by Jukka Rislakki (Translated from the Finnish by Richard Impola)
Rodopi, Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008

From the book’s cover:

What do we know about Latvia and the Latvians? A Baltic (not Balkan) nation that emerged from fifty years under the Soviet Union - interrupted by a brief but brutal Nazi-German occupation and a devastating war - now a member of the European Union and NATO.  Yes, but what else?  Relentless accusations keep appearing, especially in Russian media, often repeated in the West: “Latvian soldiers single-handedly saved Lenin’s revolution in 1917”, “Latvians killed Tsar Nikolai II and the Royal family”, “Latvia was a thoroughly anti-Semitic country and Latvians started killing Jews even before the Germans arrived in 1941”, “Nazi revival is rampant in today’s Latvia”, “The Russian minority is persecuted in Latvia...”

True, false or in-between? The Finnish journalist and author Jukka Rislakki examines charges like these and provides an outline of Latvia’s recent history while attempting to separate documented historical fact from misinformation and deliberate disinformation.  His analysis helps to explain why the Baltic States (population 7 million) consistently top the enemy list in public opinion polls of Russia ( population 143 million). His knowledge of the Baltic languages allows him to make use of local sources and up-to-date historical research.  He is a former Baltic States correspondent for Finland’s largest daily newspaper Helsingen Sanomat and the author of several books on Finnish and Latvian history. As a neutral, experienced and often critical observer, Rislakki is uniquely qulified for the task of separating truth from fiction.

THE CASE FOR LATVIA is available at the The Museum of the Occupation of Latvia.  Jukka Rislakki is married to Anna Zigure.  This book will also be translated into Latvian.  I will list the fourteen questions the author covers in my next post and all of them are worth discussing on LOL.  Maybe someone else is already familiar with this book and would like to identify Jukka’s questions and select one of the fourteen.

I urge everyone to monitor this situation, especially as the Security Police have indicated that they may go after anyone who expresses agreement with the lecturer’s (Dmitrijs Smirnovs) views or who asserts that the Security Police are moving Latvian toward totalitarianism by repressing free speech. Which is exactly what these motherf**kers are doing.

How should NATO approach Russia? Contrary to Germany, the Baltic countries and Poland want to enlarge the alliance to include Georgia and Ukraine. With NATO foreign ministers meeting this week, the alliance has hardly ever been so at odds.

The road from “new” to “old” Europe passes through Russia. The 1,795-kilometer (1,115-mile) drive from the Estonian city of Narva through the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad and on to Berlin passes through six countries and a divided political landscape that is being resurveyed since the war in Georgia. What counts today is to distance oneself from Moscow.
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Estonia: The Russians of Narva

Russia’s immediate neighbors, especially Estonia, take a decidedly different view. In the city of Narva, where Stalin had apartment buildings and factories built over the ruins of blown-up Baroque houses, 96 percent of residents are ethnic Russians. Only 40 percent have an Estonian passport. To this day, almost one in five city residents have no citizenship to this day, while the rest have opted for Russian citizenship.

Is Narva home to Moscow’s “frozen and hungry fifth column,” as Mart Helme, the former Estonian ambassador to Russia, recently warned? Is it full of Kremlin spies waiting “to creep out into the streets and provoke clashes,” as Helme puts it, “because Estonia troops are incapable of staving off the Russian army as it marches into Narva?”

“Complete nonsense,” says Mikhail Stalnukhin who, as head of the city council for the past six years, manages the affairs of Narva. Stalnukhin is a stern-looking, bearded man who offers a verbose account of discrimination against Russian-speaking Estonian citizens: of their exclusion from politics and administration, Estonian nationalism in schools and the recurring agitation against all things Russian during election campaigns.

But Stalnukhin becomes taciturn as soon as the conversation turns to his ties to Moscow, or to the question of whether a “Georgian scenario”—an invasion by Russian troops, supposedly for the protection of Russian citizens in a neighboring country—could happen in Estonia. “Such a scenario can only become reality,” he says, “if people in Estonia interested in seeing it happen make the preparations. In other words, if a genocide takes place first.”

Moscow already used the accusation of genocide against Russian citizens as an excuse for its invasion of Georgia in early August. At the time, the trade union at the Narva electricity plant proclaimed its solidarity with the brothers and sisters in faraway South Ossetia—an alarming signal that prompted Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet to make a trip to Narva.

“For two hours, speaking in Russian, I attempted to explain to the angry workers why the Estonian government supported the Georgians, not the South Ossetians,” says Paet in his office in the Estonian capital Tallinn. “We have a communication problem with the ethnic Russians in our country, and that must change.”

Estonia’s foreign minister, a man with a typically Nordic mix of a gloomy and placid temperament, does not come across as someone who would choose to stir up trouble under the safe umbrella of the NATO alliance. He has enough problems already. There is still no border treaty with Russia, because Moscow refuses to accept a preamble that characterizes the years of Soviet control over Estonia as an occupation.

In addition, there are hardly any direct relations between Estonia and its neighbor to the East anymore. The Schengen Treaty has made crossing the border more difficult since late 2007. In fact, Estonians can now travel without a visa to the Canary Islands or Florida, but not across the bridge to the Russian city of Ivangorod. Trade and the flow of money between Russia and Estonia have already suffered greatly since the riots in April 2007.

Those riots were sparked by a controversy over a memorial to Soviet soldiers who died in World War II, which the Estonian government wanted to move from downtown Tallinn to a location on the city’s outskirts. But there was more to it than that. The real dispute revolved around the interpretation of Estonia’s more recent history, most of it spent under Soviet control. The country, in which ethnic Russians make up a quarter of the population, experienced scenes reminiscent of civil war.

One fatality, hundreds of injured, more than 1,000 arrests and considerable looting marked the end of a violent conflict that woke many Estonians up to the realization that, even under the protective umbrella of NATO, it is not easy to live side-by-side with a Russian parallel society, one that speaks its own language and cultivates its own historical myths.

With a grumbling minority, a rapidly plunging economy and the recent revelations about a spy working in Estonia for Russian intelligence, it would seem that Estonian President Toomas Ilves had enough on his hands at home. Nevertheless, he appears to relish handing out advice to other Western partners in his capacity of leader of a country of 1.3 million people.

The EU, or at least “the old EU,” Ilves complains, has turned itself into an “accomplice to Moscow’s policy of zones of influence.” And NATO, he adds, made a “serious mistake” when it vacillated on the question of expansion at the Bucharest summit. For this reason, says Ilves, it is high time to clarify how much Article 5 of the NATO Treaty would be worth for Estonia in an emergency. Article 5 describes the obligation of alliance partners to protect a fellow NATO country in the event of an “armed attack.”

But, as even Ilves knows, NATO is not responsible for domestic conflicts within Estonia.

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(cont’d - Lithuania)

Take note—Rīgā prokrieviski noskaņotie un pret valsts valodu naidīgie cilvēki esot daudz agresīvāki un problēmas nākotnē būs daudz nopietnākas nekā Daugavpilī, kur savstarpējās attiecības ir cilvēciskākas. Kāpēc tad rīdzinieki allaž rāda ar pirkstu uz Daugavpili?

Vysu lobu,
/P

http://www.diena.lv/lat/politics/politika/valsts-parnems-parex-bankas-akciju-kontrolpaketi

Year: 2008
Authors: (eds.) Nils MUižnieks, Toms Rostoks, Dmitrijs Petrenko, Kristīne Doroņenkova, Solvita Denis
Organization: University of Latvia, Social and Political Research Institute
Language: English

Russian media has devoted significant attention to Latvia, much of it negative. Why has Latvia evoked such animosity? To what extent are the Russian media responsible for manufacturing an enemy image of Latvia?

The Advanced Social and Political Research Institute at the University of Latvia assembled a team of young scholars from the departments of political science and communication studies to analyse the media materials. The methodologies used by the authors are broadly the same, combining elements of discourse analysis, sociology, and political analysis. As a first step towards making sense of the vast amount of empirical material in the data base, the team reviewed the evolution of topics concerning Latvia, and found that the materials could be divided into a number of categories: the situation of Russians, controversies over history, Latvian (in both the ethnic and territorial sense) culture and Russian culture in Latvia, Latvia’s accession to the EU and NATO, and issues pertaining to the economy, including energy relations. However, in order to understand media portrayal of these topics during the period in review, some background analysis was necessary.

pdf Manufacturing Enemy Images. Russian Media Portrayal of Latvia (1.25 MB)

What one god gives, another takes away. Such is the dry humour with which Lithuanians greeted the imminent closure of the Ignalina nuclear power station, a featureless hulk rising from the snowy badlands of the frontier with Belarus and Latvia.

The god that gave Lithuania the Ignalina plant was the Soviet Union. “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country!” Vladimir Lenin once proclaimed.

The god shutting down Ignalina is the European Union, which, as a condition of Lithuania’s admission to the bloc in 2004, insisted on its closure.

To anyone who visited a Soviet factory or office in the 1980s, it appears as if time has stood still at Ignalina, with its shoddy paintwork, bad wiring, missing lights, elaborate security procedures, brusque staff and pungent, disinfectant smell.

But as the clock ticks towards the shutdown date of December 31, 2009, the prospect of its closure is being greeted with incomprehension and anxiety in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital.

Ignalina provides 70 per cent of Lithuania’s electricity, and when it shuts down the nation will have nowhere to turn for its energy supplies except Russia – the very country that, in its Soviet guise, annexed Lithuania in the 1940s, deported tens of thousands of its people to Siberia, and did not permit the nation’s independence until the Soviet Union itself fell apart in 1991.

“We’re becoming an energy-isolated island. I’d even call it a Russian monopoly,” says Valdas Adamkus, Lithuania’s president. “We don’t understand the real reason why the EU insisted on closing the Ignalina plant, which is very safe operationally. Finland is building new nuclear power units, and Lithuania is being forced to close something that’s not broken. If you ask if it’s unfair or not, I don’t believe it is fair.”

For the European Commission, it is a closed case. Memories of the 1986 Chernobyl accident in Soviet Ukraine, the world’s worst nuclear disaster, were fresh in the mind when the Commission negotiated EU entry terms for former communist countries in central and eastern Europe. Moreover, energy was cheap in Europe back then.

Soviet-designed nuclear reactors were unwanted and, it seemed, unnecessary. To make matters worse, Ignalina was a Chernobyl-type plant.

But in Ignalina the sense of outrage and injustice is intense. The plant’s first reactor was shut in 2004 after 21 years. Sweden forked out millions of euros to upgrade the safety systems of the second reactor, which, according to senior staff, could carry on for another 20 years if the appropriate maintenance work were done in 2012.

“The reactor is 1.5 times more powerful than Chernobyl and 100 times safer,” says Mikhail Demchenko, deputy head of the Lithuanian state nuclear power inspectorate.

Adding to the bitterness is the fact that 80 per cent of Ignalina’s 3,000 staff are ethnic Russians. In fact, Ignalina has the highest density of ethnic Russians anywhere in Lithuania, of whose 3.6m people only 6.3 per cent are Russian.

When the plant closes next year, up to 2,000 staff will lose their jobs. Some will stay to decommission the two reactors, although that may be easier said than done. At present, there are not enough casks to store the spent nuclear fuel.

“Originally, in the Soviet period, it was planned to put the spent fuel somewhere in Siberia. Now it is a problem for Lithuania,” says one Ignalina manager.

For the Russians facing redundancy, employment prospects are bleak. Many do not speak fluent Lithuanian, and the country is hurtling into recession.

Chief defender of the workers at Ignalina is Viktor Shevaldin, an ethnic Russian and the plant’s director-general for the past 17 years. Animated, silver-haired, tie knotted loosely below unbuttoned collar, Mr Shevaldin tells it straight, as only a Russian from the Soviet era can: “If they let me do the negotiating in Brussels, this plant would stay open. But one side won’t take me there, and the other side doesn’t want me there.”

Mr Shevaldin says Russia still operates 11 reactors like those at Ignalina and all have been successfully modernised. Ignalina’s operators, he says, also still co-operate closely with Russians on safety issues.

But Mr Shevaldin is no representative of Russian interests in disguise. “I once had an offer to leave here to manage a Russian plant. I refused. Ya – litovsky patriot!” he declares in Russian (“I am a Lithuanian patriot!”).

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Kā Krievija pārklāj Latviju
Aija Cālīte – Duļevska, Latvijas Avīze
30. novembris 2008

Kamēr Latvija svinēja savu 90. jubileju, kaimiņvalsts prezidents Medvedevs mums neuzkrītoši pasniedza īpatnēju “dāvanu”. 17. novembrī tiekoties ar ASV starptautisko attiecību padomi, viņš skaļi noformulēja to, par ko mums lika saprast jau sen. Proti, Krievijai ir sava “privileģēto interešu zona” - valstis, kuras kādreiz “bijušas PSRS sastāvdaļa, kur runā krievu valodā, ar kurām mums ir labas ekonomiskās attiecības un ļoti tuvs kultūras slānis, ar ko mums jau gadu desmitiem ir pastāvīgi kontakti”, un šajā zonā Krievija vēlas (pieprasa) saglabāt savu ietekmi. Arvien atklātāk izskan tas, ka šajā zonā ietilpst arī Latvija - šonedēļ par to raksta arī “Newsweek”.
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I have a new sideline as a fortnightly columnist for the Polish weekly Wprost. My opening salvo is here (in Polish) [go to blogspot]. For the non-Polonophones, the English version follows.

Did the British kill General Wladyslaw Sikorski? Or connive in a Soviet plot to do so? I doubt it. But as the wartime leader’s fate comes again into focus, so too comes Britain’s irritatingly lopsided view of wartime history.

It’s personal for me: my great-uncle, Charles Portal, (known in the family as “Peter”) was chief of the air staff during the war (and knew Sikorski).

He argued strongly for Polish pilots to be allowed to fly alongside the RAF in the Battle of Britain (some British military bureaucrats thought they were too ill-disciplined). His beaky face can be seen, just behind Churchill, in the most famous picture of the Yalta conference (see above, ringed in red)[go to blogspot]. After the defeat of the Nazis, he insisted, against Soviet objections, that Polish aircrew be allowed to march, in uniform, in the Victory parade in London. He won that fight-but the Poles said that unless all military units were included, the airmen would not take part.

Sadly he died when I was nine, so I could not quiz him about General Sikorski, Yalta, or anything else. But I like to think that he was horrified by the post-war settlement in Europe that handed half the continent over to the Soviet occupiers.

Most British people see it differently. For them, the story of the war is a Hollywood one, of heroic solitary struggle followed by glorious victory. Every time I hear talk of how Britain fought “alone” after the fall of France in 1940, I complain (on behalf of the Poles, and also the Greeks). And as Poland gets forgotten, Stalin’s Soviet Union gets a whitewash: sanitised as our “wartime ally”, with little mention of the cost borne by both Russians and others.

Every time I hear that victory in 1945 brought “freedom” to Europe, I quibble: to Western Europe, maybe, but what about our allies? And what’s this about a neat end in 1945? The Żołnierze wyklęci were fighting for years afterwards and Józef Franczak was not caught until 1963. The last Estonian partisan, August Sabbe, hid in the woods until 1978 (he drowned trying to escape from a KGB search party). It was not until the last Russian soldier left the Baltic states on August 31st 1994 that one could really say that the military venture launched by Hitler and Stalin was really over [bold mine].

It would be nice to think that this is just an interesting argument for historians. But Vladimir Putin’s Russia makes it topical. When I am presenting my book, the New Cold War, I like to shock audiences by asking them to imagine that the Third Reich had survived for decades, with Hitler dying in 1953 like Stalin, and being followed by a long period of stagnation under a German version of Brezhnev. Then I ask them to imagine that a “reform Nazi” (called Michael Gorbach for the sake of argument) tries to reform the unreformable with a mixture of “Öffenheit” and “Umbau” (ie “Glasnost” and “Perestroika”).

Then Herr Gorbach is toppled by a failed hardline coup (just like Gorbachev); the Third Reich collapses (just like the Soviet Union); long-forgotten nations like Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria return to the map of the world from which they were obliterated in 1938-40 (just like the Baltic states).

Then we get a new country called the German Federation, supposedly democratic and friendly. But after a few years a former SS officer (called Waldemar Puschnik) becomes leader. He moves swiftly to limit media freedom and control the political system (just like retired KGB officer Vladimir Putin). But outsiders argue that the German people want stability and it is not our job to interfere.

But then imagine that our putative SS-Obersturmbannführer Puschnik says that the Anschluss and the Munich agreement were “legal” (Just as Mr Putin does about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). That German officials tell the Dutch and the Danes that they should be grateful to the German people for their independence, that they should keep German as a second official language and that they should allow automatic citizenship to all settlers who moved there during the occupation era. (This is pretty much what the Kremlin says to the Baltic states now).

And then imagine that a German government newspaper argues that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz (Rossiskaya gazeta, a state-run Russian newspaper said in September 2007, followed by four other mainstream Russian news outlets since then, that the Katyn massacre was the work of the Nazis and not of the NKVD).

My British audiences often find that bewildering and shocking. But at least it gets them thinking. Dealing with Russia now is not just about geopolitics and realpolitik. It is about values-and they are particularly visible in our treatment of historical facts. General Sikorski knew that and complained fiercely about wartime Soviet lies on Katyn. I wish my compatriots took history seriously too.