The windswept Curonian Spit, on the Baltic Sea, affords a choice spot for reflecting on the turbulent twentieth century. It is part of Kaliningrad, Russia’s western exclave, though Lithuania possesses its northern end. From this spot, the mind naturally turns to the complexities of history, and the darkening geopolitics of our time.
From Klaipeda, Lithuania’s port city, it is accessible only by ferry. The narrow land strip, like the Baltic states as a whole, has witnessed the rise and fall of many empires, Nazi and Soviet ones not least. I found myself wandering on it during a research trip to the Baltics, investigating Soviet-era secularism and anti-religious repression. I learned a lot on these topics, but, more generally, I was impressed by Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia’s plucky spirit of independence, the dire hardships their peoples’ have experienced, and their informed disquiet about Putin’s Russia today.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” William Faulkner famously said. This might be true of all places, but it is achingly true of the Baltics. Friends of freedom ignore the lessons of their past only at great peril.
Escaping the clutches of imperial Russia after World War I, the three countries gained independence and the consolidation of national identities in the 1920s and 1930s.
The venomous fly in the ointment came with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939. Also known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact or the Mutual Assistance Treaty, this accord gave Hitler carte blanche to invade Poland in September of that year, starting the Second World War. The Pact’s “secret protocols” (not officially recognized by the Soviet Union until 1989) made allowance for spheres of influence in Eastern Europe divided between Germany and the Soviet Union.
All three Baltic states wound up in the Soviet sphere, and the flame of freedom flickered out. Shortly after occupation in 1940, Stalin sought to decapitate the countries’ political leadership and intelligentsia. In June of 1941, roughly 11,000 people from Estonia, 15,000 from Latvia, and 17,500 from Lithuania were sent eastward to the Gulag or to forced resettlement communities. Routinely, Soviet police and security forces arrived in the middle of the night, forcing men, women, children, and the elderly into cattle cars for relocation. Many perished during the journey. Others died from subsequent hardships and deprivations. Meanwhile, the Sovietization of Baltic societies proceeded apace with the new ogreish Caesar shutting down non-governmental organizations, repressing religious institutions, and collectivizing land in the name of the “working people.”
To read the whole essay, please go here to the online journal Law & Liberty, where it first appeared.
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