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Europe.view
Partners in crime
Jul 9th 2009
From Economist.com
Despite Russia's protests, Stalin was no less villainous than Hitler
IT IS depressing that it even needed to be discussed. On July 3rd in Vilnius the parliamentary assembly of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the continent’s main outfit, passed a resolution equating Stalin and Hitler. It called for August 23rd to become an official day of remembrance for the millions who were repressed, murdered, deported, robbed and raped as a result of the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. That deal, and the secret protocols that went with it, were a death sentence for the countries from the Baltic to the Black sea. The poisonous after-effects linger until today.
The resolution should have met with particularly thunderous applause from the Russian side. After all, Russians by most measures suffered particularly badly under Stalin. Following Lenin’s terrible legacy, he systematised the persecution of the country’s brightest and best. Anyone reading the classic memoirs of Stalinism, such as “Kolyma tales” by Varlam Shalamov, or Nadezhda Mandelstam’s “Hope against hope”, or a modern history such as Anne Applebaum’s “Gulag”, is suffused with the horror of those years. It is hard to imagine anyone quibbling over their condemnation.
Some do counter that Stalin was, despite his excessive toughness, a great figure in Russian and Soviet history. (Modern Russian history textbooks make the same case.) But that ignores Stalin’s disastrous record as a political and military leader. His paranoia decapitated the Red Army leadership: the best generals were murdered or jailed. Also, Stalin ignored the plentiful warnings of Hitler’s planned surprise attack in June 1941. That nearly proved disastrous.
By some counts Stalin should be seen as no less villainous than Hitler. He bears much of the blame for the war. It was the Soviet alliance with Hitler that gave the Nazi leader the confidence to attack Poland. Only Hitler’s blunders prevented the Nazis from winning the war in the East—and quite likely the whole show. It is also worth remembering that Stalinism was so repellent that it drove many Russians to fight on the Nazi side—including in the SS.
Plenty of other countries have much to be ashamed of in their wartime history. Britain’s bullying of Czechoslovakia to accept dismemberment at Nazi hands in 1938 is one good example; French collaboration with the occupation another. These are shameful, but they are not taboos.
By contrast, the OSCE resolution prompted outrage from Russia. Indeed, under the new law criminalising the “falsification of history”, anyone who voted for it, discussed it or publicised it in Russia would risk a jail sentence of up to five years. Communism’s economic failure and political repression have made it hard for anyone to claim that the Soviet Union was the epitome of a new civilisation. The victory over Nazi Germany provides some moral weight, but does not excuse Stalinism. The heroism of the Soviet soldiers who repelled the Nazi invaders has been used both to sanitise the past and to distract attention from the sleaze and incompetence of Russia’s current rulers.
The debate will not change the world: the parliamentary assembly is just a talking shop on the sidelines of the 56-member OSCE. Its resolutions are not legally binding. But the news is welcome nonetheless. Russian propagandists love using historical slogans but hate discussions of historical facts. The debate in Vilnius makes it a bit harder to maintain that stance.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
OSCE condemns Molotov-Ribbentrop
CEE and America
America and eastern Europe
Not captivating now
Jul 9th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Eastern Europe watches nervously as America improves relations with Russia
WHEN he returns home, a routine task in President Barack Obama’s in-box will be to proclaim the third week of July “Captive Nations Week”. Established by Congress in 1959 to show American solidarity with countries trapped inside the Soviet empire, it amounts nowadays to little more than a press release and a couple of parties. But it echoes a decades-old American commitment to the region’s freedom and security, sealed by NATO’s expansion to include 12 ex-communist countries.
That has created both loyalty and expectations. Eastern Europe sent troops uncomplainingly to Iraq. Several countries have soldiers in Afghanistan: indeed, some smaller ones have suffered remarkably high casualties there, largely unacknowledged by their bigger allies. And Poland and the Czech Republic agreed to host a new missile-defence system to counter a possible threat from Iran. This irks the Kremlin, which claims to fear American encroachment in its own backyard.
The east Europeans find Mr Obama an easier ally than his predecessor, George Bush. They are broadly pleased with his trip to Moscow. Unlike Mr Bush, who looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and got “a sense of his soul”, Mr Obama was not gulled into giving Russian leaders cloying praise. He brushed off attempts to trade influence in eastern Europe for help on issues such as Iran.
But on eastern Europe’s own future, the new administration’s touch is less sure. It is giving out mixed signals on the missile-defence deal signed by its predecessor. Polish and Czech leaders who argued in favour of the scheme feel exposed. One says, disapprovingly, that America’s wobbles are “unimperial”. Even tacit linkage between delaying or scrapping the scheme and pleasing Russia will heighten those worries.
Talks on a plan to put a battery of Patriot air-defence missiles in Poland are bogged down in arguments over cost, whether they will be armed and the legal and tax status of the Americans who come with them. Promises of help to modernise the Polish armed forces (“we provide the boys, you provide the boots” as a Polish official once put it) have proved frustratingly empty.
The region’s biggest fear is the health and credibility of NATO. The new members want the alliance to work on proper military planning, explicitly taking Russia into account as a potential threat as well as a partner. That has been taboo since the early 1990s and is opposed by some west European countries with close business ties to Russia. But such issues are low down the White House’s to-do list. “Obama doesn’t have a Europe policy. But neither does Europe,” says an east European leader wryly.
CEE and America
America and eastern Europe
Not captivating now
Jul 9th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Eastern Europe watches nervously as America improves relations with Russia
WHEN he returns home, a routine task in President Barack Obama’s in-box will be to proclaim the third week of July “Captive Nations Week”. Established by Congress in 1959 to show American solidarity with countries trapped inside the Soviet empire, it amounts nowadays to little more than a press release and a couple of parties. But it echoes a decades-old American commitment to the region’s freedom and security, sealed by NATO’s expansion to include 12 ex-communist countries.
That has created both loyalty and expectations. Eastern Europe sent troops uncomplainingly to Iraq. Several countries have soldiers in Afghanistan: indeed, some smaller ones have suffered remarkably high casualties there, largely unacknowledged by their bigger allies. And Poland and the Czech Republic agreed to host a new missile-defence system to counter a possible threat from Iran. This irks the Kremlin, which claims to fear American encroachment in its own backyard.
The east Europeans find Mr Obama an easier ally than his predecessor, George Bush. They are broadly pleased with his trip to Moscow. Unlike Mr Bush, who looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and got “a sense of his soul”, Mr Obama was not gulled into giving Russian leaders cloying praise. He brushed off attempts to trade influence in eastern Europe for help on issues such as Iran.
But on eastern Europe’s own future, the new administration’s touch is less sure. It is giving out mixed signals on the missile-defence deal signed by its predecessor. Polish and Czech leaders who argued in favour of the scheme feel exposed. One says, disapprovingly, that America’s wobbles are “unimperial”. Even tacit linkage between delaying or scrapping the scheme and pleasing Russia will heighten those worries.
Talks on a plan to put a battery of Patriot air-defence missiles in Poland are bogged down in arguments over cost, whether they will be armed and the legal and tax status of the Americans who come with them. Promises of help to modernise the Polish armed forces (“we provide the boys, you provide the boots” as a Polish official once put it) have proved frustratingly empty.
The region’s biggest fear is the health and credibility of NATO. The new members want the alliance to work on proper military planning, explicitly taking Russia into account as a potential threat as well as a partner. That has been taboo since the early 1990s and is opposed by some west European countries with close business ties to Russia. But such issues are low down the White House’s to-do list. “Obama doesn’t have a Europe policy. But neither does Europe,” says an east European leader wryly.
Sunday, July 05, 2009
russian intelligentsia book review
Russia's intelligentsia under communism
Yearning to be free
Jul 2nd 2009
From The Economist print edition
Illustration by Daniel Pudles
Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia. By Vladislav Zubok. Harvard University Press/Belknap; 464 pages; $35 and £25.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
THE Soviet Union was a prison, especially for the lively minded, whose travel abroad and activities at home were dictated by the Communist Party’s cultural commissars. But in the period between the end of the Stalin terror and the start of the Brezhnev era’s grim stagnation, a lucky few enjoyed some wisps of freedom.
Cultural continuity between that period and a lost past is the central theme of “Zhivago’s Children”. The metaphorical reference is to Tanya, the child of Yuri and Lara Zhivago in Boris Pasternak’s great novel. Brought up by peasants, “she has no opportunity to inherit the tradition of free-thinking, spirituality and creativity that her father embodied.” How will she turn out? The novel leaves that fictional question unanswered. Vladislav Zubok’s book shows, with great sympathy and insight, what happened to Tanya’s real-life counterparts.
The Zhivago legacy is Russia’s “silver age”, when Anna Akhmatova, a poet, and Vasily Kandinsky, a painter, as well as others, flowered towards the end of the tsarist era and in the emancipated years immediately after the Bolshevik revolution. But Stalin, who liked uplifting stories and pictures featuring combine harvesters, banned their work as subversive and decadent. Many perished in the murderous frenzy of the 1930s. Yet enough survived to preserve at least some of the knowledge and traditions of the past.
The huge expansion of Soviet higher education after the war was supposed to create docile “cultural cadres”. What emerged were young people, marked by “boundless, sparkling optimism”, proud of their country’s achievements but open-minded to its failings. After Stalin’s death, their independent thought and behaviour became “oxygenated”. Tight-knit circles of friends, kompany in Russian, discussed love, life, letters and more. In one such group the young Mikhail Gorbachev struck up an instant, passionate and lifelong liaison with a bright culture-vulture called Raisa.
Writers such as Pasternak and Akhmatova were privately revered in these circles. But the real thaw began under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. The World Youth Festival in Moscow in 1957 produced an orgy, sometimes literally, of contacts with thousands of visiting foreigners including from the capitalist West. In a society where such meetings had been as unlikely as a total solar eclipse, that had a huge impact. So did a freer press: the hard-hitting mass-market newspaper, Izvestia, and brainy, liberal-minded periodicals such as Novy Mir. As cultural iconoclasm swelled, Stalinist clichés (and the hacks who produced them) began to tumble.
Other controversies raged too, such as “lyrics v physics”. One camp believed that science would perfect society. The other sought answers from art and literature. Disagreement over that ended friendships and marriages. As the mental wounds of terror and war began to heal, the hardy survivors of the 1930s began to speak more freely to their young counterparts. Growing knowledge of the lies and crimes of the past barely shook the new intelligentsia’s faith in the Soviet system. Their world view was still Marxist, their patriotism genuine. Yet in their self-awareness and sense of mission, Zhivago’s children began to resemble the Russian intelligentsia of a century before.
Mr Zubok poignantly details the lengthy and bitter decline that followed. The earthy Khrushchev resented the cultural elite’s pretensions. Party bureaucrats saw them as subversive. The crushing of the Prague Spring destroyed faith in the Soviet system, and the intelligentsia splintered. A growing camp favoured Russian traditions and even chauvinism, denouncing the others as disloyal and cosmopolitan (and Jewish). Some writers collaborated out of cowardice or cynicism; others emigrated. A lonely few became dissidents, focusing intensely on support from the West, largely detached from everyday life in their own country. Similar divisions remain in Russia now.
The picture Mr Zubok paints so painstakingly is vivid. Yet it is only a tiny corner of the dreary canvas of Soviet life. A few thousand people in Moscow and St Petersburg had a nice and interesting time in the 1950s. But for many millions of their fellow-inmates, the Soviet decades were unrelievedly awful.
communism book review
Communism
Dead end
Jul 2nd 2009
From The Economist print edition
Mankind’s biggest mistake
The Rise and Fall of Communism. By Archie Brown. Ecco; 736 pages; $35.99. The Bodley Head; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
WHY did communism take root? Given its sorrowful harvest, why did it keep spreading? And what ever enabled it to last so long? Archie Brown’s new history of communism identifies three big questions, perhaps even the biggest, of the past century.
At first sight, all seem puzzling. Communism was an impractical mishmash of ideas, imposed by squabbling zealots that promised much, delivered little and cost millions of lives. It is striking that 36 countries at one time or another adopted this system and that five—Cuba, Laos, North Korea, Vietnam and the biggest of them all, China—still pay lip service to it.
Communism’s first big advantage was that it played on two human appetites—the noble desire for justice and the baser hunger for vengeance. Mr Brown, emeritus professor of politics at Oxford University, traces communism’s idealistic roots in the struggle against feudal oppression and beastly working conditions. The moral weight of Karl Marx’s criticisms of 19th-century capitalism even won him praise from the high priest of Western liberalism, Karl Popper, a Viennese-born philosopher who emigrated to London. But the intoxicating excitement of revolutionary shortcuts attracted the ruthless and dogmatic, who saw the chance to put into practice Marx’s muddled Utopian notions—and settle some scores on the way. “The more representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in killing, the better,” wrote Lenin in 1922. Even so, many still resist the idea that the founding fathers of communism were murderous maniacs. Revolutions against corrupt and ossified regimes in countries such as Russia and China stoked a steamy enthusiasm that took decades to dissipate.
The communist block also had two bits of good fortune. The economic slump of the 1930s discredited democracy and capitalism. Then came Hitler’s disastrous attack on the Soviet Union. The victory over fascism in Europe gave the Soviet Union, an ally of America and Britain, renewed moral weight. Given what had happened in Russia under Stalin in the 1930s, that hardly seemed deserved. As Mr Brown notes, Stalin trusted the Nazi leader more than he trusted his own generals. The Soviet Union killed more top German communists than Hitler’s regime did. Yet in some countries, Czechoslovakia for example, Soviet forces were initially welcomed as liberators, and Stalinist regimes took power with a degree of popular consent. In other countries, such as Poland and the Baltic states, it looked different: one occupation gave way to another.
The promised communist nirvana brought a mixture of mass murder, lies and latterly the grey reality of self-interested rule by authoritarian bureaucrats. But it was a bit late for second thoughts. Communist regimes proved remarkably durable, partly thanks to the use of privileges for the docile and intimidation of the independent-minded. Another source of strength was tight control of language and information that deemed most criticism unpatriotic. Cracks came as information spread, especially about the system’s bogus history and economic failings. Nationalism was a potent solvent too, particularly in places such as the Baltic states, that felt they were captive nations of a foreign empire.
Mr Brown deals conscientiously with communism in Asia and the solitary Latin American outpost of Cuba. But his main expertise, acquired over decades of scholarly study, is in the Soviet Union and its east European empire. His account is studded with delightfully pertinent and pithy personal observations and anecdotes: the censors in tsarist Russia decided that Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” was so boring that it wasn’t worth banning. Lenin thought 1917 was too early for revolution in Russia. At the Battle of Stalingrad, 50,000 Soviet citizens, including turncoats, volunteers and conscripts, were fighting on the German side. An American communist agitator once began a speech with the immortal lines: “Workers and peasants of Brooklyn”. Nikita Khrushchev hated putting things in writing because he couldn’t spell.
It is easy to be polemical about communism. Mr Brown strives to be fair-minded. He gives careful weight to the achievements of the Soviet regime, particularly in bringing mass literacy to Russia, and unparalleled social mobility. But he is sometimes too lenient. Was the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev really just an authoritarian regime, rather than a totalitarian one? Saying that the Soviet Union “repossessed” the Baltic states in the secret Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939 would strike most people there as a glaring misreading of history. And his discussion of economics is skimpy and clichéd.
Yet as a single-volume account of mankind’s biggest mistake, Mr Brown’s book is hard to beat. Readers over the age of 40 will find it an uncomfortable reminder of a dangerous and dismal past. For most younger readers, it will seem all but unimaginable.
More food
Last week’s column has aroused offence where none was meant. The aim—perhaps a bit fanciful, but it is summer after all—was to imagine menu items with names that reflect eastern Europe’s history and politics. Münchner Klöße [Munich dumplings], for example, would be a noxious dish cooked by Germans and force-fed to Czechoslovaks by Brits. But readers saw it as a patronising outsider’s attack on east European cuisine in general. How dare a newspaper published in a country that invented the chip butty and the deep-fried Mars Bar mock the rich and varied cuisine of half a continent? Not your father's peasant food At the risk of adding deliberate insult to unintended injury, the complaints do provide a peg to look at the region’s culinary highs and lows. Two big tests of national cuisine are whether the locals like it, and whether it exports. A simple way of measuring that is the incidence in a Google search of phrases such as “Albanian culinary classics” and “Estonian gourmet recipes” (zero in each case). That gives a rough guide to the level of interest in the English-speaking world in those countries’ national kitchens. Another Google test is compare the profile of each kind of ethnic restaurant in a big international city such as New York. So “italian restaurant” + “new york” brings up a mighty 2m hits, against 20,000 hits for “russian restaurant”, 33,500 for “polish”, 7,500 for “Hungarian” and so on. (Just for the record, “British restaurant” gets only 5,860.) The presence of immigrant populations has an effect (you can find Lithuanian restaurants in Chicago, if rarely anywhere else). But the undeniable fact is that Italian (and French, Chinese, Indian, Tex-Mex, etc) cuisine has established itself as part of the global culinary landscape whereas the offerings from east European countries largely have not. One reason is the isolation caused by 50 years of communism. (That also may explain the popularity of Georgian food within the Soviet Union, where it was the most exotic and tasty ethnic cuisine available.) Another is most countries’ recent roots in peasant farming. This created a need for cheap food that could support arduous manual labour: plenty of calories, fat and protein where possible, but not so well suited for a modern diner in search of taste sensations and a healthy diet. A partial exception is Hungarian cuisine, which is not for those following a low-fat diet, yet still redolent of Hapsburg-era sophistication. But even that suffers from the biggest hole in the region's traditional repertoire: the summer menu. Hearty and delicious soups and stews are all very well when the wind is howling outside. But in the sweltering heat, a cold cabbage salad doesn’t quite do the trick. Two delicious summer soups, the Lithuanian/Polish cold borscht and Hungarian wild cherry soup, both require dollops of sour cream—a no-no for the cholesterolly challenged. Estonia’s kama (a mixture of ground and roasted grains, including pea flour) added to chilled buttermilk or kefir is healthier and a taste well worth acquiring. The best summer option is probably fish: during a recent visit to Vincents in Riga, one of the priciest (and best) restaurants in the entire region, your columnist enjoyed an exquisitely presented starter of smoked and fresh halibut, salmon, trout, salmon caviar and herring. Sashimi, Baltic-style. Even more striking was the dessert, concocted out of the lurid and astringent juice of the sea-buckthorn berry. This costly and vitamin-packed elixir was mixed before our eyes with liquid nitrogen, creating an instant sorbet with explosive effects on the tongue. Did someone say that east European food was boring?
Europe.view
Food for thought
From Economist.com
Adding deliberate culinary insult to unintended injuryVincents 
Sunday, June 28, 2009
The Ottoman Yolk/ Europe View #138
Judging from the comments on the Economist website, some people have failed to see the joke in this article. It is NOT meant to be an attack on east European cuisine.
Europe.view
Ottoman Yolk
Jun 25th 2009
From Economist.com
What would a politicised east European menu look like?
“What’s “Cutlet Carpathian Style?”, your columnist asked innocently in a restaurant in Budapest recently. “You’re halfway through eating it when the Ukrainians take it away and say the rest belongs to them,” came an instant quip in return. The rest of the world may have forgotten, but Hungarians still remember the time when a large chunk of what is now Ukraine (and a lot more besides) was part of their old imperial kingdom.
The encoding of menus is a fascinating byway in gastro-linguistics. Any mention of “Hawaiian” means that chunks of pineapple have been added to the dish. Similarly, “Provençale” signals tomatoes and black olives. “Napolitano” means with basil and mozzarella; “Niçoise” is anchovies and eggs, “Veneziana” means onions. More generally, “traditional” usually means indigestible or overcooked. “Organic” means it costs more.
Alamy
A sprinkle of hope and a dollop of sadness
But rarely if ever do the menu terms have any political meaning. London’s best restaurant for real English cooking, Wilton’s, serves a dessert called “Guards’ Pudding”, invented in the trenches of the first world war (ingredients include breadcrumbs and raspberry jam). The officers who survived the wartime mincing machine apparently longed for the dish in peacetime London. The French “Macedoine” salad could be the big exception: it is a mixed fruit salad that some say was named after the ethnic confusion in Macedonia 100 years ago. But serious scholars have not endorsed that theory.
So it is tempting to try to create a menu with east European historical overtones. The starter might be Ottoman salad. That would be lazily prepared and slovenly served, and crowned with the yellow part of a boiled egg (the Ottoman yolk). Its unlikely ingredients range from sharp Balkan paprikas to gelatinous Levantine sweetmeats. It would stay on the table for ages, and some guests would end up picking bits out in order to create their own dishes (Bulgarian crudités, perhaps). Random offenders would be hauled off to the kitchen to spend a lifetime washing dishes, Janissary style.
The Hapsburger Auflauf (stew: but Hungarians would call it a goulash) would be equally varied but rather more successful, with Czech dumplings nestling quite snugly next to wisps of sauerkraut and paprika.
Romanov rissoles would be raw (and bleeding), prepared with extraordinary incompetence and bashed about by a madman. But they would be delicious compared with “Steak a la Soviet” (often known colloquially as Lenin’s Revenge): this would be a revolting mixture of gristle and animal fodder, enough to keep you alive but wishing that you were dead.
Diners would hastily turn to the more appetising part of the menu. Prague Spring Rolls would be a temptingly modern variation on traditional Czech cuisine, half-baked yet cooked with delightful enthusiasm by a kitchen crew of idealistic youngsters and hard-bitten types who have embraced nouvelle cuisine. Sadly, a jackbooted waiter stamps them to smithereens before you have begun to enjoy them. You then spend the next 20 years cleaning the restaurant windows.
Diners are told that Baltic Surprise is off the menu forever on seemingly dubious health grounds. Old people insist that it used to be delicious, involving herring and fresh herbs, eaten at midsummer with a lot of beer and dancing. Even trying to order it brings the threat that you will be locked in the cellar for life. But diners who persist will find it served with a flourish, having been cooked secretly in the kitchen from a recipe bravely preserved in the attic. Conversely, Kasha Putina (Putin’s porridge) is not on the menu either, though something is clearly cooking. Russians maintain that they love it, but the neighbours find the smell a bit overpowering.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Foreign Policy magazine (1)
The Fall and Rise and Fall Again of the Baltic States
A recessionary tale from Europe's new basket cases.
BY EDWARD LUCAS | JUNE 22, 2009
Portraying the Baltic states in their current mess requires more than words and numbers. Only an old-fashioned chart, with a sea monster, a whirlpool, or perhaps a skull and crossbones, would begin to do justice to the plight of what were until recently the shining success stories of the ex-communist world. Eating a meal in a deserted restaurant in one of the fine old capital cities of Tallinn, Riga, or Vilnius gives a sense of the collapse. So does the silence of the half-finished construction sites, the rock-bottom rates in the glitzy hotels that shot up during the boom years, and the fall of a Latvian government under the weight of the current troubles. The Baltic states today are prime candidates to be the new basket cases of Europe, with their double-digit economic declines, beleaguered governments, and shriveling state spending.
But 20 years ago, when I first visited what were then still the Soviet Baltic republics, the current problems would have seemed an almost inconceivably desirable state of affairs. The Baltic states, for almost all intents and purposes, had ceased to exist to the outside world for nearly half a century. As a youngster in Britain in the 1970s, I had read of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as one might read about the mythical land of Atlantis—a fabled place of the distant past, submerged by an unimaginable catastrophe. In the early 1980s, I huddled with demonstrators in London, their banners reading, "Estonians out of Siberia! Soviets out of Estonia!" It was hard to know which seemed less likely. In London, I met elderly, dignified survivors of the Baltic lost world in dusty rooms that reeked of irrelevance and desperation. Even just visiting the Baltic states during their years of Soviet rule was near impossible.
Then came the small miracle of the 1990s. When I lived in the Baltic states for the final two years of the Soviet era, I did not just discover Atlantis: I watched it rise out of the sea and join the United Nations.
As the editor of the English-language weekly The Baltic Independent, I chronicled what happened next: how the reborn republics cleaved to the West, shrugging off the economic and political legacy of the occupation.
Today, Atlantis is buffeted again by cruel and threatening tides. One is the sharp downturn in the domestic Baltic economies, which began two years ago when their reckless credit bubbles began popping. These had been inflated by the belief that the Baltic markets were rapidly converging with Europe’s. Property prices and consumer spending rocketed, creating huge current account deficits as Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians took advantage of the easy credit offered by banks keen to increase their market share in Europe’s most dynamic new region. Square foot for square foot, prime apartments in the Baltic capitals were costlier than in Copenhagen.
On top of all that has now crashed an even larger wave: the global recession. As small, open economies, the Baltic states thrive when their neighbors are booming, and wither when they slump. In the current downturn, demand for Baltic products—food, furniture, tourism—is sinking both in European markets and in Russia. That has led to stunning gdp falls in all three countries. In the first quarter of 2009 alone, gdp dropped at a 12 percent annual rate in Lithuania, 15 percent in Estonia, and 18 percent in Latvia. Forced to accept an imf-led bailout in December, Latvia is now struggling to meet its loan conditions. Public-sector salaries there were cut by at least 20 percent. Discretionary public spending is to fall 40 percent.
A third crashing tide is geopolitics. Russia looms next door to the Baltic states as a contemptuous and even hostile neighbor that has played out repeated military exercises based on the scenario of reconquest. The three Baltic states are today members of nato but often feel they are on its margins: in the alliance on paper, but lacking the contingency planning and military presence that would bolster the security guarantee provided by Article V of the nato treaty. Russia’s increasingly angry rhetoric and ominous moves may seem like empty posturing from the safety of Brussels or Washington, but from a Baltic standpoint they are threatening—and all the more so for having thus far prompted no clear Western response.
It used to be Belgium that was counted as the "cockpit of Europe”—the place where great-power interests clashed and were settled. Now it is the Baltic states. At stake is not just nato’s credibility, but also that of the whole post-communist experiment: Is it possible for small countries on Russia’s borders to gain durable prosperity, security, and freedom, with their destiny determined by their own talents and virtues? Or will the ebb and flow of economic fortune ultimately prove that these small states are unsustainable as anything but satrapies for more powerful neighbors?
To answer those questions, one has to start with the past. For though the Baltic states share flat landscapes and culinary quirks (herring for breakfast, potatoes for lunch and dinner), what they really have in common is their tragic recent history.
For each Baltic state, Soviet rule effectively brought a cultural revolution. National elites were murdered or exiled. Hundreds of thousands were deported, executed, or starved to death. Collectivization destroyed the peasant farms that had been the backbone of Baltic economies and societies. Finally came the suffocation of national identity through mass immigration of Russian-speakers from other parts of the Soviet Union and the purging of books that might portray the era of Baltic independence in favorable terms. Estonia’s leading novelist, the late Jaan Kross, remembered watching books from his country’s main university library destroyed by an ax-wielding apparatchik.
What particularly aroused Russian ire (and still does) was that after the 1940-1941 Soviet occupation, Estonians and Latvians did not see the prospect of another one as "liberation." Indeed, from 1944 onward, many Baltic citizens fought hard against Soviet forces, even shoulder to shoulder with the Nazis at times. The bad blood still lingers, as seen two years ago when Estonia (or eSStonia, as Russian propagandists still call it) decided to relocate a Soviet war memorial from the center of Tallinn to a military cemetery on the outskirts of town. For Russians, the bronze statue was "Alyosha the Liberator”; for Estonians, it was "The Unknown Rapist." The result was a fierce diplomatic spat, the besieging of the Estonian Embassy in Moscow, and a mammoth cyberattack that briefly disrupted public services.
The bleakness of life inside the Baltic states during the occupation era was matched by overseas apathy, even hostility, toward their fate. Britain handed over to the Kremlin the Baltic gold reserves, which had been entrusted to the Bank of England for safekeeping. Dusty embassies in Washington and elsewhere maintained the vestiges of legal existence, and a dwindling band of elderly Baltic diplomats would gather for occasional meetings at the U.S. State Department, where their flags still hung in the lobby. It was a good way to annoy the Kremlin, but the cause of Baltic independence was all but dead. Those who persisted in raising it were seen as eccentric, out of touch, and irrelevant. Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish émigré poet and Nobel Prize winner, wrote in his seminal work on totalitarianism, The Captive Mind, that he could not stop thinking about the Baltic states, which he described as being "boiled down" in a pot with a "tightly closed lid." But he also said that others regarded his preoccupation as the epitome of futility: It would waste his life and awake the "wrath of Zeus."
After regaining independence in the early 1990s, the Baltic countries could easily have turned out like Moldova: semifailed states on Europe’s periphery, corrupt, geopolitically hamstrung, and surviving on remittances. Their foreign trade was entirely tied to the collapsed Soviet economy. They had no independent institutions and no civil servants capable of running a modern state. Their politicians were a mix of wily but untrustworthy Soviet holdovers, unworldly professors (Lithuania’s first post-Soviet president, Vytautas Landsbergis, was a musicologist), and inexperienced youngsters (Juri Luik, Estonia’s representative to nato, entered high office at 26). All the while, the kgb used its cash, connections, and intimate knowledge of "the lives of others" to preserve and expand its influence—a task made easier by the unsolved question of how to deal with the hundreds of thousands of Soviet-era migrants and their descendants.
That combination of problems meant that few saw the Baltic states as future members of serious Western clubs. They were too flaky for the European Union, too geopolitically sensitive for nato, and too poor for the oecd. And many in the West told them so. As the Cold War wound down, Baltic leaders aspiring to independence received not warm words of encouragement from the West, but rebukes. Why were they so impatient? Why were they impeding Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms with their hard-line nationalism? A Finnish official even told me once that Estonian independence would be an economic and political disaster that would prove a "catastrophe”—for Finland! Such points went down badly in the Baltics, and not surprisingly. It was akin to telling a prisoner to consider his captors’ feelings, rather than trying to escape.
So how did the Baltic countries do it, succeeding so brilliantly and so quickly? Part of it was luck: Russia was weak, and its potential for mischief was initially quite limited. In addition, the Baltic diasporas provided a serendipitous assortment of unlikely leaders. Lithuania’s president, Valdas Adamkus, spent most of his life as a civil servant in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. His Estonian counterpart, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, was raised in the United States and educated at Columbia University. Former Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga spent most of her life in Canada as a psychology professor. Hundreds of lesser-known others in the 1990s helped rebuild everything from the diplomatic service to business.
But the biggest reason for the success of the Baltic states was good policymaking, usually introduced first in Estonia and then copied by the other two. In barely two years, from 1992 to 1994, the radical reforming Estonian government of Mart Laar introduced a flat tax, privatized most national industry in transparent public tenders, abolished tariffs and subsidies, stabilized the economy, balanced the budget, and perhaps most crucially, restored the prewar kroon and pegged it to the rock-solid deutsche mark. As a result, Estonia became one of the most open and transparent economies in Europe, and with growth came political stability: Russian troops left the Baltic region by 1994, fears of Balkan-style ethnic conflicts receded, and Soviet noncitizens in Estonia and Latvia began to assimilate.
Competitive advantage began to emerge. The first business to boom was transit. Then, though the Baltic states had practically no indigenous metallurgical industry, they became major players in the metals trade. Next came manufacturing, thanks to outsourcing from old Europe. Foreign investment poured in, and with it technology and know-how. Productivity soared, and tourism took off, as foreigners discovered the chocolate-box charms of Tallinn, the vistas of Jugendstil buildings in Riga, and the baroque splendors of Vilnius.
Estonia did particularly well. High-tech companies set up there and became some of the country’s largest employers. Estonian geeks in 2002 invented Skype, a peer-to-peer Internet telephony software that now has more than 400 million users worldwide. The state also pioneered "e-government," the idea of putting public administration online. At a time when these innovations were unheard of elsewhere in Europe, Estonians could file their taxes on the Internet, vote electronically, and even watch a live Webcast of their prime minister’s official waiting room. Visitors the world over came to study the Estonian model of flat taxes, lean government, and rapid innovation, which inspired no little envy among Lithuanians and Latvians, not to mention resentment from the Russians next door.
As the new millennium dawned, Atlantis was back in business, free and democratic. But it was not secure. That seemed to change in 2004, when after frustrating false starts and Western foot-dragging the Baltic states gained membership in the European Union and nato. The change was partly nominal. The states passed huge lumps of eu regulation into law, often with only cursory scrutiny of their implementation. nato, for its part, fudged the question of whether it would really be willing to defend its new Baltic frontiers against Russia. The alliance’s presence to this day in the Baltic states consists of a small squadron of fighter planes, provided by other countries on a rotating basis.
Still, the Baltic states seemed set for their happiest period ever. They were useful allies, the epitome of post-communist success, and an integral part of the Euro-atlantic world. They were secure and prosperous as never before. And they had begun to lose the "ex-Soviet" label; that was for basket cases like Georgia and Ukraine.
It took the collapse of the Latvian government in February, amid fevered speculation about devaluation and political unrest, to bring the Baltic states’ problems to the world's attention. Signs of trouble had been visible much earlier, however. For those who knew the countries well, the sense of hubris in the years of the post-2004 boom was almost stifling. Growth in Latvia, for example, was an unsustainable, debt-fueled 11.9 percent in 2006 and 10.2 percent in 2007. Current account deficits—a good sign of how far beyond its means a country is living—soared too, reaching nearly 25 percent of gdp. That made all three countries completely dependent on outsiders’ willingness to keep lending them money. As upsets elsewhere in Europe from Iceland to Ireland have proved, the trouble with this model is that borrowing money is easy when you don’t need it, but difficult when you do. In past years, the inflows inflated the bubble. Now, national survival depends on the willingness of Swedish taxpayers to guarantee banks that so unwisely overextended themselves.
The boom years in the Baltics—as in so many other fast-growing emerging markets—turned out to have been wasted. Instead of firmly applying the brakes, running large budget surpluses, tightening control of the banking system, and taking urgent action to preserve competitiveness, politicians harvested the proceeds and ignored the risks, thinking that the growth was the result of their own good decisions. Calls for caution were brushed aside. Rather, the impulse was, as Latvian tycoon-turned-politician Ainars Slesers put it, to "put the pedal on the metal."
The detrimental effects of this mentality were clear. A tight labor market sent standards in service industries plunging. At the region’s premier security thinkfest, the Lennart Meri Conference in Estonia in 2007, startled delegates turned up for breakfast on Sunday morning at Tallinn’s Radisson hotel to find that nothing was on offer. The staff simply hadn’t turned up; the manager shrugged, "Who wants to work on a Sunday morning?" Foreign tourism operators began complaining. Once a bargain destination for those seeking a quick break, the Baltic states became pricey before they became good.
The smugness not only fueled the boom, but it allowed for the dodging of decisions on issues ranging from corruption and cronyism in politics to structural economic problems. In Latvia and Lithuania particularly, politics stank. Lithuanian President Rolandas Paksas was forced out of office in 2004 amid allegations of extortion and links with Russian organized crime. Another high-ranking Lithuanian politician, Viktor Uspaskich, fled to Russia when his bookkeeper turned over evidence to the authorities of serious breaches of party finance laws. Latvia was run by a bunch of party bosses with strong business ties, irreverently dubbed the "Politburo." On repeated occasions they tried to fire the heads of autonomous public bodies, such as the chief of the anticorruption authority, who had come dangerously close to uncovering how the country was run behind the scenes.
The first clear sign of trouble came when the one big bank in the region not owned by a foreign parent, Latvia’s Parex Bank, got into difficulties in mid-2008. Parex had always been a questionable success story. In the late 1990s the bank used to advertise on Russian television with a spot showing a $1 bill and the slogan "We are closer than America." The clear implication was that Parex was a convenient means for rich Russians to get their money out of the country. Parex strongly denies that it ever broke any Latvian law, and it has never been prosecuted. However, the bank has come under intense scrutiny from international officials seeking to combat money laundering.
Parex’s weakness was that its depositors were mainly offshore and highly mobile, while its lending had mostly been to construction projects inside Latvia, many of which soured simultaneously. After depositors withdrew nearly $430 million in the course of six weeks, the bank was nationalized in November for the token price of a couple of dollars. It also received a bailout in excess of $380 million from the Latvian state and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
The incident dented Latvia's reputation hugely. The country's institutions had so far done an impressive job in seeming to insulate the running of the country from the political shenanigans of the elite. Now they had failed glaringly to supervise the country's best-known financial business, with near-catastrophic consequences. Latvia's financial weakness suddenly revealed the hollowness of past success.
The crisis has not spared Estonia and Lithuania either. A vivid illustration of that is the loss of air links with the outside world. Flying direct to Tallinn or Vilnius from main European destinations has become difficult or outright impossible. Estonia's national carrier, Estonian Air, has cut back its routes sharply. Lithuania's FlyLAL went bust amid an acrimonious dispute with the owner of the Vilnius airport, endangering the country's role as the intellectual and diplomatic hub of the Baltic. Also at risk is Lithuania's cherished prize—its yearlong celebration of the selection of Vilnius as the "European Capital of Culture" for 2009. Faced with a time-consuming and costly stopover in Copenhagen, Helsinki, or Frankfurt, many potential visitors may simply decide to stay away. Once again, the Baltic states feel they are fading from the map.
The three countries face this round of economic hardship with many important policy levers out of reach. The obvious step would be to devalue their currencies, but because they are guarded by the banks, that move would shake each country to its foundations while also bankrupting the many households and firms that have loans in euros and Swiss francs. The Baltic states have no room to relax monetary policy. Nor can they use fiscal policy to ease the pain—borrowing money to boost state spending—because all three countries are trying to meet the euro area's 3 percent budget deficit criterion.
Instead, the Baltic states are pushing through an "internal devaluation," cutting wages and pruning bureaucracy in the hope that these measures will boost their exports and attract renewed foreign investment. The sole cushion is money from the European Union and other international lenders. It could work. The three Baltic economies have already shown that they can turn on a dime. They did this in 1991 under far harder conditions and again in 1998, after the Russian financial crisis. Still, these austerity measures require extraordinary patience and a high tolerance for pain among voters who will see their living standards plunge for the next two years. It also requires Swedish and other foreign banks to stay the course on their bad loans, even as they will lose money hand over fist.
The big hope is that the crisis will prompt the reforms that Baltic politicians so smugly skipped during the boom years. It is a scandal, for example, that higher education in all three countries is so second-rate. At least one of their universities should have turned itself into a strong competitor for students and faculty frustrated with the lumbering state-run universities of old Europe. Health, transportation, local government, and criminal justice still retain striking levels of Soviet-style producer power, corruption, and inefficiency. Progress on these fronts would not just reassure voters that the state was doing its job properly—it would also encourage external lenders, such as the European Union, to help keep the Baltic states afloat. If none of this happens, though, the water level will just keep going up.
The Baltic states' current fate epitomizes the wider story in Eastern Europe, of half-baked reforms pursued with more enthusiasm than judgment. Looking back on the 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell, it is clear that the economic difficulties facing the former captive nations were overestimated. Solidarity leader Lech Walesa once said that turning a capitalist economy into a communist one was as easy as turning an aquarium into fish soup. The difficulty was reversing the process. In fact, creating a thriving capitalist system on the ruins of a planned economy has proved the easier part. The difficulty has been in building strong institutions with the political supervision necessary for them to stay healthy.
A prime example is the currency regimes: To create credibility, all three countries adopted strictly fixed exchange rates. These gained totemic significance: The central banks that administer the currency pegs to the euro are the most trusted institutions in each country. Yet by 2004, it would have been far better to have the exchange rates more flexible. A revaluation in the boom years would have cooled overheating; a devaluation now would stave off hypothermia.
The big question today is whether the Baltic states' extraordinary flexibility and determination will allow them to recover as quickly as they toppled. The danger is twofold. One is that the critical mass of patriotism and solidarity that helped them overcome past difficulties has dissipated. The most able people have another choice now: They can leave. Of my most impressive Baltic friends, one is married to a Dutch diplomat and lives in Asia; several have jobs in the comfortable bureaucracies of the European Union or nato. A sprinkling work in London or for multinational companies. When they see the mess back home, they are torn: Should they abandon their careers and return, or stay on the comfortable sidelines? The members of the Baltic diaspora, "who in their freedom had no homeland," had spent half a century waiting for the chance to help their cousins, "who in their homeland had no freedom," as the old toast goes. But it's unclear whether that romantic history will repeat itself. Undoing the consequences of foreign occupation was a lot more glamorous than unraveling the consequences of a property boom or haggling about swap arrangements with other central banks.
Second, the Baltic states' future is not just in their own hands. The economic crisis coincides with the rise of a resurgent, revanchist Russia and its alliances with a divided and demoralized Europe. The most threatening prospect for Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians is the "Schroederization" of German foreign policy—derived from former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, whose conspicuous friendship with Russian leader Vladimir Putin while in office morphed into the chairmanship of a controversial Russian-German gas pipeline consortium within months of his stepping down. The Baltic states feel squeezed. Who will defend their economic and political interests when big countries once again make decisions over their heads?
Those fears are a little overblown for now. Poland and Sweden are two European heavyweights determined to prevent a Russian-German axis from developing further. Russia's own economic problems have somewhat lessened its bilious outpourings against the Baltic states. Yet the danger remains. As unemployment rises and social strains increase, the risk of local Russian-speakers feeling victimized—or the indigenous populations blaming them—also increases. Russia has said on repeated occasions that it reserves the right to intervene, even militarily, to defend the (unspecified) interests of its "compatriots" elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. After the 2008 conflict in Georgia, few can doubt their resolve to do so. Russia is also passing a law that will make illegal any attempt to equate Hitler and Stalin, which will criminalize the Baltic states' own version of their history.
Russia can exert other kinds of leverage, too. Lithuania will be almost totally dependent on Russian gas, for example, when it has to close its nuclear power station at Ignalina at the end of the year. Latvia's lucrative east-west transit trade is one of the few bits of the economy that is still thriving. This creates potential for political pressure. Until the Baltic states have developed not only their economies but also their political institutions fully to Nordic levels, and completed their reintegration into the Western world, they will not be completely secure. And at present, the combination of a nationalist Russia and an economic downturn is alarming.
"We needed another 10 years," says Asta, one of my oldest Lithuanian friends. She's right. Atlantis rose from the depths. But the sea walls are still too low. And now the water is rising again.
Want to Know More?
Edward Lucas’s book The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia and the Threat to the West (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) offers an in-depth look at the Baltics’ neighbor and former colonizer to the East. Lucas also blogs about the region at edwardlucas.blogspot.com.
For a comprehensive history of the Baltic States from ancient times through the last century, read Anatol Lieven’s The Baltic Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). The Baltic States: Years of Independence: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, 1917-1940 (Georg von Rauch, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995) and The Baltic States: Years of Dependence, 1940-1990 (Romuald Misiunas and Rein Taagepera, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) together provide an integrated picture of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia’s survival through years of Russian colonialism, language discrimination, and nationalist struggles.
For a literary depiction of the region, William Palmer’s The Good Republic (London: Secker & Warburg, 1990) vividly captures the journey of a Baltic emigrant returning with soon-shattered innocence to his homeland. The Captive Mind, by Czeslaw Milosz, poses moral dilemmas from the lives of those living under totalitarian regimes.
Foreign Policy magazine (2)
Welcome to Baltland
In Russian, the Baltic states are called pribaltika—literally, the "Baltic shore." That infuriates Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, as do most other attempts to lump them together. Estonians are the prickliest: Toomas Hendrik Ilves, now president, angered his southern neighbors by saying that Estonia should be more fairly counted as a Nordic country, not a Baltic one. That was tactless. But in truth, the differences are legion and the similarities—barring one chunk of tragic 20th-century history—scant.
In Estonia and Latvia, national consciousness began only in the 19th century with the emancipation of serfs, the growth of literacy, and the stirring of resentment against German barons and tsarist rule. Not so in Lithuania. Its identity is shaped by a folk memory of superpower status. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the last pagan state in Europe until 1387, once stretched to the shores of the Black Sea. It was larger than the Holy Roman Empire and had six official languages. Now the size of West Virginia with only 3.7 million people, Lithuania has shrunk. But its sense of grand identity remains. In any intra-Baltic discussion, Lithuania tends to lead with a grandiose self-centered plan, often with a blithe disregard for practicalities. In March 1990, for example, Lithuania mounted a frontal attack on the Soviet Union and declared independence; Estonia and Latvia, by contrast, initially held back and only declared "sovereignty."
The three countries also have different foreign phobias. Anti-Semitism has plagued Latvia and Lithuania, but not Estonia. Russia and Russification worry Estonia and Latvia more than Lithuania, which is instead twitchier about Poland. It has clashed with Poland repeatedly over the city of Vilnius (Polish-occupied in the interwar years) and in recent years over whether their respective minority populations can spell their names in official documents with letters such as ? (which exists in Polish but not the Lithuanian alphabet) or "?" (a Lithuanian letter nonexistent in Polish).
The three states have struggled, literally and figuratively, to find a common language. Older people speak Russian, usually badly in Estonia and rather well in Lithuania. Younger people speak English, often quite proficiently in Estonia and somewhat more rarely in Latvia and Lithuania. Almost no Baltic country studies or speaks the languages of the others. A Lithuanian diplomat once told me, "It is easier for us to find a Chinese speaker than an Estonian speaker."
Life under Soviet rule was different, too. Some Lithuanians were able to watch Polish television—a huge excitement during the 1980-81 Solidarity era, and always more informative than Soviet propaganda. Similarly, from the early 1960s on, Estonians in the north of the country were able to receive Finnish television, which broadcast subtitled foreign films and documentaries: a vital window into the real world. Finns also flooded into Tallinn on cheap, visa-free booze cruises. Estonians referred to them derisively as "moose" (because, as an Estonian woman once told me, they are "large and noisy, with clumsy mating habits").
The differences between the Balts are arcane and sometimes amusing. But they matter. Estonia's Nordic-style thrift, openness, and careful planning have proved almost ideal for the post-communist years. It was the wealthiest of the three before the occupation, and it is still the leader. But its smugness-the big weak point-has now let it down badly. Latvia's more diffuse identity has perhaps meant weaker bonds between state and society, which has allowed corruption to flourish and prevented a speedy response to the crisis. Lithuania's headstrong "we do it differently" approach has repeatedly cost it time and friends, but the lag spared the country the spending frenzy that has cost the other two so dearly.
Relations will never be as close as, say, between Estonia and Finland. But sibling rivalry has its virtues. It encourages innovation-what one country invents, the others can copy. And each country is determined to be the first to emerge from the crisis.
MAP BY KATHERINE YESTER
Edward Lucas is a senior writer at The Economist and author of The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Europe view 137
WHEN the people who run the Western world go on holiday, bad things happen in eastern Europe. Last August Russia invaded Georgia. Over Christmas its gas spat with Ukraine left millions of European consumers shivering (from nerves, if not real cold). Easter (on the western Christian calendar) brought violent protests against ballot-rigging in Moldova. What upsets this summer may bring can only be guessed at. A new war in Georgia is always possible. Crimea remains a combustible mixture of incompatible military and ethnic interests. The Kremlin’s relations with the once-docile regime in Belarus are uncommonly icy. Your columnist will be keeping his BlackBerry fully charged and close by the poolside. The Russia monitor Whatever the summer crisis may be, it seems pretty clear that it will meet a crisper response from America than from the European Union. One example of that came this week when Barack Obama (presumably fairly busy with Iran, North Korea, health-care reform and other trifles) found time for an unscheduled meeting with Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the president of Estonia. That is partly a reward for the Estonians’ largely unsung service in Afghanistan (its soldiers get maimed and killed while most NATO warriors either stay away or shirk conflict). It also reflects the personal profile of the waspish and brainy Mr Ilves, America’s favourite east European politician. But it was also a coded message to Moscow: the “reset button” may be a useful gimmick to get talks going on issues such as nuclear weapons. But it does not represent any wavering in American support for the frontline states on NATO’s eastern border. America’s attention to detail contrasts with the rather feeble efforts that the European Union has been making in the region. An insightful new paper by the European Council on Foreign Relations (EFCR), a think-tank, shows how the EU is complacently frittering away its advantages and losing out to Russia in the countries of the new “Eastern Partnership”—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. On paper, the EU’s position should be invincible. It trades more with five of the six countries (Belarus is the exception) than Russia does. That is a big shift from the days when the Kremlin dominated the ex-Soviet economic space. The EU’s freedom and prosperity give it a lot of soft power too: even a distant prospect of membership counts for a lot more than the tangled embrace of Kremlin-run projects such as the still abortive Eurasian Economic Community or the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO). Belarus has flounced away from an important CSTO summit meeting amid a bitter row about new Russian barriers to its food exports. Yet the Eastern Partnership is faring poorly. Launched by the crippled Czech presidency at the Prague summit last May, the new programme is struggling to make an impact. From the big EU countries, only Angela Merkel bothered to show up at its birth. And Germany was among the countries that insisted that the most vital ingredient in the package—liberalisation of visas—was diluted almost to the point of meaninglessness. The paper’s authors argue that while the EU fiddles on the sidelines, the six countries remain badly run, stricken by economic downturns, and under constant pressure from Russia. To take just one example, Russian media, particularly television, is hugely popular, and strongly pushes the Kremlin world view. European media, by contrast, make a negligible impact. When crises erupt, the EU’s response is belated and feeble. The ECFR wants the EU to appoint high-level envoys with real clout to spend serious time and energy dealing with the region. When they are not on their holidays, that is.
Europe.view
Summertime blues
From Economist.com
Will warm weather stiffen European spines?Shutterstock 
Friday, June 12, 2009
CEE Euro-election results
Scary elections in eastern Europe
Time to start fretting
Jun 11th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Boring centre-right parties did well—but so did quite a few nasties
INTEPRETERS in the European Parliament trying to translate the remarks of George “Gigi” Becali may struggle. Even in his native Romanian, his puzzling syntax and coarse slang make him a butt of satirists. The interpreters may also blench at what he says, especially about Jews, gays, Roma (Gypsies) and women. But they may be spared this for the time being because a court has banned the newly elected Mr Becali from leaving Romania pending a criminal trial for kidnapping.
Xenophobes and populists have been elected in old European Union members such as the Netherlands too. But their east European counterparts make the westerners seem tame. Mr Becali’s fellow victor on the Greater Romania list is Corneliu Vadim Tudor, a vituperative nationalist who was once court poet to Nicolae Ceausescu, the former Communist dictator.
Yet international co-operation among politicians who hate foreigners is inherently tricky. Hungary’s far-right Jobbik party, which won three seats, may join its Balkan counterparts (including two members of Bulgaria’s explicitly racist Ataka party) in Roma-bashing. But they will have little in common when it comes to minority rights for Hungarians in neighbouring countries such as Slovakia and Romania, where Magyar irredentism is a convenient bogeyman for local chauvinists.
There were shocks at the far-left end of the spectrum too. One winner in Latvia was Alfreds Rubiks, a hardline former Communist who was jailed for backing a Kremlin-inspired coup against Latvian independence in 1991. Most Latvians see him as a pariah. His victory highlights the ominous rise of Soviet nostalgia among the country’s increasingly alienated Russians. In Estonia, by contrast, ethnic Russian parties flopped. The soft-left Centre Party got their votes, and more besides. The most striking Estonian result was the election of Indrek Tarand, a popular ex-diplomat who ran as an independent to protest against rules stopping voters from choosing among candidates on party lists.
As in western Europe, the main stories in the east were thumping wins by centre-right parties. Poland’s ruling Civic Platform did strikingly well, with 25 seats to 15 for the main opposition, the more populist Law and Justice party. In the Czech Republic the centre-right Civic Democrats won nine of the 22 seats, against seven for the Social Democrats and four for the Communists. In Hungary the ruling Socialists (ex-communists) did very badly, with only four seats to 14 for the conservative Fidesz party. That augurs well for the right in next year’s general election.
The exception was Slovakia, where the ruling centre-left Smer (Direction) party led by the prime minister, Robert Fico, did well on a paltry 19.6 % turnout, the lowest in the EU. His party won five out of 13 seats, with the fragmented conservative opposition polling poorly, as did two nationalist fringe parties in the coalition government. Both had featured in a string of recent corruption scandals.
The real significance of the elections may lie less in the composition of the new European Parliament than in pointers to the future course of national politics. Mr Fico, for example, will need to find new allies after next year’s general election if his present coalition partners continue to flop. Poland’s Civic Platform is on track to win the presidency next year.
Scandal-strewn Bulgaria is holding a parliamentary election on July 5th. If the European contest is any guide, the vote should be lively but nasty. Mafia-linked parties did alarmingly well in the European poll, though they did not win any seats. Vote-buying was common, as were other lurches towards rule-bending and ballot-rigging. In what looks like a blatant attempt to penalise minor parties, the authorities tried (but failed) to raise the election threshold to 8%, the highest in Europe. Legal chicanery meant that an opposition coalition had great difficulty even registering. Sadly, EU officials monitoring Bulgaria’s shaky progress towards clean government will have plenty to put in their next report. It is bad enough when dodgy characters win votes, but even worse when they count them.
Latvia
LIKE many small countries, Latvia has struggled to attract outsiders’ attention. Now it is famous, and hating it. The economic contraction—GDP down nearly a fifth, imports and exports down by more than 40%—is on a scale rarely seen in peacetime. Life support for the economy is being given by outsiders. Foreign banks are nervous (see article). Much depends on parliament accepting more big budget cuts: nearly $1 billion this year and the same next year. The package includes ditching the flat tax on incomes. The government agreed to this new budget, belatedly, on June 8th. That should unlock the next $1.67 billion tranche of aid from the European Union and the IMF, part of a $10.6 billion deal from late last year. But is it throwing good money after bad? Some bits of good news suggest that the economic collapse may have halted. Latvia’s flexible economy means it may manage painful reforms that amount to an “internal devaluation”. That could regain lost competitiveness and restore growth. Others think that Latvia must sacrifice the peg to the euro that has been the centrepiece of economic policy. The Bank of Latvia has spent over a tenth of its reserves in the past fortnight propping up the lat. Interest rates have spiked, and a government debt auction failed last week. Sweden’s central bank is borrowing €3 billion ($4.2 billion) from the European Central Bank, in case it needs to shore up Swedish banks that lent in Latvia. Past crises in Latin America and East Asia echo ominously. Bengt Dennis, a Swedish adviser to Latvia’s government, says devaluation is inevitable.
Latvia's economic woes
Lat in the lurch
From The Economist print edition
Vultures are circling over Latvia
But the lat’s guardian, the Bank of Latvia’s governor, Ilmars Rimsevics, is unshaken, pointing to the “beauty” of the currency-peg system. All lats in circulation are backed by euros. If people want to switch, they can, but as interest rates rise, holding lats becomes more attractive, he argues. The central bank’s independence from government is legally impregnable.
Joaquín Almunia, the EU’s monetary affairs commissioner, backed the peg this week. But political weakness still overshadows Latvia’s chances. The steely (critics say arrogant) Mr Rimsevics is barely on speaking terms with the prime minister. Latvia’s real deficit is not in the public finances but in the state’s credibility, squandered in the past by spendthrift and sleazy politicians.europe view 136 on history (again)
Europe.view
Let us have no lies
Jun 11th 2009
From Economist.com
Using the law to salve a guilty national conscience
YOU automatically lose an argument if you call the other person a Nazi, states an adage coined by Mike Godwin, a writer about the internet, in 1990. With that in mind, it is wise to proceed with caution when discussing analogies between the Holocaust and anything else. Yet as Russia’s draft law on criminalising challenges to the Stalinist version of history comes closer to reality, it is worth looking at the successes and failures of other attempts to make certain views of history illegal.
Germany, Austria and more than a dozen other European countries have laws that more or less ban “denial” of the Holocaust. Sometimes these are part of general prohibitions of Nazi activity. Sometimes they are more generally framed as anti-hatred laws.
How far that is justifiable in theory is debatable. Every country curbs free speech to some extent (look at American companies’ use of corporate libel laws, for example). Whether one particular set of sensitivities deserves more protection than another is a matter for public debate: if voters mind enough one way or another, the politicians will pass or repeal the laws concerned.
From that point of view, it is hard to quibble with Russia’s desire to protect and sanctify the memory of its millions of soldiers who fell in the fight against Nazism. As the western wartime allies wallow in nostalgia, it is worth remembering that more than ten times as many “Soviet” (admittedly a loose term) soldiers died in combat than British and American troops combined.
But it is also worth noting that Holocaust-denial laws have done little to restrict the pernicious myths peddled by those who think the Jews were the victors, not the victims, in the second world war. In fact, a bit of legal persecution is just what those advocating fringe history most want. They can argue that the authorities are trying to suppress the “truth” because they have no other answer to it. What is in reality little more than a bunch of quibbles, anomalies, loose ends and historical puzzles becomes a grand scheme of events, and thus more potent in attracting the gullible or prejudiced.
The best antidote to Holocaust denial is truth, such as the excellent nizkor.org, which provides a painstaking refutation of the mythmongers’ cases, backed up with meticulous documentation. (An enterprising group of researchers ought to provide a similar dossier to rebut the equally absurd claims of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists).
Of course, questioning the Stalinist version of history is not directly comparable to Holocaust denial. If anything, the label should be on the other side. When a Russian defence-ministry website can argue straightfacedly that it was Poland that started the second world war, it is hard to accept that the authorities in Moscow are really interested in nailing falsehoods, rather than—as they seem to be—promoting them.
But Poland has not responded by banning the import of modern Russian textbooks, or passing a law making the denial of the Katyn massacre (which Stalin ordered and then blamed on the Nazis) into a criminal offence.
Banning a particular version of history is usually a sign of a guilty conscience. In the case of continental Europe, it is to make amends for collaboration and perpetration during the darkest years of the last century. In Russia’s case, what should be a source of proud sorrow—the heroism of those who fought and defeated Hitler—is being used to cover up Stalin’s behaviour: both his bungling of the Soviet defences against Hitler’s attack, and before that conspiring with the Nazis to carve up the Baltics, Balkans and central Europe.
Saturday, June 06, 2009
Europe view 134, history
EUROPE
Europe.view
Magistra vitae?
May 28th 2009
From Economist.com
The fine line between disagreement and propaganda
FORGET gas, nukes or Iran. The deep divide between Russia and its western neighbours is about history. President Dmitry Medvedev has set up a commission to look at “falsifications of history that damage Russia’s interests” (he should use a comma: this phrasing implies that other falsifications promote Russia’s interests). A draft law in the Duma would criminalise equating Stalin and Hitler, or denying that the Red Army “liberated” eastern Europe from fascism. Whether out of cynicism or nostalgia, Russia’s rulers have resurrected the Soviet view of history, itself a product of the Stalin era. For the countries of central and eastern Europe, this is not just obnoxious, but threatening.
It would of course be foolish to expect complete harmony between Russian and western views of history. British and French textbooks seem to describe utterly different events when the many wars between the two countries are concerned (as a schoolboy in Britain, your columnist could never quite work out why the hardy and heroic English won victory after victory—but ended up losing to the supposedly far inferior French).
AFP
History is in the telling
Moreover, no version of history is final and nothing should be taboo. Plenty of questions about the past century remain unanswered, not least about Britain’s role. How far did Neville Chamberlain’s shameful betrayal of Czechoslovakia in the Munich agreement prompt Stalin to intensify his friendship with Hitler? And how should blame for the catastrophe of the Warsaw Uprising be shared between the Polish military leadership on the ground, the government-in-exile in London, the British and American authorities, and the Soviet Union?
Similarly, different forms of collaboration during the war deserve more study. Should, for example, the émigré Cossack leaders such as Pyotr Krasnov who fought on Hitler’s side be counted in the same category as the Russian Liberation Army of General Andrei Vlasov, formed by captured Soviet soldiers? Tens of thousands of Russians fought alongside the Nazis, with mixed motives: deluded, desperate and despicable. How might they be compared with the Estonians and Latvians who fought the Soviet advance in 1944? It is easy to paint the past in simple brushstrokes of evil black and brilliant white. But adding carefully chosen shades of grey creates a more informative picture.
Sadly, Russia is not looking for such nuances. Indeed, it is demanding that other countries abandon complexity and fit their history into the Soviet straitjacket. This may resonate inside Russia but it rings the wrong bells abroad, particularly as grim anniversaries approach: the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Soviet attack on Poland, the annexation of the Baltic states and Western Ukraine, and the massacre of captured Polish officers at Katyn.
Soviet authorities found it hard enough to explain Stalin-era crimes convincingly, even with complete control over the media and the secret documents safely locked away in a Kremlin safe. It will be still harder for Russia to try to revive the same arguments now. Indeed, the more Russian propagandists insist, the more loudly other countries will shout their version. They may sound a bit hysterical to a western audience that finds history rather boring. But Russia will sound worse: bullying and mendacious.
Vladimir Putin’s remarks in Budapest on the anniversary of the 1956 Soviet invasion were a model of how to sound tactful and contrite without exactly apologising. That could have worked elsewhere. Poland has been trying softly-softly tactics on Katyn, hoping that it would make it easier for Russia to back down on issues such as opening the files. But the response was “What do we get in return?” Such an approach might be justified in trade negotiations. Applied to an unsolved case of mass murder, it sounds wrong.
History, again
BRITAIN is gripped by a feeling of historical injustice. The 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings has been hijacked by the ungrateful French and self-obsessed Americans. President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to grandstand with Barack Obama. Neither country wants to admit the role of British (and Canadian) forces in the victory in Normandy. The Queen (the only living head of state actually to have worn a uniform in the war) was not even properly invited. Yet this is how the Poles usually feel when the war is discussed. And not only them. One of the most tiresome statements in the British mythography of the war goes along the lines of “Our island fortress fought alone—all of Europe was either conquered by Hitler, or stayed neutral.” They didn't surrender either It is hard to find even the narrowest sense in which that is true. Britain never surrendered, but neither did many other countries; their governments-in-exile shared the delights of the Blitz with us in London. Few if any countries counted as truly “conquered”. The Nazis met systematic armed resistance in France, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia and other countries as well. By contrast, the Channel Islands, which were under German occupation during the war, were not exactly a hotbed of anti-Nazi resistance. The most fatuous expression of this fatuous Britain-centred view of the war came when the xenophobic British National Party used a picture of a Spitfire in a poster. The party’s strategists presumably thought this epitomised British national pride. Unfortunately they failed to check the markings on the plane depicted. It actually flew in the RAF as part of the Polish 303 ("Kościuszko") squadron. In short, if the British want their wartime history to be treated fairly by other countries, they need to make sure that they themselves present a balanced perspective. Admittedly, that process is in part underway. Your columnist’s bookshelves groan with two giant tomes examining Anglo-Polish wartime cooperation. The historians were given unprecedented access to the files of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (commonly known as MI6). They didn’t find much (spies tend to regard record-keeping as a menace, not a duty). Some of the most interesting documents turned out to have survived, neglected and untouched, in cardboard boxes in the attic of the Sikorski Museum in London. It is nearly 20 years since the British Foreign Office finally acknowledged that the Katyn massacre was the work of the NKVD, not the Gestapo (disclosure: this newspaper covered the disclosure of Katyn abominably, demanding that the Polish government-in-exile sack those responsible for slandering the Soviet Union—see article). Against that background, how should Britain deal with another looming snub: the planned Polish commemoration of the start of the war in Gdansk on September 1st? It is entirely reasonable for the Poles to highlight the unprovoked Nazi attack. It is touching that Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, is planning to attend to highlight Polish-German reconciliation (that has two strands—the epic process launched by Willy Brandt in 1970, and the more recent rapprochement caused by the change of government in Warsaw). It is outright remarkable that Vladimir Putin is apparently planning to attend (thus distracting attention from the equally disgusting Soviet attack on Poland on September 17th 1939). The message is “Poland was attacked, but we survived and now we are all friends”. But what about the British, who declared war on Nazi Germany September 3rd in response to the invasion? Senior British figures will not want to provide the unacknowledged backdrop for a German-Polish-Russian love-fest. Will anyone notice if they don’t show up?
Europe.view
Mentioning the war
From Economist.com
Misaligned histories in Britain and eastern EuropeAP 
