War, Revolution, and Governance: The Baltic Countries in the Twentieth Century

Description

The 20th century in the Baltic region had it all. The turbulent century did not spare the small territory and its population, which was visited by practically every calamity the modern era had to offer. At westward edge of the Russian Empire, the region was subjected to the harsh Russification drive of the late imperial era. With diverse religions and nationalities and its geographic buffer between the Empire and the German Reich, it was also the crucible of key battles during and mass refugee crises following World War I. In the interwar period, the rise of the independent Baltic States precipitated myriad political experiments and population politics together with constant maneuvering to preserve their fragile and ultimately short-lived sovereignty. World War II ushered in a period of unprecedented extremes with waves of brutal occupations, deportations, the Holocaust, the subjection of the territory to the communist experiment, and ultimately, the decimation of state sovereignty for the next four decades. The almost unavoidable outcome of this course of events has been the focus on the region from the point of view of the large powers that sought to dominate and shape it. The rather limited number of foreign scholars who command Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian, fortified this orientation in the writing of the history of the region. The present volume seeks to shift the attention to the local point of view through the writing of Baltic scholars. By no means a comprehensive expose, the essays nevertheless explore key junctures in the history of the three Baltic countries as viewed “from within,” both then and now. Table of Contents Introduction From Self-Defense to Revolution: Lithuanian Paramilitary Groups in 1918 and 1919 The Latvian War of Independence 1918–1920 and the United States Nation Building and Gender Issues in Interwar Latvia: Representations and Reality The Political System and Ideology of Karlis Ulmanis’s Authoritarian Regime: May 15, 1934–June 17, 1940 The Rise of the Radical Right, the Demise of Democracy, and the Advent of Authoritarianism in Interwar Estonia The Czechoslovak Crisis and the Baltic States in 1938: A Fateful Year for the Baltic States Government, Society, and the Political Crisis in Lithuania, 1938–1940 Latvia, Nazi German Occupation, and the Western Allies, 1941–1945 World War II Remembrance and the Politics of Recognition: An Outline of the Post-1989 Mnemohistory of Estonian “Freedom Fighters Discrediting the Diaspora: The KGB Search for War Criminals in the West After Stalin: The Kremlin’s “New Nationalities Policy” and Estonia in 1953 Doubly Marginalized People: The Hidden Stories of Estonian Society (1940–1960) Women in the Soviet Latvian Nomenklatura (1940–1990) Moscow's Eyes in Latvia: Second Secretary of the Central Committee, Nikolai Belukha, 1963–1978 Index