The politics of Baltic independence
BALTIC STATES Baltic capitals in early June. In general, they were skeptical at best about the Baltic peoples' national aspirations, but saw the fronts as the forces for democracy and the "internationalist" movements as diehard Stalinists. In Latvia, in particular, where non-Latvians make up half the population, the front could hardly have won its two-thirds majority in the republic's
THE KREMLIN has begun to ease its economic blockade against Lithuania. On June 13, the premier of the Lithuanian republic, Kazimlera Prunskiene, announced that the Soviet authorities had agreed to a partial resumption of deliveries of natural gas and other raw materials. At the same time,
Gorbachev has floated the idea of a new treaty of union that could involve confederal relations with some republics, presumably the Baltic ones, whose independence was ended
50 years ago by Soviet military occupation and where the pro-independence formations have now won a large majority.
It remains to be seen if the Baltic national movements will accept continuation of political union in any form. But this proposal is a new watermark of Gorbachev's retreat in the face of the rising movements for national rights. At the time of the debate on the amendments to the Soviet constitution in the fall of 1988, he was still saying that he Intended to tighten the republics' ties to "the center" rather than weaken them.
GERRY FOLEY
ORBACHEV'S economic largely boomereprisals ranged. In the political conditions in the USSR, the
Kremlin does not have the leisure to apply slow strangulation policies. With new cracks in the bureaucratic system opening up every day, time works for the opposition.
At the same time as the Kremlin retreated in its attempts to cow the Lithuanians, for the first time Gorbachev publicly mocked one of the unionist leaders in the
Baltic, the chief of the Estonian Internationalist Movement. During the third session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, he said: "Comrade Kogan keeps urging
'revolutionary me to take actions
(Laughter in the hall.) But I think, comrades, that we have to find the answer on the political road, and it is already taking form. Let all our friends in the Baltic consider the formula of suspending the decisions that they have made, if only for the time of discussions."
Gorbachev cannot make concessions to the Baltic national democratic movements without stepping on the toes of the unionists, who up until now have been a bulwark of Kremlin rule.
It will be interesting to see now whether
Moscow moderates its general denunciations of national movements, which in fact have been written into recent laws against "nationalist agitation." A major line of attack by the Soviet central press against the Baltic and other independence movements has been that all "separatism" is a bad thing, in the East as well as in the
The bounds of the Soviet constitution
This line was put in a quite consistent way by Shved, a leader of the pro-Moscow rump CP in Lithuania, who has said on other occasions that of course his party supports Lithuanian aspirations -if they are expressed within the context of the Soviet constitution. He was allowed to present his opinions in the May 28 issue of Soglasie, Sajudis's Russianlanguage paper:
"Even the West German papers say that if Lithuania's outright withdrawal from the USSR is accomplished it will have a negative effect not only on the Soviet Union but on Europe. The Basques will want to secede from Spain, the Scots from Great Britain and so on. Nationalism is always a dangerous thing. And how they are cultivating anti-Russian feeling in Lithuania!"
In fact, the Baltic fronts have gotten considerable support from the local Russian populations, which are major factors in Latvia and Estonia. I talked to a number who either supported the fronts or worked with them during a tour of the
Supreme Soviet without getting a lot of votes from Russian speaking people.
In Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, I observed a meeting of trade unionists being organized by Albert Danilson of the Estonian front. They were mostly Russian airline pilots.
They made it absolutely clear that they were interested in pure trade-unionism, free from any kind of nationalism. But they were drawn to the front because it was the only organization prepared to offer them the necessary backing to set up their own organizations. Despite the fact that the front is in the majority in the local parliament, the old trade-union laws are still in force, and they make independent organizing very difficult. During the meeting, Danilson acknowledged that even after a lot of lawyer's work, none of the independent union groups had yet achieved legal status.
Conservative conception of trade unionism
The Estonian independent union is still a new and small bud. The conceptions expressed at the meeting by Danilson were those of conservative, socialpartnership unionism. He said that he was against any "purely proletarian" project or "new socialist experiments," such as a federation of independent trade-unions in East Europe. He claimed credit for having blocked the extension of a project modeled on the Polish Solidarnosc into Estonia, looked to the class-collaborationist unions of the West as model, *real unions." Nonetheless, the front has obviously felt a need to organize independent unions.
The front has another sort of organization in the factories, the Council of Work Collectives, which is a mass organization. But it is a political association that includes both managers and workers, and was formed to counter a similar USSRunionist organization with practically the same name. All the front leaders I spoke to, including a leader of the Council of Work Collectives, pointed out that such an organization was not qualified to be an instrument of the workers for defending their interests, and that independent unions were needed
Nonetheless, the actual practice of the national democratic political associations in the workplaces will be worth watching Organizations built on a similar basis in the southern Basque country and Corsica have served as vehicles for workers' radicalization. July 2, 1990 • #188 International Viewpoint
BALTIC STATES
In Latvia, the independent union project seems substantially further along. leaders say that it exists throughout the country, although some of the front leaders complain that it is stagnating. One of the principal leaders, with whom I talked, is a Russian, Yevgenii Shelyanin.
I asked both Shelyanin and the coordinator of the Latvian front in Riga whether they thought that their organization's aim self-management. Both replied that they did, and that they were interested in colmanagement as they could.
Baltic representatives at all-Union conference
Shortly before, Shelyanin had attended the conference in Novokuznetsk in western Siberia where a confederation of independent workers' organizations in the USSR was set up (see /V 187). He did not express any reservations or conditions about the Latvian organization participating in this project. As he saw it, there were three currents in the conference — those who were for pure trade unions, those for a social movement and those for a kind of party ( he mentioned "anarchosyndicalists"). He himself identified with the "social-movement current."
The Lithuanian workers' union leaders also participated in the Novokuznetsk conference. The leadership of this organization is centered in Kaunas, and not in Vilnius, and I was not able to talk to any of them. But I heard from a reliable source that the main leader, Uoka, had stressed that his support for Lithuanian independence did not involve any intention of separation from workers' organizations in other parts of previous or future parts of the USSR. After some argument, the conference passed a resolution of support for Lithuania. 1
The Lithuanian declaration of independence marked a culmination of a radicalization of national demands in the Baltic toward claiming outright independence, a radicalization that has been seen in the past period also in other national democratic movements. The people's fronts developed under the cover of perestroika, in the case of the Latvian front, explicitly within the tradition of Leninism and the Leninist national policy. In every Baltic republic, the fronts faced pressure from hard-line pro-independence organizations, which rejected Soviet legality in the name of the rights of the prewar repub-
In the Baltic, where the denunciation of national oppression has gone hand in hand with exposing the Stalinist lies about these countries voluntarily joining the Soviet Union and the crimes associated with the Soviet occupation, the demand for independence has in fact come to be expressed as a reassertion of the continuity of the independent repubInternational Viewpoint #188 • July 2, 1990 lics destroyed by Stalin's invasion.
Thus, when Lithuania declared its independence, it formally reverted to its pre-war constitution, which is hardly an inspiring symbol of the radical democratization the Baltic fronts have called for. The national-democrat dominated govemments in the other two republics have followed the same path. For peoples who have had only one brief period of independent statehood in their entire history, which for fifty years have experi enced a concerted campaign to destroy them in the name of "internationalism, the memory of the prewar republics takes on a symbolic importance that overshadows their less attractive features.
This is especially true for Estonians, the smallest of the Baltic nation, who are related to Finno-Ugric peoples of a similar size in the USSR, such as the Mordvin and Komi, whose cultures have been virtually wiped out, and smaller ones that have disappeared. In a chapter in the recently published major work on the national question in Estonia (Eesti Rahand Stalinism"), Rein Ruutsoo wrote that while Lenin called the Russian empire "a prison house of people," Stalin made it into a "cemetery of peoples."
The speech given by Lennart Meri, now foreign minister of the Estonian SSR, in the main square of Tallinn on February 24 (published in the March 2 issue of the Estonian artistic weekly Reede) exemplifeeling. He began by saying: "Today citizens of the Estonian republic are voting in a free and orderly way for the first time since the second world war. The Estonian Congress is born. The world knows no such example, no such juridic precedent. A state crushed by armed force and terror lived through the dark days in the hearts of a million people. This state survived these dark days and is with us again like a sheltering roof, like God's protective hand. The Estonian republic that lived on in our hearts now stands before the world as as the united will of a people."
High turnout for unofficial
He was referring to the election of the Estonian Congress, a body which stands outside Soviet legality and lays claim to the continuity of the prewar republic. Virtually the entire Estonian population participated in these elections. In principle, the Congress is based on citizens committees organized throughout the country. Similar structures exist in Latvia, but they are not as broad, although the Latvian Independence Movement is a far stronger organization than any of the hard-line pro-independence organizations active in the Congress.
The conception of the Congress originally stood in contradiction to the strategy of the front, which criticized it very sharply in the period leading up to the elections to the Estonian Supreme Soviet. However, it became apparent that the base of the front supported both the front and the congress. In fact, the two organizations have become overlapping. The front has the largest single group in the Congress, although it is a minority. Leaders of the front, such as Maurju Lauristin and Edgar Savisaar, also participate in the dominant forces, however, are "radical" groups — the Estonian Independence Party, the Heritage Society [which has been a sort of front of smaller hardline independence groups and individuals], the Christian Democrats and so on, who participate less, if at all, in the front. In general, the debates between moderates and radicals on the national question have been most developed in Estonia, where there are two overlapping but also conflicting mass organizations. In an interview in Reede of March 7, Tunne Kelam, chair of the Committee of Estonia (the executive committee of the Congress) described the project as a vehicle for uniting "the right and the center."
So, I was interested in finding out exactly what that meant. I asked Mart Laar, a young former dissident and a leader of the Christian Democrats, who explained that he belonged to the "right." He is writing a
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book on the armed resistance to the Sta- linist occupation, and is the author of a general article on the human cost of the occupation, which has brought denuncia- tions and a formal charge not yet pur- sued) from the Soviet authorities? "Right" and "left" support for free enterprise I asked Laar if "right," meant support of private enterprise. He was astonished: "But the Communist Party is as much in favor of private enterprise as anybody; that's no dividing line". He identified the term "right" and "radical," and it seemed what he meant by it was radical opposi- tion to the Soviet state institutions. In general, the economic programs of the various groups seem still very vague Andres Ehin, a leader of the Estonian front and prominent writer, remarked to me that one party calling itself the "Peo- ple's Conservatives" and another calling itself "Social Democratic" have indistin- guishable programs. Maurju Lauristin, one of the leaders of the front is also a founder of the Social Democratic Party. The editor of the Looming, the main Estonian literary mag- azine, dismissed this group as a bunch of professors at Tartu, who were trying to base themselves on a program for the workers after the restoration of capital- ism. Despite the vagueness of the differenc- es among the myriad of parties in Estonia, they seem more developed here than in the other two republics. The front had to
The (Estonian) banners read "The People's Front supporting perestroika"; "The Constitution for Human Rights"; "Political Rights"; "Power to the Soviets, not the bureaucracy". adopt a document on its relations with parties inside and outside of it at its congress at the end of May.
Savisaar, the principal leader of the front, who does not identify himself with any of the parties, does have an economic program, the so-called IME [the initials in Estonian for "Estonian self-financing," which also spell the word "miracle."] As the name indicates, it is based on Gorbachev's economic program. After a brief period as economics minister, Savisaar was elected a few months ago to the post of premier of the republic. He has said that he thinks that the country cannot afford to maintain the present level of social benefits.
It seems that the other fronts have similar economic programs. But, in general, they are put in the context of "perestroika from below," that is, the democratization of decision making in all spheres There is an obvious contradiction, but it has hardly begun to be experienced in practice.
In fact, I found very little discussion of economic questions, for better or worse, at the congresses of the Estonian Front and Congress, which took place while I was in the country.
The whole discussion centered around the problems of achieving national independence. The argument is polarized between "realists" and "principled" fighters for national rights, the first with a tendency toward reformism and the second with a tendency toward abstract notions of "legality," currently expressed as insistence on the legal continuity of the pre-war Estonian republic.
Nationalists set up defence force
The People's Front congress I attended seemed to be made up mainly of people from middle layers of the society. The Congress assembly was more popular. Former dissidents seem to be concentrated in the Congress, and the "realists" of the Front frequently attack it for an "underground" mentality. It was also marked by the presence of a large number ("Defense Union""), which was formed after unionists tied to storm the Supreme Soviet on May 14. The front congress was guarded by a professional force.
The Kaitselit could be seen as a paramilitary project. It was announced that a fund has been established for it by Estonians in the US. Congress people say it numbers about 2,000. But the monitors at the Congress sessions were very far from paramilitary. A similar group has been organized by the Latvian Citizens Committees-Movement for Independence, the Aizsardzibas Klubs ("Defense Clubs") But an Independence Movement leaders told me that it is only an initial nucleus of about 200 persons.
In his speech to the Congress assembly,
Edgar Savisaar stressed the dangers of any "dual power" project, arguing that it would undermine the authority of the national-democratic government of the republic and open the way for secessionist operations in where Russianspeakers are in the majority.
I asked a representative of the Estonian Independence Party if the hard-line proindependence forces looked forward to the Congress forming a parallel government and taking over the society. He denied any such "revolutionary" perspective.
He saw the Congress as a means of organizing nationalist pressure on the government and the front, a sort of guarantee that it would not make any rotten compromises with Moscow. He said the goal was the election of a legal parliament of the republic of Estonia, for which the conditions were withdrawal of Soviet troops and the restriction of the vote to "citizens of Estonia."
It is notable that the hard-line independence forces have not boycotted the official elected bodies, as might have been expected from their rejection of Soviet legality. 1. See International Viewpoint, No. 186, June 4, for the text of this resolution. 2. For a translation of this article, see International Viewpoint, No. 157, February 20, 1989 3. See, for example, the program of the Latvian Peo per, in derational Viewpoin, No. 169, Sep 9 tember 18, 1989. July 2, 1990 • #188 International Viewpoint
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EEST/- BALTIC STATES 3991 PONTAKS! PARNU, CRIME E LJUDELE
BALTIC STATES
Publicly, the Congress leaders, including Independence Party leaders, call for a sort of fusion of the Supreme Soviet, the Congress and the representatives of the old Estonian republic in exile. Trivimi Velliste, leader of the Heritage Society, stressed that the leaders of the various rungs of government were often also members of the Citizens Committees.
The adoption of the demand for independence by the fronts and their gaining control of the main official institutions of government in the Baltic republics has clearly put a squeeze on the hard-line independence groups, which have tended to move, or be pushed, into the position of being seen as the conscience, or insurance policy, of the national democratic movements but no longer a driving force.
In this situation, factionalism is strong, and was very much in evidence in the congresses of both Estonian organizations. For example, there was a whole whether speakers from the Congress had "fanatical looks in their eyes."
In an article in Reede of May 25 on the Congress, Rein Ruutso reproached Mart Laar for being so factional as to have voted for a Communist Party member against Maurju Lauristin for speaker of
Escalation of nationalist rhetoric
In Latvia, the front leaders complain about the Independence Movement escalating its national rhetoric. "Now, they keep repeating 'the Latvian nation' as if it were a litany. " The Movement has now defined itself specifically an organization to defend the rights of ethnic Latvians. The editor of its paper, Neatkariba, Aivars Jirgens, explained to me that the Movement had in fact to find a new
The Latvian Independence Movement is larger and apparently broader than the Estonian Independence Party. It has adopted an orientation of moving toward becoming a party, but Jirgens thought this would be a slow process. ment's main public leader, Eduards Berklavs, is a former secretary of the Latvian CP, purged for bourgeois nationalism in 1959. He was imprisoned under the pre-war dictator, hangs in the office of Neatkariba.
Berklavs told me that he had become disillusioned with Marxist economics, and recognized that Ulmanis had done a lot of good for the farmers (badly treated under Soviet rule) but that he still believed in Lenin's national policy. That position runs counter to the attempts in vogue now to prove that Lenin was ultiresponsible for the Stalinist national policy.
Berklavs has earned a reputation for political honesty, but he was evidently trained in the Stalinist school of pragmaInternational Viewpoint #188 • July 2, 1990 tism. When I remarked that most movements of oppressed nations in the West were oriented toward socialism because they thought that effective freedom for small peoples was impossible under capitalism, he replied: "But how can you sur-
La small socialist surrounded by big capitalist states?"
Now, however, the attitude of the big capitalist states has become a concrete issue. Saavisar began his speech to the Congress by stressing: *In the past period, the illusion has been dispelled that since the West did not recognize our incorporation into the Soviet, it supported our struggle for independence. Lithuania's situation today should give everyone pause for thought. Lithuania has been put in a very tight spot, and the West has not taken one concrete step to support
It is not unlikely that this point was aimed at least in part at the hard-line nationalist legalists. Their position has been attractive because it seemed an uncompromising assertion of national
"We had a recognized independent state that was illegally occupied; therefore independence is our right and cannot be discussed," Trivimi Velliste stressed to me.
Leaving aside the broader questions, this position raises two practical problems: First, it implies appealing to the Western powers, whose unwillingness to support national struggles in the USSR and especially the radical movements is now clear. Secondly, it places the national claims of the Baltic peoples on a higher level than those of other oppressed peoples in the USSR and thereby opens the way for a division.
Human rights and national rights
This problem was raised in an article by Andrievs Ezergailis in the June 9 issue of literary journal Literatura un Maksla (who, by the way, began his article by stressing that he was a moderate: "It is true that the international juridical status of the Baltic..is of a different sort than that of other republics that have never managed to get free of the empire.
This juridic distinction can never be forgotten, but it must not be forgotten either that for the world the principles of human rights are most important. Fundamentally, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Ukraine and other oppressed peoples have the same rights to sovereignty as the Baltic peoples."
Further on, he wrote: "For the Baltic peoples to trust in law at this historic moment seems absurd." He also ridiculed exiled politicians implicated in the pre-war dictatorship who were now trying to speak in the name of democracy and the
In general, the legalistic approach of the hard-liners tends to lead to illusions that material problems can be conjured away by legalistic pronouncements. One of the sharpest debates in the front congress, for example, was over the question of citizenship. . Maurju Lauristin had to warn the hard-liners that excluding Russian speakers from citizenship would "not change the demographic situation one
Savisaar pointed out that although the unionists had the support of only a minority of the Russian speaking population, they had still managed to get a dangerous amount of support. At the same time as the congress, an autonomous district was declared in an area in the northeast where
The tensions in the Latvian and Estonian national movements are barely perceptible in Lithuania. The hard-line group, the Lithuanian Freedom League of former dissident and political prisoner Antanas Terleckas, has remained a handful. Terleckas himself works closely with Sajudis and told me that he does not think that political currents within it are yet very
He himself thinks that in the present circumstances the most important thing is unity. Sajudis also adopted the demand for independence much earlier, in February 1989, as opposed to the fall of 1989 for the other two.
The fact that the Lithuanians have found their only real allies to be the democratic and workers' movements in the USSR and the movements of other oppressed peoples has given the Baltic movements a strong push back toward a democratic political approach and away from abstract legalism.
In fact, the debate in the national movements is still at a relatively early stage There are even different conceptions of the fronts. The Estonian front has a conception of itself to some extent as an umbrella body, as defined by the document accepted by the congress at the end of May. A leader of the Latvian front told me he thought that in normal conditions his organization would be a center party.
The Baltic States as a political laboratory
In many respects, the Baltic is the political laboratory not only for the national movements throughout the USSR but for Russians as well. Although the bureaucracy's control of the mass media is beginning to break down now in other areas, it is still only here that there is real freedom for political debate in front of the masses, and for mass involvement in political life. There seems to be good reason to hope that this will lead to the emergence of clearer and more rounded political currents, to broader conceptions of how to advance the cause of the oppressed peoples in the USSR and not only there. And this would have to involve new ideas about economic solutions as well. *
A crisis programme
USSR role of the ruling Communist parties; and of the supremacy of social interests over personal ones, international over national. Today only the first steps have been taken on the road to renovating the party's theoretical baggage. The most important reflection of this crisis is the sharpening ideological-political differentiation within
IN EARLY JULY the Communist Party of the Soviet Union meets to discuss its own future and that of the vast country it has ruled for over 70 years. For the first time since the earliest years of the revolution there will be organized factions at the congress.