Baltic States Cast Wary Eye on their Former Russian Masters

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The only countries once part of the Soviet Union to have attained membership in both the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. They all joined in 2004.

They had been forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940, as part of the division of eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin. Never reconciled to Soviet domination, they were the first among the 15 Soviet republics to proclaim their independence from the USSR in 1990, and they gained it the following year.

In 2004 they were admitted into both the EU and NATO, and they are culturally, economically, and politically now part of Europe.

Both Latvia and Estonia have unsettled disputes with Russia along their eastern borders. But apart from their continued wariness about Russian ambitions, particularly following the events in Ukraine, they also are faced with the challenge of dealing with large internal Russian-speaking minorities, the legacy of decades of Soviet subjugation.

The Baltic states are very small in both territory and population. Estonia has 1.3 million people, Latvia about two million, and the biggest, Lithuania, has three million.

Estonians and Latvians were historically Lutherans, having been influenced by the Germans and the Swedes, whereas Lithuanians were traditionally Roman Catholics, because of a close political alliance with Poland over much of their medieval history.

In fact the current capital, Vilnius, was part of Poland between the two world wars, when the capital was in Kaunas. 

After the Second World War, immigrants from the Soviet Russian republic soon became a dominant minority in Estonia and Latvia, though less so in Lithuania.

Today the Russian minorities range in population from six per cent in Lithuania, to 25 per cent in Estonia, all the way to 27 per cent in Latvia.

Some 94 per cent of the current population of Narva, Estonia’s third-largest city, next to Russia, are Russian-speakers. In some Latvian cities, too, ethnic Latvians constitute a minority, and even in the capital of Riga, they make up slightly less than half of the total population.

The newly sovereign Baltic nations regarded those Soviets who had arrived while their countries had been forcibly incorporated into the USSR not as immigrants or fellow nationals but as illegitimate occupiers, not even entitled to real inclusion within the polity.

So Estonia and Latvia enacted restrictive citizenship laws soon after independence; these entitled Russians to citizenship only after stringent tests. (Lithuania, with its small minority, did not see the need for this.)

Knowledge of the respective national language and history was set as a condition for obtaining citizenship through naturalisation. However, the purported difficulty of the initial language tests became a point of international contention, human rights organizations claiming that they made it impossible for many older Russians who grew up in the Baltic region to gain citizenship.

This problem was compounded by the fact that application for EU and NATO membership became directly linked to democratic requirements, including protection of minority rights.

Consequently, the Estonian and Latvian governments modified their strict citizenship legislation -- but this was not accompanied by an equivalent liberalization of their attitudes.

In their heart of hearts, the Baltic peoples would love to see the Russians leave. Their very presence reminds Estonians and Latvians, in particular, of their decades-long condition of Soviet oppression, which included mass murders, expulsions, and exile to gulags.

Today, though, the majority of ethnic Russians in Estonia and Latvia (as well as Lithuania) have attained citizenship. In fact, specific political parties voicing the rights and demands of the Russian minority are active. In Estonia, the Centre Party is supported by much of the ethnic Russian population. The Latvian equivalent, the Harmony Centre Party, has gained a strong voice in national politics.

Yet Moscow continues to demand better treatment of the Russian-speaking minorities in Estonia and Latvia, and some Estonians and Latvians fear that their Russian populations could be potentially manipulated by Russian President Vladimir Putin to destabilise the region.

The Baltic States are engaged in talks with their NATO partners to step up security in the region. “For us it is a very important issue that NATO is capable of acting,” said Urmas Reinsalu, the Estonian Minister of Defence.