No country in the European Union has had the impact of the war in Ukraine like it has in the Baltic republics, where the feeling of fragility and vulnerability to Russian expansionism has been exacerbated and the traumas of Stalinism have been revived. As the rulers of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania accelerate plans to demolish remaining Soviet monuments in their public spaces and eradicate Russian-language teaching from their educational systems, the Kremlin exploits the process of decommunization on the shores of the Baltic, with which it reinforces its propaganda and tries to inflame existing ethnic frictions, especially in Latvia and Estonia. In a new escalation of tension, he even searches for and captures more than 60 politicians from the three states.
“In all three countries there is a deep emotional bond with Ukraine,” summarizes Dovile Budryte, a Lithuanian university professor living in Atlanta, who emphasizes that the Baltic republics only survived as independents for a little more than 20 years in the interwar period, before suffering the occupations of the Red Army, and another of Nazi Germany. “In the last two years, a large part of the population has understood the extent to which they depend on NATO support. And there is uncertainty regarding what else the future will bring,” adds Budryte, who specializes in collective memory and trauma.
In Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – the only former Soviet republics integrated into the EU and NATO – the demolition of statues and busts of Lenin began in the late 1980s, when the USSR was faltering and Moscow’s grip was losing strength. After independence, the fervor iconoclastic it was dissipating. The illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia and the first fighting in the Ukrainian region of Donbas, in 2014, reactivated interest in eliminating traces of the Soviet past. But since 24 months ago, when the full-scale war began, the purge has been more intense than ever. Hundreds of monuments have been demolished or removed and countless streets, parks, theaters or schools have been renamed.
The Kremlin links the demolition of the Soviet past in the Baltic republics with its narrative regarding the supposed return of the ghost of Nazism. The memory of World War II is sacred for Russians. President Vladimir Putin also equates the German Leopard tanks supplied to Ukraine with the Third Reich’s Panzer tanks, which draws an uncertain parallel between removing Soviet statues and being a Nazi collaborator.
Search and arrest warrants
On February 13, the Russian Government searched for and captured Kaja Kallas, the Estonian Prime Minister, and dozens of Baltic politicians. “They must answer for the crimes once morest the memory of those who liberated the world from Nazism and fascism!” exclaimed María Zajárova, Foreign Ministry spokesperson. In 2020, Putin signed a law that punishes those who destroy Soviet-era monuments abroad with five years in prison. Maria Mälksoo, a researcher at the Center for Military Studies at the University of Copenhagen, maintains that “Russia tries to pretend that it has the right to apply its legislation in the post-Soviet space, and sends a signal to the rest of the world that it intends to erode and weaken the sovereignty of the Baltic countries.
Some demolitions, such as that of the Victory Monument in Riga, have been surrounded by tension and controversy. Every May 9, thousands of members of the Russian minority gathered around the imposing 79-meter obelisk in the center of the capital of Latvia to commemorate the defeat of the Nazi army. Although the authorities prohibited rallies and demonstrations in favor of its preservation, police intervention in several incidents led to the dismissal of Marija Golubeva, the Minister of the Interior. Even more tense was the situation in Daugavpils. In the country’s second city, where more than 80% of the population speaks Russian, the mayor defied the order to remove two monuments to the end and dozens of people were arrested.
“I was afraid that certain demolitions would cause serious disturbances in the streets of Latvia,” admits Martins Kaprans, a researcher at Riga University specializing in the Russophone population of the Baltic. Various polls reflect the deep discrepancies, on issues such as the war in Ukraine or language policy, between the Latvian majority and the quarter of the population that makes up the Russian minority. In a recent survey, 26% of Russian speakers surveyed — “fifth columnists,” according to some Latvian nationalist politicians — claimed to have a positive opinion of Putin. Kaprans maintains that the Russian community is no longer as cohesive as it was 35 years ago, and that younger generations consider identity issues less relevant.
In both Latvia and Estonia, a part of the Russian minority is stateless; They lack nationality and political rights, but they have a residence permit and access to social benefits. The Latvian Government informed more than 25,000 people in 2022 that they had to take an exam in the only official language in the country in order to remain there. A third of those examined – suspended – have received a two-year extension to expand their knowledge, but a few thousand, who did not attend the call or did not present the required documentation, will lose their residence permit in a few months.
Russian public television recently aired a special prime-time program in which “the Nazis who rule Latvia” were accused of being “the worst Russophobes there are” and of wanting to “implement a mono-ethnic state.” Even though Russian media has been banned in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania since the invasion of Ukraine, part of the population – which is the only thing they have consumed for decades – still accesses it illegally.
Putin declared in December that Russian-speaking citizens in Latvia are treated “like pigs.” In the past, the president has influenced the situation of the Russian-speaking population as a pretext for the occupation of territories in Georgia and Ukraine.
Narva, Estonia’s third city, was cited in one of Putin’s imperialist speeches as one of the places where the persecution of the Russian-speaking population is most evident. “It seems that it has been our lot to restore and strengthen the sovereignty of the country and its ancestral territories,” he declared in 2022 at a forum, shortly following drawing parallels between the invasion of Ukraine and the military campaign of 1704 in which the tsar Peter the Great “recaptured Narva following defeating the Swedes.”
Eradicate teaching in Russian
97% of Narva’s inhabitants speak Russian. Many show their disagreement with the policies that corner their mother tongue, which has no place even on tourist information panels. In a few years, classes in Russian will disappear from schools in Narva, and from all those in the Baltic republics. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are rapidly executing their respective plans to eradicate the seventh most spoken language in the world from their educational systems, with teacher replacement being the main obstacle. Furthermore, the three Baltic republics have severed all ties with the Russian Orthodox Church.
In Narva, arrests took place the night before the removal of a Soviet tank that had been resting on a stone base for more than half a century. Still, the altercations were very mild compared to those in 2007 in Tallinn, when the dismantling of a Soviet statue ended the most serious unrest that has taken place in Estonia since its independence.
In Russian Ivangorod, separated by the Narva River from the city of the same name, a replica of the T-34, the battle tank that was retired in the neighboring town and which is a sacred symbol of the Great Patriotic War for Russian nationalism.
While the Baltic countries tear down memories of oppression, the Kremlin pays tribute to its repressors and has rebuilt in Moscow the monument to the founder of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, in front of the headquarters of the Federal Security Service, the former KGB. In several remote areas of Russia, monuments in memory of Lithuanians who were victims of the deportations ordered by Stalin in the 1940s, which Latvians and Estonians also suffered, have disappeared.
The war in Ukraine has also devastated the figure of Alexander Pushkin in Eastern Europe. The poet, who died 80 years before Lenin took power, has disappeared from the streets of dozens of Baltic and Ukrainian cities. The Kremlin, which rails once morest those who destroy statues of Pushkin, has inaugurated monuments to the great poet of the Russian Empire in Caracas and Damascus. “The Russian narrative is no longer that of a small military operation [en Ucrania]”but rather that of a confrontation of civilizations in which Moscow protects its identity,” notes Intigam Mamedov, an expert on Eastern Europe and researcher at Northumbria University.
Fear of Russian aggression has spread even further in the Baltics with the latest setbacks suffered by Ukraine. The Estonian Government announced last Tuesday the arrest of 10 alleged Russian agents. Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna and his Lithuanian counterpart Gabrielius Landsbergis have insisted this month on the high probability that Russia will attack any of the three countries in the next four years. Compulsory military service has just been reintroduced in Latvia; Lithuania recovered it in 2015, and it was never abolished in Estonia.
Solidarity with Ukraine shows signs of weakness in the United States and several European countries, but not in the Baltics. The rulers of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have emerged as some of the most faithful and firm defenders of the Ukrainian cause, and have gained weight in Brussels and on the international scene. They have ceased to be alarmists y paranoid who, back in 2006, were already warning of the dangers posed by Putin. Lithuania, for example, alone demanded at the 2008 NATO summit “the immediate accession” of Ukraine, was the first country to design a strategy to disengage from Russian gas, and the only ally that supplied lethal weapons to the Ukrainian army among 2014 and 2018.
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