Preface

Summary

The story of present-day Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania must begin not at the time when countries bearing those names appeared on the European map, but when a group of stateless peoples settled permanently on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea during the fifth and sixth centuries ad. At that time, to the south, the Roman Empire had already dissolved and, in what was to become France, the Merovingian and Carolingian kings were trying to form a successor state. Much later, in the medieval period, only one of the Baltic seacoast peoples – the Lithuanians – succeeded in creating a state of their own; the other two – the Estonians and Latvians – lost such political leaders as they had by the end of the thirteenth century and until the twentieth remained subordinated to German-, Swedish-, and Russian-speaking landowning aristocracies. The Lithuanians too lost their medieval state through a voluntary union with Poland that created a commonwealth in which the Poles became the dominant force politically and socially. Only after World War I did cartographers redraw their maps of Europe to include Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as independent nation-states. Twenty years later, they had to rework them again because the three countries were absorbed by the Soviet Union in 1940 and became soviet socialist republics. The redrawing exercise was not repeated until 1991, when the USSR collapsed and the three Baltic states resumed their independence.