The Baltic States: Forging Nations Amid Empires - Kevin Platt

you [Music] okay well I am pleased to introduce our next speaker who is dr. Kevin Platt dr. Platt is Edmund and Louise Kahn term professor in the humanities in the humanities professor of Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania Platt received his BA from Amherst College and his PhD from Stanford University and taught it at Pomona College before joining the University of Pennsylvania faculty in 2002 he has been the recipient of grants from Iraq's and CER fulbright-hays and other programs and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2011-2012 he works on representations of Russian history Russian history ography history and memory in Russia Russian lyric poetry and global post-soviet Russian culture he is the author of terror and greatness Ivan and Peter as Russian myths and history in a grotesque key Russian literature and the idea of revolution and he's also the co-editor of the epic revisionism Russian history and literature as Stalinist propaganda he is also edited and contributed translations to a number of books of Russian poetry in English translation most recently hit parade the orbital group he's current projects include a critical historiography of Russia a study of contemporary Russian culture in Latvia and an edited volume titled Russian culture and global situations so let's welcome dr. Platt thanks so much for that introduction Maya and I also just wanted to thank all of you for coming here and FPR I and the Eurasia program and its leadership and also Rachel handler for really excellent organizational work a little about me as you just heard I'm a specialist primarily in Russian culture and history but I've spent a lot of time in Latvia over the years and I'm finishing a book about the contemporary cultural and social situation of Russians in Latvia and largely for that reason I know a thing or two about the history of the Baltic States and of Latvia which is the subject of my talk with you guys here today I'm gonna return to the situation of present-day Baltic States at the end of this lecture but I'll note at the outset that the peculiar situation of the current Russian population of Latvia is a significant outcome of the history that we'll explore here and contemporary debates over the status of the Russian population in Latvia are dependent on interpretation of the history of the Latvian national experience as defined by eras of domination and occupation but also a fruitful interaction with the various ethnicities of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union like Latvian national development those of Estonia and Lithuania are also deeply imbricated in history of relationships with Moscow just for a few figures to throw things into relief as you probably know a Russians make up a sizeable segment of the Latvian population currently it's 26.9% according to the 2011 census and there are another five to seven percent of speakers of Russian and other ethnicities that we could add to that number which by some calculations statistics are always tricky makes the Russian population of Latvia the largest of any post-soviet state other than the federación the case of Estonia is comparable with Latvia in many ways Lithuania has a far smaller number of Russians and it's quite distinct in this regard one question that haunts the Baltics is that of the integration of the Russian population in social and political terms and the corresponding question of the role of Russians Russian culture Russian identity and Baltic collective life and Baltic national identities this is not going to be the topic of the lecture today this is the thing that I think about a lot but I think it reveals to a certain sent the extent the the trace of Imperial relations on this territory the articulation of Baltic national identities in Baltic consciousnesses always taken place in this contact zone between Imperial formations of much larger ethnic groups that have washed over this territory from one direction and the other for centuries so let's just turn to the Baltic Nations themselves at the outset we have to make a few necessarily preambles both historical and theoretical before we think through the history of Baltic national experiences first of all we should recognize that while there is a great deal of commonality interaction and community among the Baltic societies the tendency on the part of more distant observers to lump them together as the Baltics glosses over the really great distinctions between these societies and their histories as well will talk about their distinct paths to national self-affirmation a little bit later in this talk but let's just identify for a start some more fundamental distinctions first of all linguistic Latvian and Lithuanian are both in the Baltic language group which is a subgroup of the indo-european larger group there these are really the only two Baltic languages which are languages of state in the modern world there is some debate about certain varieties of both whether they might constitute languages or dialects let Guardian for instance which is spoken by a large number of Latvian citizens in the eastern part of the state in Liguria you guys all know the old joke about the difference between a language and a dialect right know the difference between a language and a dialect is an army Estonian in distinction is a phonetic language closely related to thing Finnish more distantly with Hungarian then languages are not part of the in the European group it's a completely structurally different language but none of these languages mute is is mutually intelligible up until the middle 2000s there were still internal borders between all the Baltic States and it was always somewhat of a surprise when you arrived at the borders between Latvia and Lithuania or Latvia and Estonia which I did many times and saw that the lingua franca between the border guards of the separate nations was still Russian I think it probably would have switched to English by now but there's a need of lingua franca for inter Baltic Communications and by the way one of the very few Baltic words that has appeared in many other modern languages is the term baltic itself which we apply to these languages this region but also to the sea which gives the region its names the Baltic Sea Balt is the Baltic root for white and the Baltic Sea is is the white sea so much for language we can also think about religious distinctions Lithuania which for much of the late pre-modern and early modern eras was very closely integrated with the with Polish political and cultural life is a society in which Catholic Catholicism was the dominant force for a long time and it's still a you know predominantly Catholic society Latvians and Estonians where there was a dominance of Baltic German nobility descended from Crusaders that came into this area and Hanseatic cities of Riga and Tallinn was a zone of eventually Protestant Lutheran religiosity in short these are very distinct societies it would be possible to give completely separate and dissimilar lectures on histories of each of them but we're going to take them all together and think a little bit about those differences as we go through the history of this region but it really should be stressed that these are all completely separate contexts in very many ways alright let's let's turn now to a theoretical preamble we're talking today about national identity national consciousness national self affirmation and culture so if you think just a little bit of our about our key term nation as history teachers you're probably all well aware that nationalisms nations are not all alike political scientists like to make typological distinctions between civic nations civic nationalisms and ethnic nations or ethno-nationalism x' the former being defined primarily by a commonality of citizenship political institutions economic life and the shared history that arises from from these perhaps whereas ethno-nationalism is a conception of the nation as defined by a shared ethnicity expressed in culture or language genealogy a shared cultural being that is definitive of national life and usually associated with a historical territory which is usually conceived as an ancient birthright in practice these are ideal types and there's a kind of a secondary problem of essential ization which often afflicts national nationalism studies where specific nations are typecast as one or the other some could say of course that the United States is an example of you know civic nationalism perhaps you know the best and proudest example of civic forms of national identity or that the the Baltic conceptions of nationhood at least as some would define them gravitate towards the second towards ethnic considerations but in fact any given national identity or nation formation is first of all unique and always a work in progress it's easy to find Americans who wish to or will emphatically claim that there is a civilizational or even genealogical basis of American culture in the English language and roots of the United States in colonial settler populations from England it's you don't have to go far to find in fact American ethno nationalists s-- likewise the idea of civic nationalism has historically played a very significant role in the Baltic States and in all of the Baltic States today the problem of national identity in nationhood has been and continues to be at issue it's an ongoing situation of political and social contestation over how Civic and ethnic ideas are to be properly combined in articulating collective identity citizenship and a just settlement of a history that was patently unjust so let's return to that history a little bit all three of the Baltic people's experienced rise of national consciousness in the course of the 19th century which was the age of rising nationalism across Eastern Europe more generally as smaller ethnic and linguistic groups which had historically formed subjects of Habsburg Swedish Russian Imperial formations one by one came to recognize themselves as nations or not you know there are lots of ethnicities and languages in Eastern Europe that did not in fact nationalize in the course of the 19th century we could think for instance about the Prussians the other linguistic group from subgrouping from the the Baltic language group Prussians were by and large absorbed into German society and state formations no one spoke Prussian after the end of the 19th century basically for all three of the Baltic people's the process could be well described in the terms of Miroslav crock who is a great historian of Eastern European nationalisms it's also been well described by people like Eric Hobsbawm or more recently Ron suni nationalization was the outcome of many different factors the modernization of these territories that brought urbanization and education to many of these people which made possible the dissemination and assimilation of nationalist ideologies among educated elites and that eventually through to urban literate populations nationalist ideologies that themselves had been articulated in the end of the late 18th century in the early 19th century by herder subsequently German romantic nationalist philosophers so this process of the sort of articulation of a national idea took place in each of the Baltic States all of which were incorporated in the Russian Empire up until the revolutions of 1917 yet the process of national self articulation had significant distinctions between the three Baltic cases as I said they were distinct not only in terms of religion and language but also in terms of history Lithuania in its nationalizing imaginings could draw on a very deep history of independent statehood in the context of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth most emphatically in the the late pre-modern era despite the fact that in that era in which Lithuania elites largely assimilated to polish and Latin cultural forms and so therefore it was an era that really bequeathed very little by way literary culture to modern Lithuanian cultural life it was still a there was still a lingering sense of state identity which was available for Latvian nationalizing elites in the late 19th century of Lithuanian sorry the Latvian and Estonian peoples in distinction had been largely rural populations ruled over from the Middle Ages by Baltic Germans who since the early 18th century had been servants of the russian imperial power but there are other imbalances between these cases in the course of the 19th century of Latvia and Estonia experienced modernization to a much greater and more rapid degree than did Lithuania which remained more thoroughly rural and more thoroughly agricultural so that by the turn of the 20th century cities like Tallinn and Riga had become really major urban centers with rapidly developing industry and professional classes and a large number of urbanized educated elites drawn from the Estonian and Latvian populations you can compare that with vinius which was still a predominantly Jewish and polish commercial city at the end of the 19th century in each of these cases the rise of national consciousness takes place at the end of the 19th century and into the early 20th with the appearance of these educated elites the categorization of national cultural forms the articulation of written languages literary languages publications newspapers and literature and the coalescing of political sensibilities without going too deeply into the history of those processes we can note that it was aided at times by the elites of dominant ethnic groups the first collectors of folklore and song culture in the area where German intellectuals generally but also that it was actively impeded by Imperial Russian policies that prohibited printing and education in local languages on and off again actually and pursued start and stop policies of Russification across the area especially towards the end of the century one other thing that we should really note is the importance of song in this area song in her Derian conceptions of nationalism was privileged everywhere German conceptions of nationalism also romantic nationalism also stressed music and song is some of the most important bearers of national identity and national sensibility but song became extraordinarily important across all three of the Baltic states as one of the most important bearers and expressions of national identity the first Latvian festival of song takes place in 1873 it's a large-scale festival but in the course of the next hundred and how many years has it been since then song festivals have become regular features of the cultural life across all of the Baltic States places where the nation comes together to recognize itself and if you think about the scale of these societies you know these are very small countries they're places where you know Benedict Anderson famously describes the you know modern nationalism as the the question of imagined communities because you can't actually see everyone else in the nation you actually you have to imagine the nation these are places that are almost small enough that you can see every one and that really is the the feeling that you get if you go to like that Latvian national song festivals there's tens and tens of thousands of people gathering together singing in the mass coral experiences so a song becomes extraordinarily important in it and it remains important throughout the rest of the the modern era both within Latvia throughout all of its troubled history but also and the other Baltic States but also outside of it that is a very important form for the maintenance of cultural identity by diaspora Baltic populations across the world during the Soviet era all right by the time of the 1905 revolution these processes had coalesced in organized political activity across all three of the Baltic States during the the 1905 revolution the expression of national political mobilization was most thoroughly expressed in Latvia and Estonia where in this history it's often difficult to disentangle socialist revolutionary consciousness from national consciousness at this time a revolutionary mobilization in these territories energized people both in calls for national autonomy but all and even independence but also in straightforward calls to overthrow the Tsarist order the capitalist or landowner order the German landlords etc revolutionary disorders in Estonia and Latvia were extraordinarily extensive and as in other parts of the Russian Empire were suppressed by force with a great deal of bloodshed and violence involving hundreds of fatalities and thousands of executions over half of the executions during the 1905 revolution that were carried out by the Russian Imperial state were carried out in Latvia and Estonia there was a major center of revolutionary unrest and Lithuania because it was less urbanized and therefore had less mobile mobilized urbanized populations and also less proletarians was a less extreme case as elsewhere in the Russian Empire 1905 set the stage for the revolutions of 1917 and the subsequent period of Independence the the legalization of political parties in the post 1905 order the concessions granted by the throne allowed the public articulation of national political ideals across these societies so that when the 1917 revolution took place national actors nationalist actors were ready to take advantage of the opportunity to claim independent statehood there was presented by a really somewhat unique concatenation of events the independent statehood of the Baltic nations arose out of the confluence of revolution and war across this territory it's a very complicated set of stories that unfolds quite variously once again across the three societies but the general course of events was a result of the tumultuous conclusion of World War one in this territory Germany had extended its control over nearly all of the baltic territory and acted to encourage the creation of independent states here in order to diminish the revolutionary russian regime which was itself too weak and embattled in the early years to stake its claim here yet Germany too was weak too weak to create the puppet regimes that were probably intended for this area and while the Bolsheviks had some adherents in the Baltics especially in Latvia but also in Estonia they turned out to be just completely politically inept and basically lost the popularity battle with more nationally inclined Baltic political leaders as a result 1919 1920 through 1940 became the first era of Baltic independence we don't have time to dwell extensively on this period or any of these periods except to note that each of these societies during this period witnessed the articulation the articulation of national culture and political institutions and identities literature art journalism and other forms of national public life in really full flowering each of these states was born as a multi-ethnic society and this returns to the to the point about civic nationalism the the starting point for each of these states was a parliamentary democracy forum in which nationalism took something of a backseat to civic or ethnic nationalism took something of a backseat to civic forms of nationalism citizenship in these states was extended initially to members of all ethnicities in expressions of civic conceptions of nationhood that were really well represented among intellectuals and political elites across these societies in the early years of Independence it also has to be said that ethnic nationalist ideas were also quite important and well represented among the elites of these societies and in a reflection of the trends in Europe as a whole of the interwar period each of these societies witnessed the slow rise and prominence of ethnic conceptions of nationhood each of these states also moved through a series of coos that took place across the region different places at different times from the more liberal parliamentary forms of government that they had started with towards authoritarianism this is perhaps the most well known part of the story that I'm telling here today is the end of the first era of Baltic dependence as we know it takes place with the outbreak of world war ii as a result of the secret negotiations between the USSR and Nazi Germany in 1939 in connection with the molotov-ribbentrop non-aggression pact of august 1939 stalin and hitler basically divided the baltic region into spheres of influence in early there's a map which if i had been preparing more assiduously this morning for the I would have shown you but it's a straightforward map that was attached as a secret protocol showing the Baltic and the dividing line between the Soviet and German spheres of influence inscribed across the territory of the Baltics in early 1940 by Fiat as the Nazis were taking control of Poland and moving into western Lithuania the Soviet Union expanded by Fiat and occupied and annexed the Baltic States as new republics of the USSR and so we arrived at the area the era of Soviet occupation which was the last until 1991 now before we consider the challenges that these societies faced under Soviet rule and how they managed to meet these challenges let's consider for a minute the question of Soviet nationalities policy more broadly in theory of course the Soviet state was founded on positions of marxist internationalism which one would think would have little use for the concept of nation or nationhood the Baltic the Bolsheviks however had inherited an empire when they came to power in Petrograd in 1917 and this presented them with many pragmatic problems what should be done about the huge number of non Russian ethnicities of the empire as well as the national independence movements that were clamoring for autonomy in many regions of the empire marxist internationalism aside the Bolsheviks could not simply ignore national groups and assimilate them claiming that nationalist sentiment was a myth no one was going to buy that what about rights to speak languages to do ones thing what about rights to autonomy what about the unequal political rights which seemed to persist between Russians and Russian speakers who were in charge of the revolutionary state and everyone else wouldn't a domination of everyone else by the Russian Bolshevik Party just be a continuation of imperialism secession and national independence movements would surely get a lot of steam out of this and the whole enterprise would fail so then and came up with a formula which was later carried on and continued but also modified by Stalin the Bolsheviks would in fact recognize nations and give them tons of rights many many rights they would have every right imaginable in fact language education artistic expression via national theaters and orchestras each nation would have its own administrative unit territories the Nationals in each territory would be given proportionally greater roles in running things in proportion to the representation of those peoples on the territories in question minorities of all types would be given every possible attribute of independent cultural and political life except that they would not have the right to secede or they would have it only on paper they would have every right except for that one all of this was intended to ensure that non Russians would feel good and protected in the USSR Lenin was most concerned about what he termed great Russian chauvinism Russian nationalism the other nations had to be convinced that the Russians were not just maintaining a Russian Empire and this meant that the one nationalism that was not allowed was Russian nationalism for Marxist theorists in the 1920s it was thought perhaps that once the USSR had achieved communism and the state withered away nations wouldn't matter anyway nations would wither away too probably or maybe they would become less important that was the hope at least the long-term theoretical view still consistent with Marx's theory was that nations would eventually disappear once the world revolution was complete and the communist society was created but that future state was put off indefinitely in the 1930s the state the situation shifted yet again when in reflection of cultural and political trends everywhere and in an expression of the rise of dictatorial Stalinism which consolidated its control over the Soviet Union Russian nationalism was revived as well as a component of Soviet patriotic sentiment in the late 1930s Russian was made once again a mandatory language of education everywhere in the USSR you could choose not to study your Republican language but you had to study Russian no matter where you are in which of the Soviet republics you were born from 1937 on russian historical figures and heroes came to be celebrated as the most important in the pantheon of soviet historical figures in the 1930s became the era when the Russian Czars were rediscovered as predecessors of the Bolsheviks this unfolding of Russian of Soviet nationalities policy and practice was fraught and complex the result as it has been described by the historian Yuri Steel's can in a seminal article was that the Soviet Union was constructed in the same manner as a communal apartment and if you haven't read that article and you're interested in Soviet nationalities policy it's one to read it's called the Soviet Union as a communal apartment and it was published I think around 2001 or two and I believe in the Slavic review but it's easy to find you're a slow skin who has this great mega book out right now the government house for the house of government so a communal apartment in which each Soviet nationality had a room and the Russians had the hall the Russians were the landlords every nationality had its place in the Soviet in yours as the you know national ethnic landscape of Soviet society was constructed each nationality had territory cultural and political institutions but Russian was the lingua franca and it's cultural institutions were identical with all Soviet cultural institutions while there were Ukrainians and Moldovans and chuvash Nigerians and more Vinny ins and they all had their own theaters they all had their own writers unions they all had their own territories they all had their own communist parties there was no separate Russian theater there was no separate Russian Communist Party there was only Soviet theater and the Soviet Communist Party we should make a couple more notes concerning Soviet nationalist policy before we were tuned to the Baltics first of all the Soviet institutionalization of nation was both territorial and individual which is to say not only did each national group have a territory but also each person had an ethnic nationality which from the 1930s on was inherited and inscribed at birth in passports that were issued universally at that point well issued but then not actually given to everyone because the Russian peasants never got their passports until the 1970s in order to keep them on the land the passport national nationality was in some sense another part of the Soviet policy towards protection of the rights of cultural minorities from the 1920s and 1930s all right everyone had to be protected so Ukrainians and Belarus needed to be identified by the state so that they could be protected from the majority culture of the Belarusians so if you have a majority ukrainian village we can know that and the majority ukrainian village can have a majority ukrainian village soviet but it's an odd outcome in some sense we could easily imagine a very different settlement of the early soviet problem of nationalities in which perhaps territories remain linked with national identities but passports are linked to territories so that a ukrainian born in belarus might have a Ukrainian passport in part this is all a reflection of the sort of settling of Soviet conceptions and of Marxist Leninist Stalinist conceptions of the nature of nationalism back towards essential istic kinds of positions by the end of Stalin's reign he rewrote the linguistic theories of the of the soviet orthodox academic establishment in order to insist that in fact language and national identity were the innate reflections of unchanging historical essences that came with people's that they wouldn't in the end just disappear that they would in fact persist in some form in the future communist society the other peculiar idea that i want to touch upon before coming back to the Baltics is conceptual in the 1930s as nationality policy was taking its final shape the Soviet state also imposed a unified cultural form unified system of aesthetics on Soviet society which was called socialist realism one of the key formulas of socialist realism governing the way that this new cultural orthodoxy was to be implemented in the non Russian cultures of the USSR was national inform socialist in content it's a it's a revealing formula with regard to the place of nation in the USSR nation in the mature Soviet settlement was ornament it wasn't political content we can easily contrast this with more usual conceptions of national being that are perhaps more familiar in the world that we live in in which ethnic national being as I mentioned not as an ornament but as a deep essential content which is expressed in national culture you carry around your your nationhood on the inside but in the Soviet political orthodoxy nation was something that could be put on like a costume and worn around over a deeper commonality of socialist political forms experience got a few nice examples here of Socialist Realist culture you know national inform you know the carpet but socialist in content and I think it's a beautiful exhibit in that sense Central Asian carpets this one is nice too all right let's return to the situation of the Baltic states in the Soviet era first of all the history of the occupation was a truly enormous traumatic and tragic chapter in the histories of all of these societies the Soviets rolled in in the in 1940 and the first thing they did of course was to begin Soviet izing the the Baltic States one of the key moves was to arrest and deport thousands tens of thousands of elites immediately following this the and you know with within a year the Germans rolled in and we have the trauma of the war which results in mass displacements of additional huge elements of these societies immediately following the war the Soviets come back in and repeat the process again with more mass deportations which culminate in collectivization of the agricultural systems at the end of the 1940s which result in more mass deportations as a result the you know deportation of peoples from this area is maybe two hundred two hundred and fifty thousand people but we should also take into consideration the huge numbers of displaced people that left during the war and ever to return so there was an enormous loss of population as a result of this traumatic decade the response of the Soviet state was to replace that population with huge influxes of Russians and other non Baltic populations there were something like six or seven hundred thousand Russians and other Soviet nationals who entered into the Baltic basically replacing the populations that had been lost to displacement and deportation in the 1940s this was a phenomenon which affected once again this territory these states unequally because Latvia and Estonia had more living space in their urban centers these became the objects of much more intensive population replacement on the part of the Soviet Union they were also because they were already more industrialized slated for more industrial expansion in the Soviet economic planning and so throughout the rest of the Soviet era you have a continuous trickle of new in migration from the rest of the Soviet Union into these territories because Lithuania was less developed and more urban also possibly because there was more partisan activity in in Lithuania there was less of this initial push Soviet populations into Lithuania and that explains to some extent the difference in statistics that we'll see at the end of the Soviet era the result of this huge influxes which are really not comparable to the experience of any other Soviet states is a huge overhang of Russian culture and Russian social pressure within these societies there's a ongoing process of russification of cultural life as a result of these huge influences Russians by the late Soviet era in Latvia and Estonia felt absolutely no need of local languages or of integration in Latvian culture because a they were dominant but also because they were in the majority in the major population centers so that the Latvia is you know major population is half of it is located in Riga at the end of the Soviet era over half of the population of Riga was russophone similar things can be said about Tallinn less fully the case but it's comparable yet the Baltic people were not without resources in this fairly awful situation like other Soviet nations they had the benefit of the claim at least to their own national cultural institutions and they were expected to continue to create culture no one was talking about turning Latvians into Russians and in fact to be a good member of Soviet society a non Russian member of Soviet society one had to produce ones non Russian identity at the same time as one reiterated one's loyalty to the Soviet construction of that identity and the place of that identity in the Soviet identity landscape we could identify four different strategies of resistance the first that I'd like to think about a little bit is a so peein expression so I have here a poem that we could look at that was written in 1967 by the Estonian poet yan captain ski and published in the you know Soviet official press we need to walk very quietly eyes on ground you don't need to ask what are we looking for a long time ago our land became yours and our state fell down in shards into the big and empty world which is about American Indians right so there's straightforward approach to the the question of a so peein language using the possibilities for expression which are allowed for you to allegorize your situation and this is a very common strategy in the cultural life across this region this is another example also from Estonia fight with a dragon by Yuri Iraq it was made in 1979 shortly after a student uprising in Tallinn that was demanding the protection of Estonian cultural rights was brutally suppressed students were sent to the gulag fight with a dragon where we have this you know red dragon and the absorption of the resistor of George I guess he is but allegory is really not hard to read a second strategy for cultural resistance for the you know persistence of national self-expression is Sam is that and dissonant activity so that all of these territories following the late 1960s and as we know the Soviet Union experienced a period of liberalisation although it's there's some debate over the appropriateness of that term in the 1960s under Khrushchev which resulted in what my colleague at the University of Pennsylvania Ben Nathan's likes to call the the vegetarian era of Soviet history a period in which the penalties for resistance and for deviation from the rule were far less extreme than they had been in a Stalinist era and it's as a result of this that we see across the Soviet Union the rise of both dissidents and of various alternative media systems samizdat which is the Russian word for us it's a self-publishing all of the Baltic States became huge centers for the creation of non official manuscript literature Simas Dodd as well as for Magneto's dot the circulation of cassette tapes with prohibited or non official materials this isn't activity across these territories as well we see in the 1970s and into the early 1980s the rise of dissident groups there's a Helsinki 76 group which forms in Latvia there are nationalist groups which form in Lithuania and in Latvia across this territory they're all persecuted quite energetically by the KGB as dissidents was everywhere in the Soviet Union yet they persisted and then a third strategy for cultural survival if we think about these national communities more broadly than simply thinking about their place in the Soviet Union is immigration so significant populations existed in diaspora all through the Soviet period especially in the United States carrying out as we said earlier their own song festivals and these populations in some sense were carriers of culture the you know numbers of Latvians or Estonians or Lithuanians who actually returned following the end of the Soviet Union is negligible numbering in the tens of thousands I think in these societies yet the return of national culture of song culture the 1990 song festival in in Riga is remembered actually is the moment when there was a huge returning wave of diasporic Latvians to take part in the song festival and it was also one of the one of the moments one of the key moments in the so-called singing revolution which we'll talk about in just a minute and then finally I think the it has to be said that most importantly culture itself and cultural expression was one of the key means of the persistence of national identity in the Baltic States throughout the the Soviet era because of the formula nationalists and formed socialists and content the creation of culture in the Soviet Union culture bearing national characteristics was not in and of itself viewed as threatening to the Soviet project so Soviet song festivals corralled of course into politically correct positions but nevertheless song festivals continued to be held throughout the era of Soviet occupation and although you couldn't sing anti Soviet songs and certain nationalist songs were prohibited there were nevertheless occasions for national self-expression and I think that that really is the one of the keys to the persistence of national identity throughout the Soviet Union not just in the Baltic states its the peculiarities of the bulk of the Soviet constructions of national identity which construed national expression as something which could be emasculated or rendered politically neutral but it was that control which allowed the persistence of national cultures throughout the Soviet Union creating the basis on which national cultures could be revived in the post-soviet era when the formulation of the significance of these cultures cultural expressions for identity once again reverted to the for more familiar positions that we find normal in the world alright let's quickly talk about the end of the Soviet Union and then there'll be a little bit of time for discussion I'll have to run over this more quickly I guess if we're gonna have any time for discussion right I've got about twenty more minutes twenty-five okay so as we know Gorbachev came to power without any true intent to liberalize Soviet society the perestroika process was intended as a revival of Leninist orthodoxy that was going to reinvigorate the Soviet project that had lost steam during the long period of what came to be known as stagnation in the Gorbachev historical rhetoric Chernobyl was one of the key events that changed the the character of perestroika the Chernobyl catastrophe about which populations of Eastern Europe learned as a result of broadcasts from The Voice of America and Radio Free Europe was the key moment which forced the Soviet state and forced Gorbachev to initiate newer policies and a reinterpretation of the policy of glass nest that allowed for political well not political but first of all anti-bureaucratic criticisms which very shortly in the course of the 1980s morphed into platforms for independent political expression it was in this context the Baltic States saw the remobilize ation of national political consciousness in public in the Soviet Union the re-emergence of national organizations in the fabric of Soviet society some of the key events were also completely linked to the Chernobyl catastrophe mobilizations against huge new industrial projects that had been set for the late 80s and early 90s in the soviet union by central planning the dow java hydroelectric station phosphate mining expansions in Estonia and the construction of Auriga Metro movements public movements against these were oriented towards the environmental damage that they were going to cause but these were also movements that were highly conscious of the demographic effects that huge new industrialization projects would bring to the Baltic States by this time by the end of the Soviet era the population of ethnic Russians in Latvia which is the most extreme case had reached 34% with maybe another 10% of non Latvian Russian speakers of various kinds the probability that the hydroelectric project and the Riga metro project would present the tipping point at which Latvians became a minority within their own Republic was extraordinarily high and so this mobilization waves were oriented both towards environmental but also towards demographic and national cultural considerations a second feature of the national revivals that marked the Baltic breakdown of the Soviet Union were the song festivals and singing demonstrations which took place across the area song in this period becomes one of the main tools of political demonstration both in the context of official official events but also in the context of demonstrations which make song into the main tool of expression and then a final component that we should talk about is history history was one of the main flash points for the transformation of Soviet public life in the late 1980s glass nest wasn't originally intended as a vehicle for critique of present-day abuses and present-day failings of the Soviet system but very soon it became a vehicle for the expression of alternate versions or true versions of the history of the Soviet Union that had long been under wraps in the Baltic area one of the most crucial was the history of the sutta the molotov-ribbentrop pact the Soviet Union had denied the authenticity of the protocols to the molotov-ribbentrop pact since they had been revealed in the late 1940s in the West it was a continuous flashpoint of latvian dissidents who repeatedly brought up the secret protocols in court cases and trials of dissidents from the late 1970s and in the early 1980s in the late 80s the recognition of the authenticity of these documents became one of the chief demands of political mobilization in the the Baltic States it was the basis for the 1989 Baltic Way demonstration which was a human chain running through all three of the Baltic States and their capitals uniting millions of people in commemoration of the August 23rd signing of the molotov-ribbentrop pact fifty years earlier and it was shortly after that in the December of 1989 that the Congress of people's deputies of the Soviet Union recognized the authenticity of the Malta free Ventura pact which paved the way for the Supreme Soviet of Latvia and of the other I think actually Lithuania does it first I'm more familiar with the Latvian case but they all declared basically independence and the illegalities of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States I don't want to take any more time I want to stop what I want to say in conclusion a couple of comments to think about first of all there's this term masterpieces of history and if we think about the breakup of the Soviet Union there was a lot of bloodshed around various parts of the Soviet Union the Baltics are amazing a masterpiece of history in the sense this is a territory in which two educated observer looking in 1989 and 1990 you had all the makings of major inter-ethnic conflict which didn't happen and that it's very often now that there is a you know long history of recriminations about the course of post-soviet Baltic state hood citizenship social integration etc but one thing that has to be said about these territories is that these societies managed the transition to the post-soviet era in an extraordinarily peaceful way the number of deaths was very small and they resulted only from conflicts with the interior ministry troops there were mobilized in 1991 in a short-lived crackdown on Baltic independence movements that was pretty much immediately resisted by mass action you have to give some credit to to Russian and Soviet political elites that basically lost their nerve and Gorbachev pulled back from any serious crackdown on independence movements we should also though recognize that there are ongoing problems and the problem which remains across this region in which I think is growing more acute in present as a result of the rien scription of hard borders between west and east across this territory is the problem of successor populations what to do with the legacy population of Russians how to articulate and recapture the civic national roots that these societies actually were founded upon in the early 1920s and create a society in which everyone will find their place but everyone will feel that they can buy in so I think I'm going to stop it with that we have about 15 minutes for questions if people have them thank you I see a hand here and then here in in forging nations but empires to what extent if at all did Latvian and Lithuanian collaboration with the Germans in exterminating Jews among the populations does that form their identity today I guess I don't need the mic right so the question of collaboration is a huge one across Eastern Europe and it has to be said that in thinking about Europe as a whole the society which is dealt best with the legacy of Nazism is Germany the on on one hand it has to be said that all of these states have made very significant strides towards writing the history of collaboration ISM at the same time it also has to be said that there is a significant tendency among some segments of these populations to simply a whitewash or ignore this very significant history it's a major problem what I think is an even more major problem however is the way that ethnic politics and also entered state politics managed to weaponize this history on both sides of the of the problem so that on the one hand you have the production more and more over the last 20 years of anteye Baltic history's that paints the Baltic collaboration role as in in far starker terms then it probably should be and that paint the present politics of denial of collaboration ISM in far starker terms than they should be painted at the same time on the other hand you get the you know reaction on the part of certain segments of the baltic population and baltic society which perceives any recognition of this history of collaboration as a smear campaign against their society which has to be resisted and more and more recently it's identified as an a russian anti baltic smear campaign so that i think that you know we work ourselves into a deadlock where these societies are not able to actually have a rational conversation about this the the history becomes a political tool on both sides unfortunately I think it's it's also indicative of the the situation there were I think about fifty thousand Jews in Latvia once against the case I know best at the end of the Soviet era there are only 5,000 Jews left this is a debate which takes place in the absence of the populations that it effects so that there's a kind of a strange haunting of the territory by the genocide of the Jews which is not something which is talked about enough in these territories my wife's family her grandmother came from dilka viscus which is a little town near the Polish border in Lithuania and I remember we went to visit there about four years ago vilkin viscus was the third most important center of Jewish culture in this territory Vilnius Warsaw and Luka viscus the major synagogue a major center of Jewish culture there's also very near the Polish border so it was in the first place the Nazis came when they rolled into the Lithuanian territories and the population was entirely wiped out everyone was killed there are no Jews at all in Boca viscus now all that's left is the Jewish cemetery but the Jewish cemetery is this extraordinarily sort of ghostly site you go to the center of the town you can find like a little sign pointing down an alley that leads to the Jewish cemetery and you walk into it the grass is long it's apparently mode only once a year and there are snail shells so you're walking and this crunching as you're going through this this cemetery and it is maintained in the state of desecration that it was left 50 years ago all of the monuments are knocked down there are bullet holes it's also apparent that the local population doesn't come there even though it's in the center of a populated territory so it is it is a serious problem one which has to be considered but it's also one which right now is almost impossible to consider an irrational way in these societies as a result of the extreme polarization of historical memory your question yes I was wondering how much demographic change has occurred in the Baltics since they became independent again in 91 have the Russians generally decided to hold on or was there some outflow at some point so once again the Latvian case is the one that I know best Lithuania is very different from the Latin case there were nine point six percent of the population Russians at the end of the Soviet era and I think now it's probably down to like five percent but I do not know the precise figure now Estonia had I think thirty percent thirty point four or something at the end of the Soviet era and I'm not sure how much that one is shrunk in Latvia this is the case that I know the figures well the Russian population as we said was 34% at the end of the Soviet era with another 10% or sort of Russian speakers that's another very complicated question right who is a Russian in this territory Russian is notoriously messy ethnicity which is you know usually comprised you ask a Russian who their grandparents were and turns out they are a Lithuanian a pole a Jew and you know Georgian but in any case right so you have 34 it's now down to 24% ethnic Russians with probably another you know 7 or 8% billa Russians and Ukrainians so there has been significant outflows that's in terms of percentages and I don't know the total numbers but the other thing which has to be said about the demographics of all of these states in the era of the European Union is that they've seen enormous outflows of populations first Russians who left and the citizenship policies especially in Latvian Estonia were adopted with an eye towards encouraging Russians especially members of the military to not decide to stick around following the end of the Soviet era so there was quite significant outflow at the beginning of the 1990s but then since then there's been ongoing outflows because of the lack of Economic Opportunity and all of these territories and once again that's a very complicated story their ups and downs and it's quite different from state to state but it's safe to say that all of them are experiencing really quite significant economic shrinkage so that if Latvia was approaching 3 million people at the end of the Soviet era its closer to 2 million people now like a really significant portion of the population has has moved out and it's an ongoing problem how to encourage young people to stick around the European Union is a big playground if you're a young person the sort of ambitious young person in any of these states when they turn 14 decides you know what your European language they're going to learn German or Danish or Swedish or English probably not English anymore in order to go to university in those places and many of them don't come back so it's a problem and it's a problem which is also being addressed by EU policy there's a lot of thought about how to encourage people to return to these societies yeah here thank you very much I guess my question is a bit of a historical one I'm was really fascinated by your comments in this kind of interwar period the 20s and the 30s and thinking about this question of nationhood and nationality and sort of nationalists thought and these in these contexts I wonder if you could comment are there any sort of parallel jewish nationalist Zionists or Jewish socialist movements comparable to what was happening in places like Poland or Ukraine in these contexts and of course I think we sort of know the tragic end of that story but I wonder you know is this a moment of kind of political or social possibility for Latvian Lithuanian or Estonian Jews in terms of you know socialist Jewish movements in within you know in Latvia once again it's the case that I know best right I think that in terms of you know socialist mobilisation and you know radical leftist mobilization it becomes less of a factor in these societies very quickly after the you know declarations of independence and the creation of liberal states but in the Latvian Parliament's the way Nia is somewhat different because it becomes authoritarian very quickly and then Estonia as well so but the Latvian case really up until the early 30s is the case of a functioning Democratic and parliamentary society in which there is very prominent representation in the Parliament of all the minority groups of the of Latvia including Jews including the Baltic Germans and to a lesser extent other minority groups that are there as well and there are problems with anti-semitism at various points immediately following the independence there are waves of anti-semitic demonstrations in the 30s later on there is also there are also problems with anti-semitism but in general these are fairly well functioning multi-ethnic societies in which rights to you know cultural self-determination are fairly well recognized where you know people have their own schools they have their own ability to you know have their you know national culture I remember one of the first times that I was really starting to get interested in in Riga City history I took a walk around the city with Yusei historian he just he has since died the name will come back to me anyway long lived historian who grew up in the 1930s he was Jewish and he took me for a walk around Riga nice and well this was the block where they spoke Yiddish and this is a block that was Jewish but they spoke German over there this is a block where they spoke Latvian there's this block they spoke Russian and it really was like I think a very vibrant multi-ethnic kind of a city so I hope that's something of an answer hello just a quick question I don't know that much about I know that the fins and the Estonians share a similar or same language family but I'm not sure how much they share culturally how similar to similar they are and I was wondering about through the course of the 20th century what their relationship was like and how it evolved especially after 1917 I can't give a really detailed answer to that unfortunately because I just don't know enough about it they are extraordinarily close and in the post-soviet era there has been the articulation of very close intercultural and also interested context between Finland and Estonia and they're also just clueless in terms of territory but I don't know really the answer of the sort of long story of Finnish and Estonian interactions in cooperation so [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Foreign Policy Research Institute

Views: 9,140

Rating: 4.6390977 out of 5

Keywords: Baltics, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, History, Identity

Id: S-uBf1GoDIc

Length: 71min 19sec (4279 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2017