Baltic Facades
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Baltic Facades

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania since 1945

Aldis Purs

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eBook - ePub

Baltic Facades

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania since 1945

Aldis Purs

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About This Book

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are often grouped together as the Baltic States, but these three Eastern European countries, tied together historically, are quite different. Although each is struggling to find its place within Europe and fighting to preserve its own identity, the idea of the Baltic States is a façade. In this book, Aldis Purs dispels the myth of a single, coherent Baltic identity, presenting a radical new view of the region.

Baltic Façades illuminates the uniqueness of these three countries and locates them within the larger context of European history, also revealing the similarities they share with the rest of the continent. He also examines the anxiety the people of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania feel about their own identities and how others see them. Giving equal weight to developments in politics, economics, and social and cultural trends, he places contemporary events in a longer perspective than traditional Cold War-inspired views of the region, tracing the countries under Soviet rule after the end of World War II through their declarations of independence in the early 1990s and their admission to the European Union in 2004. Baltic Façades is an enlightening look at these three separate, though related, Eastern European countries.

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Year
2013
ISBN
9781861899323

CHAPTER 1

Historical Background

If the Baltic idea is contested in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a long history of the Baltic states built around such a Baltic concept is, to paraphrase Benedict Anderson, an ‘imagined history’. The disparate historical developments across the eastern Baltic littoral are the primary reasons why individuals such as Ilves have discredited the Baltic concept: there has simply been no common language, religion or identity whatsoever in the region over the many millennia of human history. Equally difficult and conceptually problematic is the validity of writing the history of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania back into antiquity. All three states are modern creations with histories of less than a hundred years. The history of the region before these states is a history of dozens of political entities that rarely, if ever, had political borders that matched those of modern-day Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania. Still, the political legacies and populations inherited by the modern Baltic states fundamentally shaped and influenced their twentieth-century development.
The earliest permanent human settlement near the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea came with the retreat of the glacial coverage of the last great glacial period. The physical conditions of the time and the composition of the first human artefacts (primarily wood, furs, bones and other material generally not suited to long-term preservation) complicate any attempts at dating the earliest human arrivals with any degree of exactness. The ever more sophisticated technological approaches and tools available to today’s archaeologists have slowly pushed this first arrival further back into time. Early hunters and temporary settlers conceivably moved into the region as soon as the ice thinned, let alone retreated, roughly 11,000 years ago (9000 BC). The oldest verified archaeological sites, however, are considerably younger (from 7000 to 6000 BC). Although very little is known of these earliest settlers, conventional wisdom labels them as early Finno-Ugric people. Finno-Ugric people are primarily united by linguistics, sharing a root language that is not Indo-European. Modern-day Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian are the largest surviving Finno-Ugric languages, but they are joined by more than a dozen other languages spread across Scandinavia, central Russia and Siberia. Understanding how and when Finno-Ugric peoples populated the places in which they now live relies primarily on historic linguistic reconstructions, few of which are universally accepted and scientifically verified. Still, in the case of early Finno-Ugric people on the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, consensus has it that they pre-dated a proto-Baltic migration into the region by several thousand years. As such the distant ancestors of Estonians, Finns, Livs and Sami were likely well settled in the current lands of Latvia and Estonia by 6000 to 4000 BC. To present-day archaeologists these people and their settlements do not possess our modern national identities, nor are they seen as early, proto-Estonians. Rather their culture is defined by the style of their most common archaeological relics, pottery decorated with a comb-like pattern; thus they are called the Comb Ceramic Culture or the Pit-Comb Ware Culture.
These early Finno-Ugric people began to share the territory of the Eastern coast of the Baltic Sea with early Indo-Europeans, also known as proto-Baltic peoples – or, in current archaeological terms, the Corded Ware Culture – in the fourth and third millennia BC. This group of people either moved into the region in one of the great migrations of Indo-European peoples into Europe or they preferred their ceramics decorated with the imprints of string, cord and rope. How these two cultures cohabitated is largely unknown. We do know that Finno-Ugric people pushed further north into modern-day Estonia and Finland, while proto-Baltic people settled more into modern-day Latvia and Lithuania. We do not know if this population displacement was forced, negotiated or organic. Potentially the differences between these communities and peoples were marginal, while similar patterns of agriculture, husbandry, hunting and fishing unified all inhabitants in the difficult struggle to survive in Neolithic northern Europe.
The labelling of these early inhabitants as proto-Balts, ancestors of Estonians or as Comb Ceramic peoples hints at the greater underlying problem behind our knowledge of the prehistoric Baltic region. Ultimately we know very little about the long beginnings of human habitation along the Baltic Sea. What we do know comes from occasional shards of pottery, grave sites and a quasi-forensic linguistics that uses remnants of oral traditions to recast ancient belief systems. We do not know what language these people spoke, how they identified themselves or any specifics of their history. These issues are by and large not the concerns of archaeological researchers, who track the material relics of cultures and try to recreate how people lived. Obsessions about language, identity and history are modern concerns. Modern nationalists look to archaeological evidence to support implicitly their political goals concerning national sovereignty and legitimacy. If Estonians, Latvians or Lithuanians can lay claim to living on the territory for more than 3,000 years, the reasoning goes, they must have greater political legitimacy as ‘founding nations’ of the modern nation states than more recent migrants of a few hundred years or a few decades. Ultimately, however, there is no way to substantiate claims of a common ancestry with the early settlers of the Baltic Sea region and no correlation between modern national demands and the lives of these early inhabitants. Their lives were overwhelmingly shaped and determined by the exceedingly harsh natural environment in which they lived: short growing seasons and long, dark, cold winters. Society was based largely on subsistence and survival and the prevalence of ceremonial weapons in some grave sites (the Corded Ware Culture is occasionally referred to as the Battle Axe Culture for this reason) suggests that this struggle was often violent – either in defence or in aggression to seize resources.
Archaeology tells us that, with time, the accumulation of resources moved people beyond simple indentations on pottery to greater adornments, most notably the use of local amber, and the beginnings of long-distance trade. This amber trade generated the first written acknowledgement of the people of the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea in texts by ancient Greeks and Romans and in Scandinavian sagas. The Greek and Roman texts can hardly be considered first-hand accounts of the region and amount to little more than a few lines describing the origins of amber and other hearsay. The archaeological record, however, becomes more complex and begins to give us more information about the peoples of the region. Baltic amber was known in the Mediterranean world and metals not cast locally began to appear at Baltic sites, with the Roman historian Tacitus alluding to amber and peoples likely to be Estonians by AD 98. Although no direct contact was likely, the early inhabitants of present-day Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania occasionally partook in trade with neighbours, setting off a cascade of trade that ultimately took their local goods to far destinations. Simultaneously and through similar trade, these same inhabitants of the Eastern Baltic region received products created far away. The costs of such long-distance trade suggest that early societies in the Baltic were becoming more differentiated; some more privileged individuals could command greater resources and partake in such trade. Although there is little evidence of state formation at this early date, societies were probably organized along clan networks with defined chiefs and religious shamans.1 This elite would most likely have benefited from the very occasional trade connections, although in material standards the distance between them and their compatriots was probably quite small. As before, life was defined by subsistence and survival, with trade playing a small part in societies that continued to be dominated by seasonal (slash and burn) agriculture, foraging, hunting and fishing. Life continued to be punctuated with aggressive and defensive violence, perhaps even more so than before, since early trade could often appear to be more like pillaging than negotiated exchange.
As the expanse of the written word receded with the collapse of the Roman Empire, the peoples of the eastern Baltic Sea also receded from the historical record for almost 1,000 years. By AD 900–1000, when European records again mention the Baltic, its society initially seems similar on the surface, but growing differentiation, technological change and increasing contact with other parts of Europe had begun to transform the region. Traditional national Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian histories describe the uninvited and unwelcome arrival of German merchants (followed by knights and priests) near the beginning of the thirteenth century. This narrative, however, is severely flawed and is intended as the opening salvo of the ‘700 years of German oppression’ myth in Latvian and Estonian nationalist historiography.2 Instead, by 1100, Baltic societies were moving toward primitive states with established ruling classes and religious hierarchies that were increasingly involved in long-distance trade. Baltic peoples were aware of the growing might and influence of Kievan Rus’ and some paid tribute and/or entertained emissaries and orthodox priests. The first arrival of Christianity to the eastern Baltic region came from the southeast, with a decidedly Slavic flavour. Still, there was no wholesale or prominent conversion to orthodoxy before the Mongol destruction of Kievan Rus’ in the early thirteenth century (1237–40). With the sudden absence of encroaching Russian and Orthodox influence from the East, German Catholic advances from the West found more fertile ground.
By the twelfth century Western, Central and Scandinavian Europe had clearly emerged from the greater isolationist trends of the Middle Ages and begun a process of state consolidation and expansion. Expansion into Europe’s northeast seemed inevitable, although the region was not entirely unknown. A more pronounced and permanent mercantile and religious presence pushed into the region from the 1100s on. The local inhabitants, who had already differentiated into linguistic groups that would serve as the linguistic ancestors of modern Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, also curried the favour of these new Germanic and Danish merchants. The German founding of Riga in 1201 is usually cited as the opening salvo of the northern crusades into the last bastion of paganism in Europe. The arrival of German knights and priests is often presented as the beginning of German hegemony over Latvia and Estonia and the impetus to more centralized state formation in Lithuania. More probably the twelfth and thirteenth century were complicated times of shifting alliances that saw the eventual triumph of a Catholic, German military-religious order (the Livonian Order) in modern-day Latvia and southern Estonia, Danish rule in northern Estonia and its islands, and a firm rebuttal in Lithuania. The century-long battle for conversion in modern-day Estonia and Latvia suggests that the campaign of Christianization and conquest included considerable doses of local political rivalries between indigenous political groupings. More often than not, German or Danish crusaders exploited animosity and rivalry between local clan leaders to gradually extend Catholic influence into the eastern Baltic region. The Livonian Order’s defeat by the forces of the Russian prince Alexander Nevsky in 1242, on the frozen ice of Lake Peipus, stopped further eastward incursions into Slavic lands. Several hundred years later, nationalists would bemoan the lack of unity among Baltic peoples against the crusaders, but that lack of unity itself suggests that initially crusaders were not seen as an overwhelmingly clear, common enemy. Still, the national historical narratives of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians draw considerable attention to the occasional battles that display some building of alliances between Baltic groups against crusaders, or that produced temporary military defeats for the crusading orders. These temporary alliances and short-lived victories did little to slow the establishment of German and Danish Christian hegemony over modern-day Estonia and Latvia, which was unquestioned and complete by the end of the thirteenth century.
The Lithuanian case was remarkably different, and is a strike against a common Baltic experience regarding the arrival of German crusaders in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Lithuanian society was probably in greater contact with the nearby growing political state power of Poles and Kievan Rus’. Geographically Lithuanian lands included the heavily forested lands that dominated to the north, but also more open land leading into the great Eurasian steppe. The steppe, long a veritable highway for marauding, nomadic armies, also encouraged greater contact and trade among peoples. As a result, in Lithuania the arrival of crusaders spurred concrete state formation and consolidation, which resulted in a Lithuanian kingdom that successfully rebuffed German advances. Much of this early work was accomplished by the Lithuanian leader Mindaugas, whose struggle to unite Lithuanians by force or persuasion ultimately led to his coronation as king of Lithuania in 1253.3 Many resented either the dominance of a king or the dominance of Mindaugas, and he was assassinated in 1263. Despite the formal dissolution of his kingdom and a return to multiple Lithuanian duchies, a Grand Duke acted very much like a king in coordinating military campaigns against the German Christian orders. Some of these Grand Dukes expanded Lithuanian power considerably over the next 150 years.
The Grand Dukes Gediminas (reg 1316–41) and Algirdas (reg 1345–77) particularly pressed Lithuanian expansion to the east and to the south. These lands, traditionally ruled by Russian princes aligned with Kiev, had become a political vacuum after the Mongol destruction and subjugation of Russian lands. As Mongol expansion ceased, Lithuanian authority nibbled away at its furthest reaches, particularly appealing to those eager to escape paying Mongol tributes. As a result, Slavic patterns of governance and record-keeping entered the Lithuanian court and impressed the Lithuanian nobility. By the time of Algirdas’s rule Lithuanians were probably a minority among the Grand Duke’s subjects. The Grand Duchy’s orientation would become even more confused when Algirdas’s successor, Jogaila, married the queen of Poland in 1386. This marriage necessitated the baptism of the Lithuanians in 1387, marking an end to the final pagan state in Europe. Jogaila’s marriage formally introduced Polish and Catholic influence to the Lithuanian court and its nobility.
The Grand Duchy of Lithuania would reach its zenith in terms of geopolitical power and influence under the Grand Duke Vytautas (reg 1392–1430). Vytautas continued the past practice of expansion into modern-day Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, and at his territorial peak extended Lithuania’s rule to the Black Sea. Vytautas was equally successful in warding off the still expansionist German knightly orders. In 1410 he was one of the crucial military leaders of a Polish and Lithuanian army that virtually annihilated the Teutonic Order, the vehicle for German expansion into northeast Europe, at the Battle of Grunwald/Tannenberg. In a telling commentary on how divisive this history can be, Poles and Slavs refer to the battle as Grunwald, Germans as Tannenberg, and Lithuanians as the Battle of Žalgiris. Although the battle was an unqualified military success, and ended any further medieval German expansion into the lands of modern-day Lithuania, the Grand Duchy’s ties to Poland grew ever stronger. By the sixteenth century the political elite of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was thoroughly Polish in culture.4
The radical turns of events on the shores of the eastern Baltic in this time period (1150–1410) stand out in greater detail than earlier history because written records also began in this era. Historians can confidently name individuals, tribes and battles. They can also comb early record-keeping and multiple sources to produce more nuanced and informed descriptions of the societies of the day. Still, the overwhelming majority of these written records are the records of the ‘victors’: the chronicles of how crusading knights and priests brought Christianity to Europe’s last pagans or the more tedious and less inflated records of feudal relationships and obligations. All historical documents are subjective (influenced by the conditions and whims of the author), but these are spectacularly so. The Book of Chronicles, for example, sang praises to the victories of God and his followers more than it sought to carefully record events. More troubling is the lack of documents from the ‘losing side’ to use as a corrective to the vainglory and cultural superiority of the German documents. In this way, those that fought and lost against the crusading Germans became a ‘people without history’.5 But, even with troublesome and biased sources, we are slowly able to piece together the societal framework of Europe’s last pagans.
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The experiences of modern-day Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania with the forceful intrusion of German and Danish Christianity from the twelfth to the early fifteenth century were fundamentally different in their end results (subjugation in Estonia and Latvia, state formation and successful defence and expansion in Lithuania), but there are also core similarities. Throughout the region, prior to the thirteenth century, clear state formation was still in its infancy. Clan and tribe chieftains united geographical territories and built hilltop fortresses to assert their authority and control trade. Pagan belief systems included individuals who acted as intermediaries with divine forces, but they did not create an entrenched, religious caste. The distance in material possessions, power and authority between members of society was likely not enormous. Prior to German arrival, local chiefs were in increasing contact with states and societies across Scandinavia and the Russian lands. These contacts brought material and cultural gain, but also spurred ever greater state formation, which led to bitter, contested rivalries between claimants to a potential unified crown. The Mindaugas case is the most clear and successful (if short-lived), but initial alliances forged with the Germans and Danes in Estonia and Latvia suggest a similar process at work. In Latvia and Estonia, German and Danish technological superiority (steel swords, stone castles and access to a powerful hinterland for resupply and reinforcements), with time, overwhelmed local attempts at state building and created the Livonian Order, a collection of medieval power and authority vested in a patchwork of bishops, priests and knights. In Lithuania union with Poland reinforced earlier successes against the Germans, but ultimately came at a similar price, with the acceptance of Christianity, and the ruling elite’s wholesale conversion and replacement with a ‘foreign’ culture.
From the nineteenth century on, the way in which modern Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians have recreated and reimagined these centuries is also remarkably similar. Latvian and Estonian nationalists particularly struggled against the local power of Baltic Germans, the scions of the German invasion. They, unlike the Lithuanians, were handicapped by having had one of the ‘national awakenings’ in Eastern and Central Europe but not being able to claim a great medieval kingdom (and thereby garner legitimacy). The remedy to both ills was to vilify German conquest. Estonian and Latvian nationalists portrayed the actions and plans of German knights and priests as duplicitous and inhumane, with one ultimate goal: to conquer and rule the lands of the eastern Baltic littoral. Local chiefs, warriors and would-be kings were resurrected from passing references in the old medieval chronicles and presented as brave leaders fighting against German invasion. Disunity was characterized as the gravest flaw in Estonian and Latvian defences. Once German power was established, ‘700 years’ of oppressive rule over the Estonians and Latvians began.
Lithuanians, on the other hand, have a glorious medieval history complete with stunning military victories and a state which at its zenith nearly stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. The early assassination of Mindaugas, the merger with the kingdom of Poland and the gradual fall of Lithuanian influence within the dynastic union are blamed on treacherous division and discord. Lithuania’s ‘fall and subjugation’ to ‘foreign influence’ brought Lithuanians to the same starting point as the Estonians and Latvians; at least, to nineteenth-century Lithuanian nationalists struggling against Polish and Russian hegemony.
The historical memory forged by nationalists in the nineteenth century has persisted through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Even though many of its details are not fabrications, the narrative is too simplistic and reads the conflict of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries back into the historical record. Discord and disunity can equally be explained as the real and perceived differences between the tribes and clans of the...

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