It has already been pointed out by many scholars that the supranational Soviet state meets many sociological criteria of an empire. Thus, it is populated by many different ethnic groups; they did not join the state voluntarily, having all been conquered in the past or incorporated into the state by force; and they are still forcefully kept together, even though force is far from being the only factor. Last but not least, the Soviet empire, like any other, has one dominating nation: the Russians. Thus, many regularities in other empires may also be applicable to the Soviet Union.

In this paper we present an approach to national problems in Estonia today and report an empirical assessment of some of the major causes that have brought us to the complicated problematic situation today. We make use of materials from sociological public opinion research done in 1986 and 1988.

National relations in the Second Republic contained a number of problems which throughout the entire interwar period did not find an appropriate solution. Among those was the question of the Orthodox Church in Poland. Although its believers comprised over 11 percent of the country's population, up to 1938 the Polish authorities did not legally regulate the organizational and material situation of the Orthodox Church in Poland, which was founded as a unit independent of the Russian Orthodox Church after the proclamation of an autocephalous status in 1922.

The history of Judaism in the Soviet Union is not a happy one. The Soviet Union, in a policy reminiscent of the premodern age, has persecuted the Jewish religion and not—with the exception of the 1948-53 period—Jews as persons. This does not mean that there was not discrimination. Anti-Jewish discrimination began about 1944 and presumably still continues in spite of Gorbachev's reported attempts to ease it. But we see no clear signs that the purges of the thirties were directed at Jewish party members as such. Recent research also does not credit the once common belief that the liquidation of the “Evsektsiia” (Jewish sections of the Communist party) in 1930 was an anti-Jewish act.

Common historical wisdom has it that the Peasant Revolt of 1907 and the elections of December 1937 reflected the profound anti-Semitism of the Romanian peasantry. And since the events of 1907 and 1937 have also been looked upon as decisive in determining the course of the history of the peasantry, if not of Romania as such, it seems only proper to assess the accuracy of these contentions.

The revolt of 1907 was indeed a social movement directed against the exploitation of the impoverished Moldavian and Wallachian peasantry by Romanian landlords and Jewish “arendaşi” (Leaseholders). After 1907, and throughout the interwar years, Romanian historiography and political propaganda stressed the anti-Semitic character of the uprising in an effort to exonerate the absentee, and other, Romanian landowners and to emphasize the exploitative nature of Jews and Jewish capitalism. The Jewish question was organically connected with the peasant question in a variety of ways, all condemnatory of Jewish and Judaizing capitalism.

As none of the major political parties of pro-World War I Romania—or, for that matter, few of interwar Romania as well—paid more than lip service to the economic and social plight of the peasants, it was convenient to regard the Jew as the root cause of all the evils affecting the peasantry. Before World War I, populists and, paradoxically, socialists enunciated political theories regarding “neoserfdom,” which, however different in origin, converged in demands for radical land reform. The reform came not because of such demands but because of the Bolshevik Revolution and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. Officially, it was unrelated to any political ideology, certainly separated from the Jewish question which, in theory, was resolved concurrently with the peasant question through the granting of citizenship and extension of political rights to the Jews of Romania. Following the countrywide agrarian reform in Greater Romania the peasant and the Jewish questions were in fact severed as Jews and Jewish capitalism had virtually no connections with the land.

One of the blank areas of Latvian history is the period of German occupation 1941-45. Especially obscure are the crimes against humanity and war crimes committied during that period. It is so in the West among the emigrés, and the situation is no better in Soviet Latvia. It is a taboo topic all around—the Soviets have made it taboo by sitting on the evidence, the Latvians abroad have made it taboo for their own convoluted reasons.

The Soviet absorption of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania during World War II caused hundreds of thousands of Baltic immigrants to come to the West, where they established strong, viable ethnic communities, often in league with groups that had left the region earlier. At first, Baltic publishing and publications centered almost exclusively on nationalistic themes that decried the loss of Baltic independence and attacked the Soviet Union for its role in this matter. In time, however, serious scholarship began to replace some of the passionate outpourings, and a strong, academic field of Baltic scholarship emerged in the West that dealt with all aspects of Baltic history, politics, culture, language, and other matters, regardless of its political or nationalistic implications. Over the past sixteen years, these efforts have produced a new body of Baltic publishing that has revived a strong interest in Baltic studies and has insured that regardless of the continued Soviet-domination of the region, the study of the culture and history of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania will remain a set fixture in Western scholarship on Eastern Europe.

The Baltic Way

Over the millenia the destiny of the Baltic nations has been shaped by their location on the crossroads of Northern and Eastern Europe. The history of the Baltic nations is one of the cooperation between the west and the east but it is also a history that is marked by a power struggle between the east and the west. This power struggle condemend the Baltic nations to languis under the domination of foreigners who have always tried to deny or restrict the rights of the native populations to determine their own destinies. But even under the domination of the foreigners the Baltic peoples—the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanians—have managed to maintain their own cultural identity.

This article by Zenon Pozniak is the last of a two-part series on the question of bilingualism. Part one, an article by Maté Hint, appeared in Volume XVI, Number 1 (Spring 1988) pp. 94-105.

In its 6th and 7th issues last year, “Rainbow” published an article by the linguist Mati Hint entitled “The Problems of Bilingualism: A View Without Rose-tinted Glasses.” The article, which examines the problems of bilingualism, provoked a debate which went far beyond the boundaries not only of Estonia and bilingualism, but according to many beyond the boundaries of permissibility. We know that the problem of bilingualism in the nationalities republics is a highly acute one, but we did not expect such an avalanche of responses…. Mati Hint's article continued its “religious procession through the country, eliciting more and more responses from people of feeling and conscience from all the corners of our country. In their responses people write “Rainbow” about their innermost concerns—about their people and about their native tongue. Today we received letters fom Moscow, Georgia, Armenia, Belorussia, Latvia, Lithuania, Chuvash, etc. The journal “Peoples' Friendship” ordered our writer Mati Hint to write an article about the problems of bilingualism.