Good Fences, Bad Neighbor

Aliide Naylor - The Shadow in the East: Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front

National Review, August 20, 2020 (September 7 Issue)

Tallinn, Estonia, June 2001 © Andrew Stuttaford

In the aftermath of Russia’s takeover of Crimea, there were widespread fears that the Baltic states, notwithstanding their membership in NATO, might be next. As Aliide Naylor relates in The Shadow in the East, those fears have since eased, but extreme vulnerability (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia could be overrun in days) and constant low- and not-so-low-level Russian aggression against the Baltic trio continue to keep nerves on edge.

Russia’s assault on Ukraine has forced NATO to relearn the power of symbolism. Several thousand troops from other NATO allies are now present in the Baltic states at any time, a reminder that the guarantee contained in Article 5 of the NATO treaty (an attack on one NATO country is to be treated as an attack on all) also extends to the alliance’s northeastern marches. Their numbers are tiny: no more, Naylor explains, than “a tripwire, unable to resist Russia’s military might in the event of a full-scale invasion — but thus far they have served as an effective deterrent.”

Donald Trump has, as Naylor recalls, at times appeared distinctly unenthused by NATO, yet he ought to appreciate how cost-effective deterrence is. But deterrence works only if it is credible. The Kremlin must be convinced that the risk of retaliation from NATO should Russia move on the Baltic states is too high to be worth it. Boots on the ground are an emphatic supplement to words in a treaty. In a development after the publication of this book, the U.S. will, on Trump’s instructions, withdraw roughly one-third of the 36,000 U.S. troops now deployed in Germany. Some will be shifted to Poland, others to Italy and Belgium, but the comparative calm seen in the Baltic region in recent years suggests that it would make sense, strategically and financially, to send some there too rather than (as is currently planned) bringing them all home to the U.S.

In an era of hybrid war, though, the danger from Russia is not confined to a conventional invasion. Subversion has been elevated into a dark science, and although, Naylor writes, the Baltic states have “specific sets of domestic issues that can be exploited” (a reference to Latvia’s and Estonia’s large Russian-speaking minorities), they have also “been a ‘testing ground’ of sorts for methods that are later deployed further afield.” Those methods include “information war,” something of particular concern in the Baltics. While, as Naylor points out, the Baltics’ Russian-speakers are a less monolithic group than is often assumed, too many of them live in a separate “information space,” getting much of their “news” directly from the ancestral homeland.

Then there are cyberattacks, a potentially devastating form of aggression. In 2007, as Naylor discusses, Estonia was subjected to the first mass Russian cyberattack. And the other Baltics have not been left unscathed either. Naylor notes that Article 5 refers only to “armed” attack, but she should have added that the alliance has recognized since 2014 that, under certain circumstances, the alliance’s collective self-defense provisions could be invoked after a sufficiently serious cyberattack, something she claims that NATO began to examine only in 2018. Then again, quite what that could mean in practice is — as Naylor highlights — hard to say. As a result, its deterrence value is, unfortunately, minimal. And this is not a lone gray area.

Naylor writes about how Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia have to “contend with being consistently defined as ‘post-Soviet’ — seen solely through the prism of their former occupying force,” something made even more irritating for them by the immense progress they have made since regaining their independence. But half a century of occupation cannot be wished away. Naylor’s fairly brief look at that period is mainly focused on its horrifying opening act in the 1940s, when the Baltic states were overrun first by the Soviets, then by the Germans, and then again by the Soviets. Naylor is right that the narrative of Baltic victimhood has sometimes been allowed — even today — to obscure the ugly and inexcusable local participation in the Holocaust. She has, however, little to say about the terrible choices faced by other citizens of these three small nations caught between two totalitarian colossi and not infrequently forced to pick sides. She largely passes over the decades after the Baltics had seemingly been absorbed within the Soviet Union for good — a mistake, given how those times still resonate — but notes how “the occupation era is ‘othered’ and remains an alien presence inside the countries even as it is recalled as part of their history.” Yes, but that’s nothing new: Visiting Estonia almost exactly two years after it broke free from the USSR, I was struck by how often ethnic Estonians spoke of wanting the “normal” life they had been denied in the Soviet years. The loss of independence, large-scale Russian immigration, and the imposition of a bizarre economic system manufactured a reality that they had had to deal with but had never accepted as theirs.

Naturally, Naylor casts her gaze eastwards, skillfully sketching attitudes within Russia as she does so. But I was surprised to read that Russians hung on to “their fiercely communist beliefs” into the 1990s. (In truth, many, especially pensioners, driven by nostalgia and, mainly, anxiety about atrophied social benefits, mourned the lost stability of the Brezhnev years; Bolsheviks they were not.) Naylor is correct, though, that the chaos of that decade is a key element in Putin’s support. So far as Russian sentiment about the Baltics is concerned, she is right to cite the resentment felt by many Russians as NATO expanded towards their borders, but that was, it ought to be said, also one expression — among many — of a still persistent sense of imperial entitlement. Russia should, apparently, have a veto over the alliances made by the peoples it once ruled.

Naylor has traveled extensively in the Baltic region but has also worked and studied in Russia, experience that adds a valuable perspective to the book as well as some unexpected insights. For instance, she maintains that Russia applies “feminizing language to the Baltics” or, more generally, the West, depicting criticism of Russia as overly emotional or hysterical or, alternatively, infantile, in order to depict “the western world [as] a child, a girl, someone to be easily overpowered and intimidated by displays of machismo.”

The Shadow in the East may revolve around the Baltics’ relationship with Russia, but the book is not only about that. While it is neither a history of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia nor a comprehensive guide to the Baltics today, there are glances, at least, at contemporary life in these countries, chosen, I suspect, in part because of their appeal to the author, ranging from the hipsters of Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius to little delivery robots trundling along Estonian streets to song, folk culture, and even a spot of paganism.

If I had to guess (it is not a stretch), Naylor’s politics tend towards the “progressive,” and that might explain her stance when it comes to the ethnic politics of the region. She appears uneasy, for example, over restrictive legislation governing the status of the Russian language, legislation understandable in countries where history, size, and, in a way, geography make state-sanctioned bilingualism unacceptable. And then, although Naylor does not downplay the atrocities of early Soviet rule (far from it), it was jolting to read that native Estonians’ share of their own country’s population had “dwindled” from “97.3 percent in 1945 to 61.5 percent” in 1989, an oddly peaceful, inadequate verb. There is, for the most part, only indirect discussion in The Shadow in the East of the neocolonial immigration policy that led to an influx of (primarily) Russians into Estonia (and, for that matter, Latvia) on a scale that has permanently transformed their ethnic composition.

Equally, while EU membership — Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia all joined in 2004 — has been an enormous boon to the Baltic states, Naylor’s evident distaste for Brexit might be the reason she doesn’t touch on the challenge that the centripetal forces set in motion by a single market and a shared currency might eventually represent to the prosperity of the union’s Baltic periphery. More than that, the opportunity to work elsewhere in the EU (something to which Naylor alludes) is an essential freedom but a possibly existential threat to three small countries with a giant, belligerent neighbor and — in Latvia and Estonia — a delicate ethnic balance. All three saw significant population declines in the 1990s (partly owing to an outflow of Russians), and in Latvia and Lithuania this trend has continued (Estonia benefits from the fact that its linguistic, cultural, and geographic proximity to Finland makes it easy to commute there rather than emigrate). Since joining the EU, Lithuania’s and Latvia’s populations have each fallen by over 15 percent (the aftereffects of the collapse in the birth rate — now partly reversed — after independence will not have helped). Around 1.2 million ethnic Latvians live in Latvia, fewer than a million ethnic Estonians in Estonia. In 1989, Lennart Meri, a future president of Estonia, spoke of the “biological and social terror of belonging to a people that is dying out.” Naylor concludes that “the future for the Baltics can be bright,” and so it can. But for all the extraordinary strides that the Baltic states have made since shaking off the USSR, I doubt that that terror has gone.