BALTIC STATES: Growling Russian Bear Makes Baltics Nervous

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Edvinas Butkus

VILNIUS, May 21 1996 (IPS) - As presidential elections draw close in Russia, the independent Baltic states have found themselves unwilling subjects of attention in the angry campaigning surrounding the vote.

Estonian foreign minister Siym Kallas told the Russian daily Segodnya that forces seeking to restore the Russian empire are gaining strength in Moscow. “We really fear for our small country and our small people,” he told the publication in an interview much criticised in Russia.

Estonian ambassador Mart Helme was called in by the Russian foreign ministry on May 8 after he told the media that there was “a specific threat to Estonia from Russia,” and that “militant nationalism had triumphed” in Moscow.

“We see such attitudes increasingly being spread in Russia, a big and mighty country,” Kallas told Segodnya. “There is a wish to expand its influence.”

Moscow denies a plot, and counters with accusations of anti- Russian discrimination in the Baltics. On Monday a Russian delegation told the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe that some aspects of Latvia’s citizenship and state language laws ran counter to the principles of European human rights conventions.

In Latvia, said the group, ethnic Russians account for about 34 percent of the population, but Moscow parties have made similar allegations in defence of Russians in Estonia and Lithuania.

The problems — both real and imagined — of Russian communities in independent nations formerly part of the now-defunct Soviet Union, are a recurring subject of many of the candidates’ speeches.

Their solutions vary from the merely eccentric to the downright threatening, and all of them impinge on Baltic sovereignty in some way.

Russian ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky vows to ‘liquidate’ the independence of the Baltic states if he becomes president in June. Parliamentary deputy Alexander Nevzorov claims that Russia will “recover” the three states, first seized by Stalin in 1940, “with even more victims” this time round.

And the Russian All-People’s Union (ROS), led by the Russian State Duma (parliament) deputy speaker Sergei Baburin, has laid claim on Russia’s behalf to the territory of Klaipeda on the Lithuanian Baltic coast.

Of the three only Zhirinovsky is an actual candidate for president on Jun. 16, but with the Russian military zone of Kaliningrad flanking the Baltic states, separated from Russia proper by their lands, all such comments raise the tension in the Baltics.

The problem is accentuated by the determination of the candidates to see the Russians in the Baltics vote in the polls; even have electoral districts drawn up across the three states, as if the trio were still part of the Russian empire.

Baburin has demanded that five electoral districts in Lithuania be opened during the Russian presidential poll, plus another 25 districts in Estonia and 10 in Latvia.

Russian citizens living in the Baltics — many of whom emigrated there during the years of Soviet rule — are entitled to vote in Russian elections at diplomatic missions, as is standard under the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.

During Russian parliamentary elections last December, some 2,000 eligible Russians out of 10,500 voted at the embassy in Vilnius, and 790 out of 2,000 at the consulate in Klaipeda.

There are about 310,000 Russians living in Lithuania, some 8.5 percent of a total population of about 3.7 million. Most are now Lithuanian citizens and cannot vote in Russian elections, says Lithuanian foreign ministry secretary Albinas Januska.

Not all Russian efforts to win votes in the Baltics are malign. Russian president Boris Yeltsin, recognising real concern about the rights of Russians abroad, is offering a one-off grant of 63,250 roubles (less than 13 dollars) to Soviet veterans of World War II living in the Baltics.

But when Estonia’s Kallas told Segodnya that the elections have exposed a growing political movement to retake the Baltic States, he spoke for Estonians, Latvians and Lithanians across the region.

Babarin’s party says the Klaipeda region of Lithuania — which they describe as a “historic part” of German Prussia — was transferred to the Soviet Union, not Lithuania, at the 1945 Potsdam Conference between the victorious powers of World War II.

The ROS claims the then ‘Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania’ only had ‘administrative responsibility’ for the lands, and since independent Lithuania refuses to recognise its absorption by the former Soviet Union in 1940, the land reverts to Russia, inheritors of the USSR’s international responsibilities.

Unsurprisingly this perspective is flatly rejected in Vilnius. Lithuanian historian Juozas Tumelis says the Klaipeda region was part of ‘Klein Litauen’ or ‘Little Lithuania’, a historical area defined in the 16th century as lands conquered by the now extinct Baltic tribes.

After World War I the predominately Lithuanian northern part of Klein Litauen went to Lithuania, while the major southern part was left in German hands. In 1925 50.8 percent of Klaipeda’s citizens considered themselves Lithuanian, 41.9 percent German, and 7.3 percent ‘other’ nationalities, including a handful of Russians.

Klaipeda was taken over by Nazi Germany in March 1939 triggering a wave of terror against Lithuanians. Defeated Germany then lost its claim to the land in the wholesale redrawing of borders in the region carried out at Potsdam.

The Lithuanian Foreign Ministry said in a diplomatic note that the airing of such views negatively affected Lithuanian-Russian relations and the constructive dialogue between the two.

Vilnius also complained during military exercises in and around the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, which many Lithuanians regard as Klein Litauen. The exercises, held Mar. 19-23, also involved live-firing by Russian warships on an area of the Baltic sea claimed by both states and a practice amphibious landing operation.

The Lithuanian Foreign Ministry complained that Moscow’s failed to inform them about the exercise beforehand. But in mid-May the Lithuanian Parliament agreed in principle to allow Russian warships to pay a friendly visit to Klaipeda’s port, albeit in times better suiting both countries.

This measured Lithuanian response to Moscow’s ‘psychological war’ is too weak, argues opposition leader Vytautas Landsbergis. He cited Moscow’s various draft plans to bring Russian forces in to the Baltic region.

The aim, he argued, was to create a small-scale ‘Cold War’ in the region to remind the West and the Baltic states that the region was of strategic interest to Russia — and that Russia retained the ability to intervene there if circumstances required.