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From the Birth of Nations to the European Union: Colonial and Decolonial Developments in the Baltic Region

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Shifting Forms of Continental Colonialism

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the trajectory of Baltic developments from the 1860s until the present with an emphasis on historical continuities over different periods of colonial rule. Latvian and Estonian national consciousness started to develop under both Baltic German and Russian rule. After two decades of independence, Soviet annexation in 1940 gradually imposed a centralized Soviet colonial regime. We see a paradoxical structure of repetition there, where decolonial movements of the Soviet era used strategies borrowed from nineteenth-century German romanticism and were domesticated into the Baltic cultural realm during the 1860s–1880s. Following the tradition of Baltic song festivals allows us to outline the seesaw structure of decolonial movements, where relative gains are partially lost in subsequent strengthenings of colonial rule.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The editors consider continental colonialism as “a process and outcome of territorial expansion, land-based economic underdevelopment and center-periphery dependency within a mainland….” (see introduction). The three defining features of Russian and Soviet colonialism in the Baltics are territorial expansion, the violent privileging of the value systems of the colonizing culture, and the accompanying center–periphery difference.

  2. 2.

    Good sources in English or German concerning the history of the region, from medieval to early modern times and beyond, include Stone (2001), Frost (2000), North (2011). Plakans (2011) provides a solid account from the eighteenth to early twentieth century period of Tsarist rule and Kasekamp (2010) offers a short and concise history of the region.

  3. 3.

    In addition to retaining their privileges they also regained those discarded by the earlier Swedish rule.

  4. 4.

    All translations from the German and Estonian are mine.

  5. 5.

    Naïve monarchism was typical of traditional peasantry not only in the Tsarist empire, but also in Western Europe; see Magocsi (2002, 79).

  6. 6.

    However, many Baltic composers and artists were educated in St. Petersburg.

  7. 7.

    I am writing here about large cultural developments and leaving nuance aside for the moment. As Ivar Ijabs (2014) reminds us, members of the Young Latvia movement in the 1860s generally shared and supported the ideas of Russian Slavophiles. Still, as Ijabs also confirms, such an identification was propelled by a reaction against Baltic German cultural and administrative hegemony.

  8. 8.

    On post-WWII Stalinism see Fowkes (1993), McCauley (2008), Fürst (2010), Prozorov (2016).

  9. 9.

    Later, in 1951, all materials of the 1947 song festival—all informational booklets for singers and local conductors, notes, the festival album—were removed from the libraries, to cleanse the libraries from ideologically harmful materials; see Torri (2008, 21, 25).

  10. 10.

    In Latvia, the turn towards full Sovietization of song festival tradition happened after the 1950 song festival, which still included a good number of pieces from prewar Latvian repertoire; see Šmidchens (2014).

  11. 11.

    Pages are not numbered in this publication.

  12. 12.

    ‘Eesti asi’ or ‘Estonian matters’ was a commonly used expression during the Soviet era. It signified any kind of non-Soviet, nationally tuned activity. The opposite term ‘Russian stuff’ was also commonly in use in everyday parlance, and referred to anything related to Soviet rule, economy, or culture.

  13. 13.

    The tradition of lighting a festival light was initiated in 1960, after the construction of a new stage with a special tower for the festival light. In 1960, the torch was lit in Uku farm in Saku district, where a Communist printing house was set up during “the bourgeois era” (Allandi 2014, 195).

  14. 14.

    In the Estonian SSR, the more balanced way of writing about the pre-Soviet past became slowly possible in the 1970s; see Sarapik (2015).

  15. 15.

    About the Perestroika-era developments in the Baltics, see Taagepera (1993), Smith (1996, 1999).

  16. 16.

    By this time, the pre-Soviet Lithuanian flag had already been displayed once again, but in the context of a different meeting.

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Acknowledgments

Research for this chapter was supported by the research grants PUT1218 and IRG22-2 of the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research, the Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies (CEES, European Regional Development Fond) and the Estonian Literary Museum.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Epp Annus

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale), Germany

    Dittmar Schorkowitz

  2. Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA

    John R. Chávez

  3. Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Philipps University of Marburg, Marburg, Germany

    Ingo W. Schröder

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Annus, E. (2019). From the Birth of Nations to the European Union: Colonial and Decolonial Developments in the Baltic Region. In: Schorkowitz, D., Chávez, J.R., Schröder, I.W. (eds) Shifting Forms of Continental Colonialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9817-9_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9817-9_18

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