Although the three Baltic republics had been part of the European continent even during Soviet times, the “iron curtain” – to use Churchill's words – separated the communist world from western Europe for almost half a century. Indeed, Soviet-era censorship had magnified the psychological impact of the separation. Not all parts of the communist world were equally far removed from the “capitalist west”; the cultural borders of the eastern European satellite states were relatively permeable to western influences of various kinds, and in the Baltic littoral access to Finnish television images, the Voice of America, and other western stations was possible with special equipment in spite of jamming (although illegal). Western sailors brought western magazines and music cassettes to Baltic seaports, and even the Communist Party had become somewhat tolerant of western musical and fashion “fads” among the young from the 1970s on.

By the later 1980s, however, when barriers of all sorts began to fall, a cascade of impressions, revelations, and personal observations merged into a general feeling of socioeconomic and cultural backwardness that was both enervating and inspiring. The reentry into a dynamic and prosperous Europe would doubtlessly place the Baltic littoral at the bottom of European states in terms of socioeconomic measurements – a humiliating position; even so, the move would ensure progress toward “normality,” a societal characteristic that was mentioned with increasing frequency in the Baltic media.