Baltic Republics

For disambiguation, see Baltic. The term Baltic Republics referred to the three Soviet Republics of Estonian SSR, Latvian SSR, and Lithuanian SSR. They were so-called in Soviet contexts because they made up most of that country's coast on the Baltic Sea. The sovereign nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, who had gained sovereignty in 1918, were occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940. After a period of German belligerent occupation from 1941 to 1944-1945, the three countries were re-integrated as constituent parts by the Soviet Union. They regained their independence in 1991 and are now sometimes jointly referred to as the Baltic States.

The United States and other Western democracies considered the forcible incorporation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into the Soviet Union illegal, and, at least formally, did not consider the three Baltic countries to be constituent parts of the Soviet Union. The same legal interpretation is shared by the current governments and majority of the population in the three countries. During the Soviet period, the three Republics were usually referred to as "Pribaltika" in Russian. This term rooted in Russian history and approximately means "(area) near the Baltic (sea)".

The sixteen (after 1956, fifteen) Soviet Socialist Republics (SSR) that made up the USSR in the post-War period, including (according to Soviet law) the three Baltic Republics, formally kept a form of sovereignty, retaining the option to leave the Union. In practice the USSR was however a highly centralized state ruled from Moscow. The Soviet Union conducted a policy of russification by encouraging Russians and other Russian-speaking ethnic groups of USSR to settle in the Baltic Republics. Today, over one-quarter of the population of Estonia are Russian-speakers. In Latvia the figure is closer to one-third and in its capital (Riga) ethnic Russians now outnumber ethnic Latvians.

According to Soviet law, the three local languages (Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian) had the status of official languages in the three respective "Republics" and they were used in schools and local administrative apparatus in parallel with Russian (which was the official language of whole USSR in all but name). However, as the Russian-speaking settlers from USSR formed an ever larger part of the population and typically were neither encouraged nor motivated to learn the local language, almost everybody had to learn Russian to some extent and use it whenever communicating with Russian-speakers in daily life.

Soviet cultural policy, which encouraged multiculturalism, allowed Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians to preserve a high degree of Europe-oriented national identity. In Soviet times this made them appear as the "West" of the Soviet Union in the cultural and political sense, thus as close to emigration a Russian could get without leaving the USSR. Having regained independence, the strong national identity, and the fact of already having independent nationhood before the War, facilitated the Baltic States' transition into sovereign nations with a liberal constitutional order.

References

Baltic Sea | Soviet Republics | Aftermath of World War II

Repúblicas bálticas | 발트 공화국 | Stati baltici | Repúblicas bálticas

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References