost every other country waited until the United States gave her official recognition in the autumn of 1991, shortly after the power regime in Moscow had collapsed.
Ever since the Baltic countries became independent, Russia has been huffing and puffing to get them back. Moscow lost not only her only ice-free ports—and the ones with the easiest access to Europe—she also lost her favorite playland, Latvia. Russian parliamentarian Vladimir Zhirinovsky threatened to pile Russia’s nuclear waste at the borders and blow radioactive fumes across the Baltic countries with giant fans, and he made other far less laughable threats. Russia immediately began harping about the treatment of ethnic Russians, most of whom stayed in the Baltic States. Forgetting the centuries when Russia had forced those in her hold to learn Russian, Moscow had a conniption fit when the Latvian and Estonian governments turned the tables: they announced that to gain citizenship in their countries, Russians—one-third of the populations in Latvia and Estonia—would have to learn the local language. Many haven’t—and thus aren’t legal citizens. Meanwhile, their Soviet passports and citizenship are now invalid. Over 1 million of the 8 million residents of the Baltic countries are now officially stateless.
But what’s really eating Moscow is that the trio has joined the European Union and NATO. Entry into the EU promises greater economic stability for the Baltic countries, and means that Russia can no longer slap huge tariffs on goods from the countries or so easily yank their chains.
And their entry into NATO—the club that symbolized everything that Cold War Russia loathed and feared—was an even harsher slap that hit the Russian paranoia button. Russia fears (correctly) that NATO will be spying on her, and meanwhile the Baltic States fear (also correctly) that Russia is sending in spies. In recent years, a slew of Russian diplomats, accused of being spooks snooping around about NATO, were deported from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
“The fact that you can go to bed and not worry about somebody knocking on the door and putting you on a train for Siberia.”—President Vaira Vike-Freiberga on why Latvia joined NATO4
NATO-BOUND: KA-CHING!
It’s understandable that the Baltic countries wanted to enter NATO, the post–World War II arms club created to threaten the Soviet Union by mere presence alone. Russia is curled up next door, the Baltic armed forces are flimsy, and NATO membership carries a certain cachet. But why NATO invited the tiny Baltic States into the club is another matter. Granted, the Baltic States can provide intelligence about Russian activities, and no countries need NATO protection more. What the three incoming countries also offer: a bigger market for big-time arms sales, since NATO requires that 2 percent of a country’s GDP be thrown at defense spending. Predictably, the largest arms manufacturer in the United States—Lockheed Martin—was the strongest lobbyist for NATO expansion. Before they’d even entered, the Baltic countries placed an order with Lockheed for a high-tech air surveillance system, Baltnet, with a price tag of $100 million.5 That pretty much tapped their budgets; their air forces currently consist of borrowed planes.
What Every American Should Know About Europe Page 40