The Shadow in the East

Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front

Aliide Naylor

• Editorial: I.B. Tauris
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786726384
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Baltic History

'An insightful, nuanced account that highlights the present multitude of currents at play in Europe' - Peter Pomerantsev The Baltics are vital democracies in North-Eastern Europe, but with a belligerent Vladimir Putin to their east – plotting his war on Ukraine – and 'expansionist' NATO to their west, these NATO members have increasingly been the subject of unsettling headlines in both Western and Russian media. But beyond the headlines, what is daily existence like in the Baltics, and what does the security of these frontline nations mean for the world? Based on her extensive research and work as a journalist, Aliide Naylor takes us inside the geopolitics of the region. Travelling to the heart of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania she explores modernity in the region, investigates smuggling and troop movements in the borderlands, and explains the countries' unique cultural identities. Naylor tells us why the Baltics have been vital to the political struggle between East and West, and how they play a critical role in understanding the long running tensions between Russia and Europe.

1 THE SHADOW OF THE PAST

‘Trust me: if you scratch any Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian of my generation, and you ask them who was worse – the Soviets or the Nazis? – the Soviets were way, way worse,’ says Felicia, an eighty-year-old woman via Skype from southern California. She has a halo of thick white hair, eyes nearly as round as her glasses, and is surprisingly glib about an illness which she believes will kill her. When the Soviets occupied Lithuania in the 1940s as part of Joseph Stalin’s plan to annexe the Baltic states, she was bundled out of the country as a refugee to spend a chunk of her childhood in displaced person camps in Germany. She was only eight or nine when she left. ‘It was kind of an exciting trip,’ she says. ‘For my sister it was sheer misery. And my parents, the poor things.’

Her bleak history is almost hard to believe; she is merry to the point of being ethereal and now owns the vast collection of dolls she once longed for as a child. Her twinkle is perhaps indicative of her youthful lack of awareness in the 1940s, blind to the full harshness of wartime Europe. But her story, and that of her family, is one of many similar tales that shape the modern consciousness of Baltic residents and refugees alike – however mythologized or imagined they might be.

There were two Soviet occupations of the Baltic states: the first in 1940–1, and the second from June 1944 which lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 1941, the Nazis broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact overnight – the secret nonaggression agreement between Hitler and Stalin (which saw Lithuania initially fall on the German side before a revision in September 1939).¹ ‘All of a sudden … we hear these artillery shells and shots going on, and it turns out the Germans just had their blitzkrieg,’ Felicia recalls, adding that they thought ‘thank God’ when the stormtroopers arrived. They were ‘very polite and they were very nice, and they were kind, and they were clean. And they were all the things that the Soviets were not.’

Felicia pauses, realizing the gravity of what she is saying. She takes a moment to emphasize that she is only speaking on behalf of the ‘ethnic’ populations, rather than the Jews. She mentions ‘barbaric’ thievery and rape.

The memory of the Second World War and beyond is still deeply etched into the fabric of modern society in every single Baltic state – in public space, education and art (to name just a few). The brutality of accounts from the era is horrifying, and undoubtedly helps sculpt present-day Baltic attitudes to contemporary Russia. They provide a dominant narrative of Baltic residents being cornered into self-defence after victimization at the hands of two militarily superior invading forces. It’s hardly surprising they take on this tone; conservative estimates suggest that, in total, Soviet mass deportations saw at least 200,000 people forcibly removed from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and taken to Siberia and Kazakhstan.² Higher estimates put the figure closer to 371,000–400,000.³

In the Museum of Occupations in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, people of around the same age as Felicia recollect similarly dismal experiences of having been displaced after fleeing the Baltics. Others who stayed in the country during and after the war recount the grim events to which they bore witness. Magnus Kald from the largest Estonian island, Saaremaa, died in 2014, but every twenty-five minutes or so, his voice still echoes through the glass-walled building on loop. ‘Soviets tortured people at the castle – the hands of most of the women were tied behind their backs with barbed wire, breasts amputated.’ As his voice circles, a steady rotation of tourists take the three seats in front. He says that pins were pushed into their noses and under their nails, and that in another building, orchestras played to drown out the sounds of screaming.

The personal and inherited memories of violence from the era unsurprisingly spill over into the literary canon. In Finnish-Estonian author Sofi Oksanen’s 2008 novel Purge, both a guarded elderly woman and one of her younger relatives are subjected to sex crimes at the hands of Russians. The book describes the elderly woman’s attempts to isolate herself from society while simultaneously managing to silently identify fellow survivors. ‘From every trembling hand, she could tell – there’s another one. From every flinch at the sound of a Russian soldier’s shout and every lurch at the tramp of boots. Her, too?’ The semi-autobiographical A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile by Latvian author Agate Nesaule also details similar, graphic experiences of acts of sexual violence committed against Latvian women at the hands of the Soviet soldiers during the Second World War, and how she learned as a young child that women easily become prey during conflict.⁴ In the book, Nesaule’s own mother encouraged her to move to the front of a queue to be shot so she could avoid witnessing others being tortured.

Of course, both texts illustrate problematic boundaries between history and fiction. It is impossible to quantify how widespread gender-based violence was, and the topic is so ephemeral too because of lack of documentation and stigma. One man of Latvian émigré parentage, when I brought up the subject, said it was ‘an interesting topic that I have not heard about’. Even documentary accounts are sometimes left implicit or tackled in an evasive manner. In Imbi Paju’s 2005 documentary Memories Denied, despite focusing on the female experience, she never directly confronts the subject of sexual violence with her interviewees who were incarcerated at Tallinn’s Patarei prison.⁵

‘I wish my sister were still alive,’ Felicia clarifies. ‘She was terrified of falling into Soviet hands when they returned in 1944.’ She relays unverifiable, but unnervingly specific stories passed though the teenage girl rumour mills, that her sister later passed on to her. ‘Rape for the ordinary Russian peasant-soldier was a group game, showing off who could do it longer-shorter-wilder … her opinion [of Nazis] was that for them it was more a single person act of anger, expression of power or resentment,’ she said. ‘Germans prided themselves on being “cultured”.’ The absence of written accounts provides very strong grounds for denial, and along with the dearth of proof, such accounts rely on an understanding of individuals or groups as representations of the whole (e.g. in terms of their nationality).

In the event that a case was reported, there could be serious negative consequences for the accuser. Lithuanian Elena Spirgevičienė filed a complaint with the Soviet Union’s Central Committee of the Communist Party on 10 June 1959 alleging that a Soviet partisan (there were both Soviet and Lithuanian partisans), Alfonsas Čeponis, was part of a group who raped her, murdered her sister and attempted to rape then killed her daughter. Čeponis, along with two other Soviet partisans with distinctly Lithuanian names, had been posthumously granted the title Hero of the Soviet Union in 1958 as part of a Soviet attempt to suggest Lithuanian origins to the Soviet partisan movement. Spirgevičienė portrayed herself as pro-Soviet and termed Čeponis a bandit, therefore presenting the violence ‘in the language of ordinary criminality, as if disregarding the wartime context’ and stepping outside the constraints of nationality.⁶ However, it was Spirgevičienė who was discredited as a ‘class enemy’ and her allegations erased as the committee focused on the food taken by the partisans (‘if they took things they needed them’) and politicized the affair into one couched in German collaborationist sentiment and anti-Soviet leanings.⁷

Memoirs occasionally describe events from the occupations in lurid detail. One Estonian woman named Hilja Lill, born in 1905, describes how ‘the Reds’ had ‘torn about everywhere, demolishing and ransacking houses, looting storage buildings and slaughtering animals’ and how ‘the furniture and the walls were smeared with excrement.’⁸ In Lill’s case she was sure to ascribe responsibility to the nation, not the ‘bandits’ or ‘criminals’ within it. The Red Army soldiers’ reputation persists to this day. The generations that survived this period retained serious and often tragic memories of trauma, perceived through the polarized ideas of nationality and ethnicity that pervaded wartime Europe. Some members of younger generations in the Baltics – even those born after the Soviet occupation ended – assume a gormless expression, make gorilla noises, or tap their temples to indicate stupidity when referring to the forces from the east. ‘They murdered our intelligentsia!’ is a common indignant outburst.

The shadow of history similarly hangs over the refugee population and their descendants, many of whom, having been forced to leave, retained a close attachment to their homeland. But instead of living out their time under Soviet rule, they attained fresh experiences abroad on the understanding that returning to the geographical homeland as they knew it was not an option, nor did they know when – or if – it would be. In this uncertainty, they possessed a certain determination to preserve memories of their country as they nostalgically remembered it, maintaining the language and traditions, with a sense of the homeland as utopia. ‘Don’t talk badly about Latvia!’ a child reprimands her parents in biographical novel Five Fingers, having grown up in Siberia hearing how ‘beautiful’ and precious’ the country is.⁹ When independence eventually returned to the region in 1991, after the Soviet collapse, many Baltic refugees or their descendants went back to their countries of origin, leading members of the younger generations who stayed to refer to them a little sarcastically as ‘wise old elves’ who obtained an education in the ‘freeland’ to later impart their knowledge to the ‘peasants’ who stayed.¹⁰ While the older generations replete with either raw memories of the occupation or displaced personhood are incrementally dying out, lingering undercurrents of elitism and inverse elitism both remain embedded in the populace. Those who fled are simultaneously revered and resented, even today. After the war, official Soviet histories of the three former republics were required to outline how the local proletariat threw off the ‘bourgeois yoke’ to establish socialism.¹¹ This conflict is embodied well in a quote from former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who was born in Sweden and grew up in New Jersey – he was one of these returnees. He once said, ‘the Soviet period was like a Crazy Eddie’s commercial in the middle of a Mozart Concerto’, itself suggesting a certain “class” divide between the populace that experienced the Soviet era and those who left.¹²

This disconnect was also evident in Lithuania, when former Communist Party head Algirdas Brazauskas became its new post-independence president from 1993 after winning against the independent Stasys Lozoraitis, who was born, educated, and involved in diplomatic service outside of Soviet Lithuania, and popular in Washington DC. Lozoraitis had ‘carried the torch’ for Lithuania during the occupation, and he had the support of Vytautas Landsbergis – ostensibly the leader of the independence movement, who had a reputation of being more ‘professorial’ than charismatic. Yet Brazauskas was perceived as more down-to-earth, and a strong orator.¹³ The understandings that developed during the war and in its aftermath remained deeply present in the rhetoric, experiences and politics of all that followed.

After the Baltics were successf...