Source: The Estonian paper "Kodumaa"(Motherland) November 16, 1988

As shown by this table, the actual number of deported was less than planned. Many men fled and hid in the woods during the night the deportations took place and joined the guerrillas. The Communists therefore had to gather and deport more women and children than they originally intended to, but they could not get hold of enough to compensate the lack of men. Communist planned economy had failed again…

The number of people deported varied between different parts of the country but on an average 7,6 per cent of the population was sent away. According to Estonian researcher Aigi Rahi, who has made a special study of the deportations from the area surrounding the university town of Tartu, the deportation was targeted directly towards children, women and elderly people. The number of working age men was only 12 per cent" (9).

Among those deported in 1949 approximately one out of ten died in Siberia. Since a relatively large number of those were elderly, some would have died even if they stayed in Estonia. But that is no excuse for preventing them to end their lives as free men in their own country. Those who survived and eventually were allowed to return to their country were not allowed to live in their former places of residence, or in the larger cities and they found it hard to find employment. Rahi comments: "The wounds inflicted by the deportation in March 1949 can not be measured in numbers and percentages only. We are talking about thousands of lost years of creative work, crushed families, unborn children, closed educational opportunities. Those who were sent to Siberia as children did not speak Russian and met with great difficulties in Russian schools. Younger children learnt Russian well and after their return to Estonia they were forced to continue in Russian schools. The deportations spelled forced collectivisation and the end of private farming. The persecution made fear, hatred and informing on others spread among the population … After the mass deportations of 1949 and the forced collectivisation of farming, the feeling of despair and indifference spread among the rural population. This was shown in decreasing numbers of births, rural flight and a growing number of suicides. In addition the mass deportations created an environment favourable to immigration and a substantial change of the demografic structure".

In the year 1950, a further 1 415 Estonians and Latvians were deported from those parts of the formerly independent Estonian and Latvian territories that had been incorporated with Russia in 1945.

In the following year several hundred members of prohibited religious groups in Estonia were sent to Siberian camps.

In the spring of 1950 the Baltic Communist parties adopted, on orders from Moscow, resolutions that were used to arrest intellectuals like teachers, authors, artists, musicians, lawyers and doctors. Even native Baltic Communist leaders were accused of being "bourgeoisie nationalists", among them the First secretary of the Party, the chairman of the Presidium of the Estonian Supreme Soviet and other leading "June Communists" i.e. Communists who had arrived in Estonia from Russia after the 1940 occupation. Towards the end of that decade the chairman of the presidium of the Latvian Supreme Soviet was purged together with the head of government, several ministers, party secretaries, editors-in-chief and other leading party men, all because a group of Latvian "national Communists", led by the deputy head of government Eduards Berklavs, had managed to gather a majority in the most important institution of the Latvia Communist party, the Politbureau. Since the Soviet leader Nikita Chruschev in his "secret speech" to the 1956 Soviet party congress had talked about the right of all peoples to chose their own road to Socialism these people thought that that right applied to Latvians too. They were wrong. Simultaneously the minister for education, the chancellor of the university in the capital and several Lithuanian professors were removed from office – all accused of being "bourgeoisie nationalists ".

Altogether around 139 700 persons were deported from Latvia during the reign of Stalin. During the whole Communist era 51 973 Latvians were arrested, according to official information 1 986 of those were executed. The total number of known victims of Communist genocide in Latvia – arrested, executed and deported – would thus be 191 673 persons. That number constitutes about 15 per cent of the country’s population according to the 1959 census. The real number was probably higher because far from every arrestation, execution or deportation was recorded and archived. Besides, many Latvians were killed in Russia but nobody knows the exact number. Out of the Latvians living in the Soviet Union prior to World War Two, around 70 000 were hit by the wave of terror of 1937-1939 and 25 000 among them were killed (10).

The total number of known victims of Communism in Lithuania, calculated in the same way, was around 360 000 persons; ca 130 000 were deported (28 000 of those died in Siberia), ca 200 000 were arrested (149 741 of those were later transferred to Communist concentration camps), 25 000 members of the resistance movement were killed as well as 2 747 prisoners in Lithuanian prisons.

In Estonia the number of victims can be summarised as follows: around 30 000 were deported, around 80 000 were arrested, around 2 000 were executed and the same number of civilians fell victims to Communist bombing, around 10 000 soldiers fell while fighting on the Russian side, (and 8 000 fighting on the German side). The population losses in Estonia were two or three times larger. That means that around 70 000 refugees, around 20 000 Baltic Germans who moved "home" to Germany prior to and during the war, around 80 000 persons who were evacuated or mobilised and sent to Russia, around 70 000 inhabitants of areas that were forcibly separated from Estonia and incorporated with Russia should be added to the above mentioned number. If one includes relatives of all those arrested, executed, deported and generally persecuted one could claim that around half the population was hit by Communist persecutions (11).

While many Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians were deported from their countries, many Russians and some Belo Russians, Ukrainans and others were sent to the Baltic states – some of those presumably against their will. The consequence of these Communist migrations was that the Baltic part of the population in the Baltic countries steadily decreased.

The Estonians constituted, according to 1938 numbers, a little more than 93 per cent of the Estonian population. 50 years later their number had fell to less than 60 per cent. No other European country had been subjected to population losses of the same magnitude as Estonia (and Latvia) during and after the war. As late as in the early nineties the Estonians had not reached the name numbers as they had prior to the war, the occupation and the deportations.

"The rest of Europe has never seen population changes this dramatic and might therefore find it difficult to understand the enormity of what the Estonians have been subjected to" stated Lennart Meri, at the time a well known writer and film maker, later foreign minister and president, when I interviewed him in the early nineties. "There are no comparisons. But you could try to imagine Moscow with 15 million inhabitants, half of them Chinese, where for instance the traffic cops used their ´big brother rights´ and spoke only Chinese. And in restaurants the old cutlery had been replaced with chopsticks" (12).

The situation was no better in Latvia, at least not from the point of view of the Latvian population. In the early nineties the Latvians were almost 100 000 fewer than they were prior to World War Two. The number of Latvians in Latvia decreased during the same period from 82 to 52 per cent. In Riga, the capital, no more than every third person was Latvian, in the second largest city Daugavpils only every eight person, etc.

Translated into Swedish numbers, the Baltic population losses during World War II would mean that more than a million Swedes had been arrested or deported. The Estonian experiences would also mean that half the population of, say Stockholm, would be Russian – while the Latvian experiences would mean that more than two-thirds of the population of the Swedish capital would be Russian speaking. Street signs would be bilingual bur most taxi drivers, postal workers, cashiers and others would speak Russian only. All meetings in authorities and organisations would need to include one Russian speaking person only in order to force all Swedes to try to speak Russian. If someone had tried to use the reactionary argument that people in Sweden should be allowed to speak Swedish, he would have been branded as a "bourgeoisie nationalist " and "anti-Communist" and he would have been forced to explain his actions to the Communist party representative in his place of work and maybe to the security police.

Those who – in a state of drunkenness or even when completely sober – sang the prohibited Swedish national anthem "Du gamla, du fria" or hid the old yellow-and-blue flag in the attic might, if they were exposed, have been sentenced to a year of forced labour or incarceration in a mental hospital. Those who had dreamed of travelling abroad or to be able to buy their own car in ten years time could simply forget all about it, if they had received a note in their work book. Or even worse, they might have a relative who had escaped over Öresund at the time of the Communist "liberation" or who had been sentenced to the "Swedish punishment", which meant 25 years of forced labour in the iron mines in Lappland followed by 5 years of inner exile in the interior of Norrland.

During the Communist period, Estonia was forced to receive more than 7 million immigrants, mainly Russians, who in most cases never rooted themselves or cared about learning the language of the country. For Sweden this would have meant that around 35 million immigrants had come and left and that around 5 million of them had stayed and had been given a number of advantages, language wise  and otherwise.

Immigration to a free society where the indigenous population has not been subjected to genocide and do not feel their future existence threatened, is one thing. Mass immigration that the domestic authorities are totally unable to influence and where the domestic population is being discriminated against while immigrants are given priority when it comes to jobs and housing and other things, is totally another.

Knowing what we know today, the fact that Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians – after decades of russifiation and oppression – were able to free themselves without as much as hurting a hair on a single Russian’s head is unbelievable. Maybe they realised that most Russians too were victims of Communism rather that it’s active or passive henchmen and fellow-travellers.

3. Autodafès and cultural murder

In places where Communists have managed to get in a position of authority by their own power, genocide has usually been followed by cultural murder. That happened in the Baltic states as well.

On the anniversary of the Nazi-Communist treaty, the Communist party newspaper, the "Rahva Hääl" (Voice of the People) in Estonia proclaimed that the government had decided to withdraw from "sale and other distribution all anti-Soviet defamatory- and agitatory literature, literature praising and excusing the bourgeoisie exploiters’ ideology and exploitation, chauvinist literature promoting enmity and hatred between peoples and all kinds of religious literature striving for political goals by appealing to the religious feelings of the people. This decision applies to newspapers and magazines as well as fictional and non-fictional literature".

As early as the month before, the Communist security organs had decide to confiscate and destroy "recreational literature" that for some reason they disliked – everything from the Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan stories to Alexander Dumas´ "The Count of Monte Cristo". What the Communists might have had against Tarzan except for the fact that he was an individual hero and probably neither Socialist nor Communist is difficult to understand. In Dumas’ case, the fact that the hero is a Count might have been enough …

A Literature Authority was created that same autumn and as a result the long lists of prohibited books were no longer published. Libraries and book shops were silently emptied of "unsuitable literature". Books the Communists disliked were torn and cut to pieces using big knifes or put on the chopping-block and chopped to pieces with axes. In the central warehouse of the publishing houses only (the Estonian equivalent of today’s Seelig in Sweden) 23 employees spent more than two weeks destroying books in this somewhat primitive fashion.

During the Nazi occupation, a further 400 titles were destroyed, most of them had been published during the prior Communist occupation.

When the Soviet troups returned in the autumn of 1944, a more extensive search for unsuitable literature was again launched. During the years immediately following the war, around 150 000 titles were removed from the main library in Tallinn only. Nobody on the outside knew then – and nobody knows today – exactly according to which principles the Communists measured how "hostile to the people" different books were. The fate of a particular book could depend on accidental factors, like the mood at the moment or the personal preferences of the Communist" "literature police" whose task it was to judge different books.

Not until 1950 were the arbitrary judgements replaced by the publication of the Communists’ "List no 1 of obsolete editions that are not allowed in libraries or bookshops". Obsolete according to this list were all "newspapers and magazines published in Estonia during the bourgeoisie period and the German occupation" and all school textbooks published during the same period. Also obsolete were 3 000 named novels, poetry collections and non-fiction volumes. Two years later a second llist was published containing another 2 000 prohibited books.

Among the forbidden and destroyed books were masterpieces like the "Estonian Encyclopaedia " and biographical reference books, "History of Estonian art " and "General history of art" and series like "Nobel prize winners", "The Nordic novel ", "The great masters of the written word ", the works of Dostoyevsky, "Today’s novel", the a-shilling-a-book series published by the Loodus publishing firm and "Living science". Also destroyed were hundreds of children’s books and books for young people which were among the classics of world literature or Estonian literature.

A contemporary Estonian author and cultural journalist, Aivo Lôhmus in Tartu, was soft spoken but articulate when he, in the early nineties pronounced a judgement on the Communist cultural murder: "The destruction of such a large part of a people’s cultural heritage cannot be blamed on the spirit of the times or the mistakes of individuals. The actions were deliberate, our entire earlier culture and history were treated as mortal enemies. Just like the liquidation of tens of thousands of people this also must be counted among the crimes that can never be forgotten or forgiven." (13)

Around 10 000 titles and 5 000 years of magazines published prior to or during World War II were destroyed in Estonia. In reality nearly all books published during the Independence were made unavailable during the Communist period – for everybody except party loyal researchers who in exceptional cases could be allowed access to the closed special archives for forbidden literature.

The idea behind this Communist cultural murder was that a people deprived of its history is also easily robbed of it’s future. Latvia and Lithuania saw the same development:

"The destruction of the Latvian cultural heritage has been systematic. The methods used by the party officials can without doubt be compared to those of the Nazis. Latvian books published during the independent years were transported to paper mills or burnt. As the officials normally did not understand any language but Russian, foreign books, mainly German, were burnt as well. One of the most extensive "operations" was the destruction of the monasterial library in Aglonas containing 50 000 volumes, including ancient folios and an irreplaceable collection of documents. The books were thrown onto a fire that could be seen many miles away. The destruction of non-comfortable or forbidden books and documents continued during the seventies and even the eighties. In addition, many books ended up in the so called ´special funds´ where only a chosen few had access to them. The point of it all was to annihilate the historical awareness of the people, in a true Orwellian manner". (14)

While the Communists burnt and destroyed old masterpieces they created almost nothing new of any value as long as Stalin was alive. In the year before Stalin died, 1952, the only publications of new Estonian books consisted of two collections of political poetry and a play that was critical of the United States of America.

Had Stalin lived longer, all Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian literature – and many other non-Russian literatures – might have been totally destroyed. But instead the sixties and seventies meant a cultural re-birth, where authors and others made a point of honour of being able to fool the Communist censors and communicate with the people above the censors’ heads. And during the "singing revolution " in the nineties cultural workers became the leaders of the showdown with Communist crimes against humans and ideas.  

4. Faith and persecution

During the first Communist occupation religious teaching in schools was forbidden. The universities’ theological departments were closed. All those who had had their children baptised or taken through confirmation were branded as "enemies of the people". Christmas and other Christian holidays became ordinary working days and Christmas trees in private homes were strictly forbidden.

Clergymen became one of the most persecuted groups during the Communist terror. Estonia had two Lutheran, one Catholic and one Orthodox bishop among the deported. The small Catholic church ceased to function and the bishop Eduard Profittlich disappeared without a trace in Siberia. Prior to the second Communist occupation, a large number of the leaders of the Lutheran church fled to Sweden together with 70 ministers. Only half of the congregations still had their vicars after the war. They were forced to pay three times the normal rent and higher electricity fees than other citizens in addition to higher income taxes because their income was regarded as having been obtained "without work".

In Latvia less than 100 out of 250 Lutheran ministers were still there after the war. The Arch bishopTeodors Grünbergs had been deported already by the Nazis – as had the Orthodox metropolitan and three Catholic bishops – and many priests had fled to the West. Out of the priests that remained in Latvia when the Communists returned, five were murdered and an additional 35 were deported. Monasteries were dissolved, monks and nuns and many laymen were arrested, shot instantly or sent to Siberia.

In Lithuania in 1946 three out of five bishops were in Soviet labour camps. A sixth was executed and the archbishop was arrested after he had said in his cathedral that he had never signed the pro-Soviet statement that had been falsely published in his name by the Communist party newspaper Pravda ("the Truth"). He was sentenced to the usual "Baltic punishment", 25 years imprisonment followed by 5 years exile, but he died after only a few years in Communist captivity.

Around 400 out of the more than 1 100 churches in Lithuania were eventually used for secular purposes; the John cathedral in the capital became a furniture storage, the Casimir cathedral became a museum of atheism, the Bernhard cathedral and the Catherine cathedral became storages for art, and fruit and vegetables respectively. The James cathedral became the storage for the ballet, S:t Michaels church became a workshop, etc.

All seventy odd Catholic monasteries in Lithuania and three out of four seminars were closed down. The fourth was made considerably smaller and was controlled by the security police, which supervised seminar teachers, priests and other congregational workers. The same kind of cut downs and controls were implemented in Latvia and Estonia.

After Stalin’s death in March of 1953 the Communists’ religious persecution was momentarily slackened. The faithful were permitted to print prayer books and religious calendars and confirmation of young people was permitted. But during the last Khruschev years, 1959-1964, the Balts were hit by a new wave of Communist closings of churches, atheist propaganda and persecution. While Communist persecution of the faithful and their congregations in the Baltic states (and the rest of the Soviet Union) was reinforced, a dialogue between more or less naive Christians and Marxists abroad was encouraged.

Beginning in the late fifties atheist summer days and other alternatives to church ceremonies were introduced. Young believers could get lower grades in order and demeanour if they were disclosed as going to church in their free time and they could be kept from further studies at universities. Those who wanted a university degree had to pass the test in Marxism-Leninism, a test that usually included a question about "how one can know that God does not exist". That kind of pressure made the Communist religious policies nominally successful, even though it hardly enhanceded respect or sympathy for Communism or its followers among Christians in the Baltic states.

Especially in Lithuania the Communists continued to imprison outspoken priests, not least because they feared that "religious contamination" would spread from Poland to the equally Catholic Lithuania and from there maybe to the other Baltic states and the rest of the Soviet Union. A few fighting Lithuanian priests were murdered or killed in strange circumstances, as was Father Jerzy Popieluszko in Poland. The persecution of free speaking priests and the Communist crackdown on religion led to a number of popular protests; more than 17 000 Lithuanian Catholics complained in a 1972  letter that Catholics had been fired from their jobs because of their religion and were unable to get new jobs. More than 14 000 pupils complained in another letter that they were subjected to atheist instruction in school, etc.

According to the Soviet constitution the church was separated from the state already under the reign of Lenin. In reality the Communists had a stronger grip on the inner concerns of the religious congregations than in any country with a state church.

Communist laws on religion were introduced also in the Baltic states. All congregations had to be approved of and registered by secular authorities, in reality by the Communist party. Not even the members of these approved congregations were allowed to do more than to gather within the four walls of the church to pray, sing, read the Bible or listen to a sermon. The Communist religious policies are clearly shown in the pastoral statutes the Communists tried to implement for the Free Churches in the Baltics (and the rest of the Soviet Union) beginning in the early sixties. These statutes said among other things that "the leader of the congregation has to be sure of and remember that the aim of the service today is not to attract new members to the churches " (§1). "Among his duties is to resist unhealthy missionary activities " (§2)."The leader of the congregation must not allow any deviations in the service and he must not allow himself to be carried away by his own sermon" (§4). "There must be no more chasing after crowds in our congregations. The christening of youth between the ages of 18 and 30 must be limited to an absolute minimum "(§11) (15)

In Estonia the church was not permitted to print a single Bible or any other book with a spiritual content during the Communist period. In Latvia the Christians were allowed to print a hymnal  and the New Testament in small editions in 1954 and 1960 respectively. In Lithuania as well, the publishing of religious literature was banned but the Lithuanian Catholic Church remained so strong and independent in relation to the Communists that a number of magazines with a national and religious content continued to be distributed underground.

Not until the Communists had realised that the church could be defeated solely by being defiled, the persecutions started to get less insistent. During the liberation from Communism in the late eighties freedom of religion became an integral part of the general calls for freedom. A number of clergymen fought for freedom and independence for the Baltic states.  

5. The economy - agiant on feet of clay

The Soviet Union was a superpower thanks to its military power but this power was achieved and maintained only by great sacrifices in other areas than the "military industrial complex" All societies conform to the same economic laws – the more you spent in certain areas, the less you have in any given moment to spend in other areas.

When the kulaks as a class had been annihilated, agriculture in general became a problem in the entire Soviet Union. That happened also in the Baltic states when most independent farmers had been sent to Siberian camps after World War II. The authorities introduced extensive obligations to deliver agricultural produce to the state and increased taxes on agricultural incomes in order to force the remaining farmers to increase their production.

When the collective farms, the kolkhoz, had been introduced in the Baltic states as well, every kolkhoz farmer was allowed to keep his own little plot of no more than 0,6 hectares (1,5 acres). Employees of the state farms, the sovkhoz, were allowed to use pastures for their domestic animals – no more than one milk cow, one calf, two pigs, five sheep and an unlimited number of chickens.

In time a smaller and smaller number of agricultural workers used this opportunity to keep their own animals. But the private gardens continued to make an important contribution to the Baltic food supply (and in the entire Soviet Union). They represented around 3 per cent of the farmland but provided as much as 60 per cent of the potato supply, 40 per cent of fruit and vegetables and 30 per cent of the milk and meat supply. Without the private gardens, the food supply would have been even worse.

Another problem area was housing. The Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck has sometimes claimed that there are two ways to ruin a city. One is to bomb it, the second is to introduce rent control. The Estonian capital Tallinn was forced to try both methods during the Communist period and the result was obvious enough.

The Soviet bomb terror that struck Tallinn on March 9, 1944, cost 463 people their lives and 659 were wounded. Around 8 000 buildings were destroyed, including 40 per cent of the residential buildings which made 20 000 people homeless. Just a few days earlier Soviet bombers had destroyed what was possibly the finest baroque city of the old Swedish realm, Narva.

After the war rents were kept at the same level during the entire Soviet period – rents in the Soviet Union had not been raised since the twenties. This, combined with the fact that Communist economists did not favour housing construction, led to a housing problem and living conditions so overcrowded that only the oldest and poorest in neighbouring countries like Sweden can imagine anything like it. Inhabitants of Tallinn before World War II had had an average of more than 17 square meters, after decades of Communist rule only 8 meters per persons were left. This was partly a consequence of the Russian mass immigration, partly of the wearing out of the old residential quarters and partly of the insufficient building of new housing.

Only those who had less than four meters at their disposal were favoured when it came to the waiting list. A family with two children and 24 meters of living space did in reality not stand a chance to get a new and bigger place to live, if they lacked influential friends and were unable to bribe their way to a new apartment. Immigrants on the other hand could be given priority, something that did not help to endear them to the local population. Towards the very end of the Communist period the standard was changed to 6 meters per person but in reality that did not make much of a difference.

Since Communist planned economy worked so badly and bottlenecks appeared in different parts of the economy, most businessmen and individuals preferred to be safe rather than sorry. Businessmen wanted to procure more labour, capital, raw materials and other produce than they really needed. And individuals hoarded rare goods as soon as they were available, something that increased the lack of goods and the waiting.

Corruption became the lubricant that made the wheels of Communist planned economy run a little smoother. Dishonesty, selfishness and mendacity became integral parts of everyday life, although the powers-that-be officially preached the virtues of honesty, unselfishness and truthfulness. The Communist party secretary became the symbol of these double standards by making a beautiful speech about equality and solidarity on Labour Day, and the day after sending one of his underlings to one of the party stores where prominent party officials could cheaply purchase goods that were unavailable to ordinary citizens.

A consequence of the Communist bureaucrats’ indifference to the wishes and needs of ordinary citizens and the lagging behind of the quality and quantity of the domestic production of consumers’ goods was the exaggerated appreciation of all things foreign. I noticed that as early as on my first visit to Communist Estonia, in the early seventies.

The first day I was there I found a queue extending over several blocks. My reporter’s curiosity was awakened and I followed the queue to its beginning (or end) and found a shoe shop.

"They have had Czech boots delivered today " a girl in the queue explained. "They are much better than ours, even though they can’t exactly compare with what you produce in the West". The girl added that one of the cashiers in the shop had called her as soon as she had learnt of the Czech boots. The girl then called her friends and acquaintances, etc, and this long queue had materialised in a very short time – in the middle of the working day.

Those queues easily turned into hotbeds of anti-Soviet, anti-Socialist and anti-Communist anecdotes. Most of them quite naturally dealt with the workings (or lack of them) of the Communist planned economy. I still remember the first ones I heard outside that shoe shop.

"Were do you prefer to end up when you die, in the Socialist or in the Capitalist hell? – In the Soviet Hell, of course. There is always hope that they haven’t got enough coal or tar for the pots ".

"What difference is there between Capitalism and Socialism? – Capitalism makes social mistakes but Socialism makes capital ones ".

A third standard anecdote was about the difference between Socialist fairy tales and Capitalist ones. Capitalist fairy tales begin with the words: "Once upon a time there was …" and Socialist ones with the words: "Once there will be …"

I also remember how I tried to preach a kind of "message of contentment" to my Estonian countrymen during this first visit. In Sweden, in those days, the debate was very much about the problems and exaggerations of the materialistic welfare society. So there I was, trying to explain to my "poor country cousins" that they should be kind of proud of their poverty.

But most people I spoke to must have found me unintelligible or insufferable when I tried to explain to them how wonderfully good it was not to have fifteen different brands of toothpaste in the shops, as was the case in Sweden. "Sure, but isn’t that better than not having a single brand when you need a tube " one friend retorted irritably.

Communist shops did store toothpaste, but there were always one or several basic commodities missing. This might sound trivial to spoiled welfare Swedes, used to being able to buy anything they can afford – even though more and more people can afford less and less in this era of massive unemployment. But in the Communist Baltic states the shortage of goods, their substandard quality and  the frequent queuing all contributed to make life hard.

The Swedish author Per Olov Enquist who, during travels in the sixties and seventies, had noticed a growing wealth in the Latvian capital Riga, was shocked when he returned in the eighties. In a series of stories in the daily Expressen in April 1983 he stated:

"Riga, where I most often found myself, was a nice and alive and loveable city. And a little prettier every time. The change in this late winter of 1983 is a shock to me. The decline is so evident. Not only the length of all the queues or the shortage of goods or the shortage of food, the fact that shops are suddenly so empty, or the way Riga suddenly seems so run-down, or how little has happened to city development, downtown and outside of the city centre. No, what has changed most are the ordinary people’s very basic, concrete everyday circumstances. Everything is suddenly very expensive".

In the late eighties a number of ordinary consumer products were rationed. The ration was 150 grams of bread every day (the same ration as in Stalin’s camps), 200 grams of butter per month, 400 grams of macaroni and 600 grams of coffee every quarter of a year. That meant a cup of coffee every week.

Communists in the East and in the West were still known to defend the system by saying that at least everybody had a job and prices were stable. But not even that was true anymore.

In every economy, inflation can be said to appear when demand exceeds supply of goods and services. This can lead to an increase in prices (which means deflation of the value of the currency), queues or rationing. The Communist societies showed all classical signs of inflation and one new feature – quality decline instead of higher prices.

Nominal prices were usually kept unchanged. The price of sausage in the Baltic states, for instance, did not change between the early sixties and the late eighties. But the amount of meat and other healthy ingredients in any given kind of sausage sank to less than half of what it had been, the rest was flour and water, sold for the price of sausage. In the very small free market where farmers from the collective farms were allowed to sell products they had produced themselves, old-fashioned sausage was still available but to a price four times the official.

The least bad result of Communist economic policies might have been the fact that everybody was kept occupied, albeit not in a meaningful job that contributed to create wealth for everybody. Many tourists during the Communist period were surprised to find the "threefold" service in shops. You first queued to point out the goods you wanted, then to pay for them  and then to have them given to you. If you went shopping for groceries your might have to queue in this way first in the milk shop, then in the bakery and then in the butcher’s shop (if there was any meat to queue for). This sure kept people occupied but it did not increase productivity or efficiency and thus it contributed to increasing the gap between the Baltic countries and their neighbours regarding standard of living.

You did not have to be an economist to realise how much the Baltic states lagged behind the Nordic countries after the war. The difference was especially evident in the case of Finland and Estonia, two countries that before the war used to be comparable in most respects. But after the war the standard of living in Finland grew very much higher than in Estonia. Estonia had either been subjected to an economic system that was very inefficient, or else the country had been exploited. One explanation does not exclude the other. What was perfectly obvious was that the Communist planned economy contributed to put the Baltic peoples far behind their neighbours. It will be many years before that changes even though growth in later years has been faster in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania than in the rest of the Nordic countries.

6. Pollution

Possibly the largest environmental problem in the Baltic states during the Communist period was the waste of raw materials. Soviet Communism used on average twice as much energy and raw materials as American Capitalism to produce the same amount of goods and services. The question was how long the world would be able to afford such a wasteful economy as the Soviet one – and whether even the Soviet Union could afford it.

To us living around the Baltic Sea it should be especially interesting to see how Communist planned economy affected the environment in our neighbouring countries. The pseudonym Komarov reminded his readers in a book published in 1981 of how Swedish scientists had found high amounts of PCB outside the Baltic coast, but how Soviet authorities then said that the results were incorrect. No environmentally dangerous plastic materials were manufactured in the Communist Baltic states. But it turned out eventually that large amounts of PCB certainly had been manufactured and distributed – but by enterprises that were part of the industrial-military complex. They had no obligation to be environmentally conscious and no obligation even to inform anybody about the environmentally dangerous things they were doing.

Communist secrecy and the closed nature of the system was without a doubt a contributing factor in pollution. Baltic friends of the environment did not have the opportunities of their colleagues in the West to form independent pressure groups to lobby authorities and enterprises. A green party of the Western kind or a Popular Movement against Nuclear power would have been regarded as an "anti-Soviet organisation" by the Communists across the Baltic Sea, and treated accordingly. The organisation would quickly have been dissolved and its leaders would have been imprisoned by the security police.

The ruthless exploitation of natural resources and other kinds of pollution did indeed trigger a number of protests during the Communist period, from among other Baltic natural scientists. In 1977 eighteen prominent scientists in Estonia compiled a detailed documentation of the pollution and the threats against the environment in their country. According to them, the expansion of even more stone quarries, mines and power plants would "inevitably cause dramatic changes in the ecological balance, not only in Northern Estonia but in the entire Baltic Sea area". The scientists continued:

"As a consequence of extensive mining of oil shale on a large scale, a considerable part of North Eastern Estonia has turned into a lunar landscape. Enormous piles of ashes and barren rocks can been seen above a grey and almost dead landscape. Fertile soil and vegetation has been destroyed over large areas, the air is polluted by dust, smoke, sulphurous contamination, nitrogen, phenols and other toxic substances. Rivers like Purtse and Pühajôgi, once full of trout and salmon, are now totally without life and in addition they poison the sea, kilometres away from their discharges. The groundwater is heavily polluted. That is the nature of the landscape in the oil shale area in North Eastern Estonia." (16)

The letter writes also worried about the plans to create enormous phosphorite mines in North Eastern Estonia. Exactly there, in the area where the first Communist mass grave was discovered during World War One, was a large deposit of phosphorite, a substance used by the Soviet Union to produce phosphate fertilisers. According to the letter writers, phosphorite mining in that area would lead to a "to a large extent destroyed landscape " and additional emissions of toxic substances, among them some radioactive ones, in the Baltic Sea.

The phosphorite plans were seen by many Estonians as a question of the national destiny. First because large scale mining of this kind would lower the groundwater level considerably and the waste would affect even more lakes and rivers and threaten or destroy their flora and fauna. Second because some of the residual products of phosphorite mining combusts spontaneously when they come into contact with the oxygen in the air, they then dissolve in water and poison water and ground with radioactivity. Third because the mining was planned to take place in the area where most Estonian rivers have their origins. The phosphorite mining thus threatened to make the water in all rivers in Northern and Western Estonia unfit for human and animal consumption, paralyse agriculture and pollute adjacent parts of the Baltic Sea. The resistance against these Communist and colonial plans thus became an important part of the peaceful liberation movement of the late eighties and early nineties, the so called singing revolution, in Estonia (17).

It was not hard to understand why the Estonians were worried, since Communist planned economy already had transformed large parts of Estonia and the rest of the Baltic states to ecological disasters. In Narva, vast amounts of pollution was spread from the chimneys and cold water basins of the gigantic power plants. These two power plants together were the fourth largest source of sulphure dioxide pollution in Europe. Instead of cleaning the gasses the Communists built chimneys high enough for the emissions to reach Finland and Sweden. During the Communist period the sulphure contaminations from Narva could be registered as far away as along the coast of Northern Sweden.

Outside one of the power plants there is a veritable mountain of ashes and several square kilometres of ashes containing lime and sulphure and heavy metals, some of them radioactive. The yellow-green ash-containing water used to wash the ovens had a PH of about 12. That was enough to burn a hole in the skin, if someone was stupid enough to touch the "water".

According to local environmentalists, 96 per cent of the children in Narva were ill. Twice as many as normal were born prematurely and lung cancer was more frequent than anywhere else in the then Soviet Union. Despite all this – and despite the Soviet government’s international commitment to have lowered sulphure emissions by 50 per cent by 1995 – the Communist economists wanted to build a third, gigantic power plant in Narva. The two earlier had a capacity of 1 600 and 1 435 megawatt respectively, the new one was planned to have a capacity of as much as 2 500 megawatt – to compare with the largest water power station in Sweden, Harsprånget, 940 megawatt. If this third power station had been built, it would have become the largest single source of sulphure emissions in Europe. One of the ideas behind this project was to sell electrical power to Sweden in the event of Sweden’s abolishing nuclear power prematurely and thus experienced a shortage of electricity. But the Communists lost power in Estonia and the third power plant was never built in Narva. The amount of sulphure emissions from the Narva power plants have been reduced by half during the independence – mostly thanks to a lowered production.

The large phosphorite mines that had already been built by the Communists – six subterranean mines and three open-cast mines – sent all their sewage water un-purified out into the Gulf of Finland and the Lake Peipsi (which constitutes a part of the Estonian-Russian border). An even larger environmental problem was – and still is – the radioactive peninsula at Sillamäe close to Narva. In that location the Communists built a reprocessing plant for uranium, thorium and other radioactive substances, a plant so secret that not even Estonians were allowed to visit the town without a special permit. The radioactive waste from the plant was deposited by the beach, which made the beach unusable many years ago. Even worse, the problem of how to store the radioactive waste in Sillamäe to prevent the low wall from collapsing and all the waste going straight out into the Gulf of Finland.

The situation in Latvia was equally bad, since Communist economists judged managers and employed only by how much they produced – not by how they produced it. A bonus was paid to all companies that claimed to have produced more than the planned goals, regardless of what waste of raw materials and what amount of toxic pollution of air and water they had caused. In Latvia as well, no one was allowed to speak openly about the environmental problems.

"In the 60s and 70s the problems were concealed, denied, and classified, in spite of the obvious damage to the environment that was visible everywhere. Managers and party bureaucrats were more interested in the economic plan and regarded environmental problems as an annoying detail or an obstacle to the fulfilment of the plan" (18)

Most of the sewage in Riga was released directly into the Riga Bay. The consequence was that the fish died and that people by the end of the eighties no longer were allowed to swim at the famous beaches in the Bay, – Jurmala (the beach in Riga) and Pärnu in Estonia.

"Another heavily polluted area is the Ventspils area, opposite Gotland, which houses a large oil harbour and plants where substances like ammonia are produced. The careless handling of oil and oil products and toxic waste from the ammonia production have made the whole area dangerous. The ammonia plant was built in co-operation with the American oil company Occidental Petroleum, owned by the American multi-millionaire Armand Hammer ("Lenin’s friend ") and the production is intended primarily for the American market. According to the views of the local population this Russian-American project has contributed to pollution and immigration and generally meant nothing but problems for Latvia and the Latvian people. The vernacular expression is ´Latvia’s Chernobyl´" (19)

The greatest threat to the environment in Lithuania is the nuclear power plant in Ignalina, the same kind of plant as the one that broke down in Chernobyl in the Ukraine. International efforts have helped to increase safety at this plant. But only the overly optimistic believe that the danger of "another Chernobyl" is gone for ever. Everybody else in the Baltic states and in their neighbours should worry about the Ignalina plant – another part of the Communist heritage that threatens us all.

Conclusion

No honorable person would today question the fact that crimes against humanity have been committed in the Baltic states by Communism and Communists. The question is whether these crimes should be forgotten and forgiven or whether they should be punished. And if so, who is going to judge whom and how?

As we all know, a number of prominent Nazis were put to trial in Nuremberg in 1946, and sentenced for crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. But not a single Communist has been tried and sentenced for such crimes in the Baltic states or Eastern Europe.

If crimes against humanity are always wrong – regardless of the political beliefs of the criminal – the morally right thing to do would be to launch a second Nuremberg trial, this time against Communist war criminals in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to begin with. The simplest way to do this would be to expand the mandate of the International Court in the Hague, where war criminals from former Yugoslavia have already been sentenced.

The Baltic peoples are – according to their respective national laws – able to prosecute those who have committed crimes against humanity within their territories. One of the leaders of Stalin’s "secret police" in Latvia, Alfons Noviks, was arrested in March of 1994, sentenced in December of 1995 to penal servitude for life. He died at the age of 88 in a prison infirmary in March 1996. When Latvia was occupied by the Communists in June 1940 Noviks had become head of security in the city Daugavpils and when the Communists returned in 1945 he was made minister of security and head of the NKVD (later called KGB). He confessed in court byt said that all he had done was to follow orders – an apology not accepted by the Nuremberg tribunal and not by the court in Riga.

Estonia has prosecuted some former security men for the part they played in the Stalin era deportations. The first of these men was the at the time 85 years old Vassili Riis in March 1996, but due to his fragile state of health the trial was postponed several times and Riis died before it started. He had been head of security on the island Saaremaa and signed arrestation orders for 340 people who were later executed. Also Michail Ryzjkov, head of security in Western Estonia and responsible for a large number of deportations, died before he was put to trial.

The first person to be sentenced in Estonia was the 73 year-old Johannes Klaassepp, who, on January 22, 1999, was sentenced to eight years in prison with a two year trial period for having sent and tried to send ten families to prison camps in Siberia. On March 10, 1999 yet another Soviet security man, the 80 year-old Vassili Beskov, was sentenced to eight years in prison with a three year trial period for sending or trying to send away nine families. Several others deporters are waiting for their trials.

The Estonian security police has been able to afford no more than five or six persons, among them four historians, to study the mass deportations of 1941 and 1949. The researchers have had to wade through tens of thousands of personal acts out of old Soviet archives in order to try to find evidence against identifiable persons who can be prosecuted. The work is exceedingly time consuming. In two years they gathered 32 volumes with a total of 8 570 pages about an infamous "deporter", Idel Jakobson, who between 1940 and 1950 led the NKVD investigative department in Estonia. But a psychiatric evaluation showed that Jacobson was no longer able to assume responsiblity for his actions, just like Riis and Ryzjkov Jakobson died before any trial was started.

Estonian opinion is divided as to the usefulness of these trials. When the security police charged the above mentioned Klaassepp, a number of politicians were asked about their reactions. The chairman of the (presently) only Russian party in the Parliament, Viktor Andrejev, said that the mass deportations had to be dealt with but maybe the legal system did not afford the right means. Above all he could see no point in punishing single individuals. The liberal political scientist Igor Gräzin on the other hand considered it natural that all those who had committed war crimes or crimes against humanity be prosecuted, although in certain cases punishment might be forfeited for humanitarian reasons. According to conservative MP Enn Tarto, who as an 18 year-old was arrested for the first time by the Soviet Security service and sentenced to altogether more than 25 years in prison, Estonia has an obligation to prosecute everyone who voluntarily or consciously participated in things like the deportations. According to him, Estonia has taken this obligation upon herself by signing the UN convention which says that there is to be no statute of limitation on war crimes and crimes against humanity, and by incorporating such a law in 1994. But another conservative politician, Urmas Arumäe, said that forgiving would be better than to constantly pick at old scabs and keep tensions alive, particularly so because the Estonian people has made its views on the past clear by electing its own, non Communist way. The Prosecutor General said that the Parliament is free to hand down opinions on Communism as a political system while the courts deal with individual persons’ possibly criminal actions. President Lennart Meri said after the first "deporter" had been sentenced: "We are able to forgive everything but only if we know everything about it".

In all three Baltic states everyone who runs for office has to sign a document saying that they have never worked for foreign security services against their own people. These statements can be declared void only by a court. Neither the former Soviet security services nor their Western equivalents have shared their material on Soviet agents in the Baltic states with Baltic courts or Baltic media. That is why several former (?) KGB- and GRU agents have managed to get themselves elected to the Baltic parliaments.

In Latvia, the names of five MPs were found on discarded KGB file cards. The prosecutor general said that the cards were genuine but that "they did not prove any ties to the KGB". The parliament decided, with 46 votes against 17, to suspend the five pending investigations and trial. Four were aquitted due to lack of evidence but the fifth, foreign secretary Georgs Andrejevs, resigned voluntarily in June 1995. By then he had confessed in a newspaper that he had joined the KGB as an agent in 1963, in order to facilitate his career as an anesthesiologist and to be allowed to travel abroad. Andrejevs said that he did not harm anyone by his co-operation with the KGB but instead warned people who were under surveillance. He resigned since he had broken the laws of the country by not admitting to his ties to the KGB.

In May 1994 the Latvian parliament decided that individuals should also be allowed to know what KGB’s old archives have on them and that access to these records can be given to others only by a court order, that individuals and companies with access to KGB-documents have to release them to a public "Centre for the documentation of the consequences of totalitarian regimes" and that information about individual persons’ ties to the KGB might not be published within the next ten years. The Latvian law was changed a year later to make it possible for former KGB agents to run for public office. This does not mean that Latvia is indifferent to past co-operation with Communist (or Nazi) security services, all it means is that such information should not be used for political or private extortion and used to accuse individuals without support of the legal system.

Former Soviet agents in Estonia had to report to the security police on April 1 1996 at the latest. Those who did not would see their names published, if the security police had proof of their former activities. Only 1'150 of approximately 10'000 agents had reported when the time limit expired (20).

There is hardly a democrat in the Baltic states who would question the fact that the security services of the occupation power – from the NKVD to the KGB and their military equivalent the GRU – should be regarded as criminal organisations and that actions on their behalf should be regarded as treason. But could – and should – the Communist party and its followers be declared illegal? If the party is declared illegal because of its participation in crimes against humanity in the Baltic states, does that mean that party members are to be regarded as criminals or should specific individual criminal actions be required? Does that mean that former party members should not be allowed to run for public office and to hold governmental och local jobs? (21)

The former Communist party in Estonia, having changed its name to the Democratic Labour Party joined forces with a Russian party and managed to get a couple of places in the parliament in the 1999 parliamentary elections.

In Latvia the Communist party was prohibited on August 23 1991, two days after the reactionary Communists’ failed coup in the Soviet Union and also subsequent to the Latvian parliament’s declaration of national independence. Those who had been active in the Communist party subsequent to January 13 1991 – the day when Gorbachev sent Soviet troups into Riga – or in the pro-Soviet organisations Interfront och National Salvation Committe (which supported the August 1991 coup), are not allowed to run for public office. The leader of the old time Communists, Alfreds Rubiks, the last Communist Mayor of Riga, was sentenced in July 1995 to eight years in prison for collaboration with Soviet security forces in trying to overthrow the Latvian government 1990-91, when six people were killed in January 1991. He was released in the autumn of 1998 after serving 3/4 of his term. In the parliamentary elections the following autumn Rubiks’s party joined two other leftist parties and together they managed to get elected to 16 out of the 100 parliamentary seats.

Also in Lithuania a few former Communist leaders were prosecuted in December 1998, accused of participation in the attempted coup against the Lithuanian government on January 13 1991 that cost 14 people their lifes. Out of the 51 who were to be prosecuted only six could actually be put to trial, the others were hiding in Russia or Belorussia. Notable among the accused was the then First Secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party Mykolas Burokevicius. The trial was postponed because one of the accused and one defense attorney were taken ill.

A former Communist leader in Lithuania, Algirdas Brazauskas, even managed to get himsef elected president succeeding the freedom fighter hero Vytautas Landsbergis; but Brazauskas was in turn succeeded by a conservative American Lithuanian, Valdas Adamkus. On December 10, 1998 the Lithuanian Parliament adopted – with 68 votes in favour and none against – a resolution condemning the Communist ideology and its consequences for Lithuania. The parliament was of the opinion that former Communists are morally and politically responsible for the crimes against humanity committed in the name of Communism. The resolution therefore required limitations of former Communists’ possibilites to act politically in the future; this demand was dropped by the parliament on the following day (22).  It was however firm in its resolve that today’s Communists are morally and politically responsible for yesterday’s Communists’ crimes.

In all three Baltic states several former members of the Communist party have been elected to parliament as representatives of other parties.

For my own part I, as a committed anti-Communist (and anti-Fascist), have been prepared to co-operate with former members of the Estonian Communist party and in some cases even with former KGB- and GRU agents. Partly because some of them seemed to me to have as little sympathy for Communism (or Fascism) as I had myself and partly because I have been unwilling to judge people who have been raised and lived under much more difficult conditions than I have. But I find it hard to understand how educated persons in free countries like Sweden have been able to join a Communist party or a former Communist party and even still call themselves Communists – a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall (23).

The world’s responsibility

Those who have seen and read the accounts of the Communist genocides in the Baltic states might wonder why so little has been said about it in the rest of the world.

One explanation is that the Communist crimes in the Baltic states were committed at the "wrong" time and by the "wrong" people. When the Baltic states were occupied in June 1940 the west had its attention focussed on Paris which was just about so succumb to the German Nazis. And when the first big deportations out of the Baltic states took place in June 1941 the rest of the world was more interested in the upcoming Nazi attack on its former Communist comrades in arms in the Soviet Union.

After the war many forgot – or did not care - that the Communist Soviet Union had been an ally of Nazi Germany for two of the war’s five years. The fact that millions of Russians and other Soviet citizens had lost their lifes in the fight against the Nazis made it harder for the Balts to get anyone to listen sympathetically when they told people about the hundreds of thousands of Balts who had been murdered by the Communists. Few cared about the representatives of the small Baltic peoples when they raised accusations against a super power that had been allied to the democratic Western powers for a part of the war and was on the winning side at the end of it. Those responsible for the Communist genocide in the Baltic states and Eastern Europe were even allowed to participate in the Nuremberg trials against Nazi war criminals and to pass sentence on the people who were responsible for Nazi crimes against humanity.

Stéphane Courtois states in "The black book of Communism" that "while Himmler’s and Eichmann’s names have become known all over the world as symbols of contemporary barbarism, most people have never heard of (the leaders of Communist terror) Dzerjzinskij, Jagoda or Jesjov".

Since history is always written by the victors, Auschwitz and Buchenwald became – and rightly so – the very worst words of cruelty. But few people in the West were as informed about Kolyma and Magadan – not even after Varlam Sjalamov published his "Tales from Kolyma" and Aleksandr Solsjenitsyn his magnum opus on the Gulag Archipelago. There are people who still have not heard of these Communist extermination camps – even though the Communist preceded the Nazis in creating such camps and killed an even larger number of people in their camps. And how many have even heard of scholars like Rudolf J.Rummel who has in a number of books documented these government and ideologically sponsored mass murders? (24)

The Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, said in his memoirs: "The management of the security police had sent us a detailed description of the Russian concentration camps. Based on witnesses’ accounts, conditions in those camps hade been minutely described. Special emphasis was given to the Russian extermination of whole ethnic groups by means of forced labour".

One kind of dictatorship can never be used to defend, conceal or diminish the cruelty of another dictatorship and its excesses. That is why it now is time to remember the victims of both Nazi and Communist crimes against humanity – and to hold those accountable who have hitherto been able to escape punishment for their crimes.

The Communist takeover in Eastern Europe after the war was hailed by many as a Soviet "liberation" of these peoples. But all that happened was that oppression changed form and colour. Naive or cynical powers that be in the West, like the American president Roosevelt, who in Yalta in 1945 sacrificed Eastern Europe and the Baltic states to the Communists even believed in Stalins’ talk about free elections in the "liberated" countries.

The silence about Communist crimes against humanity in the Baltic states was originally due to the fact that very few people in the West knew anything at all about the things that were happening on the other side of the Baltic Sea after the second world war. In Sweden’s case shame over the 1946 deportation of some Baltic refugees and the hasty and cynical recognition of the Communist occupation contributed to the silence. Sweden recognised the Communist occupation of its neighbours in the spring of 1941 – the first country in the world to do so after the then ally of Stalin, Nazi Germany.

After the war the Baltic countries became almost totally inaccesible to Western journalists. Even to this day many Swedes are ignorant of the Baltic guerilla fights against the Communist occupation and the fact that it was the longest and bloodiest in Europe after the war.

When Baltic guerilla members were inprisoned, tortured and in most cases shot or sent to Siberian camps it took years for their names to become known to us in the West. Maybe their names turned up as foot-notes in unknown exile historians’ little known books.

But for those who really wanted to know, the information on Communist atrocities and inefficiency in general and in the Baltic states in particular was accessible. A number of former party members like Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone and Stephen Spender bore witness to the gap between Communist theory and practice, for instance in Richard Crossman’s anthology "The God that failed" (1949; in Swedish as "Vi trodde på kommunismen"/We believed in Communism/1950). A number of defectors and refugees from Communism witnessed in gripping detail, among them Viktor Kravtjenko in his book (in Swedish as "Jag valde friheten" /I chose freedom/1947). He became the target of a smear campaign led by French and other Western European Communists, much like the campaign against David Rousset. This former trotskyist wrote a book, "L´univers concentrationnaire" (The world of concentration camps) where he described his own experiences of Nazi concentration camps and demanded an investigation into the Communist concentration camps. French Communists, led by the poet Louis Aragon, denied the existence of such camps – at a time when millions of innocent people, Communists included, expired in them.

Baltic organisations in several countries, Sweden and the US among them, tried to provide information which later turned out to have been remarkably correct. The American Congress adopted a well researched resolution that was later published with other documents in book form,"Nazi-Soviet Conspiracy and the Baltic States. Diplomatic Documents and Other Evidence"(Boreas 1948) about the criminal collusion between Nazi and Communist leaders that led to occupation and genocide in the Baltic states.

Starting in the seventies, the Soviet security forces were virtually unable to search a home of any Baltic dissident without Amnesty International, the Swedish Association for help to political prisoners in Estonia, Latvian social democrats in Sweden or Lithuanian activists in the Vatican and the US hearing about it and informing everybody interested about the fate of Baltic freedom fighters. But more people still defended political prisoners like Nelson Mandela in South Africa and Palestinian freedom fighters and terrorists in the areas occupied by Israel than Baltic democrats like Mart Niklus in Estonia, Fricis Menders and Linards Grantins in Latvia and Balys Gajauskas in Lithuania.

Individual reporters made great contributions but there was no systematic coverage of the development across the Baltic Sea. Each and every day during the seventies and eighties we could follow the actions of Israeli occupation forces aganist Palestinians in newspapers, radio and television. Many people were upset when Palestinian protesters were expelled and the Swedish parliament once arranged a special debate on the issue. But when the Communist occupants in our closest neighbours inprisoned och expelled peace loving and freedom hungry Balts, the silence lasted for a long time. No TV images, no radio, no debate in the Parliament.

"If we had not been so forgotten by the world our fate might have become milder than what was the case" the chairman of the Estonian Culture Council Ignar Fjuk said to me towards the end of the eighties. "But it is not to late for the world – led by Sweden – to assume its responsibility."

At last reality won over "the conspiracy of silence" against the Baltic freedom fighters. It all began with several excellent news stories in the TV 2 news program Rapport during the spring of 1988 where Göran Sjöstrand reported on the expulsion of Baltic protesters. It continued with recurring reporting by competent reporters like television’s Kent Wännström, radio’s Kjell-Albin Abrahamsson and Anders Eriksson, Dagens Nyheter’s Harald Hamrin, Svenska Dagbladet’s Elisabeth Crona, Dagens Industri’s Sten Sjöström, Aftonbladet’s Tommy Svensson among others.

The media attention made an increasing number of politicians support the peaceful fight for freedom in the Baltic states. But the old Communists, who, through their connections with the party comrades across the Baltic Sea would have been able to to much good had they assumed their moral and political responsibility, were very tardy when it came to dealing with their "pure Russian" heritage in the Baltic question.

Swedish Communists and the Baltic states (25)

Several of later years’ soft Swedish parlour Communists, people like the former party chairman C.H.Hermansson, joined the Swedish Communist party during a period when it vigorously defended Hitler’s and Stalin’s assault on our neighbours – Denmark and Norway to the West and Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland to the East.

Since Hitler and Stalin were still allies and the Swedish Communist party was Swedish by name only, in reality it was a subdivision of the Communist International, the Swedish party paper, Ny Dag, paid tribute to the Nazi troups that marched into Norway in April 1940. On April 24 1940 Ny Dag wrote: "There is no hatred towards the German soldiers. One frequently sees Norwegian workers and German soldiers in friendly discussions on streetcorners or in beer parlours."

The Swedish Communists defended foreign oppressors in the same way when they reported on the occupation of the Baltic states during the summer of 1940. Ny Dag had assured, already on October 5, 1939: "The Soviet Union does not threaten, on the contrary it defends the integrity of the small states. No small country in Europe could at present be more safe than Estonia when it comes to its future existence."

When Stalin, acting in agreement with Hitler, had his troups incorporate Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Eastern Poland and the Romanian Bessarabia (today’s Moldavia) and tried to incorporate Finland, Ny Dag was jubilant (July 26, 1940): "Aided by the great socialist worker’s state the border states have been liberated from their dependance on the imperialist super powers."

The mock elections held by the occupying power was termed by Ny Dag on July 8 1940 "the first free people’s elections" and on July 22 the same year the paper reported "celebrations without end when the Baltic states became socialist". The executive editor of Ny Dag, Gustav Johansson, later a long term Communist MP, wrote after a round trip through the recently occupied Baltic states: "I have seen three countries that used to belong to the worst reactionary terror regimes of Europe, transformed into free Soviet republics through a peaceful revolution."

Johansson wrote this in his pamphlet "Resa i Baltikum" (Travel in the Baltic states), published by the party itself in 1940. With a turn of phrase that would be hard to beat he termed the Soviet occupation the "red Army’s reinforcement of the garrisons" (p 11).

For several decades Swedish Communists continued to defend the oppression and russification policies, the militarisation, environmental pollution and the socialist economic system which made the peoples in the Baltic states poorer each year than their neighbours in the Nordic countries. When the worst mass murderer known to history, Josef Stalin, died, the Swedish Communist party arranged a memorial service and the central committe proclaimed: "Stalin is dead. The greatest popular leader and statesman of our time, the brilliant leader of the socialist community, the standard-bearer of Communism, has left us. May the Communists of Sweden be able to show an example when it comes to managing the inheritance from the greatest Marxist of our time, Josef Stalin. May the Swedish Communists honour Stalin’s memory by improving their knowledge of Stalin’s brilliant teachings and let them guide all our political activities. Under the honourable standard of Stalin, onwards, towards Socialism!"

One of the members of the Central Committe later became one of the most exposed and media friendly party chairmen the Swedish Communists have ever had. He, C.H.Hermansson, said that for his part: "Stalin is one of the most brilliant scientists of all times. He continued the works of Marx, Engels and Lening, organised, enriched and developed the theory of Marxism within the new circumstances created by development. During his revolutionary fight Stalin performed poineering work in many different areas – economy, politics, philosophy, the art of war, linguistics and culture among them. In each and every one of these areas his contribution is immense. Nobody can understand the problems of our time who hasn’t studied the works of Stalin. Those who haven’t studied Stalin’s theoretical works are ‘illitterate’ in the areas of economy, politics, philosophy, etc …Stalin has been the leader and the teacher, not only for the people of the Soviet Union but for the working classes all over the world. In our party’s future work we have to improve our ability to use and practice Stalin’s teachings. Lenin and Stalin are and remain the most important teachers for the Swedish working class".

Almost three years later one of Stalin’s successors, Nikita Chruschev, made his famous "secret speech" to the twentieth Soviet Party Congress, where he denounced Stalin as the periodically insane mass murderer he actually was. Sure, Chruschev mostly condemned Stalin’s murder of other Communists but the mass deportations of whole Soviet peoples were mentioned, albeit fleetingly. However that did not stop Chruschev from sending in troups six months later to drown the Hungarian revolution in blood in the autumn of 1956. The showdown on Stalinismn had at least started even though it would be another three decades before Soviet Russia was able to start dealing with Leninism and Communism.

When the Soviet powers-that-be stopped celebrating Stalin, the obedient Swedish Communists also stopped singing his praises. But as late as in his speech to the Soviet Party Congress in 1976 Lars Werner proposed toasts to the "friendship between the Soviet and Swedish Communists" and to "our common fight for peace, democracy, (!) and socialism". In the same year Werner represented Vänsterpartiet kommunisterna at the world Communist congress in Berlin. Lars Werner and others even said: "Communists have always fought hard for democratic freedoms and rights against everyone wanting to curb these rights".

Neither Lars Werner nor his friends said a word about the democratic freedoms and rights of the Baltic peoples. They had learnt not to defend the oppression in the Baltic states unnecessarily but that did not mean that they dared support the Baltic struggle against the Communist super power. Thus Vänsterpartiet kommunisterna (Vpk) refused to participate in the Baltic Peace and Freedom Cruise in the summer of 1995. And when the then party chairman Lars Werner was asked by Expressen on June 27,1988 whether in his opinion Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania should enjoy the status of free and independent countries he answered: "Yes, if such a thing as a referendum, for instance, proves that they want out of the Soviet Union."

But to the follow-up question – whether he was prepared to demand that the Soviet leaders arrange such a referendum, he answered: "I don’t advice others. I am too busy getting advice myself."

At the time Lars Werner was in trouble with comrades in his own party who disliked his boorishness towards women and his drinking. But could internal party squabbles be reason enough to refuse to support the freedom fight of entire neighbouring peoples after decades of genocide and oppression? And sure enough, Werner had dispensed advice on international issues, for example to the US to stop supporting the contras in Nicaragua. Wasn’t Communist forces in the Baltic states (at least) as bad as American capitalists’ support to contras?

In another intervju, made during the same period by the Swedish news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå in October 1987, Werner was asked why Communism always led to restrictions on personal freedom. He answered by referring to above all the development in the Soviet Union and continued: "Also in the first Eastern European Communist states external threats were used as an excuse for internal restrictions of freedom. There is no excuse for going on doing that when it is no longer necessary."

Necessary? When did mass murder, persecution and oppression become necessary? And for whom was it necessary – other than for the Party and the regime? But why was it ever necessary for Swedish Communists to defend an inhuman and thus indefensible system like Communism in power?

When the fate of the Baltic states began to be recognised in Sweden during the late eighties, even a few leftist politicians made statements in a freer vein than before. The then newly elected vice chairman of the party, Gudrun Schyman, supported the Baltic Freedom fight in warm words. Even the Moscow-educated MP Bertil Måbrink talked about the possibility to let the Baltic peoples have "their national, democratic and cultural rights provided for".

If these rights were not – and had not been – provided for, why had the Vänsterpartiet not earlier come out in favour of these demands? Why did they wait for the Communists in Moscow to show sympathy for the demands before daring to articulate them?

How many of the nursing aids, pre-school teachers, actors and other cultural workers who today support the leftist party have any idea that their predecessors on Stalin’s orders defended Hitler’s occupations of our neighbours Denmark and Norway and the genocide in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia?

For how much longer will we have to wait before today’s leftists really deal with the long silence of their own party and its co-responsibility for the crimes committed by Communist comrades across the Baltic Sea?

And how does one explain, not defend, that more and more young leftists today are prepared to call themselves Communists and defend even Lenin?

Communist theory and practice

Someone once said that Nazism and the Second World War could have been avoided if the world’s leaders had only read the Nazis’ books and taken them seriously. Maybe the same goes for Communism.

Already Karl Marx predicted that Capitalism would be replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat. But he never said what this really meant.

Lenin said in his book "The proletarian revolution and the renegate Kautsky" that "the revolution of the proletariat is a regime that has been conquered and sustained through violence directed towards the bourgeoisie, a regime that is not restricted by any laws" (26).

In the same book Lenin confessed that "where necessary for the revolution the working class should deprive the capitalists of their right to vote and dissolve every parliament that turns out to be counter revolutionary". This was according to Lenin "the only position that a marxist could take".

In this respect Lenin lived as he preached, after his party only got one fourth of the votes in the Russian election in November 1917. The newly elected Peoples’ Assembly was dissolved at its first meeting on January 5, 1918. Thus the first free election also became the last in the history of the Soviet state. Later Lenin himself confessed: "The dissolution of the Constituent assembly by the Soviet regime meant a total and open liquidation of the idea of democracy" (27).

The Swedish Communist party’s program – and later Vänsterpartiet’s – for a long time said that "the October revolution in Russia meant that the workers and farmers seized power in Russia". But the historic event that leftists – and too many others – have been accustomed to call the October revolution was nothing but a Communist coup d’état against the democratic transitional Russian government. Lenin and his Communists did not overthrow the czar, they overthrew the Kerenskij cabinet that had been elected after the revolution of February 1917.

Nor was it workers and farmers who seized power in the so called great October revolution, it was a small amount of red guards led by Lenin’s small elitist party. The so called October revolution did not even take place in October according to our chronology, it took place in November.

Lenin never pretended to be a peaceful, democratic socialist. He never showed anything but contempt for universal suffrage, parliamentarism, the rule of law and individual rights and freedoms, those things he called bourgeoisie. This however did not prevent him from demanding such rights to facilitate the Communist seizure of power, which would later abolish them.

Before the revolution Lenin demanded that the Russian authorities "immediately and without restraints acknowledge. . . freedom of the press". After the Communist coup he rejected, in a speech to the Tenth Party Congress, freedom of the press in the following word: "We have no wish to commit suicide and that is the reason why we will not introduce freedom of the press".

This to Lenin was not double standards. He never concealed that to him the only moral actions were actions that promoted the Communist revolution, the Communist party and the interests of the proletariat (as defined by him).

Already in 1904 Lenin had declared: "The basis of our faith is that things like truth, justice and virtue do not exist. Everything is relative to us, except Communism which we regard as the source of all that is true, just and virtuous".

In a speech to the Russian Communist youth organisation in 1920 Lenin added that "our moral is completely subordinated to the interests of the proletarian class struggle".

This is why the disciples of Lenin – unlike the Jesuits who falsely have been ascribed the phrase – frequently have let the ends justify the means. Long term strategy has been abandoned for confusing short sighted tactics. One instance that many Balts and others paid for with their lifes was the 1939 Nazi-Communist pact.

The pact shows the basic Communist tactic of co-operating with ideological opponents until they become strong enough to crush them or ignoring them. The Russian social democrat Plechanov saw through this as early as prior to the 1917 Communist coup in Russia. He knew what Lenin and his disciples meant by socialist unity. Plechanov said that "the Communists want unity the way people want to unite with a piece of bread – they swallow it". He found reason for suspicion in Lenin’s statements, such as this about the social democrats: "Their place is in jail regardless of whether they openly display themselves as social democrats or as without party affiliations". To the Eleventh Party Congress Lenin added that "our revolutionary courts should execute anyone who openly admits to being a social democrat".

Lenin and his Communists had nothing against co-operation with other Socialists and social democrats as long as they needed support against the czar. But as soon as they themselves had seized power the will to co-operate ended. Many social democrats and freedom loving socialists were executed when no longer needed by the Communists. Others were incarcerated in the first concentration camps, later to inspire among others the German Nazis.

The rest of the story is probably well known to anyone who wanted and wants to know. The dictatorship of the proletariat that Lenin wanted to use to replace political democracy developed into Party dictatorship over the proletariat and everybody else – and under the reign of Stalin into the Party leader’s dictatorship over the Party, the proletariat and the rest of the population.

Prior to the Communist coup in Russia Lenin declared that socialism was a pre-requisite for the different peoples’ peace and freedom. He promised to liberate the "imprisoned" nations in czarist Russia, sometimes called the "peoples’ prison".

Subsequent to the communist coup in November 1917 the new revolutionary government proclaimed that all non-Russian peoples had the right to liberate themselves. Those who wanted to would be allowed to leave the Russian empire.

For this reason Lenin is sometimes portrayed as a supporter of the idea of national self -determination. But to him this principle was only a means to and end, the end being the "world revolution" and the "dictatorship of the proletariat".

As long as the nationalism of the non-Russian peoples was directed towards czarist rule it should in other words be encouraged, but after the Communist coup nationalism could not be allowed to disturb the march towards a socialist society. The red Army was engaged in and managed to incorporate Georgia, Armenia, the Ukraine, Belorussia and Central Asia into the Communist Soviet Russian empire. Lenin also encouraged local Communists to use violence to seize power in the Baltic states towards the end of the Great War. The efforts failed but Communist infiltration from the East continued. But when an attempted coup directed from Moscow in Estonia in December 1924 had failed in getting popular support, the Communists were forced to wait until the beginning of the Second World War before they could occupy Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

During that time Stalin managed to get most of the leaders of the short lived Estonian Labour Commune of 1919 executed as well as 16 out of 21 former members of the "Latvian" Soviet government of the same year and seven out of eight former members of the "Lithuanian" Soviet government of 1918/19.

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were given a couple of decades of grace before they were occupied while Finland and Poland (apart from during the Second World War) have remained independent. In the incorporated Soviet republics no national self-determination was allowed within the most powerful power structure, the Communist party. The Communist nationalities policy saw as its main enemy, not the chauvinism of the largest nation, the Russians, but rather the "bourgeoisie nationalism" of the smaller nations. During the entire history of the Soviet state not a single Russian was sentenced for this crime while many Balts, Ukrainians, Caucasians and others were given 25 year prison sentences for demanding the same rights fort their peoples as those of the Russian "master race".

Lenin regarded religion the way he regarded nationalism. As long as naive Christians could be of use to the Communists and the Communists needed their support he attracted them by promising freedom of religion. Subsequent to the Communist take-over religion was proclaimed a capitalist relic and as such doomed to expire. To be on the safe side Lenin and his disciples resorted to euthanasia to speed up the process. Atheism became an inseparable part of Communist theory and practice – except in dealing with believers in non-Communist countries and organisations that could be useful foreign policy-wise, such as the World Council of Churches and the Lutheran World Council.

Keeping in mind everything Lenin and his followers have said and written – and carried through in practice – it is hard to understand that young people in this age are able to see themselves as his disciples. In somebody who was seriously disturbed this might be understandable but when the person in question is the chairman of a political youth organisation like Jenny Lindahl from the Communist Youth of Sweden?

For those who have experienced Communism in practice the fact that a young person calls herself a Communist is just as disturbing as it is to Jews, gypsies and others persecuted by the Nazis to see and listen to Swedish skinheads calling themselves neo-Nazis. Instead of proudly calling themselves Communists and claim that "Communists have always fought for democratic freedoms and rights" maybe today’s Communists should be ashamed and apologize or at least learn something from their party’s not always proud history?

The social democrats and the Baltic states

Before and during the Great War social democrats, like Party leader Hjalmar Branting, supported Baltic refugees. After the war Branting, "the Balts’ friend", tried to enforce a Nordic recognition of the independence of the new neighbours, the Baltic states, while the Conservatives wanted to wait and see and feared Socialist contamination from the young, radical republics. And the social democrat Mayor of Stockholm, Carl Lindhagen, tried in vain to gather support for an alliance of all the small states around the Baltic Sea – Baltic and Scandinavian.

After the Second World War almost no social democrats could be seen on the Baltic barricades. Even during these decades some politicians supported the Baltic demands for freedom – among them party leaders like Conservatives Jarl Hjalmarsson and Carl Bildt and Liberals like Bertil Ohlin and Per Ahlmark.

Others kept quiet, not least an otherwise internationally committed politician like Olof Palme. His maternal grandfather had been Dean of the Riga Institute of Technology and his mother had been raised in Latvia, where Olof Palme himself had spent the summers of his childhood. In the mid-seventies Palme and myself were appointed honorary members of the democratic resistance in the Baltics; in Palme’s case because the Baltic democrats mistakenly thought that Palme’s words about " the rights of small peoples" also applied to Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians. But Palme only supported the Baltic freedom fight publicly on one single occasion, when he as leader of the opposition made the main speech at the celebration of the Estonian day of independence in the Concert Hall in Stockholm in February 1980.

Thus the Swedish social democrats managed in the eighties to get caught in a bind on the Baltic issue. On the one hand Palme in his speech had demanded "national independence" for the Baltic states which made it difficult for him and other social democrats to critizise others who demanded human and national rights for our Baltic neighbours. On the other hand Palme definitely did not want to annoy the Soviet leaders by stating what probably was his real opinions. For that reason he never answered any of the innumerable columns where I and others called for his support for the Baltic freedom fight.

In the parliamentary foreign policy debate on March 16, 1983 Olof Palme accused the members of the Moderate party of …"returning to that crusading spirit aiming to ‘liberate’ Eastern Europe that prevailed in conservative groups in the West during the Cold War. According to this view one of the