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The Baltic States
Three small nations on Europe's most closely watched frontier
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania form the least ambiguous grouping in this collection, and even here the edges blur. The three are Baltic by coastline rather than by kinship: Latvian and Lithuanian are the last survivors of the Baltic branch of Indo-European, while Estonian is Finno-Ugric, closer to Finnish than to either neighbor. Nobody in Tallinn imagines they share a language with Vilnius. What they do share is a fifty-year Soviet occupation, a simultaneous escape from it, and a border with Russia that has made them the most closely watched frontier in Europe. The label itself is young — after 1918 it often included Finland, and sometimes Poland.
The land is glacial leftovers: low, wet, and forested, with almost no relief. Woodland covers more than half of Estonia and Latvia, bogs and peatlands take much of the rest, and the highest point in the three countries combined, Latvia's Gaizinkalns at 312 meters, is a hill by any honest measure. The Baltic Sea gives them a shared coast of dunes, pine, and amber, from Estonia's roughly 2,000 islands through the broad Gulf of Riga to the sandbar of Lithuania's Curonian Spit. The Daugava and the Nemunas carry water down from Belarus and Russia. Winters are long and grey, summers brief and luminous, marked by midsummer bonfires and choral festivals that draw tens of thousands of singers at once.
Ruled in turn by Danes, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Russians, the three declared independence in 1918, lost it to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940. Deportations, Russification, and industrial resettlement followed, which is why Estonia and Latvia still hold sizeable Russian-speaking minorities. Independence returned in 1990 and 1991 through the Singing Revolution and the Baltic Way, when roughly two million people joined hands in a human chain 675 kilometers long. All three entered NATO and the European Union in 2004 and now use the euro. With about six million people between them, they carry disproportionate weight in digital government, cyber-defense, and warnings about Moscow that the rest of Europe has learned to heed.