Latvians in the crosshairs

“In a Baltic Nation, Fear and Suspicion Stalk Russian Speakers,” announced The New York Times on December 18th: “In response to the war in Ukraine, Latvia has targeted residents with Russian passports as part of efforts to combat Moscow’s influence.”

The Times told of two Russian-speaking residents who were informed they must leave the country. The first was born in Latvia 63 years ago. The second arrived to work in a Soviet factory in 1980, and took Russian citizenship to get early retirement benefits. When Latvia regained independence in the 1991 “Singing Revolution,” it “denied full citizenship to some Russian speakers because they could not pass a Latvian language test. They were issued ‘noncitizen’ passports, a status that allowed them to travel and guaranteed residency and full access to health care and social benefits. But it shut them out from many government jobs and national politics.”

The article does mention arguments favoring Latvia’s policies. Jānis Dombrava, a member of the Saeima (Parliament) says: “We can keep those who want to integrate but not those who are waiting for the return of the Soviet Union. They should leave.”

The Times also provides comments by the kind and understanding Russian state media: Latvia is a “fascist-led country of Russophobes intent on creating a mono-ethnic state.” Vladimir Putin said Russian speakers are treated “like pigs.” Latvia, he adds, is preparing to dump them on Russia’s border “in wheelchairs.” This, he warned, would only lead “to clashes within their own country.”

All the news that’s fit to tint

The Times story was misleading in that it cited two examples out of thousands. It found both in Daugavpils, the closest Latvian city to Russia, where 80% of the populace is Russian-speaking. Yet after the article’s early scare paragraphs, we learn that one woman passed the language test and had her residency restored. The other woman, who didn’t pass, has not been expelled. Nor, despite “a maze of bureaucracy,” have any others.

“We are not rushing to expel anyone,” says Ilze Briede, the head of Latvia’s migration department. Nobody, she adds, has been deported or is likely to be anytime soon. The deadline for compliance has been extended until 2025.”

So, before we fix the charge of ethnic cleansing and a new form of Aryan supremacy reminiscent of the Third Reich, perhaps we should consider reality. With Latvian forebears and having spent time there, this writer may have some to offer. (I visited just after independence, then bicycled the 400-mile coast from Lithuania to Estonia a few years later.)

The other side of the story

1) Latvia is a country where, as Churchill said, the people own the government, not the government the people; where they elect representatives to govern them; where they may say what they like and worship as they please. That makes them “people like us.” (Ukraine, by the way is none of those things—if banning opposition parties, shutting Orthodox churches, and muzzling the press are any indicators.) Latvia is also a NATO member. Judge that based on where it takes you.

2) Latvia is a welcoming country, and not just to tourists. Proportionately, it has admitted more Ukrainian refugees than the United States: 32,000 to 220,000. Their number is proportional to 560,000 in America. Ukrainians are now the fourth largest ethnic group after Latvians, Russians and Belarusians.

3) Latvia’s situation is not just 50,000 Russian speakers in Daugavpils. It’s broader than that. When they regained independence, 40% of the population was ethnic Russian—the product of 50 years of Communist oppressors shuffling Russians in and Latvians out. It’s now down to 24% (450,000)–not through pogroms or deportations but because many Russians went home when Communism ended and Latvia reestablished its native language. (Yes, there is a language test for full citizenship, but only in basic conversational Latvian.)

War and remembrance

The Times is right about one thing: Latvians have long memories. On my first visit, I met a veteran of the Latvian Legion (organized by the Germans to fight the Russians, which they did, to a standstill in May 1945). He showed me flat farmland where they dug in against oncoming Soviet tanks—Shermans acquired by Lend-Lease, their white stars hastily repainted red. “But why did you fight with the Nazis?” I asked. “You have to remember,” he said sadly: “We had to choose between barbarians.”

On my second visit, we talked history with Mayor Teodors Eniņš of the coastal city of Liepāja (pronounced “Lee’-a-pie”). When I said “Churchill” he said “Yalta”—the fateful summit conference that had confirmed Soviet rule of Eastern Europe. The conversation drifted into “a frank exchange of views,” as the diplomats put it.

“You should have nuked them in 1945,” the mayor said quietly. Taken aback, I remonstrated. “We left Yalta with promises of free elections. It was all we could hope for. The Red Army held half the continent. The only alternative was war. No one would have that.

“Moreover” (warming to my subject), “things could have been worse. Greece—thanks to Churchill’s “percentages agreement” with Stalin in 1944—was liberated. Stalin agreed to fight Japan.” Mayor Eniņš was undeterred. “You should have fought them,” he repeaatead. “Think of all the trouble you would have saved yourselves—not to mention us.”

As we stood to leave, he pulled up his shirt, showing scars across his stomach. As a boy, he and his mates would visit the barb-wired beaches after curfew, walking backwards into the water to simulate an invasion. He’d been strafed by Soviet guards. “They had guns and dogs.” How you think about these things often depends on how you grew up.

Peace and tolerance

Given such attitudes, you might think Latvians would hate Russophones, but you’d be wrong. The historian Owen Rutter wrote of the republic in 1925: “To anyone who had seen the Latvian people at war, their gentle tolerance in peace was perplexing. By the brutally intolerant standards so common in the world now, one would expect the Latvians to have deported all the Baltic Germans, levied discriminatory taxes on the Jews…. Instead they pronounced amnesty for those who had fought against them [and offered] minorities full citizenship and free education.”

There were remarkable reforms: by allowing women to vote during the momentary Russian elections in 1905, Latvia became the first district in Europe with female suffrage; this continued during Latvia’s independence. The recent comments by Jānis Dombrava and Ilze Briede show this attitude remains.

It’s odd, don’t you think? We never read any articles about Latvians scattered across Russia, who never got home because of “a maze of bureaucracy,” or other reasons. They don’t fit the Times narrative—which seems always that civilized democracies are as bad as all those other countries.

The Times even declares that according to German pollsters, 53% of Russian speakers in Latvia view Putin negatively. You could probably better that number if you asked Russian speakers in Russia—provided they dared give an honest answer.

Related articles

“Churchill and the Baltic States: From the Second World War to Liberation,” 2018.

“Churchill and the Baltic”: Part 1 of a four-part essay, Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 2017.

“No doubt where the right lay”: 1940-95

Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky was a “Bollinger Bolshevik” who mixed support for Communism with a love of Western luxury. Friendly to Churchill, he knew the Englishman hoped to separate Hitler and Stalin, even after World War II had started.

But Maisky tended to see what he wished to see. In December he recorded: “The British Government announces its readiness to recognize ‘de facto’ the changes in the Baltics so as to settle ‘de jure’ the whole issue later, probably after the war.” There was no such announcement.

“The Russian danger…”

Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Churchill broadcast: “the Russian danger is therefore our danger.”  Why then not recognize the Soviet occupation of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia? The question came now, not only from soft-liners like Cripps and Halifax, but from close Churchill associates like Eden and Beaverbrook. But de jure recognition was one thing Stalin would never get get.

When Eden, now foreign minister, visited Moscow in December 1941, he implored Churchill to modify his stance. It was Eden’s first major foreign policy assignment. Temperament, ambition, anxiety for victory impelled him. American opinion influenced Churchill too, and the USA at that time remained opposed to recognizing a Soviet Baltic.

While Eden was in Moscow, Churchill was in America. Eden urged him and Roosevelt to recognize immediately the Soviet Baltic. “Stark realism” demanded it. The Anglo-Americans could not stop the Russians from getting their way.

Churchill still demurred. The 1941 Soviet conquests, he replied,

were acquired by acts of aggression in shameful collusion with Hitler. The transfer of the peoples of the Baltic States to Soviet Russia against their will would be contrary to all the principles for which we are fighting this war and would dishonour our cause….there must be no mistake about the opinion of any British Government of which I am the head, namely, that it adheres to those principles of freedom and democracy set forth in the Atlantic Charter.

“The Ireland of Russia”

In February 1942 the War Cabinet discussed alternatives to outright recognition. Eden proposed agreeing to Russia’s Baltic military bases. Halifax proposed quasi-independence, with Russian control of Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian defense and foreign policy. Churchill opposed both.  In Washington, Halifax mentioned recognition to Roosevelt. The President was interested, but Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles told FDR it would epitomize “the worst phase of the spirit of Munich.” In another thrust, Beaverbrook asked: “How can it be argued now that territory occupied then by the Russians—Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia—is not the native soil of the Russians?” Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians could offer some arguments.

The pressure of events wore on the Prime Minister. The Russians were holding down 185 German divisions on a thousand-mile front. On 7 March 1942, Churchill sent a feeler to Roosevelt:

The increasing gravity of the war has led me to feel that the principles of the Atlantic Charter ought not to be construed so as to deny Russia the frontiers she occupied when Germany attacked her. This was the basis on which Russia acceded to the Charter, and I expect that a severe process of liquidating hostile elements in the Baltic States, etc. was employed by the Russians when they took those regions at the beginning of the war.

* * *

Churchill’s suspicions were correct. Latvia’s President Karlis Ulmanis had been arrested and deported; he died in 1942. Konstantin Päts of Estonia spent years in prisons or “psychiatric hospitals,” finally dying in 1956. Lithuania’s Antanas Smetona, the first Baltic president to institute an authoritarian regime (1926), fled, ultimately to the USA, where he died in 1944. From June 1940, politicians, teachers and intelligentsia—anyone who seemed a threat to the Soviet rule—was deported.

On 8 April 1942, the War Cabinet approved British recognition of the 1941 Soviet borders. But now Roosevelt objected. The United States, he said through Secretary of State Hull, “would not remain silent if territorial clauses were included in the [Anglo-Soviet] treaty.” Eden conveyed this to Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov who, surprisingly, accepted.  Thus it was that American, not British diplomacy that forestalled de jure recognition of the Soviet Baltic in 1942. But Martin Gilbert maintained that this was actually “to Churchill’s relief.” Alexander Cadogan, a Foreign Office official who shared Churchill’s views on the Baltic, wrote, “We must remember that [recognition] is a bad thing. We oughtn’t to do it, and I shan’t be sorry if we don’t.”

Baltic “Ostland”

There matters rested while the Germans, first hailed as liberators, conducted another violent ethnic clensing. Over 300,000 Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians—one out of ten—were executed. They slaughtered Jews in hastily-built death camps. The Gestapo and a few quislilngs ruled the Nazi colony “Ostland.” With the Red Army’s return in 1944 came a third holocaust. An Estonian remembered: “The Germans were brutal, the Russians worse.” Clearances of Baltic citizens continued under Stalin’s successors. Ethnic Russians moved in while natives were shuttled out. To this day, native Latvians form barely a majority in their country.

At the Teheran conference in late 1943, Roosevelt abandoned his non-recognition policy—but not openly. With remarkable cynicism, he explained to Stalin that he did not wish to lose the votes of the six or seven million Polish-Americans, or of the smaller, though not negligible, number of voters of Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian origin.

How easily Roosevelt surrendered the liberties he had so strongly defended a year earlier. “Moral postures in the harsh world of power politics may acquire a certain nobility in their very futility,” wrote David Kirby. “But when tainted by a history of compromise and failed bargains, they tend to appear somewhat shabby.”

* * *

But Teheran also left Churchill with a softer attitude toward Stalin. His feelings had changed, he wrote Eden, tempered by hard reality on the ground:

The tremendous victories of the Russian armies, the deep-seated changes which have taken place in the character of the Russian State and Government, the new confidence which has grown in our hearts towards Stalin—these have all had their effect. Most of all is the fact that the Russians may very soon be in physical possession of these territories, and it is absolutely certain that we should never attempt to turn them out.

Churchill was a politician depending on the support of a majority, and no politician could remain blind to that reality. But in judging Churchill, must consider his complete record. And for him, the subject remained.

To his War Cabinet in late January Churchill said the “ideal position would be to postpone any decision about frontiers until after the war, and then to consider all frontier questions together.” Nevertheless, the Red Army was  “advancing into Poland.” Churchill knew he was caught in a shocking compromise of proclaimed principle. What were they to say to Parliament and the nation, he asked Eden, about the idealistic principles declared in the Atlantic Charter?

The March of Fate

As the Red Army swarmed west in 1944, surviving Balts had the unpalatable choice of siding with one barbarian or the other. More fought with the Germans than the Russians. Stalin expended half a million men vainly trying to storm the “Courland Pocket,” declaring that the imperialist West would try to prevent reestablishment of Soviet authority. But the West had no such intentions. Instead, Balts faced tanks bearing American white stars. They were U.S. Shermans, thrown into battle without their new red stars. But the Baltic fighters gave up only with the German surrender.

In 1950, Churchill sadly summarized the tragedy of the Baltic States:

Hitler had cast them away like pawns in 1939. There had been a severe Russian and Communist purge. All the dominant personalities had been liquidated in one way or another. The life of these strong peoples was henceforward underground. Presently Hitler came back with a Nazi counter-purge. Finally, in the general victory the Soviets had control again. Thus the deadly comb ran back and forth, and back again, through Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. There was no doubt however where the right lay. The Baltic States should be sovereign independent peoples.

In the end, the United States, along with Britain, Australia, Canada and a few other countries, never recognized the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Baltic gold remained safe in London, and their embassies continued to function. But Balts fortunate enough to escape, and their children, have long memories. They did not look kindly on Roosevelt, nor, one has to say, on Churchill.

What we can learn

It is useful to study Churchill and the Baltic for what it can teach us today about powerful aggressors and the fate of small nations. In wartime negotiations, the Soviets were consistent. They made the most extreme demands, offering little in exchange. Meet their demands and more followed. Whenever the other side said they would not agree, an eleventh-hour shift by Moscow would result. Even this was not a defeat, since the democracies were often so grateful for evidence of good will that they would struggle to meet the next round of Soviet demands. The perceptive Churchill once told Eden, “do not be disappointed if you are not able to bring home a joint public declaration.”

Churchill frequently repeated the Boer expression, “All will come right.” By 1992, when I made my first visit, the Baltic was free. In 1995 with three friends, I bicycled the Latvian coast from Lithuania to Estonia, and presented a Latvian translation of Churchill’s The Dream to President Guntis Ulmanis.

The British ambassador had arranged for us to meet local officials along the way. I will never forget the words of Teodors Eniņš, Mayor of Liepaja. He raised the question of why the Anglo-Americans hadn’t fought Russia to free Eastern Europe in 1945. We said the American and British public would have never countenanced it. “You should have done it anyway,” Mayor Eniņš replied. “Think of how much trouble you would have saved yourselves—not to mention us.”

Walter Russell Mead in The American Interest finely described the Museum of the KGB. In the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, it documents victims of the Soviet occupation, 1940-91:

Yet those poor Lithuanian partisans who fought a hopeless guerrilla campaign against the Soviet occupation after 1945 kept waiting for us to show up,” Mead continued. “Apparently they made the mistake of believing all those fine words that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill wrote in The Atlantic Charter.

I have no doubt that Roosevelt and Truman were right to avoid war with the Soviet Union after World War Two…But war over eastern Europe in 1945 was unthinkable; containment was the best we could do.

A visit to Latvia

North of Lithuania is Latvia, home of some of my ancestors, where three friends and I bicycled in 1995 on the 50th anniversary of V-E Day. The ostensible reason was to celebrate the ongoing battle waged by Baltic partisans against the renewed Soviet occupation, following the “liberation of Europe,” as we all comfortably referred to it in the West back in 1945.

Our way had been made smooth by the late Richard Ralph, then Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Latvia, who arranged for us to stay at the British Embassy in Riga , and to meet various functionaries on our 410-mile ride from the Lithuanian to the Estonian border.

Our first stop was the port city of Liepaja, where with the rain pelting down outside, we breakfasted with the mayor, Teodors Enins (1934-2008). When we said “Churchill,” Mayor Enins said “Yalta,” and the conversation immediately moved into “a frank exchange of views,” as the diplomats put it.

A hard conversation

“You should have nuked them in 1945,” Mayor Enins said of the Russians. He spoke of he fifty-year Soviet occupation, in the midst of which he had grown up. He had strafe marks on his belly, acquired as a young lad on the beaches after dark. He’d  been wounded by Soviet soldiers, who patrolled every inch of the Baltic coast.

I said of course that there was no chance of the Anglo-Americans attacking Russia in 1945. We had just clawed down Hitler with them. They were our allies. We had left Yalta in February 1945 holding guarantees of Polish self-determination. That was all we could hope for.

Yalta confirmed postwar Soviet rule in the Baltic States and much of Eastern Europe. With the Red Army occupying half the continent, there were few alternatives except war, which no Western statesman would have launched in those circumstances.

Moreover, we told Mr. Enins, “Things could have been worse. Greece—thanks to Churchill’s oft-denounced ‘spheres of influence’ agreement with Stalin in 1944—was liberated. So in the end was Austria. Stalin agreed to enter the war against Japan. All these were promises he kept.”

“You should have fought them”

“But the Polish guarantees proved worthless, didn’t they?” said the mayor. True. Churchill and Roosevelt were in communication about what to do next when FDR died in April 1945. President Truman, ill-briefed as vice-president, moved with caution, unwilling to upset an important ally. Churchill lost the July election and was replaced at Potsdam, the last wartime conference, by Clement Attlee.

I told Mayor Enins how Churchill had written in Triumph and Tragedy that had he returned to Potsdam, he would have forced a “showdown” over Poland. What the result would have been is a matter for conjecture. “Much of Eastern Europe, given harsh reality, had no chance for liberty,” I said, “but we should not denounce the efforts Churchill made.”

Teodors Enins listened politely, but then he just shook his head. “No. You should have fought them anyway,” he said sadly. “Think of how much blood and treasure you would have saved yourselves—not to mention us.”

As in many things, what you think often depends on where you grew up.