Never Mind The Baltics

“They'll be coming for us next!”, squeal the governments of the Baltic States.

The, mostly but not exclusively Russian, ethnic minorities in those States, members both of NATO and of the EU, should be so lucky.

In Latvia,  one third of the population is stateless due to the staggeringly racist definition of citizenship.

In Estonia, even native-born citizenship is alienable upon being found also to hold a Russian passport; the last Patriarch of Moscow, Alexy II, was from Estonia, and he had previously been the Archbishop of his native Tallinn, a city with a world famous Russian Orthodox Cathedral.

Unburdened by Russophobia, and therefore possessed of solutions to the problem of Russian oligarchical takeover, the alliance between the traditional Right and the traditional Left has been saying all of this, and more, for years.

Soviet Republics from 1944 to 1991, the Baltic States became independent a few months before the dissolution of the USSR.

Their brief independence between the Wars had been part of the humiliation inflicted by Germany and Austria-Hungary on defeated Russia at Brest-Litovsk in 1918.

Latvia and Estonia became dictatorships in 1934, and Lithuania as early as 1926.

Although Lithuania has a different history, Latvia and Estonia had never existed as independent states before 1918.

After having been ruled by the Teutonic Knights and then by Sweden, they had become parts of the Russian Empire from the 1720s onwards.

In other words, and in order to give some perspective, they had done so only very slightly after the Union between England and Scotland.

Therefore, their incorporation into the Soviet Union in 1944 was nothing more than the restoration of the centuries-old status quo ante.

It was warmly welcomed by much of the Baltic political class, which contained many committed Communists.

That the Polish city of Wilno, now Vilnius, should have become and remained the capital of Lithuania was and is entirely pursuant to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939.

It is the case that the large Russian minorities in Lithuania and, especially, in Latvia and in Estonia, increased during the Soviet period, very much at the request of the local Communist Parties, which sought them to fill various positions in the economy.

But those minorities had existed, and had been numerically considerable, for centuries.

Upon independence in 1991, the Baltic States adopted the founding constitutional principle that they had been occupied by the USSR rather than incorporated into it, so that they were merely reverting to their interrupted sovereign statehood.

In 1993, Latvia even elected a President, Guntis Ulmanis, who was a great-nephew of Kārlis Ulmanis, the Inter-War dictator. He had come up through a rapidly reconstituted party which his great-uncle had banned.

But the laws of occupation are comprehensively set out in the Hague Conventions of 1907. The powerless citizenry of an occupied state remains a separate legal entity from its occupier.

Whereas incorporation makes the members of that citizenry into citizens of the incorporating state. That was what happened in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

From 1944 to 1991, their inhabitants were Soviet citizens, simply as a matter of legal fact. As they had been from 1922 to 1940, and as they had been de facto even if not de jure, along with everyone else in the territory concerned, from 1917 to 1922.

Those states therefore share in the responsibility for the Soviet regime during most of its history.

All over the Soviet Union, there were monuments to the Red Latvian Riflemen who had fought in and for the Revolution. Latvians had been one of the largest ethnic groups in the Bolshevik secret police, despite comprising a very small proportion of the population of the new Soviet state.

“Russian” and “Communist” were obviously not  interchangeable terms, while the Russian Empire had always defined all as equal if they served the Tsar, which was how it had managed to incorporate the Balts, among so very many others.

They were never victims of imperialism as the term is ordinarily understood.

Yet, like many Austrians in relation to the Third Reich, but without the excuse that most people involved are now dead, they are determined to pretend that they were indeed victims.

Citizenship is denied, voting rights are refused, amenities are not extended, schools teaching through the medium of Russian are closed, and so on. Inside NATO. Inside the EU.

These are not even measures against small minorities, or against recent immigrants with their children and grandchildren, for whose rights in these spheres the advocates of Eurofederalism and Atlanticism normally, and in most cases rightly, fight with such vigour.

Rather, these are measures against large population groups that are several centuries old.

The defence of Saint Petersburg, and of the highly populous heartland of ethnic Russian culture from that city to Moscow, is impossible without control of the Baltic States.

Purging them of their Russian and Soviet pasts, and of their large and longstanding Russian populations, as surely as the clutching of those purged states to the bosoms of NATO and the EU, is part and parcel of driving Russia out of European and Western affairs; of deracinating or “othering” Russia as Eurasian and Asian.

That serves to estrange the civilisation of which Russia seeks, however imperfectly, to be the principal protector: defined by the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three the Old Israel, Hellenism, and the Roman Empire; therefore highly critical of economic neoliberalism, of the social structures associated with it, and of the imposition of that order by force of arms; while also a bulwark both against Islamic expansionism and against East Asian domination.

See the quite un-self-conscious, hugely effective role of Russia in defending the ancient indigenous Christians of Syria against the Islamist terrorists and invaders favoured by the forces of interventionist economic and social liberalism centred on a republic of which those are the defining mythoi, the ones held up as defining Western civilisation, so that those of Russia must be consigned to the faraway Steppes, if not sent all the way to Siberia.

It is no coincidence that the former President Valdas Adamkus of Lithuania, the former President Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga of Latvia, and the incumbent President Toomas Ilves of Estonia, all grew up in North America.

The ghastly Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia, who is advising the Ukrainian coup, is also a graduate of Columbia Law School, and committed to NATO and EU membership, flying the EU flag from public buildings and the like even though Georgia is not in the EU and is unlikely ever to be admitted.

As for joining NATO, that would have put us at war with Russia in 2008, so forget it. Ukraine, take note.

That war was caused when our beloved Saakashvili invaded a territory which was only legally part of Georgia by fiat of Stalin, which had not been run from Tbilisi since the end of the Soviet Union, and whose Russian-speaking, Russian passport-holding inhabitants Saakashvili wished to cleanse by force. Does any of this resonate today?

But they have not only been dancing in the streets at his departure in Abkhazia and in South Ossetia. Georgians are delighted to see the back of this Olympically corrupt person with a truly horrific human rights record, whom the West had indulged because he was almost an American and because he was a very violent anti-Russian, opening up his country to predatory global capitalism and however forlornly seeking membership of its political institutions.

The same political institutions that are as willing to sacrifice the long-established and numerous Russians of the Baltic as to sacrifice those of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, or to sacrifice the ancient indigenous Christians of Syria or of the Holy Land.

By their very existence, those populations embody both historical realities and philosophical propositions on which one must never even permit oneself to think, never mind to speak or to act.