Right, right and right again – Latvia and the Kremlin in the eras of Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin
I first visited in January 1990, as the Soviet occupation was beginning to crumble. For the May 4th declaration of sovereignty which we are commemorating today I was not actually in Latvia – as far as I remember I was covering another story elsewhere in the Baltics.
But I was already well acquainted with the cause of the Baltic states. As a teenager I had read Czeslaw Milosz’s Captive Mind, with the unforgettable warning in the final chapter that “if you think about the Baltic states you will go mad”.
But he was writing in 1953. For my generation, we didn’t need to go mad. We got going. And I have been coming to your country ever since, as a journalist, editor, and now as the director of a thinktank specialising in the region’s security.
One of my rules when talking to audiences in the Baltics is not to indulge in Westsplaining. I don’t want to tell you things that you know already. But Andris Teikmanis, who kindly invited me to this conference, asked me to offer some insights on insights into British and broader European decision-making in the period before and after August 1991. I have reviewed as much as I can of the British press coverage of the Baltic states from 1940 up to 1991. It did not take me very long. I have also reviewed every debate in the British Parliament on the Baltic states in that period. That took me a bit longer.
The first point of reference is something we in the West got right, which is the non-recognition policy. I don’t need to explain the details to an expert audience like this, but it mattered. We did not make the mistake that Sweden and Austria made, and also briefly Australia.
In the same breath I should also mention the Baltic gold reserves, so shamefully handed over to the Soviet Union in January 1968. I have been back to read the parliamentary debates at the time, and although the Labour government at the time was of course quite wrong to do this, it is worth noting that even then, in the depths of the cold war, there was formidable opposition from Conservative and other parliamentarians, not least that champion of the Baltic states, Colonel Sir Tufton Beamish MP. Those of you who read the satirical periodical Private Eye will know that it regular features a comically old-fashioned fictional character called Sir Bufton Tufton. What may have seemed at the time to be his anachronistic eccentricity has been vindicated by events.
The policy of the British government from the 1980s onwards fell into three categories. There was a formal, legalistic side, which consisted chiefly of reiterating the non-recognition policy, sometimes with subtle shifts of emphasis, while focussing on relations with the Kremlin. No British diplomats from the Moscow embassy paid official visits to Latvia. If they came on unofficial, private visits, in so far as these were possible in the Soviet system, they would typically be met by representatives of the so-called Latvian SSR ministry of foreign affairs. The British visitors would politely decline any contact, and indeed, if they were feeling mischievous, affect ignorance and puzzlement that any foreign ministry still existed in Riga. The Latvian legation remained, along with the other Baltic missions in London, in an appendix to the Diplomatic List.
This was exemplified in this statement from the then Foreign Office minister William Waldegrave to the Commons in November 1989
Successive British Governments have never recognised de jure the forcible incorporation of the former Baltic states in the Soviet Union. It follows that we respect the right of the peoples of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to say what their own future should be. Considerable progress has been made towards greater democracy in the Baltic states in recent months. We welcome this.
Note the “former” there. Democracy yes, but no explicit support for independence
Much more important for the British and other governments was the policy towards Gorbachev. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was convinced, from their first meeting in 1984, that he someone she could do business with, and her single-mindedness on that front pushed the Baltic question to the sidelines. She did not press Gorbachev on the Baltic states in 1988 and 1989, even after the spectacular success of the Baltic Way in August of that year.
She did raise the Baltics in her speech in Moscow in June 1990, although hardly with a ringing expression of support. She said:
As you know, Britain has never recognised de jure the incorporation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union. We have always supported self-determination for them.
My understanding is that the Soviet Union also supports that principle. So, there being no difference in principle, it really should be possible to resolve the practical problems arising from the present situation in the Baltic states through discussion.
In this, Mrs Thatcher represented an overwhelming, even stifling consensus in British and west European policymaking. Nothing mattered more than keeping Gorbachev in power and keeping the hardliners at bay. If the Baltic states were causing problems for Gorbachev, then they were a problem for the West too. I was frequently interviewed on the BBC in 1990, and the typical question was to ask whether Baltic “nationalists” realised the danger of their approach.
(this is from the Baltic Independent)
I tried as best as I could to put the argument another way. If Gorbachev was sincere, then he must accept that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was illegal and that its injustice must be rectified. If he could not accept that, then he was a phony. We now know that Gorbachev was duplicitous on this issue. He continued to dispute the authenticity of the pact, on the ridiculous grounds that Molotov had signed his name in “German letters” (meaning the Latin alphabet), at a time when the original was in the communist party archives and had been viewed by Gorbachev’s aides as early as 1987.
Source: https://x.com/BadBalticTakes/status/2091531655794020788/photo/1
It was hard work making this case. Even harder for you. But things changed in 1991. One reason was the resignation of the foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze in December 1990, with his apocalyptic speech to the Congress of People’s Deputies, warning of a “creeping dictatorship”. Another was the events of January 13 in Vilnius, and in Riga on January 20th. It was noted that Gorbachev did not condemn the violence, but blamed the Lithuanian authorities for causing trouble. The OMON here in Riga also attacked and robbed three British journalists, Anatol Lieven of The Times, Marcus Warren of The Daily Telegraph and Brian Killen of Reuters. That led to questions in Parliament too. A nation in captivity for decades is one thing. A British journalist being detained briefly is much more serious. A foreign office minister Douglas Hogg said that the Soviet chargé had been summoned to the Foreign Office, and that Britain had agreed with its European partners that all non-humanitarian aid to the USSR would be paused, and that the abuses would be raised at the then CSCE.
The third leg of British policy is harder to talk about, because it was and remains secret. But it is my strong impression that our intelligence service, along with some allied counterparts, took a very different view. One reason was that people from the Baltic states were an extraordinarily useful source of information about what was happening inside the Soviet Union, on everything from power politics to military posture. Despite the catastrophes 40 years previously, in Operation Jungle, there was a notable willingness among Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians to cooperate with western intelligence services. The relaxation of travel restrictions made it easier for our people to meet them, and for them to meet us.
I also detected a different attitude in what one might call the “house view” of Soviet reality. My impression is that the intelligence services had a far more clear-eyed understanding of the likelihood of the Soviet Union’s collapse, and of its desirability. One related example of this is Paul Goble, formerly of the CIA, who as the State Department’s special adviser on Soviet nationality issues and Baltic affairs under Secretary James Baker, repeatedly warned that the deep-seated grievances of the so-called Soviet republics would destroy the Soviet state from within. Nobody from British intelligence has yet spoken publicly about their views in that era, but I do not believe that they saw things differently.
August 1991 was a vindication of the Baltic approach. The continuity of legal statehood, exemplified by the Congress of Latvia and its Estonian counterpart. The commitment to non-violence. The alliances with similarly minded individuals and movements in the Russian government of Boris Yeltsin, in cities governments such as Moscow and St Petersburg, in Moldova, Ukraine and the Caucasus. You were right and what one might call the “Chicken Kiev” camp were wrong.
But it didn’t stop there. You insisted on proper statehood, on the withdrawal of the Soviet occupation forces. You insisted on restoring your own currency, the lat — at a time when the IMF was advocating a common currency from Tallinn to Tashkent. You instituted language and citizenship laws that were designed explicitly to reverse the cultural and demographic russification of the occupation era. That era was encapsulated by Bill Clinton’s flying visit to Riga in July 1994. I covered that trip, and quizzed him at the press conference.
This was my question
You hope that things are going to go right in Russia. But supposing they don’t? Supposing in two years’ time we have a President Zhirinovsky or some other hard-liner in Moscow? Can you now assure your Baltic colleagues here that America will not permit them again either by subversion or bullying or any other means, to come back under Moscow’s sphere of influence?
Clinton did not answer directly but he stressed that Nato’s Partnership for Peace, which Russia belonged to, involved recognising other countries’ territorial integrity and independence. “we are trying to do everything we can to secure the independence of the Baltics… we are laying the foundations that I think are most likely to guarantee the long-term security and independence of these nations.
How times change.
The next big change was the growing understanding in Western eyes that Latvia was a serious economic, political and security partner. Increasingly you became a subject, not an object. This took some time. I am still amazed that Helmut Kohl never paid a bilateral visit to Riga. His only trip here was for a CBSS summit in 1998 and a meeting with Viktor Chernomyrdin. But Germany was a laggard here. I think a particularly important shift came in the intelligence and security world, with the development of serious partnership between your services and their Nato counterparts. Perhaps the highlight of this was the Latvian role in intercepting a consignment of Russian missiles destined for Slobodan Milošević’s regime in Belgrade.
So you were right under Gorbachev, under Yeltsin, and you were right about Putin too. I was the Moscow bureau chief for the Economist in 1998 to 2002. Your excellent ambassador Normans Penke was a magnetic north in the clarity and consistency of his analysis, as was his predecessor the Imants Daudišs, who died so sadly aged only 56.
They and others were right to highlight the threat from Russian revanchism, at a time when Western commentators and decision-makers were all but unanimous in their view that Russia was a friendly, harmless and most of all profitable country to do business with.
And you are right now to depict the threat from Russia accurately. Russia does not have the military capability to attack Nato head-on. Instead it is waging a different kind of war, mixing sabotage, propaganda, dirty money and cyberattacks. The aim is to weaken and break Nato’s cohesion and interfere in its decision-making.
The big problem you face here is misleading Western commentary, using cliches and stereotypes to depict you as some kind of special case here, or a “soft target”.
I particularly dislike terms like “tiny” and “ex-Soviet”, and lazy talk of a monolithic “Russian minority”. “Russian-speakers” is a term from the Kremlin propaganda lexicon, invented by Sergei Karaganov in 1993.
We should remember that the Kremlin wants to depict you with five Fs, every one of them false. Failed states, friendless, fragile and fascist.
There’s another F too, “Frontline”. The Baltics are not the “frontline states.” The frontline is in Germany right now.
We have a lot to learn from Latvia. It is so striking that you have been right, right, right again, and so many of our decision-makers and opinion-formers in the old west have been wrong, wrong and wrong again. It is lucky that you are such patient people.
My thinktank’s message to the rest of Europe is “be more Baltic”. You see things we don’t see, you hear things we don’t hear. You do things we don’t do. We are lucky to have you, and after 36 years it is high time we recognised it.