mattbell

Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia have recovered remarkably well from their half-century of oppression. If you don't stray from the downtown areas, it's hard to see any trace of it aside from the various monuments commemorating its end. They did get a lot of financial assistance from the EU, but simply throwing money at the problem is no guarantee of results; there was clearly the passion and knowledge on the part of the Baltic states to make the rapid recovery happen.

In the late 1980s as the old Soviet Union was weakening, the eastern European republics began to push for independence.* While the USSR was weak, it was still far more powerful than the tiny Baltic states that stood up to it. Russia sent troops to violently suppress these independence movements but ultimately they gave in to international pressure and let them break off.

It's impressive how resilient these countries were given what they experienced. On the eve of World War II, Hitler and Stalin secretly divided up the (independent) countries of Eastern Europe. Russia orchestrated takeovers of the Baltic republics and promptly exterminated religious and political leaders, intellectuals, businesspeople, and any other dissenting voices. Hundreds of thousands of people died. A couple of years later, when Germany turned on Russia, the Nazis took over the Baltic republics. Initially many residents saw them as liberators, but the Nazis soon made it clear they had other plans. They documentted the mass killings of the Russians, blamed these actions on the Jews, and then set up concentration camps to kill the city's Jewish population and anyone who had helped the Russians during their occupation. Toward the end of the war, Russia recaptured the country and again exterminated any dissenters as well as anyone who whad worked with the Germans. For the next 45 years, the countries were run into the ground by the distant, autocratic, and incompetent government in Moscow. (eg farmers were often directed by Moscow to grow crops that were unsuitable for the region.) Despite all of this, the residents of these countries were willing to stand up to the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and risk violent suppression to gain independence.

This is stunning when you think about it. Anyone who was 20 when the Baltics lost their independence would have been in their late sixties when the independence movement returned, so the vast majority of residents at the time would have known nothing but oppression.

Not surprisingly, these countries all have a strong national identity. Here's one concrete way of measuring it -- they are among the least populous countries to have their own domestic film industry. It's as if the residents of San Francisco spoke their own language, and big-budget films were made and marketed in this language for consumption purely by San Francisco residents.

*(In a Gandhi-esque moment of protest, the residents of the three countries formed an unbroken human chain from one end of the region to the other.)