Abstract
THE BALTIC QUESTION HAD BEEN PUT INTO COLD STORAGE BY 1950. THE United States and Britain had been forced to accept as a fact that the Baltic states had been incorporated into the USSR. Soviet system had been reintroduced in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and no one could force the Soviet army out. However, Soviet presence in the eastern Baltic lacked legitimacy, because the majority of states had not formally recognized the transfer of sovereignty. As long as the Cold War was fought with the ideological intensity already apparent in 1950, it was unlikely that the Western Powers would declare the annexation legitimate. As far as international law was concerned, the prewar Baltic republics had not ceased to exist. The most important bearers of the continuity were the Baltic embassies in London and Washington, the only state organs that would function without interruption from 1940 to 1991. Symbolically, Ernst Jaakson, who had worked at the Estonian consulate in New York since 1932, became the first ambassador of the restored Republic of Estonia in 1991.
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Notes
Paul A. Goble, “The Politics of a Principle: US Non-Recognition Policy Before, During and After the Recovery of Baltic Independence,” in John Hiden, Vahur Made, David J. Smith (eds.), The Baltic Question during the Cold War (London: Routledge, 2008), 45–55.
Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko convinced General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev that no one would come to tell Moscow what human rights meant in the USSR, Anatolii F. Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s six Cold War Presidents, 1962–1986 (New York: Times Books, 1995), 345–6.
Molotov said this on August 15, 1975, Albert Resis (ed.), Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics: Conversations with Felix Chuev (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee: 1993), 49.
This is a deliberate simplification of a complex processes, analyzed for example in Daniel C. Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Kristina Spohr Readman, “Between Political Rhetoric and Realpolitik Calculation: Western Diplomacy and the Baltic Independence Struggle in the Cold War Endgame,” in John Hiden, Vahur Made, and David J. Smith (eds.), The Baltic Question during the Cold War (London: Routledge, 2008), 156–88.
Vladislav Zubok, Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Krushchev (Cambridge, MS.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
This interpretation is based on Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: the Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 303–35.
Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for our Country and the World ((New York: Harper “warrior-liberator”, who had through centuries protected the Baltic “farmer-fisherman” from foreign conquerors, Gorbachev’s speech at a meeting with the Latvian Party aktiv, Rahva Hääl, February 21, 1987; he also glorified Peter I, Kristian Gerner, Stefan Hedlund, The Baltic States and the End of the Soviet Empire (London: Routledge, 1993), 62.
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© 2014 Kaarel Piirimäe
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Piirimäe, K. (2014). Conclusion and Epilogue. In: Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Baltic Question. The World of the Roosevelts. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137442345_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137442345_11
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