Comparative Politics and Government of the Baltic States

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the 21st Century

D. Auers

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137369963
• eBook ISBN: 9781137369970
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book traces the development of the political institutions, electoral systems, parties, civil society, economic and social policies and foreign affairs of the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania over the last quarter century.

1

A Brief Political History of the Baltic States

Political discourse in the Baltic states is marked by debates on the past as much as on the future. The 1980s drive to break from the Soviet Union, driven by an overwhelming sense of historical injustice, began with small ‘calendar demonstrations’ marking significant dates in Baltic history. Key domestic and international disputes are based on contested interpretations of history. This is particularly visible each spring in Latvia. On 16 March a shrinking number of Latvian Waffen SS Legion veterans, along with several hundred nationalist supporters, march from the historic Dom Church in the Old Town of Riga to the towering Freedom Monument, the symbol of Latvia’s independent statehood. There they are confronted by counter-demonstrating Russophone ‘anti-fascist’ protesters. A few months later, on 9 May, the positions are reversed as Latvia’s Russophone community celebrates Victory in Europe day (which marks the end of the Second World War for the Soviet Union) at the Soviet-era Victory Monument. Protesting Latvians accuse participants of honouring totalitarian communism.¹ There is no common ground between the two groups. History lives, breathes, provokes and mobilises Baltic publics to an extent almost unimaginable in neighbouring Western European democracies.

Evidently, a study of the Baltic states’ political systems must begin with a discussion of the complicated and contentious history of the region. Rather than duplicate the many available excellent comparative and single-country histories of the Baltic states, I will sketch the broad sweep of comparative Baltic history and focus on the controversies that touch and shape the political systems of modern Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.² The first section briefly considers the geography and climate that shaped the comparatively late modernisation of the region and then discusses the emergence of Baltic national movements in the nineteenth century. The next part covers the First World War, the collapse of the Russian Empire and the following vicious battles for autonomy and independent statehood. The third part covers the rise and fall of the democratic inter-war states. The fourth part discusses the Second World War and the three brutal occupations that it brought. I then deal with the impact of four decades of sovietisation. Finally, I consider the emergence of opposition to the Soviet regime in the second half of the 1980s and the successful non-violent revolutions that led to the re-emergence of independent, democratic Baltic states in August 1991.

1.1 Three nations survive and awake

Geography and the relatively small size of the Baltic nations, located at the eastern edge of the Baltic Sea, explain much of the turbulence of Baltic history. Samuel Huntington (1996, p. 159) defined the Baltic states–Russian/Belorussian border as the ‘eastern boundary of western civilization’. While Huntington gives an overly simplistic vision of a complicated, multi-layered and bitter cultural history, he does capture the geographic vulnerability of the small Baltic nations, located in a flat, boggy, forested and sparsely populated region fought over by larger, more powerful neighbours for more than eight hundred years.³ This history also explains why the languages, the key to the construction of the three Baltic nations, survived. This is the ‘Windy Land – a zone where conquerors alternated sufficiently often, so that their languages could not take root[, this] ... inadvertently gave the local language breathing space’ (Taagepera, 2011, p. 126).

In the early thirteenth century the territory that makes up much of modern Estonia and Latvia was conquered by Teutonic Knights, shielding the clerics, missionaries and merchants that accompanied them. The order was also charged with eradicating the pagan customs still practiced by the indigenous people, who had started settling in the region around 11,000 BC, and with protecting the new native converts to Christianity. This is the bitter-sweet beginning of European culture encroaching on the peoples of the area and the eradication of the indigenous Baltic societies that were already organised into hierarchical, actively trading communities. It is also what Aldis Purs (2012, p. 25) has described as the ‘opening salvo of the “700 years of German oppression” myth’ that nationalists use to account for the late emergence of the Baltic nations. On the one hand, this is the moment at which the Baltic states began their long and slow integration with the ideas, economies and politics of the European continent to the west, south and (later) north. On the other hand, this is the point at which they began to have their unique pagan traditions, lifestyles and control of the land stripped away from them. Relations with Western Europe still prompt mixed emotions.

This is the stage at which the history of the modern Baltic states begins. Danish, Swedish, Polish and Russian empires later invaded and occupied the Baltic lands, but throughout the Baltic, the Germans – often the direct descendants of the first Crusaders – remained the effective governors of the Estonian and Latvian lands. Lithuania, however, resisted the Teutonic Knights long enough to become the last remaining pagan nation in Europe (only converting to Christianity in the late fourteenth century, following dynastic union with Poland). Lithuania grew into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, stretching into modern Ukraine, and raised a clutch of heroic leaders on whom nationalists could later draw in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Vytautas and Mindaugas, Lithuanian grand dukes, remain popular boys’ names in modern Lithuania. Following the dynastic union, Poles, rather than Germans, emerged as the ruling class in the Lithuanian lands. Crucially, Lithuania also acted as a buffer between the German lands to the west and Estonia and Latvia to the northeast, preventing what could otherwise have been a mass migration of ethnic German peasants to the lands controlled by German nobility.

Nevertheless, the Baltic lands became increasingly multinational. While the Baltic Germans long ruled the region, and the three titular nations made up most of the peasant population: Poles lived in Lithuania’s Eastern Marshes; Jews (also known as Litvaks in Lithuania, where Vilnius was a major centre of Yiddish culture) lived in Lithuania and, to a lesser extent, Latvia; Russian Old Believers were in eastern Latvia and small Roma communities were scattered around the country. The rapid post–Second World War influx of Russophones created large new minorities in Estonia and Latvia.

There is little recorded information about the detailed rhythm of life enjoyed by the native Baltic peasants who lived under varying degrees of serfdom until the early nineteenth century (and later in Lithuania and Latgale in what is now the eastern region of Latvia). Life was likely particularly ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Hobbes, 1651, p. 89). Their cultures were ignored and neglected by the ruling Germans, allowing them to maintain distinct primordial identities based on their unique (and difficult-to-master) languages, ancient pagan rituals and traditions that were never entirely eradicated despite eventual mass conversion to Christianity.⁴ As Anatol Lieven (1994, pp. 110–111) points out, ‘until the early nineteenth century, peasant folk songs and legends were, to all intents and purposes, the essence of Latvian and Estonian culture’.

Just as the Baltic Sea is the youngest sea in the world, formed only 10–15,000 years ago, the three Baltic nations are among Europe’s youngest, created at the tail end of Central Europe’s arc of nation awakening. European trends take longer to reach the Baltic periphery of the region. They do eventually arrive, however, and such was the case with the Enlightenment. In Miroslav Hroch’s (1985) terms, it arrived ‘belatedly’ but took hold furiously fast.⁵ As elsewhere in nineteenth-century Europe, the Enlightenment contributed to a national awakening (ärkamisaeg in Estonian, atmoda in Latvian and atgimimas in Lithuanian) of the Baltic nations, which began as the region modernised through socio-economic change, resulting in increased educational attainment (Gellner, 1983). National awakening describes the resulting discovery, codification and mass communication of distinctive Baltic identities by the first wave of modernised and educated Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian professionals in the mid-nineteenth century. It remains a key concept, linking the contemporary Baltic states with the (slumbering) ancient communities of the region as well as with early Baltic nationalists in the nineteenth century (the first awakening), the statesmen and soldiers who led Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to statehood at the end of the First World War (the second awakening) and with the national movements of the late Soviet era (the third awakening). Indeed, contemporary nationalist politicians have talked of the need for a twenty-first century fourth awakening to allow the Baltic nations to rediscover and return to their core national values (Dzintars, 2010).

Modernisation began with the emancipation of Estonian and Latvian peasants in 1816 and 1819, well before the rest of the Russian Empire (including Lithuania and Latgale) in 1861. The first significant changes in social structure began in the 1840s and 1850s when legislative reforms allowed ethnic Estonians and Latvians to purchase agricultural land (often funded by loans from state mortgage banks) and removed restrictions on migration to urban areas. The resulting increases in agricultural efficiency and productivity led to higher incomes, educational opportunities and social mobility, while industrialisation meant increasing blue-collar and professional urban job opportunities. The sons of Estonian and Latvian peasants were capable of seizing the opportunity to enter higher education thanks to the earlier efforts of rural Lutheran German clerics following the teachings of Martin Luther, who had encouraged the reading of the Bible in native tongues. Indeed, Baltic Germans played a key role in developing early Baltic culture. The German cleric and intellectual Johann Gottfried Herder lived in Riga from 1764–1769 and developed a fascination with Latvian peasant folklore and poetry that, he argued, revealed a distinct national culture. Baltic Germans authored and published the first Latvian-language grammar book in 1761, financed the first Estonian-language teaching post at the University of Tartu (then Dorpat) in 1803 and founded the Estonian Learned Society in 1838. By 1897 the Russian census records that 95 per cent of the total population of Estland (Estonia) and 92 per cent of Livland (Latvia minus Latgale) could read, while the average in the Russian Empire as a whole was just 28 per cent (Raun, 1979, p. 115).

By 1885 Estonians had ‘evolved into a nation with newspapers, theatre, poetry, and mass cultural events, expressing themselves in a rapidly modernizing language and sustained by a vigorous farm economy’ (Taagepera, 1993, p. 31). This was equally true of Latvians and, a few decades later, of Lithuanians, whose national movement only emerged in the 1880s (Balkelis, 2009). Rapid industrialisation of the port cities of Riga, Liepaja and Tallinn, connected to the rest of the Russian Empire through newly constructed rail links, saw a corresponding growth in economic activity, jobs and population. Riga grew from 75,000 in 1860 to 500,000 by 1910. A significant part of this growth was made up of Latvian migration from rural to urban areas: in the 1867 census Latvians made up 23.6 per cent of the population of Riga, but by 1897 this proportion had risen to 45 per cent (Ābols, 2003, p. 98). In the same year Estonians were almost two-thirds of the population of Tallinn. In contrast, the same census revealed that only 2 per cent of the population of Vilnius, the city that would (briefly) become the capital of Lithuania just two decades later, were ethnic Lithuanians. 93 per cent of ethnic Lithuanians remained peasants (Balkelis, 2009, p. 2). Many Lithuanians migrated to North America seeking opportunities to make a better life and by the First World War it was estimated that roughly one-third of all ethnic Lithuanians lived in the United States or Canada. Others found work elsewhere in the Russian Empire – the 1897 census revealed that one-third of educated Lithuanians worked in a different place in the Empire (Balkelis, 2009, p. 24). Lithuanians were hampered by limited professional opportunities and a comparative lack of industrialisation in their part of the Russian Empire – as a buffer zone between Tsarist Russia and Germany, the regime was reluctant to invest in industrialising the Lithuanian lands.

By the mid- to late-nineteenth century, Balts no longer needed to assimilate into the Baltic-German community in order to progress socially. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, Russian authorities, worried by the impact of the unification of Germany on Baltic-German attitudes to the region, attempted to rein in the Baltic nations through a Russification programme. However, it was too little, too late. Indeed, it even promoted the Baltic cultures as the switch to Russian-language teaching in schools and universities increasingly drove Baltic Germans away from the region and increased opportunities for the titular populations.

Creeping liberalisation of political activity in the Russian Empire allowed ethnic Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians to form associations guarding their own cultural interests. Early organisations were formed in educational institutions. The only university-level institution in the Livonia administrative region, the University of Dorpat (Tartu), attracted Estonians and Latvians, while Lithuanians typically went to St. Petersburg or Moscow. Krišjānis Valdemārs organised ‘Tartu Latvian student evenings’ and, in 1862, part of the same group, now based in St. Petersburg, began publishing a Latvian-language newspaper, Pēterburgas Avīze (The Petersburg Newspaper), reaching a circulation of 4,000 within a few years (Page, 1949, p. 25). This group, which came to be known as the Jaunlatvieši (Young Latvians⁶), proved the catalyst for a rapidly increasing output of Latvian literature. The group also founded the student fraternity Lettonia, the first elite Latvian organisation. A later rival, the Latvian Jaunstrāvnieki (New Current) movement was more explicitly political and left-wing, and its leaders were eventually forced into exile (primarily in London and Zurich), largely because they were perceived as a direct political threat to the Tsarist order, unlike the Jaunlatvieši who initially focused on cultural, rather than political, autonomy. There was no such deep division between Estonian nationalists – perhaps reflecting the lower level of industrialisation in Estonia. Rather, the emerging Estonian nationalist movement was split between those who pivoted westwards (such as Johannes Voldemar Jannsen, the founder of Eesti Postimees), believing that Estonians had a Western European cultural identity tied to Baltic German traditions and to the ‘Saint Petersburg patriots’ group, which looked to the east because Baltic Germans were seen as oppressors (Smith, 2002). The much smaller Lithuanian national movement – estimated by Miroslav Hroch (1985) at just 290 individuals in 1890 – was also less divided than were the Latvian activists. This indicates the developing sophistication of the Estonian and Latvian national movements, as they developed conflicts and cleavages. However, at this point a key difference emerged between the two northernmost Baltic nations and Lithuania. The Catholic Church, rather than Lutheranism, was key in building Lithuanian identity and – rather than urban, cosmopolitan students – rurally based priests were the early nationalists.

A wider Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian civil society also continued to develop: ‘funeral savings groups, friendship associations, and cultural associations’ began to mushroom, and farmers, teachers and other professions banded together, not least because Balts were still excluded from similar Baltic-German and Russian groups (Freivalds, 1961, p. 26). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Estonian Jakob Hurt and Latvian Krišjānis Barons collected and codified existing Estonian and Latvian folklore, the foundation of traditional Baltic culture. A key Latvian organisation was the Riga Latvian Association (Rigas Latviešu Biedrība). Founded in 1868, it represented the conservative urban middle class that considered both the Jaunlatvieši and the Jaunstrāvnieki far too confrontational. It focused on developing Latvian culture, organising the first Latvian theatre in 1868 and published a series of books on topics ranging from popular science to fiction. Its most significant initiative was the first Latvian song festival in 1873, which gathered together Latvians from all regions and acted as a highly visual, emotional demonstration of the existence of a broad Latvian nation – a people with a common culture and language spread across the Latvian lands. Similarly, the Alexander School (Eesti Aleksandrikool) mobilised Estonians to finance an Estonian-speaking secondary school, and the first Estonian song festival was organised by Johann Voldemar Jannsen’s Vanemuine Choral Society in 1869. These song festivals are still the key public events in the Estonian and Latvian cultural calendars. Lithuanian civil society organised later (and no song festival was held until 1924), largely because so few Lithuanians lived in urban areas. However, song festivals are now also central to Lithuanian cultural identity. A Lithuanian Learned Society was only founded in 1907. Indeed, Lithuanian civil society at that time was largely built on the personal generosity of a single wealthy benefactor, Petras Vileišis, who funded newspapers, published books and supported national organisations based in Vilnius. At one point, he was estimated to have financially supported up to one-third of the Lithuanian community in Vilnius (Balkelis, 2009, p. 43).

Industrialisation allowed left-wing ideas to quickly spread beyond student debates in the universities and, by the turn of the century both urban and, to a lesser extent rural, Baltic territories were dotted with small, illegal groups of social democrats, who were active not just in discussing socialist literature, but also organised demonstrations and even festivities. Debate and discussion eventually led to the formation of political parties. The Lithuanian Social Democratic Party (LSDP) was founded in 1896, the Latvian Social Democratic Workers Party (LSDSP) in 1904 and the Estonian Social Democratic Workers’ Association (ESDTU) in 1905. The Russian Social Democratic Workers Party also had supporters in the Baltic territories, as did the Jewish Bund. The key cleavage between Baltic and Russian socialists at this time was national: In contrast to the Russians, the Baltic social democrats supported the creation of some form of autonomous political Baltic units within the Tsarist state.

The social contours of the region had completely changed by the early twentieth century. From the 1866 local parish council elections onwards, Latvians, Estonians and later Lithuanians began gaining valua...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  A Brief Political History of the Baltic States
• 2  Elected and Unelected Institutions
• 3  Elections, Referendums and Parties
• 4  Civil Society, Corruption and Ethnic Relations
• 5  Economic, Social and Welfare Issues
• 6  Foreign and Security Policy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index