Historians of international relations between the wars have on the whole been preoccupied with events in London, Paris, Berlin, and Moscow. Few have been long detained by the view from Helsinki and Stockholm, let alone that from Tallinn, Riga, and Kaunas. John Duncan Gregory, of the Northern Department of the Foreign Office, relegated the Baltic area to ‘the edge of diplomacy’ in his memoirs and there it remained until more recent times. It was as if the Baltic republics in particular, like other ‘small’ powers in South East Europe and East Europe, had an existence which could be measured only in terms of what ‘great’ powers did to them. As late as 1986 a scholarly study was published with the revealing title: From Competition to Rivalry. The Anglo–German Relationship in the Countries at the European Periphery. As Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania mark the 50th anniversary of the Soviet takeover in 1940 by insisting on independence talks with Gorbachev's government, the Baltic region can be seen to be anything but peripheral. Nothing illustrates this more effectively than the way in which today's Baltic republics have made the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact of August 1939 a focal point in their renewed struggle for statehood. In doing so they have prised open cracks in the Soviet constitutional order itself.

The year 1990 seems therefore an appropriate time to emphasise the centrality of Baltic issues to the outbreak of the Second World War.