Enter the Feisty BalticsNATO newcomers Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania finally get peace of mind.
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Enter the Feisty Baltics NATO newcomers Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania finally get peace of mind. On a warm summer morning, just before dawn, 12-year-old Len-nart Meri woke to the sound stomping jackboots and strangers shouting in Russian. When he opened his eyes, he saw two bayonet-wielding Red Army soldiers standing over his bed. They gave Meri, his parents, and younger brother half an hour to dress and pack a suitcase. The soldiers then drove the family to a railway depot where cargo trains waited, bound for Siberian labor camps. “There were cattle carriages with small windows and iron bars. Behind these bars, I saw human faces, children weeping, women weeping,” Meri told me in May 2000. A Soviet officer told Meri’s father Georg, a prominent Estonian diplomat, that he would be taken on a separate train. “My father clasped my shoulder and said to me, ‘from now on you are the eldest man in the family, so take care of your mother,’” Meri said. The date was June 14, 1941, less than a year after the Red Army had invaded Estonia. On that same day, in what many Estonians call a 1940s version of “ethnic cleansing,” the Soviet authorities deported 10,000 people from this tiny Baltic nation to Siberia. Three-fourths of them perished in the harsh Russian winter. Throughout the 1940s, the Soviets sent more than 30,000 Estonians to Siberian labor camps. Nearly every family in the country was affected. Meri was among the lucky ones. His family survived exile and was united after the war; he went on to serve as Estonia’s first post-independence president from 1992-2002, after the country gained freedom from Moscow in 1991. Others were not so fortunate. Meri’s story, like tens of thousands of others, goes a long way toward explaining why Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have been so eager to join NATO – and why they have little patience for Moscow’s objections. In the basement of Estonia’s State Archive building in Tallinn, rows and rows of decades old KGB files tell the tales of thousands of lives ruined by Soviet rule. In dry bureaucratic language, the yellowing documents contained in the neatly stacked folders tell the story of a nation terrorized – one family at a time. In one folder, there is the story of how Magnus and Kersti Oispuu. The couple, together with their two young sons Leo and Felix, were exiled to Siberia on the same day as Meri. Of the four, only Leo survived. There is a Soviet deportation order for an entire family, including a three-year-old girl. A 78-year-old man sent to Siberia for owning a farm. A 21-year-old man executed for belonging to the Young Eagles, an organization similar to the Boy Scouts. A 17-year-old boy imprisoned for wearing a “forbidden” high school pin. Similar tales can be found in archives in Latvia and Lithuania. Throughout the Baltics, some 200,000 people were deported to Siberia under Soviet rule. When the three Baltic nations receive invitations to join the alliance at this week’s summit, it will give their citizens a peace of mind and security that they have never truly enjoyed. Independent between the World War I and World War II, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have long been a historical stomping ground for Europe’s great powers. In the 1940s, they fell victim to the imperial designs of two of history’s most nefarious regimes, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. In August 1940, after Stalin and Hitler signed a secret treaty carving up Europe, Soviet forces invaded the Baltics and began a program of mass arrests, deportations and executions. Moscow’s aim was to decapitate these societies by exiling or eliminating their most talented politicians, intellectuals and cultural figures. Tens of thousands of people were exiled or killed. Germany broke its treaty with Moscow in July 1941 and invaded the three Baltic nations. While many initially saw the Nazis as liberators and some collaborated with the Germans, most simply tried to survive in what they saw as a battle between two evil regimes. The Baltic countries “had two enemies and no place to turn,” says Valters Nollendorfs, a Riga-based historian. The Soviets returned in July 1944, and another wave of repression commenced. After the war, the three countries were forcefully incorporated into the USSR. The Baltics never fully accepted Soviet rule, and many actively resisted it. Tens of thousands of people took to the region’s thick forests to fight. In Estonia in particular, the resistance fighters known as the Forest Bro-thers earned legendary status. They blew up newly erected Soviet monuments, and in defiance of a ban on Estonian national symbols, they flew the country’s blue, black and white flag from tall buildings. They also ambushed army patrols, wrecked power lines and assassinated local Communist Party and KGB officials. “The Forest Brothers considered it their duty to uphold the nation’s spirit of resistance while demoralizing and intimidating the Soviet authorities,” Mart Laar, Estonia’s former prime minister and a historian specializing in the Forest Brothers, wrote in his book The War in the Woods. Moscow, meanwhile, waged a vicious war to wipe out the resistance in a conflict that historians estimate claimed 50,000 lives. Although the Red Army had wiped out most of the resistance by the 1950s, it was not until 1978 that the last of the Forest Brothers – a single old man in the woods with a rifle – was captured. Encouraged by broadcasts from Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, many in the Baltics say they believed that if they just held out a little while longer, the United States would come to the rescue. It didn’t, and the Baltics languished under Moscow’s rule until the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. Since the fall of Communism, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia have been among the most successful among the newly independent states in developing democracy and a market economy. But the wounds of the past century are still fresh, and security – the belief that such things will never happen to them again – has been an elusive goal. “Security is like virginity,” Meri said. “Either you are a virgin or you are not. Either you have security or you don’t.” After decades of waiting, the Baltics are finally about to get their virginity. Brian Whitmore is Central and Eastern European correspondent for The Boston Globe. He can be reached at letters@pill.cz |
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