Problems of Baltic historiography, 1939-41
ENThe Soviet historian M.N. (Mikhail Nikolayevich) Pokrovsky was heavily attacked after his death for his assertion that history was politics thrust upon the past. But the attention paid in the last few years to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 and to the events of 1939–40 in the Baltic would suggest that there is no shortage of examples of Pokrovsky’s dictum. Such political history constitutes the substance of my thoughts here. In this chapter I will consider various sorts of problems, mostly revolving around questions of sources and what to trust in reconstructing the history of 1939–41—the politics of sources and problems of understanding them. In this period, we can distinguish three phases: August 1939–June 1940, the shadow of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; June–August 1940, the Soviet takeover of the eastern shore of the Baltic; and August 1940–June 1941, the establishment of Soviet rule. Conditions were different in each. I will consider the significance of the pact, some details of the Soviet takeover, questions of relations between nationalities, and the problem of an individual’s finding his place in a dynamically changing situation. I will concentrate on the Lithuanian experience, but many of the questions with which I will concern myself also obtain in one form or another for the other two states, Latvia and Estonia. [...]. [Extract, p. 491]
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