No country in the European Union has felt the impact of the war in Ukraine more than the Baltic republics, where feelings of fragility and vulnerability to Russian expansionism have deepened and the traumas of Stalinism are resurfacing. As the rulers of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania move forward with their plans to demolish the remaining Soviet monuments in their public spaces and eliminate Russian lessons from their education systems, the Kremlin is exploiting the process of decommunization on the shores of the Baltic Sea to reinforce its propaganda and attempts to stoke existing ethnic tensions, particularly in Latvia and Estonia. In a new escalation of tensions, more than 60 politicians from the three countries are searched and arrested.
“In all three countries there is a deep emotional connection to Ukraine,” summarizes Dovile Budryte, a Lithuanian university professor based in Atlanta, emphasizing that the Baltic republics survived as independent states for just over 20 years in the interwar period before falling under The crisis suffered occupations by the Red Army and another in Nazi Germany. “Over the last two years, a large part of the population has understood how dependent they are on NATO's support. And there is uncertainty about what else the future will bring,” adds Budryte, who specializes in memories and collective trauma.
In Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – the only former Soviet republics integrated into the EU and NATO – the destruction of Lenin statues and busts began in the late 1980s as the USSR and Moscow's clutches weakened. After independence, the iconoclastic fervor waned. Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea and the first fighting in Ukraine's Donbass region in 2014 have renewed interest in removing 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 were demolished or removed and countless streets, parks, theaters and schools were renamed.
The Kremlin connects the destruction of the Soviet past in the Baltic republics with its narrative about the supposed return of the spirit of National Socialism. The memory of the Second World War is sacred to Russians. President Vladimir Putin also equates the German Leopard tanks delivered to Ukraine with the tanks of the Third Reich, drawing an uneasy parallel between the removal of Soviet statues and the fact that he collaborated with the Nazis.
Search and arrest warrants
On February 13, the Russian government searched for and captured Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas and dozens of Baltic politicians. “You must answer for the crimes against the memory of those who liberated the world from Nazism and fascism!” shouted María Zajárova, spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry. In 2020, Putin signed a law punishing 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, claims: “Russia is trying to pretend that it has the right to apply its legislation in the post-Soviet space, sending a signal to the rest of the world that aims to to undermine and weaken the sovereignty of the Baltic countries.
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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-high obelisk in the center of the Latvian capital to commemorate the defeat of the Nazi army. Although authorities had banned rallies and demonstrations in favor of their preservation, police intervention in several incidents led to the dismissal of Interior Minister Marija Golubeva. The situation in Daugavpils was even more tense. In the country's second-largest city, where more than 80% of the population speaks Russian, the mayor defied orders to remove two monuments until the end and dozens of people were arrested.
“I was afraid that certain demolitions would lead to serious unrest on the streets of Latvia,” admits Martins Kaprans, a researcher at the University of Riga who specializes in the Russian-speaking population of the Baltics. Several polls reflect the deep discrepancies between the Latvian majority and the quarter of the population that makes up the Russian minority, on issues such as the war in Ukraine and language policy. In a recent poll, 26% of Russian speakers surveyed – “fifth columnists,” according to some Latvian nationalist politicians – said they had a positive opinion of Putin. Kaprans claims that the Russian community is no longer as cohesive as it was 35 years ago and that younger generations consider identity issues to be less relevant.
In both Latvia and Estonia, part of the Russian minority is stateless; They lack citizenship and political rights, but have residence permits and access to social benefits. The Latvian government told more than 25,000 people in 2022 that they would have to take an exam in the country's only official language to stay there. A third of those examined – suspended – received a two-year extension to expand their knowledge, but several thousand who did not take part in the tender or did not provide the necessary documents will lose their residence permit in a few months.
Russian public television recently aired a prime-time special that accused “the Nazis who rule Latvia” of being “the worst Russophobes there are” and of wanting to “establish an ethnic monkey state.” Although Russian media has been banned in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania since the invasion of Ukraine, part of the population – the only thing they have consumed for decades – still accesses it illegally.
Putin said in December that Russian-speaking citizens in Latvia were being treated “like pigs.” In the past, the president has used the plight of the Russian-speaking population as a pretext for occupying territories in Georgia and Ukraine.
Narva, Estonia's third-largest city, was described 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 our task was to restore and strengthen the sovereignty of the country and its ancestral territories,” he told a forum in 2022, shortly after drawing parallels between the invasion of Ukraine and the 1704 campaign of Tsar Peter the Great Great “recaptured Narva after defeating the Swedes.”
Abolition of teaching in Russian
97% of Narva's residents speak Russian. Many show that they do not agree with the politics of their native language, which has no place even on tourist information boards. In a few years, Russian lessons will disappear from schools in Narva and from all schools in the Baltic republics. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are rapidly implementing their respective plans to eliminate the world's seventh most spoken language from their education systems, with replacing teachers the biggest obstacle. In addition, the three Baltic republics have severed all ties with the Russian Orthodox Church.
Arrests occurred in Narva the night before the removal of a Soviet tank that had stood on a stone pedestal for more than half a century. Still, the unrest was very mild compared to 2007 in Tallinn, when the dismantling of a Soviet statue ended the worst unrest in Estonia since its independence.
In Ivangorod, Russia, separated from the city of the same name by the Narva River, there is a replica of the T-34, the main battle tank that was decommissioned in the neighboring city and is a sacred symbol of the Great Patriotic War for Russian nationalism.
Withdrawal of Soviet tanks in Narva, August 2022. Sergei Stepanov (AP)
As the Baltic countries tear down reminders of oppression, the Kremlin is paying tribute to its oppressors and in Moscow has rebuilt the monument to Cheka founder Felix Dzerzhinsky in front of the headquarters of the Federal Security Service, the former KGB. In several remote areas of Russia, monuments commemorating Lithuanians who were victims of the deportations ordered by Stalin in the 1940s, which also affected Latvians and Estonians, have disappeared.
The war in Ukraine also destroyed the figure of Alexander Pushkin in Eastern Europe. The poet, who died 80 years before Lenin came to power, has disappeared from the streets of dozens of Baltic and Ukrainian cities. The Kremlin, railing against those who destroy Pushkin statues, has dedicated monuments to the Russian Empire's great poet in Caracas and Damascus. “The Russian narrative is no longer that of a small military operation [en Ucrania]“But 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.
With the recent setbacks in Ukraine, fears of Russian aggression in the Baltics have spread even further. The Estonian government announced the arrest of ten suspected Russian agents last Tuesday. Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna and his Lithuanian counterpart Gabrielius Landsbergis this month stressed the high likelihood that Russia would attack one of the three countries in the next four years. Conscription has just been reintroduced in Latvia; Lithuania regained it in 2015 and Estonia never abolished it.
Solidarity with Ukraine is waning in the United States and several European countries, but not in the Baltics. The rulers of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have emerged as the most loyal and staunch defenders of the Ukrainian cause, gaining weight in Brussels and on the international stage. They are no longer the alarmists and paranoid people who warned of the dangers that Putin brought with him back in 2006. Lithuania, for example, was the only country to call for Ukraine's “immediate accession” at the 2008 NATO summit, was the first country to outline a strategy to phase out Russian gas, and the only ally to supply lethal weapons to the country between 2014 and 2018 Ukrainian army supplied.
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