World Affairs International

Walking through the SoHo district of New York City, I came across a box full of books. Among many titles, including works by Secretary of State George P. Schultz and Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, I found an old, tan book. Given that most others looked far newer, it immediately caught my attention, and I stowed it away even as my friends glanced over cookbooks and recipes for their upcoming Spring break.

My first impression of The Baltic Riddle was that it was some old collection of Baltic folklore. I had already walked several blocks away from where I had found it when I peeked inside, and to my surprise, found an analysis of the Baltic States from the Second World War. More fascinatingly, the book itself was printed in the midst of the German occupation of the Baltics, with a disclaimer on its opening pages that the book’s size and margins had been reduced for the war effort.

Immediately I was impressed, assuming I had found some sort of historical treasure. A cursory glance online drew back my initial optimism—the few reviews it had lambasted it as a work of communist propaganda. It was only then that I, having not even arrived home yet, began to search up the author himself. Though the first few queries gave little save for communist discussion forums which proposed The Baltic Riddle as a good counterargument to ideas of Baltic nationalism, closer research over the next few days inspired me not only to complete the book, but write a brief sum of my thoughts on its contents.

Gregory Meiksins, per his own words, was born in Latvia on September 20^th, 1911. No Latvian nation existed then, but the seeds of Latvian independence had been sown by its unique history—one which Meiksins’ characterization of is reliable and fair. Throughout the first Part of his work, Meiksins explains the history of the Baltic nations, fixating on its history at the crossroads between rampaging Teutonic knights and the rise of the Russian Empire. Through a careful look at his work, in comparison to various other online/literary resources, his writing is fairly accurate, with nuances.

Knowing roughly where Meiksins would take his narrative, I found his characterization of the Baltic-Russian relationship to be interesting—to him, the Baltic was Russia’s lungs, whereas to the Baltic, Russia consisted of two separate identities—Czarist Russia, which imposed upon the Baltic States its oppressive Germanic aristocracy, and the Russian people, who Meiksins mentions in regards to attempted policies of Russification. In these instances, he counters Russification with Germanization, as if each choice is one or the other. Later in the New York Times, he clarifies his belief that the Balts are separate from both. Nevertheless, he presents the history of the Baltic peoples’ identity as a dichotomy between Germany and Russia.

Meiksins is very careful to separate the Russian Empire from Russia, a difference which he marks often. He repeats this in his brief characterization of Finland, where his bias is more evident—in attributing Finnish independence to the joint struggle for Bolshevism by the Russian peoples against ‘Russian Czarist forces’. As such, Meiksins lays the first justifications for Soviet aggression long before he addresses Soviet Russia’s actions, or even existence.

From prehistory to just after the First World War, Meiksins’ history of the Baltics is tentatively accurate. His chronology of events in regards to the rise of dictatorships in the Baltic region is reasonably true as well, but biased wording decorate his writing. In all of his scenarios, the Soviet presence is written as benevolent and sympathetic to the cause of Baltic independence. Blame for fascism is assigned to supposed Allied-German cooperation in keeping the Baltic in German hands, whilst glossing over the extent of Russian influence and pressure on the Baltic region. His characterizations of the Baltic dictatorships are that they walked willingly into the hands of Hitler irrespective of what he considers to be benign, friendly overtures on the part of the Soviet Union.

Meiksins left Latvia for the United States in his mid-20s, per Orville Prescott of the New York Times. Writing in the midst of Nazi Germany’s rampage through the Baltic countries, it is impossible not to sympathize with the basis of Meiksins’ antifascist rhetoric. What must be questioned is his reliability as a fair narrator of the nature of the Baltic/Finnish political system, particularly as they were after Hitler’s ascent to power. Meiksins, through omissions of Russian terrorism and brutality, paints an image of Soviet benevolence to the Baltic people. Meiksins rages against Polish, British, and German injustices against the Baltic people, but refuses to name a single Soviet crime: and not for want of.

His most egregious claims center around antifascism, with the following notion:

Nor had the Red Army ceased its preparations for the struggle against Fascism, even during the “peace that fostered revenge in its bosom,” as the Russians aptly called the Russo-German Pact of August 22, 1939.

Gregory Meiksins via The Baltic Riddle, pg. 116

This is a flat out lie. The Soviet pravda’s mentions of Fascism dropped to a minimum over the course of September 1939-August 1941, and Stalin’s attempts to involve the Soviets on the side of the Axis only ceased on the eve of Operation Barbarossa. As for the Red Army’s supposed preparation against the German war machine, it was precisely so unprepared that there was virtually no resistance at all to the German invasion until Stalin, in complete disbelief as to Hitler’s betrayal, ordered a defense to commence.

For Meiksins, Soviet intervention and Soviet ignorance can be written as needed, without regard for the other. His praise of Soviet deterrence immediately runs counter to his later claims that the Red Army purposefully ignored the pleas of its communist partners in Latvia, and sought to preserve democratic institutions even if they led increasingly to fascism. This is a falsehood, and the Soviet purges of Latvian anticommunists, fascists and liberals alike, is well-documented now as it was then.

Second is an excerpt from the following set of pages, where Meiksins describes with clinical terms the supposed ‘benevolence’ of Russian liberation.

Nobody could predict which way the Germans would choose to move. Rather than take further risks, the Russians decided not to tolerate pro-Fascist regimes any longer. Strong warnings were given to these governments. Soviet tanks rumbled through the frontier posts, rushing to enter the capitals. of the Baltic states. This served as a signal for the popular opposition . . . But the mere presence of Soviet troops alone cannot explain the immediate response of the huge public majority which supported the new government and accepted the changes as inevitable and necessary . . . with resistance limited to isolated instances, terrorist measures were hardly necessary.

Gregory Meiksins via The Baltic Riddle, pg. 118-119

At least 35,000 Latvians were killed or disappeared into the Siberian hinterland of the Soviet Union. More than a hundred thousand fled into Western Europe, which in the case of diminutive Latvia, was an overwhelming loss of population. They were joined by many tens of thousands more after the Second World War ended,

Meiksins’ categorization of the Soviets in 1943 may have occurred before public knowledge of the German-Soviet carving of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence (which assigned the Baltic regions to the Soviets and earmarked them for Russian invasion), but the accounts of Latvian dissenters, many of whom arrived in the United States, were more than numerous. His credibility on the Soviet treatment of the Baltics and Finland is, more than any other section of his book, highly dubious.

But the above-mentioned quotations happen to be the most quoted inferences of Meiksins’ book amongst socialist and communist internet forums. Does credibility elsewhere on historic matters lend him credibility here? No. But for echo-chambers dedicated to justifying Russian revisionism to Westerners, the young Meiksins’ description of his home country and its Baltic neighbors is more than enough to perpetuate the existence of any ‘Baltic question’ to this day.

To a certain extent, Meiksins was blinded by his ideology. Dr. Alfred Bilmanis, 24 years his senior, sums up Meiksins as follows:

It is impossible for me to conceive that a real Latvian would advocate the suppression of his country by a foreign power, and in a free democracy like the United States at that, as Mr. Meiksins does . . . Moreover, although Moscow is only eighteen hours by train from Riga, the capital of Latvia, and Mr. Meiksins praises the Soviet system so highly, he nevertheless preferred to travel the long distance to America rather than spend his self-termed “exile” in his beloved Soviet Union.

Dr. Alfred Bilmanis via The New York Times

Of course, Dr. Bilmanis is not infallible. He himself wrote scathingly of the Soviet occupation without applying the same terms to the Germans, as follows:

At the same time it is evident also that the change from the monstrous terroristic military occupation by Soviet Russia—to military occupation by German troops apparently taking place at the present moment in Latvia will not bring freedom and full independence to Latvia and its inhabitants.

Dr. Alfred Bilmanis via the Wilson Center

And yet, Dr. Bilmanis is markedly different than Meiksins in his rejection of the notion that the Baltics can thrive under either. Though his criticism of Nazi Germany is uncannily tempered in comparison to his characterization of Soviet occupation, he makes clear that Latvia’s future must be independent of either, whereas Meiksins’ internationalism stands in favor of Latvian membership within the Soviet Union.

The problem with Meiksins lies precisely in this: the paradoxical nature of claiming to be both a non-Russian nationalist and a communist. He refuses to acknowledge the simple reality: that Soviet expansionism through the creation of satellite states is a direct continuance of the Russian imperial project. His disbelief that Stalin’s regime would not perpetuate the policies of Russification that today plague the history of Eastern Europe stands in contrast to the bitter struggle for the Baltic identity in the long years of the Cold War.

On some level, he must have known—else he would have not left for the United States. Why else would he come to America, if he had not seen the risk of joining more than 35,000 of his people slaughtered by the Soviet regime? Did he not know or even suspect the crimes perpetrated under Stalin’s occupation of his homeland? This is precisely what Dr. Bilmanis’ criticism of Meiksins implies, and what makes Meiksins’ rebuttal ultimately miss its mark. Other Latvian expatriates, arriving both before and after Meiksins, were aware of the terror being inflicted on the Baltic people by the Soviet regime. Meiksins, himself never present in the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, had no authority to defend the purported actions of a regime he refused to reside in. Like today’s common trope of Russians defending Putin from their apartments in Berlin, his willful ignorance of authoritarianism destroys his credibility.

Whether or not Meiksins could have predicted his nation’s emancipation from the iron curtain, the Baltics have emerged as the core of resistance against Russian imperialism in the war in Ukraine. Retrospectively, his work is depressing. If written today, it reads as any long-winded article from the so-called ‘realists’ who justify Russian expansionism, through the boogeyman of the ‘capitalist’, ‘woke’, ‘interventionist’ America. What separates him from the propagandists of today is that in his case, the alternative to the Soviet Union was truly an evil, genocidal power—not Western democracy.

Caught between Hitler and Stalin, it is difficult to judge by modern standards the choices made by those who, in the bloodiest battlefields of the Second World War, sought to preserve their independence amidst giants. Yet, some did it back then. As such, The Baltic Riddle is worth reading, as a valuable perspective into the question of preserving a nation’s identity in a contest of great powers. But ultimately, as many communist theorists during the rise of the Soviet regime, Meiksins’ work is akin to placing a noose around himself and his country. Only by the democratic principles of the nation which harbored him, one whose supposed ‘propaganda’ he so viciously attacked—did he not meet the fate of countless others in his place.