Historical demography in the Baltic States: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Baltijos šalys (Baltic states); Estija (Estonia); Istorinė demografija; Latvija (Latvia); Historical demography; Latvia; Lithuania; The Baltic States.

ENIn the twentieth century, academic scholarship focused on the historical development of the populations of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia did not have the opportunity to develop fully because in 1940 the USSR occupied these three countries and for the next half century imposed on population research the ideological orthodoxies of the Communist Party, which frequently treated demographic facts about the territories of the USSR as state secrets. Interest in the scholarship trends and methodological innovations in western countries was discouraged and often condemned, and citations of western scholars were viewed with suspicion. The sparse scholarly work of the interwar period, when the three Baltic countries were independent, could not therefore make very much progress. Even so, in Lithuania scholars compiled and published population sources from the relatively distant past but normally did not apply to them the analytical methodology that was coming into prominence from the 1950s on in western countries. A similar situation obtained in Latvia, though there a few monographs addressing historical-population questions did appear but were cast in the style of traditional population history rather than that of historical demography, and tended to use aggregate figures rather than rates and calculations of trend lines. Investigation of familial structures in historical Latvian territory was carried out from the 1970s onward principally by scholars in the Latvian western diaspora. Estonia differed from its two Baltic neighbors as a result of visits there by Peter Laslett, one of the members of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, whose presentations captured the imagination of a handful of scholars and resulted in the publication during the 1970s and 1980s of numerous monographs using nearly the full panoply of western historical demographic methods. [From the publication]