Baltic Independence at 100

I'd like to welcome everybody my name is Alan luxembourg president of the farm Policy Research Institute we're very happy today to sponsor a special event on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the independence of the three Baltic States Estonia Latvia and Lithuania and this program is an outgrowth of a project that has been going on for three years at fbri called our Baltic initiative which is itself part of a larger program called our Eurasia programme we've had great success in publishing voices from the region in our various publications and in having American scholars write about the region culturally politically economically and with respect to national security issues before we begin the formal part of our program I would like first to thank John med vecas and Chris debarred for their support through the JJ med vecas Foundation and the Martin and Audrey Gross foundation for support of our Baltic initiative and for support of our program so join me in thanking them now I'd like to introduce to you the ambassador of latvia ambassador andres filled a Govich who will also make some welcoming remarks [Applause] good morning everyone LaBrie president Luxembourg console John with vets keys professor cotton for me it's an immense pleasure to address all of you and to be back to Philadelphia after some years of absence my name is Andres pill Tagore which I am the eighth Latvian ambassador to the United Nations in New York I'm not coming from Washington DC but from New York and I'm very pleased to attend this event which is dedicated to the centennial of the Latvian and other Baltic states modern statehood exactly hundred years ago in November 1918 the modern Latvian state was proclaimed it was proclaimed on the ruins of the World War one but it took more than three years to consolidate the freedom and to win international recognition so this festive season of celebrations will last for the next three years and I very much look forward to coming back and to reflect on the past present and future during this time of reflection in Latvia of course we look back on the events we look at the recent restoration of independence 28 years ago we look at lessons learned from the 20s from the 30s when the country was founded and of course we reflect also on the tragic period of the Second World War and successive decades in the 50s 60s 70s and 80s when Latvia was on the wrong side of history against its will when country was statehood was destroyed when we lost about a third of our population due to deportations due to the Holocaust due to the Exile of the Latvians abroad etc and of course we have made a few less from that recent Centennial one lesson is that Latvia should never be neutral in this world in the 20s and 30s the leadership of Latvia that time thought that by staying non-aligned by staying neutral we might escape cold winds of history we could escape great rivalry between big regional powers Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and as you know from the history we failed quite spectacularly we lost statehood the Euro legally it continued to exist more than 30 countries did not recognize in cooperation of Latvia Estonia Queeny into the Soviet Union but the fact our country was governed by the Soviet Union we lost to generation of independent life of Latvia we miraculously regained freedom during this song song revolution Gandhi style in non-violent independence movement but still one of the lesson is that we have to be very much engaged in two world affairs we have to have strong allies and in that regard of course after regaining of independence one of our our prime goals has been to be very strong allies of the United States to be in members of NATO to be members of the European Union and for the last 15 years we have been unparalleled strong staunch allies of the United States and I think this is one of our lessons but we have learned and which we are going to cherish and treasure and develop and nurture in the in the future in that regard I think the initiative by the Foreign Policy Research Institute is very welcome to sustain to develop to cultivate these very special ties between Baltic States and in the United the United States the second lesson what we have learned is that we have to have we have to develop the United Nations League of Nations was a very weak organization this organization had no military forces to protect resolutions or decisions made by the League of Nations League of Nations could expel Russia after the winter war against Finland but the way I know any kind of follow-up mechanisms to protect member states upon aggression so one of our goals is really to develop those multilateral institutions and this is what we are doing now and even being a small country of two million people under the 56 parallel north we are trying to be very active within UN as well not only NATO not only European Union but UN as well and as we speak we have troops even in as distant places as Mali in the sake of region in sub-saharan Africa on a peaceful enforcement mission and I am quite pleased that we have had unanimous support in the Parliament for that deployment in 2016 we have very few unanimous votes in the Parliament as you do on the Capitol Hill but on that occasion that has happened and I think it's a it's an indication how mature has has matured how has maturity understanding in the Parliament that we need international engagements and we have to contribute and we should not expect only to receive support but we have to show that we we can help countries in need fighting terrorism and fighting radical extremism of course one of the lessons what we have learned is the third one is that we have to be quite open and quite critical to ourselves and to to the painful history of the 20th century it has as I already indicated the history has been quite dramatic in Latvia we have seen World War one when we lost one third of the population we had World War two when we lost another 1/3 of the population and population today is as big as before World War one and we have seen that the totalitarian ideologies Soviet Union planted or forced us under the communism and we have had Nazi Germany for four years almost five years of occupation we have seen Holocaust etcetera so one of the lessons what we are we've been struggling and we've been dealing with is this addressing of the history lessons collaboration crimes against humanity totalitarian ideologies and how to inform how to educate how to commemorate those events and we try to do it in a quest fundamental an open way a lot has been done but of course these issues will never be finished they will never be completely resolved or completely reconciled we are trying in that regard and I think the forthcoming lecture is also very much within this direction within this vein and I am very happy that Professor Kotkin will be visiting Riga as soon as next week to discuss also legacy of Isaiah Berlin and I think I'm sure some other related issues related to the to the issues of humanism legacy of the totalitarian ideologies which which we have seen in the twentieth century and we are striving to avoid in the 21st one so I want to thank you again for supporting this Baltic initiative we very much happy to celebrate the centennial but within this festive move we think about serious challenges which exist the world is not a safe place not at all and in that sense we think that this partnership between Baltic States and United States partnership between Europe and the United States are fundamental and we are certainly working to avoid any gap widening between our two continents so thank you so much again and later on I will be also staying after the lecture so if there are any questions we'll be happy to answer them thank you Thank You ambassador the way we do things at fbri is to look at contemporary international affairs through the lens of history geography and culture and the purpose of today's event is to look at the Baltic States as they've been buffeted by the lodger geopolitical forces in the last hundred years and there really is no one better than our speaker today Steve Kotkin Steve is the berkland professor of history and international affairs at Princeton he's a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and he is also our own Eurasia fellow here at F PRI he's the author of numerous books on geopolitics and authoritarianism his two most recent books are the first two volumes of a trilogy on Stalin the first was called paradoxes of power 1878 to 1928 it was described by The Wall Street Journal as superb by the New York Times as riveting by The New Yorker as near definitive and the second volume waiting for Hitler has it has one the author Ross annual prize from the Salon Foreign Relations he has written for The New York Times a New York Review of Books the Financial Times in lots of other periodicals and as the ambassador said he'll be giving the very distinguished annual elected as a Abul in lecture in Riga next Thursday so if you're in the vicinity feel free this is just a dress rehearsal for that so anyway please welcome dr. Stephen Kaka Thank You ambassador consul generals honorary consul generals it's a great honor to be here for this particular occasion Latvia obviates amar so Simca dunya kuriboh Latvia congratulations on the centennial of your independence Allen do we have time for questions history can be very very cruel but history can also be uplifting and that combination of cruelty and uplift will be the topic of this brief lecture today I'm gonna do it in five small pieces the first piece is what I'm going to call the heroism piece you know mind if I get a little bit closer to the audience just to see the heroism story is one that we know well and that some of you may have participated in it's about the protest movements which culminated in the stopping of the hydroelectric dam on the Daugava River in 1986 it's about the folk singing and the folk singing revolution 1988 it's about the Baltic way of 1989 and the gigantic human chain of at least 1.2 million people all the way from Tollan through Riga and on to Vilnius these things happened we witnessed them and they were spectacular deeply spectacular because this happened behind the Iron Curtain in still unfree Soviet Union so the heroism was there and we could talk for the next several days about the details that story is very important because it wasn't heroic and peaceful everywhere of course we have the counter example of the tragedy of Yugoslavia and so the peaceful protests and transition in the three Baltic countries it provides a very important contrast their peaceful mobilization and the methods that they used provide a very important contrast to what happened elsewhere and the tragedy of Yugoslavia the bolts had something which really helped a lot and that was the Hitler Stalin pact now you're gonna say to me how could the Hitler Stalin pact have been helpful it was a terrible agreement between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany on August 23rd 1939 to divide up Eastern Europe into spheres of influence and eventually facilitated the incorporation of the three Baltic republics into the Soviet Union ending their independence how could this have been an asset well of course the pact itself was not an asset at the time and it produced that tragedy that the Ambassador alluded to and that I've alluded to but what the pact did for the Baltic States was to link the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and that was very valuable in the protest movement you see because Nazi Germany is generally considered beyond redemption ultimate evil or as the Soviet Union some people thought that there was a revolution to be redeemed inside the Stalinist state that the Soviet Union was not all bad it provided for education for upward mobility and it could maybe be converted reformed into socialism with a human face so whereas Nazi Germany was beyond redemption the Soviet Union was a matter of controversy and some people not all found some redeeming qualities there however the packed this mullet off Ribbentrop pact as it's sometimes called but was actually a Hitler Stalin pack because Molotov and Ribbentrop didn't have the authority to do stuff like this it was the two leaders that pact linked the Soviet regime to Nazism in a way that was very important for the morale discrediting the moral condemnation of the Soviet regime now you would think that with Solzhenitsyn and many others there would have been no need for this that is no need to condemn the Soviet regime in moral terms however there was such a need and the pact turned out to be useful it turned out to be an asset after all the tragedy that it caused in fact that great Baltic way that human chain of 1989 was staged on August 23rd 1989 the 50th anniversary of the Hitler Stalin pact now let me move to the second part of my brief remarks here and talk a little bit about the contradictions so the uplift the heroism the peaceful demonstrations and protests beginning largely on the environmental cultural side culminating in the politics making use of the tragedy of the Stalin the Hitler Stalin pact and then of course history is full of contradictions as well the movement in all three Baltic states for first a measure of autonomy and ultimately independence in the late 1980s and early 1990s those movements were not ethnically monolithic they involved in ethnic terms all the different peoples who lived in the Baltic States and this was a very important part of their ideology and their legitimacy so for example in Latvia they tried to incorporate the Russian population living in Latvia on behalf of Latvia x' claims to autonomy and then independence this was the correct strategy but then as I said came the contradictions what to do about the official language of each Baltic country should they recognize only one language the titular nation or the main nations language or should they recognize the languages of these other people many of whom came to the Baltic countries on their Soviet regime that was very difficult to manage in addition the citizenship question was every one a citizenship of the Baltic countries just by virtue of the fact that they were there in residence as of 1991 or did people have to qualify for citizenship based upon when their family first got there these were difficult and controversial issues and there was no simple answer to these questions and so the contradictions then came out and we began to see even more that the heroism story was only a partial story so for example without Mikhail Gorbachev and his desire to reform the Soviet Union his misguided desire to reform the Soviet Union which ended up destabilizing and ultimately destroying that massive Empire without Mikhail Gorbachev I'm not sure that the peaceful approach of the Baltic peoples would have been successful then we also must acknowledge the role of Poland in all of this obviously Poland got out of communism earlier than the three Baltic states and the example of Poland was deeply inspirational in the Baltics right the Solidarity the 1989 roundtable in Poland and ultimately the concession of the Polish rump communist regime to bring solidarity into the government this was extremely inspirational because it proved in reality not just in theory that you could get out of Soviet rule Soviet occupation and communism this was deeply important in Lithuania which of course has a shared a deeply shared past with Poland so we began to see all of this and then the other part that we didn't see so much but was really important at the time was that it was actually Russian nationalism that ultimately broke the Union big states like the Soviet Union don't collapse on the periphery they collapse in the center when their willpower was sapped and their institutions corrode and Boris Yeltsin as you'll recall led a movement in Moscow against Moscow it was a movement on behalf of the Russian Republic the Russian piece of the Soviet Union against the Soviet Union and it was on the basis of Russian national consciousness we didn't take Russian national consciousness very seriously neither at the time nor prior to that but of course we're taking it much more seriously now and it was a very key ingredient in what happened in the Baltics as well because Boris Yeltsin went to the Baltics and cut a deal and favoured Baltic independence as part of his play against the Soviet Union on behalf of Russia still today we speak about the Soviet collapse versus the Baltic revolution we give agency to the bolts in heroism which as I said was real and we witnessed it in real time I remember that Lenin statue in the center of Vilnius coming down off that pedestal some of you may have remember that as well at the same time however why do we call it the Soviet collapse and the Baltic Revolution in part it's because we don't give as much agency to this dimension of Russian nationalism and the revolution that took place in Russian consciousness as well as took place in the other Union republics including the three Baltic states there are deeper contradictions in deeper history that we don't have time to go into today Tallinn which is the capital of Estonia where the singing revolution began and then also took up great momentum in Latvia Tallinn means Danish town the capital of Estonia means Danish town so there's a deep and rich history of connections obviously the Baltic Sea is a sea and obviously the commercial ties and the cultural ties all of that needs to be remembered as well as part of the heroism story of 1989 through 91 all right let me get to my third part I'm going to go back 200 years to the 1918 piece very briefly each one of these pieces deserves a lecture on its own and if this were a multi-day seminar or for example if you could give up your cable TV addiction and and just stay with me for a while instead of watching the latest this and that having to do with you-know-who but you can't really give that up because your addiction is pretty much beyond what a yes it's it's its own version of the opioid crisis sadly if we talk a little bit about what happened the hundred years ago there's a really important distinction that we need to make now remember history is very cruel but in the cruelty sometimes there are these assets that we don't fully understand until the fullness of time so the Stalin the Hitler Stalin pact was beyond cruel and yet it could eventually after all of the terror and destruction that it involved it could nonetheless ultimately prove to be an asset we wouldn't want it in the first place we would have preferred to avoid it but once we have it then it it can in the fullness of time have multiple dimensions so I want to talk about the German occupation during World War one of northeastern Europe which was known as Oboro Stauber lost and this predominantly accepted on Lithuania but also including pieces of what became Latvia and Bella Russia Oba OS was Ludendorff's Little Kingdom Ludendorff was the great one of the great military figures of Germany in World War one and in the occupation of this area at Eastern Europe which they called in German Oboro still kind of the upper East right in this occupation the Germans decided remember the Germans in World War one on the Eastern Front would win the war in March 1918 there was the Treaty of brest-litovsk where the Soviet Union which was then Soviet Russia capitulated and ceded a tremendous amount of territory the Germans lost World War one on the Western Front but they won World War one on the Eastern Front and having pushed the Russian army back they were then in occupation of many of these territories including the summer central Lithuania and important parts of Latvia and they created this occupation regime known as Oba Osten what did they do they attempted to exploit the place for resources for the German army so that meant Ripoff the peasants grain and that meant take everything that wasn't nailed down and then after that was done take that things that were also nailed down and this German occupation however had a cultural dimension it had the kind of cultural dimension that we would associate with those Germans of the Vilhelm ein era not the Nazi era it's not the same regime the first German occupation the world war 1 1 and the cultural product the program was to have German culture high german culture the achievements of German culture cool to be a guiding star and for the locals to assimilate into German culture in other words the local cultures didn't matter because German culture was so much higher and so the locals they might speak these vernacular languages they might have their own literature they might have their own epic poetry but we are Germany and we have a higher culture and so the Germans were very condescending to put it mildly to the peoples that they occupied they couldn't even speak to them because the Germans didn't bother to learn those languages and didn't really bring translators with them in the occupation in fact ironically the main translators translating between the German military occupation and the local population in Lithuania Latvia Bella Russia were Jews because they spoke Yiddish as a native language and therefore could understand German and of course they lived in these communities and they could speak the local languages besides the it issue as well so besides the the Jews the Germans didn't really have any Aries to be able to even speak to let alone understand the localities that they were in occupation of Germany in other words could not and did not want to indigenous their occupation they were very far from the local population the German state documents are very ignorant of the local population of the local economy of the local society of the local cultures and the Germans didn't put out any newspapers in local languages as propaganda for the German occupation so now we have a contrast the Soviet regime this is not an argument that the Soviet regime is a better regime I think I've been pretty clear in all of my books and I think I've been clear today as well that I don't have a high regard for the morality and the politics of the Soviet regime however there was one thing the Soviet regime could do so that although Soviet occupation over time once again was cruel and horrific there was a dimension of it that no one really foresaw that could become an asset and that was that the Soviet regime they were like missionaries the old missionaries in the Russian Empire wanted to teach people the Bible and how do you teach them in the Bible if they don't speak your language and the answer is you translate the Bible into their language and so you want to convert people to Eastern Orthodoxy well maybe you should learn lithuanian and maybe you should translate that into lithuanian and on it goes and so this is what the communists adopted in a way the same model they were not going to teach the Bible they were not believers in God they were atheists of course and they destroyed churches and they destroyed mosques and synagogues this is a history we know well but they were going to teach them communism and how were they going to teach them communism they were going to do it in the vernacular languages this doesn't mean that they were kind this doesn't mean that they didn't suppress these languages in these peoples of course they did we're talking about communism here however unlike the Germans the Communists put out communist propaganda in every vernacular language and the Communists didn't need the Jewish population Yiddish speaking Jewish population to translate communism for them they engaged the local population and tried to recruit communists among the locals we're not romanticizing communism here because of course communism was oppressive in cultural terms too there was censorship they suppressed a lot of the local culture that was important they suppressed a lot of the local leaders even loyal communists in Lithuania Latvia and Estonia were arrested and executed by the communist regime this is not a discussion about how the communists were better than the Nazis this was a discussion this is a discussion about how partly intentionally and partly unintentionally communism could and did indigenous communism didn't need to wipe out the local languages and the local cultures in order to achieve its goals it was brutal it deported tens of thousands more than a hundred thousand Latvians for example during the period of communism right we're deported from the territory of Latvia elsewhere in the far north to gulag labor camps we know this all I'm saying is that there's a kind of irony here that communism in a way because of its desire to forcefully coercively implant itself in these localities could and did indigenous and as a result did an attempt to fully wipe out the local cultures but instead try to use them we became an asset over time through the grief the brutality the terror and everything else for the locals I point number four I think I'm okay with time I better just check we're almost done I'm gonna go and take you briefly to Tibet and Mongolia now that may seem silly in a lecture on a hundred years of Baltic independence but then again those of you who have attended more than one of my lectures will know that's I'm not above silliness or attempted silliness if you look at the story of Tibet within this 1918 Baltic framework you see some heartbreaking similarities but more heartbreaking differences Tibet was able briefly not de jure but de facto to break off from Chinese rule and to become independent not in law but in fact from 1912 through 1949 what kind of same period that we're talking about laid the foundations of these modern states these modern nations on the Baltic Sea the differences were however the tibet was not admitted to the League of Nations like Latvia Lithuania and Estonia in September 1921 Tibet didn't gain that recognition now if you look at the history of the Western powers visa vie the Baltics you see a lot of cynicism you see a lot of failure to help you see a lot of opportunities where they could have done more and failed to do something especially in the 19 18 19 and 20 period when they all assumed that the three independent Baltic states would be absorbed back into Russia unfortunately so they didn't really aggressively promote the independent the powers didn't aggressively promote the independence of the Baltic states in that period right after nineteen but they did a whole lot more for the Baltic States than they did for it Tibet in the case of Tibet you had the British and the Russians competing for influence in inner Asia that so-called great game all throughout inner Asia Iran Afghanistan India and of course Central Asia or inner Asia on both the Russian side and the Chinese side but that competition was limited by the difficult terrain the mountains are really high the snows are really deep the ability to access Tibet was very very limited and moreover each side Britain and Russia were only looking to deny the other control over Tibet they weren't looking to promote Tibet eventually of course the Chinese Communists under Mao are victorious proclaiming in October 1949 the communist state in China and then they send the troops into Tibet almost immediately after proclaiming the communist state in China in October 1949 the Tibet story now is obviously different from the Baltic story Tibet is being overrun by Communist China and its prospects for the kind of free and independent state that we have in the Baltics are dim Mongolia provides another contrast because Mongolia did break away from China and it broke away in large part because Russia decided to do that under the Soviet Union in 1921 the Soviets helped stage a coup which eventually was christened the revolution in Mongolia impart the proximity to the territory of the Soviet Union helped a lot and in part the local agency also helped because many of the Mongols who participated in these events saw in the Soviet Union a vision of the future Mongolia is suffered incredibly under Soviet rule it was the first satellite before the East European satellites of post-world War two Mongolia was the first Soviet satellite beginning in 1921 and they went through the Stalinist terror of the 1930s and the Lamas Ares that is to say the Buddhist Lama series were destroyed the Lamas were killed the nomadic livestock herders were starved it was the kind of communist rule you would expect and yet Mongolia today is an independent state and it's only an independent state because it became a Soviet satellite which through all this tragedy through all this terror murder famine nonetheless the Mongolian people like the Baltic people survived and they survived within their own state which could and did escape communism very important all right fifth and final point if I'm allowed am i okay Al Anon time for fifth and final point here okay much more needs to be said about each one of these points and perhaps in the question period we'll explore them more but I'm giving a very big geopolitical overview of this amazing story and the Baltics to give us not the details of what happened in the Baltic States which we remember well but a kind of context in which to appreciate and understand that amazing history let's talk a little bit about the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and then we'll talk about 1991 and the present the fifth and concluding piece of the lecture in 1919 the Treaty of Versailles and in World War one and it is not a treaty that does very well in the history books there were many critics at the time and retrospectively there's almost nobody who's saying the Versailles Treaty was a good treaty it's seen as more or less indefensible there are two criticisms of the Versailles Treaty the main criticism is that it was too punitive it blamed the Germans alone for the war it imposed reparations high costs on the Germans and created a great deal of instability in Germany and therefore contributed to the rise of Hitler and so how much worse can a treaty get than that right and as I said some people at the time said the same thing about the treaty and now this is the predominant view in the history books there's another view a minority view but it's also critical of the Versailles Treaty and it says the treaty was fine the Germans were really responsible for World War one they were the aggressors they should have paid the price the reparations were a good idea the problem wasn't that it was a punitive treaty the problem was that the British lacked the willpower they lacked the resolve the determination to enforce the treaty if they had only enforced the provisions of the treaty it would have been fine okay so my argument for those of you who've read the Stalin Volume one and lived to sit here in this lecture room today will know that my argument is that those two arguments are irrelevant because the Versailles Treaty was an anomaly in 1919 for the first and only time since Bismarck's unification of Germany in 1870 71 for the first and only time both German power and Russian power were destroyed they were flat in their back so you could impose a treaty on Germany without Russia in 1919 but that's not something you could do again and it's not something that could possibly last no matter how punitive or non-punitive the treaty no matter how much resolve or lack of resolve the British had the treaty was dead in the water dead on arrival DOA and that's because you could guess that either German power or Russian power would come back and in fact both of them came back and both of them came back in a single generation so that you had a treaty imposed on Germany where they couldn't do anything about it and imposed on the world when the Soviet Union couldn't do anything about it and pretty soon both Germany and the Soviet Union could do something about it and didn't like it and the great irony of the Versailles Treaty is that it was the British who recognized this from the beginning and it was Lloyd George at the General Conference in 1922 who himself began to try to revise the Versailles Treaty to bring the Germans in and maybe even bring the Soviets in because without them you couldn't have a stable order Lloyd George in other words was the original guy who began to try to revise the Versailles Treaty the British were the first revisionists of their own Versailles order of their own Versailles peace and in fact all during the period between the First World War and the Second World War the British never stopped trying to revise the Versailles Treaty and to bring Germany in and maybe even the Soviet Union in Hitler came to power in 1933 and the British continued to try to revise the treaty from their side this is known as appeasement and Chamberlain and everything you know about but it didn't start with him the British continued to try to stabilize the international order by making Germany a partner inside the tent a new treaty better than Versailles that would recognize that Germany was a power and maybe even that the Soviet Union was a power it failed it all failed we know that there was World War two but it tells you something about history sometimes when something is impossible it's impossible yeah so the Versailles Treaty was impossible we needed a better treaty fast forward this is where I'll conclude fast forward to 1991 now this is not a perfect analogy because there was no equivalent of the Versailles Treaty in 1991 they didn't sit down in Versailles in that amazing Hall of Mirrors if you visited Versailles that Chateau and negotiate and sign a peace treaty there were a lot of piecemeal agreements piecemeal agreements some were treaties some didn't have the status of a treaty they were only memoranda or even lower level than that but there were a series of agreements about the new order after 1991 which guess what was imposed on Russia and guess what in 1991 Russia could do nothing about it do you know that in 1991 Boris Yeltsin when he was campaigning to take Russia out of the Soviet Union he demanded from Ukraine Crimea in 1991 yes he did and you know what the Crimean said this is what they said and you know what Yeltsin did about it nothing because what could he do they were in freefall collapse he could do nothing about the fact that they didn't like 1991 what in 1991 the Soviet Union was formally granted Russia was formerly granted the Soviet Union seat where the veto on the Security Council of the UN that was momentous it wasn't necessarily automatic that the Russia would inherit the Soviet Union's veto in the UN this was done in exchange for Russia taking on all the debt of the Soviet Union so Ukraine and Kazakhstan were no longer responsible for Soviet debt even their piece of it and that's because Russia got the UN Security Council veto right there were other deals there was a deal about German unification which was an even bigger deal and we're burying in Washington this week the first president Bush the father who presided over a lot of this and we see what a statesman can look like and what integrity looks like and it's nice to be reminded of that this week the German unification piece was a really big piece and was also not automatic and Russia was a party to that and agreed to that there was also the winding down of the Warsaw Pact the removal of troops from Eastern European satellites the removal of troops from the Baltic States none of this was automatic all of that was negotiated some of you may have participated in those negotiations there was the Budapest memorandum in 1994 yes when the United States along with Britain Russia guaranteed the sovereignty and the borders of Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons and then in 2014 when the Russians could now had the power to act on their desire to reclaim Crimea when they took it back what did we do in response compared to those obligations we assumed in that Budapest memorandum so the point of this lecture once again three can be very very cruel and can also be uplifting but we have to be more realistic about geopolitics in order to stabilize our situation so Russia doesn't like the 1991 treaties once again there's an oversight treaty equivalent there's agreements and memoranda there's no formal treaty the same way but Russia doesn't like it and it now has the capacity to do something about it and it is and when we make commitments we should honor them but we didn't honor the Budapest memorandum defending Ukraine's sovereignty and so this tells you that the willpower on the American side to stand up for the integrity of Ukraine against Russian aggression is lacking and you can say once again like you did about the British oh the treaties were fine it's just the British lack the resolve to enforce them and you can fight that battle again and you talk about willpower and resolve which involves two hundred and fifty thousand American boys and girls getting on planes with their military gear and going to Ukraine and then sitting there for 10 20 or whatever many years like they are in Afghanistan or wherever if you're ready for that then you can talk to me about resolve otherwise we need a conversation which takes account of the fact that Russia has the ability to do things that we don't like and if we don't have the quote willpower and resolve to stand up to it then we need to figure out what in what different ways we can protect our interests protect free peoples and honor our commitments fewer commitments but every one you make you honor it all the way as we did in the Baltic States ambassador Matlock the last American ambassador in the Soviet Union as ambassador never traveled to the bull like States you know why because the United States didn't recognize the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states so the Soviet of the American ambassador in Moscow wouldn't travel in his official capacity from Moscow from the Soviet Union post to the Baltic States because they were not part of the Soviet Union in American thinking so that was a commitment that we made and it was a very important commitment and we upheld that commitment and we formalized that commitment of course in 2004 with NATO admission and NATO is an ironclad guarantee and so when you make ironclad guarantees and you live up to them you honor them that's one thing the Budapest memorandum is a different thing but it's about the revival of Russian power and its ability to do things about what it doesn't like and that's true going forward I'll leave you with a last thought think for a second if today's Germany look like today's Russia where would we be we know what Russia looks like we know what the Putin regime looks like we know what those gangsters in Moscow look like what if a regime like that was in Germany where would we be so that tells you that the game the whole game is not necessarily the Russia peace but it's the German peace isn't it and it's making sure that we're in a tight alliance with Germany and that we do everything to mutually support each other's market economy and democracy because Germany is the really big piece here thank you very much for your attention okay we have time for just a couple of minutes of questions we have people carrying microphones so wait till they get to you I'll recognize you if you have a question I'll wait for the microphone yes I'd like to go back to the beginning of the recognition by the United States why was it given the Wilson administration's commitment to the fourteen points in the principle national self-determination that it never recognized the Baltic States instead that was done in the middle of the Harding administration so American foreign policy has a lot of idealism built into it which reflects national character and reflects a certain other aspects of people's vision of the world and then it also has a lot of non idealism built into it as well which is sometimes called rail politique sometimes called cynicism Wilson is normally put in the idealist category and therefore all the things that he should have done or all the principles he enunciated should have applied universally but sometimes the idealism gets put through the meat grinder of the rail politique and as I said there were there was an assumption deeply shared in London in Paris for sure about how the Baltic States independence was just an accident wasn't enduring and was therefore going to end and they were going to be reabsorbed back into Russia and so we should acknowledge this reabsorption back into Russia instead of defending them and defend what we could defend it's kind of like the debate we're having now over Ukraine it's a very similar debate and so I didn't take a position on what we should do in Ukraine I just wanted to point out those tensions so Wilson made commitments that didn't extend to the full scope of the rhetoric that he pronounced in part because of this assumption that Russia was too big to ever allow the Baltics to be free of course that assumption was proven wrong and it was proven wrong in the combination of Poland Finland right 1918 in the Baltic States is about Finland and Poland as well as the Baltic States and without Finland and Poland there is no independence of the Baltic States in 1918 Germany also plays a really big role in support in part through military occupation and through sometimes unintentional support not support from a moral point of view but support sometimes unintended consequences so the Baltic independence was not seen as real back then and hopefully we don't see Ukraine's independence the same way through a cynical lens but at the same time we recognize that it's Russian power has to be managed it can't just be dismissed we got another one yes you said that you believe that the Hitler Stalin pact in the long run was beneficial and I wanted you to explain that statement in practical terms how has it been beneficial or is beneficial now once again so the Hitler Stalin pact was evil and we wouldn't have wanted it to happen and it produced tragedy once the evil happened once the tragedy occurred once all of that had to be lived and experienced and the suffering and everything else you would think there would be no possible silver lining you would think there would be nothing positive to extract from the depth of that human tragedy it turned out there was a positive piece that could be extracted despite the fact that the treaty was horrific the pact was horrific and that piece was to be able to better discredit in moral terms the Soviet Union by linking it to Nazi evil the more you linked the Soviet Union to Nazi evil the more the Soviet Union was also beyond redemption just like the Hitler regime if Stalin and Hitler were connected tied know better than each other and if Hitler was ultimate evil that turned out to be a political asset in 1989 91 now once again this is not a positive view of that treaty that treaty was an evil pact there's nothing positive about it and the consequences of people who had to live under that were very stark what happened to family the Ambassador alluded to this that history is gut-wrenching we wouldn't want that history to repeat I'm only saying that after all that happened which we didn't want to happen there was this little piece of it that turned out to have some use but that doesn't justify the pact and that doesn't mean that we would want the pact to have happened in the first place against the pact the problem is it happened but in the unraveling 50 years later August 23rd 1989 the pact was very useful and mobilized this incredible chain of courageous people from Riga through Vilnius from Thailand through Riga to Vilnius that's almost 400 miles and people linked in a human chain almost 400 miles on the 50th anniversary of this horrific pact and so once again I'm looking at that and I'm saying that enabled a lot of people to be able to be brave and to bring down this communist regime and their locality and so in so beneficial might not be the word but it had some qualities to it that were not intended that could be used by people after all the tragedy happened why are we here today we're here today because a hundred years ago and now still today Latvia Lithuania and Estonia are independent and free countries that's why we're here today that's what we should never forget that was a struggle that was horrible you heard the details about losing a third of your population twice who would want a history like that who would want to subject their nation to histories like that nobody would nobody would want that kind of history but unfortunately that's the history they've had and that's the history in many ways that they've overcome unlike Tibet for example right and so that's the history we're here celebrating today we're not celebrating Nazism and German occupation we're not celebrating Soviet Communism and Soviet occupation we're not celebrating any of that tyranny and horror right we're overcoming that and overcoming that is a constant process and part of that means dealing with your past as honestly and as thoroughly as possible including some of the paradoxes of the past because that's how we got to the amazing place that we are today in the Baltic States thank you for your attention I want to thank professor kotkin I think he criticized everyone here for being addicted to cable TV but you could see it's far preferable to be addicted to Steve cotton and but our larger hope is that you will be addicted to the Foreign Policy Research Institute here and support the high quality programs and research ongoing every day at FBI thank you for joining us [Music]

Channel: Foreign Policy Research Institute

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Length: 63min 10sec (3790 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 07 2018