Bitter Annexations

August 1940

When I was growing up, people looking for some no-frills fun-in-the-sun traveled to Crimea in the summer, while those seeking a bit of refinement spent their vacations in the Baltic states.

The Baltic Sea was cold, usually too cold for swimming, but you got a taste of a completely different life, one with little resemblance to the life familiar to your average Soviet citizen. Back then, the Baltic republics served as a sort of surrogate for forbidden Europe. It was cleaner than what we were used to, and the ubiquitous cafes (a welcome change from our usual Soviet stolovayas) were filled with beautifully coifed old ladies sitting at little tables sipping coffee. Picturesque Gothic cathedrals and orderly market squares dotted the city centers, fitting very nicely with our image of what a medieval European city must have looked like. The Baltics offered Soviet vacationers a taste of the exotic.

Yet, at the same time, there was a certain tension in the air. Resort employees might suddenly ignore a question asked in Russian, and dirty looks were not uncommon. Nobody spoke openly about the occupation of the Baltics, but the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the subsequent occupation of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia by Soviet troops supposedly there to defend them, and then the “help” they were given in conducting elections where – surprise, surprise! – the Communist Party prevailed, as well as the deportations and arrests, the resistance and repression, were in the back of everyone’s mind. Vacationers making merry in Jurmala might be almost totally ignorant of these events, but they could still sense the reverberation of history.

Then came perestroika, and the Baltic republics were the first to express their eagerness to throw off the communist yoke and break away from the Union. We in Moscow followed events there with bated breath: the emergence of popular fronts in Tallinn and Riga, efforts by Soviet special forces to suppress a grassroots movement in Lithuania, and, on August 23, 1989, the anniversary of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the formation of a living chain stretching across the three republics in memory of the tragic events tied to the Nazi-Soviet agreement. We demonstrated in Moscow, chanting “Freedom for the Baltic Republics,” assuming that this freedom and freedom for Russia were two parts of the same unfolding whole.

Twenty years have passed, and now those who live in the Baltic states are citizens of the European Union. The Russian-speaking population seems to have gotten used to their new minority status. But it is not easy to forget old wounds.

Of all the countries of the former “socialist camp” I have traveled to, nowhere have I or my friends been so sternly “called to account” for the crimes of the Soviet regime as in the Baltic states. At one international conference, a history teacher from Vilnius approached one of my colleagues with a smile on her face and handed him a postcard. “Here is what’s left of our ancient Kremlin,” she pronounced sweetly. “This part was destroyed by your people [ваши].” We reciprocated her smile, but felt as if we had just been spat upon.

Who exactly were “our people” for whose actions we were supposedly responsible? Andrei Zhdanov, who presided over the establishment of Soviet power in Estonia, and who several years later crushed the journals Zvezda and Leningrad, labeling Mikhail Zoshchenko “a coward and vulgarian” and Anna Akhmatova “half nun, half whore”? Or Andrei Vyshinsky, who conducted the sovietization of Latvia – the prosecutor who presided over the Moscow show trials of 1936-38? Or Vladimir Dekanozov, who was put in charge of Lithuania after purging the Soviet army and police?

What makes these brutes “my people”? The fact that they came from Moscow and spoke Russian? And what about the presidents of Latvia and Estonia who, albeit under tremendous pressure, concluded treaties with the USSR? Or the Baltic communists who greeted their ideological comrades with open arms? The elections held in the summer of 1940 were bogus through and through. Can it really be that they were falsified exclusively by “Russians,” with no help from Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians?

Who carried out the deportations that decimated the Baltic republics, depriving them of their finest politicians, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals? Of course the deportees were shipped out in trains guarded by Soviet soldiers, but wasn’t it “their own people” who made up the lists and rounded them up?

At various times during his bloody reign, Stalin uprooted entire peoples, forcing every man, woman, and child to pay for the crimes, real or imagined, committed against his regime by individual members of their ethnic group. Let us all avoid his example of painting entire peoples with the same brush.

Surely by now we should all recognize that the tragedy suffered by the Baltic republics was perpetrated not by Russians and Russia, but by Stalin and his communist henchmen, a diverse group that included Russians, Jews, Georgians, Ossetians, Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, among many others.

May I live to see that day!