Ethnic Conflicts in the Baltic States in Post-soviet Period

Сборник статей

This collection of articles concerns the consideration of the causes, forms of existence and mechanisms of realisation of ethnic conflicts in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia in 1991–2013 The articles presented by the authors are an attempt to understand the experience of the struggle of ethnic minorities in the countries in question against the ethnic discrimination regimes.

Ethnic conflicts in the Baltic states in post-soviet period

Collection of articles edited by Doctor of Economics

A. V. Gaponenko

This book was published with the financial support of the Foundation for Legal Support of Russians Living Abroad

В© Edited by Doctor of Economics A. V. Gaponenko. Institute for European Studies, Riga, 2013

Foreword

The USSR had existed for three quarters of a century. For all that time, the ruling Communist elite conducted a policy of formation of a single political nation out of the extremely ethnically heterogeneous population of the country. This nation was called �Soviet people’, which was not a correct term from the point of view of modern science.

The Soviet nation was built based on the principles of internationalism, i.e. equality of all ethnic groups. To ensure such equality, during the Communist years most of those ethnic groups received their own state education: Soviet and autonomous republics, districts and at some point even regions and townships. As a part of the state education, those so-called main ethnic groups were able to develop their languages and culture freely, open schools and universities, have their own media and publish books, newspapers and magazines in their languages. Many ethnic groups received their written language for the first time. Ethnic groups that were not considered main also were present in the ethnic formation provided by the state. They had a lower social status and considerably less opportunities for their ethnic development.

Russian was the official language in the USSR. This was determined by a large number of Russian population. Highly �sovietised’ Russian culture dominated in the USSR. It was due to a large number of Russian culture organisations and their production of large volumes of high-quality �cultural product’. However, the USSR was not the state of Russian people. Russians did not have their own state formation or their own structural division in the ruling Communist Party.

In the course of building the Soviet nation, the ruling elite did not allow ethnic conflicts. The main tool of the regulation of the relations between individual ethnic groups was the dominating Communist ideology. However, when the ideas of universal equality failed to work, the Communists did not hesitate to use force. The elites involved in the ethnic conflicts lost their social status and were separated from their public. In extreme cases, mass relocation of conflicting ethnic groups to completely new places of settlement and liquidation of their state entities took place. Russians were not an exception in this respect.

In the last years of the USSR, the Communists stopped to use force for settlement of both social and ethnic conflicts. Then they loosened their control over the public consciousness, including the sphere of interethnic relations. As a result of that, during the democratic transformations that took place after 1986, in all Soviet and most of the Autonomous Republics national-communists came to power. They started redistributing the resources in their own favour and in favour of their native ethnic groups. The ideas of internationalism were abandoned completely.

All this led to immediate manifestation of the ethnic conflicts that had been smoothed over by the Communists. Actual ethnic wars started between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, between Moldavia and Pridnestrovie (Transnistria). Ethnic civil wars broke out in Kirghizia and Tajikistan. Ethnic conflict between Uzbekistan and Kirghizia also saw some use of force. Ethnic clashes erupt