”Elections are lovelier, the second time around. Just as wonderful with both feet on the ground” would somewhat paraphrased have been a suitable piece of music for Sauli Niinistö last Sunday evening. The song “The second time around”, performed among others by Frank Sinatra undoubtedly described the sentiments of the newly elected president, who with an overwhelming majority won the Finnish presidential elections on Sunday (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8J9BEmiY5w) In the 2006 presidential elections Niinistö lost the presidency with a small margin to the incumbent, Tarja Halonen, the first and so far only women president of Finland.

Sauli Niinistö, a former finance minister and speaker of the parliament from the conservative National Coalition party received 62,7 per cent of the votes, a result which came as no surprise. Pekka Haavisto, from the green party, who surprisingly won the second ticket to the second round was supported by 37,6 per cent of the voters. Some commentators claimed  that there were two winners of the elections, but only one president elected. During the two weeks between the first and second round of the presidential elections the two finalists travelled around the country to mobilize the “homeless” voters. The social media were used by the campaign staffs and activists to mobilize people to vote for their candidates. Moreover, the internet was also used for micro-finding for the campaign of Pekka Haavisto, which is a completely new feature in political campaigning in Finland. Sauli Niinistö’s campaign was financially supported by big finance and industry in addition to the party financial support, Haavisto had a considerably smaller campaign budget and in addition to the green party, predominantly organizations and people from the civil society and culture collected money by organizing concerts and events.

The electoral turnout of 68,8 per cent was lower than in the first round of the presidential elections. In the previous presidential elections in 2006 the voter turnout was 77,2 in the second round, that is, the electoral turnout dropped considerably. Moreover, it was lower than in the parliamentary elections of 2011, which is surprising against the background that voting has been higher in presidential than in parliamentary elections. The fact that the two candidates did not compete along any of the traditional conflict dimensions is part of the explanation. Firstly, for the first time since direct elections of the president were introduced (1994) the final round was not a competition between a candidate from the left and the right, but rather between a market-liberal and value-conservative and a liberal internationalist. Secondly, both candidates represent the urban southern Finland and voters of the rural northern and eastern parts abstained from voting as they probably conceived that none of the candidates in the final round could represent their regional concerns and EU-scepticism. Thirdly, as Finland has had a female president for twelve years gender was not an issue relevant for political mobilization this time.   

The person of the presidential candidates in terms of experience, representative ability and trustworthiness  has in comparison to party ideology and policy issues been of great importance when presidents are elected, but these presidential elections can without doubt be considered as the most personalized during the last 30 years. As the differences between the Sauli Niinistö and Pekka Haavisto were small in foreign and security policies  – they did not see Finnish membership in the NATO as an immediate concern, but an option if the situation should change, they cherish Nordic cooperation and good relations with Russia – their personalities was played out in their campaigns in addition to that the media took a great interest in their background, families, life-style, economy and even if and which pets they have. (Yes, the new president has a dog named Lennu).

Sauli Niinistö and Pekka Haavisto have had parallel political careers, but in different political parties and settings. Both became members of the Finnish  parliament for the first time in 1987 and had their first ministerial experiences in the broadly based rainbow coalition formed in 1995. Sauli Niinistö started as a Minister of Jurisprudence, but his reputation (and part of the popularity) comes from his period as a tough a budget-discplinising Minister of Finance. Pekka Haavisto, who back in 1995 was the first green minister of Europe and had transformed the green movement to a political party, assumed the Minister of Environment and Foreign Aid. He started a diplomatic career with conflict resolution and diplomacy in the Palestine, Sudan and other countries for the UN and the EU after he resigned from the government in 1999. Sauli Niinistö has been the Speaker of the Finnish parliament and has been the vice-president for the European Investment bank. Both candidates were experienced politicians, however, with different trajectories depending on their policy interests. Haavisto campaigned on his international merits and humanitarian experiences and targeted his campaign on issues as tolerance and solidarity in Finland and abroad. His unforeseen success is the result of a popular counter-mobilisation to the parliamentary breakthrough of the populist and nationalist party of the True Finns in the parliamentary elections last spring. The symphatisers expressed that Haavisto represented a truer Finnishness – Nordic openness, solidarity and internationalism – than the True Finns did. Sauli Niinistö had a firm background in traditional party politics and has been the chairman of the European conservative political parties. Sauli Niinistö is the first president of the National Coalitions party since Juho Kustaa Paasikivi (1946-1956) and the conservative party that was isolated from government until 1987 because it was not conceived of as trustworthy in the eyes of the Soviet Union, now controls both the Prime Minister and the President of Finland.  The political landscape of Finland has changed dramatically in the last years as the voters are more volatile and more prone to change political party from one election to the other.

However, the family-constellations of the two candidates played a major role in the elections. Pekka Haavisto is in a registered partnership with a male Ecuadorian hair-dresser and for the value-conservative voters it was unconceivable with a gay president who would welcome the guests to the annual indendence festivities and represent Finland internationally with a husband at his side. The fact that Sauli Niinistös wife is thirty years younger than himself raised some criticism as well. Nevertheless, both candidates engaged their partners in the election campaign and played on the issue of their representative abilities and against the background of the reduced competencies of the president and the increased personalization the question is whether the Finnish president rather is functional king and elected monarch? 

So, how come that Niinistö was elected with such a great margin and will that impact of how he as a president interprets the role of the new presidency? Sauli Niinistö explained his success by saying that his popularity resides in that he is so Finnish – a nice person, somewhat shy and not so talkative. Given his background as a market liberal person and a background as an advocate of cutting down welfare benefits, his value conservatism in combination with the fact that this was the second time he ran for president were crucial. Sauli Niinistö has throughout the entire presidential campaign been clear on how the role of the new president is to be played. Since the president has a direct mandate from the people he is entitled to engage also in other policy domains than those prescribed in the Finnish constitution. He has signalled that he will set up a working group on how to cope with the social exclusion of young people in Finland and that he will set up an informal evening meetings with politicians and others (modeled on the  weekly evening meeting of the cabinets). Sauli Niinistö will not restrict himself to the position of an opinion-moulder, on the contrary, he has at several occasions said that his mission is not to change the way people think. Given the strong support of Sauli Niinistö he is likely to use it as a motive for intervening in domestic politics. And, many voters still long for a strong president.  Foreign and security politics has traditionally been an issue of consensus in Finnish politics, but it is likely that changes are come compared to Tarja Halonen’s engagement in human rights and international solidarity. The developing new markets will be of greater concern, and Niinistö has said that his role is not to teach other states how to do things. The question is whether this applies to human rights and democratic diplomacy as well?  

When the voters go to the polls for the second round of the Finnish presidential election on Sunday February 5, the ultimate winner will be destined for a significantly weakened presidential office.  In the first round of the presidential elections last Sunday Sauli Niinistö, from the National Coalition party, with 37 per cent of the votes and Pekka Haavisto representing the greens with 18,8 per cent made it to the second round.  The role of the future president was of the main issues during the first round of electoral campaign and will be further debated during the upcoming week between the two finalists. Under the amended Constitution that takes effect in March this year, further powers have been stripped from the office of president. Beyond the issues of the EU, Finnish membership in NATO, intolerance towards ethnic, cultural, linguistic and sexual minorities and widening wealth gaps in Finnish society, the ongoing election debate has been characterized by disagreements about how the new presidential role should be shaped. To bowdlerize Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author, the Finnish presidential office invites contradictory expectations and a variety of takes on how the role as head of state should be interpreted.

A gradual parliamentarization of the Republic of Finland began when President Urho Kekkonen stepped down from a record-long and autocratic presidency, which lasted from 1956 to 1981. The dualism in Finnish government, where the president shared executive power with the cabinet and legislative power with the parliament, has gradually transitioned into a monistic form of government where the president is answerable to both the cabinet and the parliament. Like the French model, the Finnish model of semi-presidentialism gave the president significant foreign and domestic powers. The president appointed the person charged with forming a government (in practice, the prime minister), was empowered to dissolve the parliament and call a new election, and could make individual appointments to high-level state offices. The president also directed foreign and security policy and was the commander in chief of the armed forces. And there were no term limits. During President Kekkonen’s long-term presidency (1956-1981) these powers meant that the president exerted strong influence over domestic policy, including through foreign policy means.

Finland’s special relationship with the Soviet Union and the president’s responsibility for foreign and security policy offered Kekkonen, in his capacity as guarantor of trusting relations with its neighbor in the east, ample opportunities to use foreign policy as a cudgel in domestic policy disputes regarding, among else, the political credibility of political parties and individual candidates in Soviet eyes. President Kekkonen has also been accused of using Soviet threats to strengthen his own position. Among else, claims have been made that the Note Crisis of 1961, when the Soviet Union wanted to renegotiate the FCMA (Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance) treaty, was engineered by Kekkonen to outmaneuver the Social Democratic candidate Olavi Honka in the upcoming presidential election. The decades of the Kekkonen era were dark years from the democratic standpoint: Urho Kekkonen’s term in office was extended by emergency law from 1974 to 1978. Every political party except the Christian League and the Finnish Rural Party nominated Kekkonen as their candidate in the 1978 presidential election.

The first reform after Kekkonen resigned was to introduce direct election of the president, which seems somewhat contradictory considering that the president is given legitimacy by the people, independent of the parliament. Before the reform, the voters had elected electors to electoral colleges, which appointed the president – providing ample opportunity for strategic maneuvering and political horse-trading.

Direct election was fully applied for the first time in 1994. The new Constitution of 2000 took the first step away from semi-presidentialism and towards a more parliamentary presidency when the president was stripped of certain means of exerting power over domestic policy, including the power to appoint the person charged with forming a government (indirectly, the prime minister), dissolve parliament, and call a new election. The president’s foreign and security policy powers were retained, however, which led to disputes about who should represent Finland at meetings of the European Council and when the EU dealt with foreign and defense policy matters. This was a flashpoint issue in situations when the president and the prime minister represented different parties, and sometimes the prime minister and the president both participated in summit meetings. This so-called “two-plate” model (since two places had to be laid at the table for Finland at summit meetings) has come to an end with the constitutional amendment now coming into force, which stipulates that the minister will represent Finland in EU contexts. The responsibility for EU policy, which had partly been shared between the president and the prime minister, has now been transferred entirely to the prime minister’s remit.

The wording of the 2000 Constitution, which provides that foreign policy is directed by the president of the republic in cooperation with the cabinet, was not changed in the amendment, but its interpretation has shifted, since it stipulates that when the president and the prime minister disagree, the matter will be decided in accordance with the parliament’s position. To put it in a nutshell, the parliament and the cabinet are in theory free to ignore the president’s opinion, but in practice agreement would be sought for. In light of these constitutional changes, parliamentarism has been further strengthened in Finland. Even though the office of the president has been formally weakened, it is less clear whether and how this will be reflected in the actual exercise of power. Accordingly, how the candidates in this election understand the office of president is a matter worthy of consideration.

In somewhat simplified terms, two different interpretations can be discerned as to how the new presidential role should be practiced. First, there is the traditional view of the president as a strong leader whose primary responsibility is to direct foreign and security policy. This understanding is justified by the fact that since 1994 the president has been elected directly by the voters instead of an electoral college – and thus has legitimacy and a power base independent of the parliament. On the minus side, the president’s traditional responsibility for foreign and security policy has been significantly weakened.

The other view is that the president’s primary function is to shape opinion and act as a social figurehead in relation to fundamental values like democracy, tolerance, equality, and solidarity, including on the global level. The president stands above day-to-day politics, but exerts influence by broaching issues for political debate – that is, the presidency is of a symbolic nature. The term used in Finnish is “arvojohtaja,” which can be somewhat clumsily translated to English as “values leader.” This presidential model strongly resembles the German presidency, for example, where the president has a representative function and, depending on the holder, may intervene in day-to-day political debate.  The difference is that the German president is elected by the parliament, whereas a popular vote decides the Finnish president.  It has been suggested that the Finnish president should be elected by the parliament as well in order to finalise the process of parliamentarisation of the Finnish political system. The weakening of the president’s formal powers is consistent with this understanding of the president’s role. Even though the office of president has been gradually drained of power, Finnish voters still expect a strong president. As a rule, the president enjoys greater public trust than the parliament and cabinet, and voter turnout is higher in presidential elections than in parliamentary elections.

In the ongoing presidential election campaign, the first position has represented mainly by the gray eminences in the starting lineup. National Coalition Party candidate Sauli Niinistö, former minister of finance and speaker of the parliament, believes the president cannot be a symbolic relic, but instead has an independent power base, since he or she is elected directly by the people and can act accordingly. Niinistö, who made it to the second round of the presidential elections and in all likelihood will be the next president of Finland, does not deny that the president can be a “values leader,” but believes the president’s mandate is not to shape the worldviews of the Finnish people. Paavo Väyrynen, the Center Party candidate, thinks along the same lines. The president’s primary task is to direct foreign policy and in so far as EU policy encompasses foreign policy, EU policy is also within the president’s remit. The True Finns candidate for president, Timo Soini, believes the president’s powers should be preserved and that a strong president is needed to protect the Finnish people from the EU – and he blames the constraints of presidential power on the EU. And the people want a strong president: “The idea of a Finnish president as a master of ceremonies, mascot, or ribbon-cutter is anathema to the Finnish people,” he says.

Left Alliance party leader and presidential candidate Paavo Arhinmäki and Swedish People’s Party candidate Eva Biaudet, the ombudsman for minorities,  emerged in the first round as the strongest proponents of an opinion-shaping role for the president. The president’s task is to safeguard society’s fundamental values and human rights and lead the way to greater tolerance and solidarity, including when the president represents Finland on the international stage. Social Democratic presidential candidate Paavo Lipponen, former prime minister, presented himself as the “tough leader of soft values,” while Pekka Haavisto, running for the Green League and who will meet Niinistö in the second round, believes the president should be a globally respected shaper of opinion.

The parliamentarization of Finnish government has proven to be a protracted process that has met with opposition. Parliamentarization might have gone smoother and faster if Finland had chosen monarchism over republicanism, which nearly happened. When Finland issued its declaration of independence in December 1917 after the separation from Russia, this gave the existing parliamentary assembly an initial, principal-based support for a republican form of government. After the victory of the Whites in the Civil War of 1918, the idea of a monarchy became increasingly appealing in conservative and pro-German circles. Experience had proven, after all, that unbridled parliamentary rule was not a good thing in crisis situations. The monarchists also believed that Finland’s continued independence was dependent on good relations with Germany. On the 9^th of October that year, Emperor William II’s brother-in-law Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse was elected King of Finland. His Finnish royal name was to be Yrjö – or George – the First. The defeat of Germany in the First World War put paid to the Finnish royal adventure and with the Constitution of 1919 the Republicans left the constitutional field of battle victorious. The European monarchies have all lost political power, while presidentialism has been more long-lived. And so in Finland as well.

The competition about the second ticket to the presidential final turned out to be a much more exciting and a close race than expected. Moreover, the outcome was unforeseen as Pekka Haavisto, the candidate of the Green party, with 18.8 per cent of the votes surpassed two political nestors in Finnish politics, Paavo Väyrynen from the Centre party and Paavo Lipponen from the Social-democratic party. The political commentators immediately termed the final spurt of the former green party leader as a “Haavisto-effect” and interpreted it as a liberal counter-mobilization against the success of the nationalist and populist True Finns in the parliamentary elections in April 2011.

Whereas Paavo Väyrynen with 17.5 per cent of the votes was successful in mobilizing the supporters of the Centre party, the electoral outcome of Paavo Lipponen, a former prime minister and speaker of Parliament, was a great disappointment. He only gained a third of what his party received in the parliamentary elections of 2011, that is, 7.5 per cent. This also goes for the leader of the True Finns, Timo Soini, who was not successful in repeating the electoral success of his populist party in the parliamentary elections. With 9.4 per cent of the vote he polled a half of the party vote last spring. Even though it was said that Timo Soini seriously did not want to become president, the low turnout for the party is an indication of a weakened position within the party of the leader of the True Finns. A representative of the nationalist faction of the party commented that the party no longer is only Timo Soini, which is a further indication of the different groups within the party.  Every parliamentary party had nominated their own candidate for the presidential elections, which is perceived as needed in order to attain media visibility for the political parties and/or their leaders – in particular since local elections are forthcoming in the autumn. Paavo Arhinmäki, leader of the Left Alliance, received 5.5 per cent of the vote, whereas the two female candidates – Eva Biaudet from the Swedish People’s party and Sari Essayah from the Christian Alliance – got less than three per cent of the votes given. After twelve year with a women president, that is Tarja Halonen, the attractiveness of voting a woman was gone.

The electoral turnout is usually higher in presidential than in parliamentary elections. It was comparatively high this time as well – 72.8 per cent – which might surprise because the formal competences of the Finnish head of state have been further restricted in a constitutional revision last autumn. As a result of the ongoing parliamentarization of the Finnish political system, foreign and security policy is the remaining formal competence of the president taking office in March. Moreover, the president shares influence on foreign and security policy with the government and the Riksdag (parliament). Over the last 15 years, the office of president has been stripped of most powers, i.e., the semi-presidential presidency has been replaced with a more parliamentary head of state with predominantly representative and symbolic functions.

In spite of this weakening of the presidency the popular interest taken in the presidential elections is high and many voters still prefer and imagine a strong president, as has been the case historically, due to the special international and geopolitical situation of Finland close to the Soviet Union in the bipolar world –setting as well as short-lived and tumultuous governmental cabinets during the 1950s- mid -1980s. The Soviet Union has disintegrated and the governments nowadays survive entire electoral periods. However, during this electoral campaign the transformation of the presidency was repeatedly mentioned in the debates and most of the candidates were themselves prone to stress the modified presidency. This seems to have found increasing resonance among the voters.

Foreign politics and value-leadership

Two main themes dominated the campaign: foreign and security policy, on the one hand, and on the other what issues a president, standing above daily politics and primarily acting as a moulder of public opinion and agenda-setter, should raise. Agreement and unity over foreign and security policy has historically prevailed in Finnish politics. This proved to be the case even in this electoral campaign, with the exception of the EU. None of candidates advocated that Finland join the military alliance even though Finnish membership in the NATO has been on the agenda in public commissions and debates. However, some – among them both Sauli Niinistö and Pekka Haavisto – said that at the present moment Finland would not benefit from a NATO-membership, but that it is an option if circumstances should arise, and Haavisto added that a referendum would be needed in that case. Paavo Väyrynen, Timo Soini, and Paavo Arhinmäki were the fiercest opponents to the NATO. The reason for the reluctance of the candidates to open the Pandora’s box of military alliances is that a great majority of the population is negative to a Finnish NATO-membership. The close neighborhood (= the Nordic countries) and in particular Russia are prioritized issues in Finnish politics. No differences were manifested in the debates concerning Russia, as all the candidates stated they considered the relations with the eastern neighbor as good and well working. The greatest disagreements prevailed over EU – the euro and the financial support packages – even though the president with the constitutional revision that comes into force by the first of March no longer has any formal say over EU-policies. The debate on EU concerned the costs involved for Finland in supporting the European economies in crisis, rather the development of the EU as such. As mentioned, the president did previously share EU-issues with the government, but from March this is an exclusive competence of the cabinet. In particular Paavo Väyrynen and Timo Soini challenged this fact, and required that the opinion of the president must be considered when it comes to foreign and security policy within the Union – and also on other matters.

A second theme in the debates was the role of the president as an agenda-setter and a moulder of opinion, which in Finnish is termed “arvojohtaja” or value-leader. What issues are appropriate for a president to engage in? As a result of the electoral breakthrough of the True Finns in the parliamentary elections of 2011 with their anti-EU, anti-establishment, nationalist and xenophobic agenda in combination with criticism of the growing socio-economic differences, many candidates stated that they would engage in calling for greater social-economic equality, tolerance of minorities – ethnic, linguistic, and sexual – and the defense of an open Finnish society embedded in a global community. Some were, however, more trustworthy in this than others.  Sauli Niinistö and Paavo Lipponen were finance- and prime ministers respectively during the 1990s when cutbacks were made that underpinned growing socio-economic inequalities. The leader of the True Finns, Timo Soini, as well as Paavo Väyrynen, a former foreign minister, were keener on stressing the socio-economic and regional differences, whereas Pekka Haavisto, Paavo Lipponen, Paavo Arhinmäki and Eva Biaudet were the strongest spokesmen and woman for a tolerant and open-minded Finland. Timo Soini was challenged on the nationalist and anti-immigration stances within the True Finns and whether he agreed with them as he has been soft on parliamentarians who have made hate-like statements on various minorities or called for military intervention to calm demonstrations in Greece. Soini, as always counters that he – as a Catholic – considers all human life as equally valuable. Nevertheless, he was obviously stressed by the harsh debates on this point.

Personalized presidential elections

The person is of greater importance than party-ideology in presidential than in parliamentary elections. The restricted power competencies of the president and the fact that there is little disagreement over foreign and security politics has rendered the candidate’s person and image even more important. In these elections party ideology was of less importance than ever since the pattern that a candidate of the left (read: a social-democrat) meets a candidate of the right, which emerged after the end of the long-term reign of Urho Kekkonen (1956–1981) came to an end. The two candidates of the left were many hundred of thousand of votes away from coming to the second round of these presidential elections and 30 years of social democratic dominance at the presidency was terminated. Personal characteristics as experience, style and private life have increasingly been scrutinized in the media and also played out by the candidates themselves. The fact that Pekka Haavisto is gay and lives in a registered partnership with a hairdresser has upset many conservative voters. Some condemn homosexuality as such, whereas others think that it would be improper if the president together with his man welcomes the guest to the annual presidential reception on the Day of independence. Both Sauli Niinistö and Paavo Väyrynen have showed up with their wives on several occasions and thanked them in public for their support and loyalty as a means to manifest their representativeness as a couple for moving into the presidential residence. 

A conservative market-liberal versus a value-liberal internationalist

The second round in the presidential elections takes place on February 5. 40 per cent of the votes given last Sunday are now without candidates of their first choice.  The two presidential finalists and their campaign organizations are now engaged in targeting messages to these homeless voters. In previous elections the winning candidate of the first round has always been voted president. Sauli Niinistö has quite of an electoral advantage with his 37 per cent of the votes and Pekka Haavisto needs to catch up substantially in order to challenge Niinistö. Sauli Niinistö is backed up by a multitude of financial resources, whereas the campaign of Pekka Haavisto lacks money and relies on popular engagement, among others by using social media and personal campaigning. .

In the presidential finals, Sauli Niinstö, a value conservative market liberal former Minister of finance and speaker of the parliament, meets Pekka Haavisto, who is a value-liberal green internationalist that has been Minister of Environment and also has worked for the UN and other international organizations in Africa and the Middle East. Haavisto’s political socialization resides in green grass-root activism, whereas Niinistö is politically bred within the National Coalition party. They do both represent the urban southern Finland. The challenge for both candidates is to attract the EU-sceptic voters of the rural areas and the labour voters of the left. These are likely to stay at home on the election day unless the presidential finalists can formulate credible policies for these voters on the EU, social and regional equality. However, issues related to value-conservatism and value-liberalism will probably be of greater importance, since the two candidates are close to one another when it comes to foreign and security policy. Their personalities and personal styles are likely to make a difference as well. In the sauna at the classic public swimming pool at Yrjönkatu in central Helsinki, two ladies chatted the day after the elections on how the two contenders for the presidency left the televised election evening emission. “Niinistö took a limousine with a driver opening the door for him. Pekka walked in the falling snow along the Mannerheim street towards the centre of town taking some time to chat with international journalists and people he met”. On February 5 we will know whether the president of Finland prefers to take the car or rather walk home.

Historical regions are customarily defined in terms of shared culture and language, political history, and economic development. The Nordic region is one example, East Central Europe is another. The Baltic States (with a capital “S”) are not. In terms of regional history, Estonia can be defined as a Nordic state and Lithuania as an East Central European state. Latvia becomes a borderland: the state has no historical identity under this name and is a construction with the Latvian language as the common denominator. It is for the Latvians that the term “Baltic” is meaningful. Being labeled “Baltic” indicates that the country has been placed by definition into a greater regional community, and does not stand apart as an isolated minor state in the shadow of Russia.

The Soviet Russian equivalent to the English expression “the Baltic States” is Pribaltika. It is part of the concept of Russia. In the Russian language, and thus in the Russian conceptual world, there are on the one hand the concepts of “Russia” and “Eurasia”, in which the concepts of Pribaltika, Zakavkaz (Trans-Caucasus), and Dalny Vostok (the Far East) are included, and on the other hand “not Russia”, the rest of the world. Finland and Poland are not included in the concept of Russia. Since Estonia endeavors to appear as a Nordic state, cultivating relationships with Sweden and Finland, and since Lithuania gravitates towards Poland and Belarus (East Central Europe), Latvia remains, with its capital city Riga, the still vital nucleus of the concept of Pribaltika.

American historian Andrejs Plakans and Estonian historian Andres Kasekamp have chosen to give their new books about Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania the titles A Concise History of the Baltic States and A History of the Baltic States respectively. The subject of the books is that indicated by the English term, that is, the history of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. But what does that mean? Three parallel histories about three states? A single, coherent historical narrative about a geographical designation? A comparative historical narrative about three states whose commonality is that they border each other in pairs from north to south, and that they all border the same fourth state? A history of all the state formations that the three modern “Baltic” states have been part of over the course of history? A history of a macro-region, the Baltic Sea region, to which the three states belong?

For both Plakans and Kasekamp, the concept of “the Baltic States” is a construction. It denotes the geographical area that severed the bonds with Russia after World War II and had not until then been defined in terms of nation-states. The “Balts” were the German landowners and burghers whose forefathers had settled in Estonia and Livonia in the Middle Ages. Estonia was a name for part of the historical German province of Livonia — which was, by the way, named after the Livonian people and language — and Latvia was a new creation named after the Latvian people and language. The new states were defined territorially essentially along the linguistic dividing lines between them. While Lithuania certainly existed as a state in the Middle Ages, it was not especially “Lithuanian”. The inhabitants of the historical Grand Duchy were largely speakers of Slavic languages and the state was united with Poland from the late 14th century to the end of the 18th century. The new state of Lithuania was defined, like the two others, essentially according to linguistic criteria. Andrejs Plakans and Andres Kasekamp explain how all of this proceeded and how a historical narrative about the Baltic States can be constructed on this basis. The concept seems to be a historical Procrustean bed.

At the beginning of his book, Kasekamp refers to the deeply problematical matter of making “the Baltic States” the subject of a historical narrative. In his foreword, he maintains:

[I]t was not preordained that these three countries together would today be commonly known as the Baltic states. They are not the Baltic States with a capital “S”, as in the United States, not the lazy shorthand “Baltics”, patterned after the “Balkans”.

Historically speaking, what has created the term “the Baltic States” is the formation of new states in Europe after World War I and after the Soviet occupation and incorporation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania of 1940—1991 (in turn interrupted by the German occupation of 1941—1944/45).

The last chapter of Kasekamp’s book is called “Return to the West (1991—2009)”. The title indicates that the three contemporary states are part of the concept of “the West”. The last section in the chapter is entitled “Relations with Russia”. The title indicates that the three states are not included in the concept of “Russia”. The last chapter of Plakans’s book is called “Reentering Europe, 1991 —”. The conceptual formation is identical to Kasekamp’s but the “reentering” is here presented as a process that is still going on. The last section is called “The Travails of Normality”, a title which suggests that the period before 1991 was abnormal and that the years since have been a time of arduous alignment with “Europe”.

The operational definition of the term “The Baltic States” thus becomes such that it comprises the three modern states that cover most of the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea and Europe’s border zone against the non-West, that is to say, Russia. Plakans leads us to understand that this is a temporary definition in a determined phase of European political history. He suggests that there’s something paradoxical in the fact that while Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are internationally recognized states, it seems increasingly less relevant to write the separate history of any single state among them. He describes the task of “Baltic” historians in 1991:

Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian historians had to devise ways of doing their work with at least two audiences in mind: readers in their home countries who, after a half-century of browsing through heavily ideological historical accounts, were truly interested in what really happened in the past; and the larger international historical profession in which national histories, though continuing to be written usually as textbooks, were not generally regarded as contributing much to human knowledge. 

Notably, the nationally defined historians are not expected to write histories whose subject is the Baltic States! Both Plakans and Kasekamp have chosen to write the history of the three countries founded on the generally accepted 19th century construction of peoples within the confines of the Germanic cultural area (Herder’s conceptualization of Volk). On this basis, they both write a comparative history. The backdrop is the general history of the Baltic Sea region from prehistory onward, with special focus on the geographical area where hunters, farmers, and fishermen spoke the two Baltic-Finnic languages, Estonian and Livonian, and the two Baltic languages, Latvian and Lithuanian (“Baltic” here thus denotes a language group in accordance with 19th century German linguistics). The result is that the peoples who have had Estonian, Livonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian as their native languages emerge as subjects and direct producers, while those with other native languages, especially German and Russian, emerge as the masters and shapers of political structures. In the case of Lithuania, we also have the speakers of Russian as the subjects (in contemporary usage, “White Russians” or “Belarusians” and “Ukrainians”) and the speakers of Polish as the  masters.

Historiography in the contemporary states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania is characterized, as Plakans mentions, by the classic nation-state paradigm. This is not true of individual historians’ rigorous scholarly examinations of various historical problems, but it is true of the role of history in society in the form of textbooks and historical memory culture. It is not only true of those who identify themselves as Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians (there are no Livonians any more), but also of those who identify themselves as Russians. With respect to the latter, it is also true of citizens and political leaders in Russia. They are very active participants in the work of defining the “true” history of the three Baltic states. From that perspective, the history of the Baltic peoples is also part of Russian history.

Kasekamp and Plakans recount how historical commissions with international membership were established in each of the three Baltic states after 1991, which were tasked with documenting and analyzing human rights violations during the Soviet and Nazi occupations. These involved outrages committed by people of varying ethnic origins but in the name of the German or the Soviet state. The Russian government perceived this as an attempt to challenge the official Russian thesis that the Baltic states were liberated (and not occupied for the third time in four years) by the Red Army in 1944—1945. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev appointed a historical commission in May 2009, as Kasekamp pointed out, to refute the “falsification of history” (by the Balts).

The example of the historical commissions is evidence of a fundamental difference between the spiritual climate in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania on the one hand and Russia on the other. While state-funded historical research in the three Baltic states is theoretically aimed at trying to clarify historical fact, the commission in Russia is oriented towards establishing the true history in accordance with a predefined conclusion.

Both authors provide good explanations of the conceptual complications, as well as the somewhat arbitrary nature of combining the history of the three states in a single narrative. One might say that the authors allow their narratives to meet an important pragmatic criterion. There is a need in the English-speaking world for syntheses that look upon history from the perspectives that have shaped the people who today make up the majority populations in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and whose native languages are Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian. Consequently, this involves parallel national histories from a dual comparative perspective: first, a comparison of the history that has played out in the geographical territory of the three modern states among themselves, and second, a depiction of the history in the context of general political, economic, social, and cultural conditions in the Baltic Sea region. As a result, Estonia’s history and part of Latvia’s history are written into German history especially and Swedish history to some extent; another part of Latvia’s history and all of Lithuania’s history are written into Polish history; and what is more, Lithuania’s history is also written into Russian history.

Plakans and Kasekamp show that history in which the subject is “the Baltic states” has been constructed on the basis of current political perspectives. For this reason, the history is an open question and both books easily could have ended with a “to be continued” cliffhanger. History may take yet another turn. Both books intimate that Jews played a key economic, political, and cultural role in the Lithuanian area both when Lithuania was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and when it comprised a few governorates in Russia. Consequently, “Baltic” history is, in addition to the history of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, not only also Swedish, German, Russian, and Polish, but Jewish as well. In one part of Lithuania (and Belarus) with Vilnius as the capital, a Jewish national homeland could have been created — a Jewish state with Yiddish as the national language — if 20th century history had taken another turn and if the Jewish national state project had not been projected onto Palestine, instead of what was actually the biggest Jewish settlement area in Europe. This settlement area could then have become a fourth “Baltic state” after the First World War, a Jewish nation-state according to the same ethnic criteria otherwise applied when the new states in Europe were created.

The Baltic states could thus have become four in 1920. Surprisingly enough, the Jewish project has once again become topical, as evidenced in this report by The Economist (June 11th) from the 2011 Venice Biennale:

[T]he Polish […] pavilion has been given over to Yael Bartana, an Israeli video artist. The pavilion presents a trilogy of films about the Jewish Renaissance Movement, a political group founded by the artist that calls for the return of Jews to eastern Europe.

If one permits oneself to think along constructivist lines, yet another possibility arises, alongside a Jewish project: a presumptive fifth Baltic state, in what is now known as the Kaliningrad area and is part of the Russian state. ≈

The complexity of the past that is presented in this book is announced on the book cover itself: the picture placed there shows two Estonian soldiers in two different military uniforms (German and Soviet). The soldiers are portrayed close to each other, as if they are friends, not enemies. The title of the book also introduces the reader to the problems of the conflicts of remembering. The narratives of eight Estonian men presented in the book differ in style and focus, and correspond to several different contexts of remembering (this last aspect is skillfully discussed in the analytical chapters). The narratives also illustrate differences in self-positioning with respect to war experiences, as well as the complexity of choices all the narrators faced during the war. The book brings together memories of those who were recruited by the Nazi-German and Soviet military administrations (some of the narrators were recruited by both of these administrations one after the other), as well as of those who served as volunteers in the Finnish Army or spent a large part of the war as “mobilized workers” in the Soviet rear. Many of those whose memories are published in the book (or their close relatives) suffered from Soviet repression and deportation, and the deportation is frequently remembered as part of the experience of the war. The reconstruction of this complex picture of the war experience is seen by the editor of the book as very important: one of the aims of the book is to subvert the “ethnicization” of the presentation of the war produced by Estonian media (according to that simplified picture, the ethnic Russians had to represent the Soviet military experience, while ethnic Estonians were deemed to represent the German one).

The analytical part is well-grounded in source materials — most of those performing the analysis of the narratives expand the scope of their sources by bringing follow-up interviews with the narrators and their relatives into the analysis, as well as archive materials and other people’s memories. Due to discrepancies in the interpretation of some historical events by the narrators and the researchers, the names of the narrators were changed for publication. The analytical chapters, however, differ significantly with respect to their use of theory: while some chapters clearly present a particular theoretical approach, others are more descriptive. From the theoretical viewpoint, chapters by Ene Kõresaar, Rutt Hinrikus, and Olaf Mertelsmann are particularly interesting. Ene Kõresaar sees the aim of her chapter as understanding “the personal significance of war for the narrator” in the cultural context of the 1990s, when Estonian veterans took part in public discussion about the past. Kõresaar uses Debbora Battaglia’s term “representational economy” in order to describe the complicated process of the presentation of the “self” as a “reification” that is continually defeated in communication and competition with other voices and stories. Indeed, central to her interests are relationships between the narrator and his audience. Kõresaar also looks at problems of remembering the Soviet period through the frame of “memory of rupture” developed in her earlier works. Thus, she pays attention to the time of remembering (Boris Takk’s memories were written in 1993, the period of the public discussion about the Soviet past as a time of “rupture”, the period when any normal life was impossible) as well as to different “communities of memory” (like family, veterans’ groups, the local community) where war memories could be presented. According to Kõresaar, Takk successfully deals with the problem of guilt (he volunteered for the German Army that occupied Estonia and served in the Waffen-SS) by using the concept of the “third way”. He wrote that he joined the German Army in order to save Estonia by fighting against the Red Army. Kõresaar explains Takk’s choices through his idea that “the choice made by Estonians [...] was to survive in the name of Estonian independence”. Later she finds a similar strategy when Takk explains why he joined the Communist Party in the 1970s: according to the narrator, he wanted to fight the enemy from within. It is important to note here that even if the political context of remembering (in 1990s) is supposed to be radically different from the context of the event, memories about serving in the Nazi army still seem to be a stigmatizing experience. For example, another narrator, Loog, whose memories are found in the book, did not mention it at all; the information about his short military service in the German police was discovered later.

Rutt Hinrikus, who analyzes the story of Reinhold Mirk, a Red Army officer during the Second World War, who continued to serve as an officer of the Special Estonian Military Unit until 1956, uses Aleida Assmann’s concept of winners and losers. Hinrikus notes, however, that in the Estonian context the use of these concepts is more complicated and, most probably, Mirk was thinking in practical terms in both situations. At the same time, Hinrikus notes that about one half of the space of Mirk’s narrative is dedicated to his experience working in the labor battalions during the first half of the war; this could be seen as a sign that that period was particularly difficult, and was filled with suffering. The scholar identifies three different scenarios according to which Mirk’s narrative is composed: “victim of forced conscription into the labor battalion, soldier of the victorious army and Estonian nationalist”. Hinrikus comes to the conclusion that his memories “reflect changes in the strategies of remembering the war” in Estonia.

Olaf Mertelsmann, in analyzing the memories of Boris Raag, has chosen to follow Sheila Fitzpatrick’s ideas on Homo Sovieticus as a survivor. Raag gives an account of his life in the Soviet rear as a soldier who was mobilized, and presents his experience of long travel through Central Asia (like many other Estonians, he was mobilized, but was not sent to the front out of suspicions held by Soviet military leadership toward ethnic Estonian soldiers). He also describes relationships with other Estonian men in similar situations, the struggle for food, and his desertion from the army. According to Mertelsmann, Raag is “neither a victim nor a hero, but a survivor using his agency”3. The author pays special attention to the use of humor in the narration and indicates the possible influence of fiction on Raag’s writing style.

What can analyzed memories tell us about war and about men in war? Although the authors of the book do not refer explicitly to theories of gender, the construction of masculinity through self-narrations about the war experiences could be well analyzed on the basis of this material. Some of the authors of the narratives describe themselves as a rather “natural” object for conscription by different military authorities. For example, Ailo Ehamaa writes that those men born before the end of 1922 got to participate in the war on one side or another. (“Had I been born a month later or in January of the next year, my fate might have been different.”) Similarly to Raag, he presents himself as a rather involuntary participant in one of the most dramatic events of the 20th century — the World War. Aili Aarelaid-Tart, who analyzes Ehamaa’s story, takes up the idea of the “alien war” that made Ehamaa into a rather neutral observer: “The war journey is presented rather as a sequence of fortunate and unfortunate happenings, of itineraries and locations, than as an emotional description of the horrors of battle, friends who were killed before his eyes, soldier’s jokes, etc.” Another important topic for male biographies in general and for military biographies in particular is the topic of male bonding. The particular importance of male friendship for survival is acknowledged by Tiina Kirss in her reading of Ylo-Vesse Velvelt’s memory of the last period of the war. Velvelt was mobilized into the German Army only in 1944 and is a survivor of the “Czech Hell” (the partisan war in Czechoslovakia during the last phase of the war). Like Ehamaa, Velvelt finds himself in a situation of “choiceless choice”, where he has to choose between “worse and bad”.4

However, as we saw in the example of the story analyzed by Kõresaar, several narratives offer the possibility of looking at the war period as a time when choice based on moral values is given special significance by the narrator (this is usually seen as a typical characteristic of male narratives). These narratives are constructed around agency and rational decisions. An example of this is Tiiu Jaago’s presentation of the story of Lembitu Varblane, the so-called Finnish boy (the name for those who took part in the war on the Finnish side in hopes of fighting against both Russians and Germans). In order to focus on the decision-making process, Jaago puts Varblane’s story into the context of other published memories, and also pays attention to changes in the character of the story that indicated different stages of personal development of the narrator. After analyzing Varblane’s experience of fleeing to Finland and serving in the Finnish navy, she goes on to analyze his strategies under the Soviet regime (Varblane’s relatives were arrested — his mother and brother were deported to Siberia — and, understanding that “the Soviet system was destroying country life”, he decides to work as a teacher in the village school). The presentation of the life story of Heinrich Uustalu (analyzed by Terje Anepaio) differs from other stories through a certain “distortion” in the presentation of the “male story”. Anepaio draws the attention of the reader to the emotional parts of Uustalu’s story, dedicated to his life before the war (which presents a picture of development and progress) and to the story of his family. The latter is a source of special suffering for the narrator: he and his wife (they married in September 1941) suffered deportation to Siberia and eleven years of separation from each other. Uustalu presents himself in his story as a man for whom the family has a primary value and provides an emotional picture of his feelings towards his wife and child, and of the reunion with his family in Siberia in 1955. That makes Uustalu’s story different from the other stories represented in the book, where family life is simply mentioned, rather than described in any detail.

Thus, the book under review could be seen as expanding our knowledge of several important issues. First, it complicates the established picture of the “two sides” in the war and contributes to the post–Cold War discussions about the Second World War and ways of presenting and commemorating it.5 Second, it provides a new, more nuanced picture of what the Second World War was and meant for Estonia. Finally, even if the book does not focus enough on the gender dimensions of the stories presented, in my opinion it would be very useful for anyone interested in male story-writing and constructions of masculinity. ≈

[B]ut when I reach for universal terms and try to say something about the history of the twentieth century I find that instead I’ve gone back to my childhood and to the fact — once so important — that my brother and Hitler were both born on 20 April.

Most people in the today’s world were born and raised before the new millennium and can bear witness to their biographies. However, with the passage of time, the drama of the horrifying 20th century becomes more distant and professional historians claim a greater stake, so individual lives tend to merge into larger patterns. Still, in their self-presentations, most people have distinct, though distorted and doctored, private memories of this short period in the history of mankind. At the same time, a person lives not only his own life as an individual but also, consciously and subconsciously, the lives of his contemporaries and their epoch.

At the heart of the common history depicted in The Eitingons lies the October or Russian Revolution, an event of the utmost significance that perturbed friend, foe, and non-aligned (neutral, third position, or whatever the case might have been) — and in its unfolding molded the peoples, nations, and battlegrounds of a world these creatures inhabited for almost 75 years. The murder of Leo Trotsky was in many respects the 20th century’s most fateful assassination; without question far more important than the murder of Kirov, and fully comparable to the 1914 killing in Sarajevo of Grand Duke Franz Ferdinand, not to mention the killings of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, or Che Guevara in the New World, despite the global tourist industry’s having made the most of the latter.

The end of the Soviet Empire and the disappearance of a (potential) world elicited a wave of histories, both individual and collective, cultural or economic, political and social. Berlin and Moscow in particular became popular destinations for researchers, journalists, pundits, travelers, and other semi-professionals searching for their pasts, and for ours. Archives and peoples contributed to the scrutiny of historical incidents as well as of “longues durées”, individual characters, human institutions, and other artifacts. For a short while, almost everything was open to inquiry, at least in the former center of the Second World. This was long before “Wikileaks” and the triumph of virtual media messages. Hence, the post-Soviet period has been very different from the 1980s and previous decades, when either détente or cold war was on the agenda. During a sojourn in Washington D.C. in the late 1980s, I happened to follow a polemic in the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books between two American ex-communists, along with several letters to these magazines, on the links among Stalin’s designated Leo Trotsky stalker in Turkey and Mexico; the cosmopolitan Jew Leonid Eitingon, of humble Belarusian origins; the Freudian psychoanalyst Max Eitingon, a member of a wealthy Russian émigré family who lived in Germany, Palestine, and the US; and the financing of Trotsky’s annihilation. “Intellectuals and Assassins: Annals of Stalin’s Killerati” was the chilling title of the literary analytical turncoat Stephen Schwartz’s opening article. Another ex-commie and eminent historian, Theodore Draper, objected that the most likely non-Soviet financier, the American multimillionaire Motty Eitingon, was a mere fellow traveler. Draper was not able to provide convincing evidence because relevant documents were still inaccessible.

When, at the age of 71, Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books, made her controversial debut as an author after twenty years of research with The Eitingons: A Twentieth Century Story (a paperback edition appeared in late 2010), I was reminded of this exchange as she took the polemic as her starting point: “If you set aside Schwartz’s more lurid suggestions”, she writes, “the notion isn’t entirely far-fetched even now, and it certainly wouldn’t have seemed so if you’d been a Russian émigré living in Paris in the 1930s.” However, Draper is one of the first to be mentioned in the book’s acknowledgements “for his generosity”. The mystery is there from the beginning, as is “generosity”, and Wilmers tries to get at both in her collective maternal family biography. This is a very personal yet in certain ways disturbingly impersonal analysis of some “known unknowns”, which ends up by revealing some family secrets and giving some global events and epics a new twist.

The Eitingons opens with family gossip and letters before moving on to the Soviet archives of the 1990s, first focusing on Moscow, where the descendants of the infamous killerati still live, then moving on to Minsk. In between, we are told a fascinating story that begins in the historical shtetls close to Lukashenko’s Mogilev on the border between contemporary Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, continues in Austria-Hungary and Russia, extends simultaneously eastward and westward in Mexico as well as in Harbin (“the Chicago of the East”) and Constantinople, and also in Leipzig and Łódź (where the author’s mother was born), Madrid and Paris of the 1920s and ’30s. It is the ups and downs of revolution, popular fronts and world communism, the Chinese and Spanish civil wars, Stalin and the Communist International, the capitalist fur trade from Siberia to New York and its glamorous family life, spiced with European psychoanalysis in Berlin and Vienna. The story ends in the 1990s and the new millennium’s first decade among family members in Moscow and to some extent Geneva and London. That the Moscow Eitingons are her family is still an open question for Wilmers herself, as well as for her new acquaintances, which adds to the entertainment and uncertainty throughout the book. Its structure supports her enterprise: theoretically well aware of space, time, languages, and the factuality of objective reality, it disdains straightforward account-giving in favor of at least three parallel chronologies, framed by the author’s relationship with her mother, beginning with adolescence and ending “At the Undertaker’s” long after the main characters have passed on. It is also rhythmical: its five sections, covering more than 440 pages, run smoothly on the whole, like essays by the most frequent contributors to her London paper, interrupted at times by chapters that are closer to that paper’s forthright  book reviews or regular diary. The Eitingons is the work of an editor-cum-researcher, though there are a few places where Wilmers would have benefitted from a second opinion (for instance, the sentence “My family did some ugly things but I understand why they did them”, however crucial it may be, occurs twice, on page 421 and again on page 441).

In the early 20th century, as European markets declined in importance, the first-class furs that Siberian hunters had been supplying for hundreds of years were mostly shipped across the Atlantic. Trade was free apart from a brief US embargo after 1948. Although no family or company archives seem to exist, the available historical records make it possible to outline the history of Russian-Soviet fur trade and the role of Jewish people within this business. The research literature is comprehensive; sources were available before 1989 and many of them have been re-examined firsthand. Wilmers has done her homework; the bibliography runs to nine pages. Moreover, she does not hesitate to include family anecdotes from late 19th century Eastern Europe — her ancestors were the “Rothschilds of Leipzig”. It is this mix of high and low that makes the book such a vivid encounter with the living past. The pre-revolutionary origins of the family relationships are set out quite clearly, at least on the future Western male side, while the Eitingons of the future East are more elusive, though pictures of Leonid with siblings, father, and grandfather are reproduced. Having made the best of the archives, Wilmers has recourse to Leonid’s descendants’ memories from the early 1920s, the published autobiography of a Soviet KGB general who was Leonid’s long-standing superior and protector, and a Brazilian aunt who recalled a story about a poor, young orphan, cousin or second cousin (“brother” in Russian), who once lived in the house of the rich aunt and on leaving forgot to take the revolutionary pamphlets which he had hidden under his bed. But Wilmers does not rest content with the fact that Leonid and Max came from roughly the same village in old Pale, and may have shared an apartment in Moscow for a short while some years after the revolution. The records clearly show that two male members of the wealthy Eitingon family were arrested in 1918 in Moscow but were soon released after having raised a substantial sum of money. Meanwhile, the female Eitingons who lived in Moscow during the upheavals were “playing cards”. The men tried to carry on their business and hold on to what they treasured most: personal contacts. One of the two, on learning of an impending second arrest that would call for an even larger sum, left for Stockholm and crossed Sweden to sail on the SS Stockholm from Göteborg to New York. However, no anecdotes or rumors from Sweden have survived, and, presumably, we will never know whether the fugitive met the “Rothschilds of Gothenburg”. Otherwise, documents and tales go hand in hand in Wilmers’s narrative, which mentions Raoul Wallenberg once, and notes that Sweden was the origin of one of Leonid’s many forged passports.

The family’s fur traders and their complicated relationship with both American and Soviet authorities before the Second World War are colorfully depicted. They are Mary-Kay Wilmers’s intimate kin, in particular her great-uncle, the charming moneymaker Motty Eitingon (1885—1956) and his global entourage. She has her own childhood memories of this giant, and is not impressed. For three decades, Motty was the world’s leading fur trader, living on a grand scale with a correspondingly outgoing social life. Wilmers is circumspect about his dealings with the Bolsheviks and the FBI; her account is mainly based on the latter’s files. It seems that he may have financed the early Communist Party of the Soviet Union — and thereby also the instigator of world revolution, the Comintern — particularly in 1926 when the young Soviet regime awarded him, now an American citizen, a contract that for a decade or two gave him a monopoly in the fur trade. He had a considerable number of companies — mostly run by relatives — at critical locations around the world, above all in the Northern hemisphere, not unlike the Rothschilds or the Sassoons. Well-oiled top-level contacts characterized this early global oligarch, and he needed them to cope with market forces, in particular during the Great Depression. The FBI, which this book implies was rather amateurish compared to its principal rival, continued to haunt him but finally concluded that he “is not pro-Soviet but is a shrewd businessman who posed a pro-Soviet front to gain a choice position with the Russians in order to acquire Russian furs and make a fortune”. At the same time, he was an extraordinarily generous family patriarch, and was also able to buy off striking American trade unions led by another Russian émigré, the red Ben Gold from Bessarabia. On one occasion, however, it was the other branch of American unionism, the ferociously anti-communist AFL, that took Motty Eitingon to the FBI, but Eitingon had cleared the deal with Herbert Hoover. He was a constant gambler and continued in the same vein until his various enterprises lost contact with prospective consumers. That brings us to the McCarthy hysteria of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

While Motty Eitingon may or may not have provided funds for V. I. Lenin, another family member certainly did so for Sigmund Freud. This is the even more extravagant but much more secretive Max Eitingon (1881—1943), son of the first fur tycoon Chaim (“the Rothschild of Leipzig” who financed the construction of the city’s first orthodox synagogue), whose daughter married her and Max’s second cousin Motty (he later divorced her). All Max had to do “was to shake the money tree and watch the moidores come down”, Wilmer writes boldly. To her, he is a more distant relative, one of an older generation of the author’s intimates and well remembered for his charming manners. He had a taste for secular Yiddish culture, from the classics to modern music. He had a bad stammer, and his interests differed from those of the rest of the male tribe. He spent the first decade of the new century in Zürich as a medical student devoted to psychiatry, first with Jung, then as a confidant of Freud, which made Jung jealous. Max Eitingon underwent the first ever training analysis (by Freud) and later organized free analytical sessions in Berlin until the Nazis closed his practice. He was remembered by those of his clients who survived Kristallnacht and the subsequent hell. After a meeting with Max’s father, Freud wrote to Max that Chaim looked “very healthy and rejuvenated, and monosyllabic and impatient as, I assume, is in his nature”. In 1926, Max became president of the International Psychoanalytic Association; he was also a respected administrator, financier, and member of the Freudian clan. In the interwar period, he traveled extensively, for example to Moscow and Paris, where he became involved in a court hearing about the murder of a Russian émigré general. This was in 1937, and another Eitingon was now in charge of numerous special operations in nearby Spain. It is no coincidence that Max was of special interest to Schwartz, who, like so many others, came to despise the divan and its practitioners and associate it with darkness at noon. Moreover, Max had been impoverished by the Depression and he and his wife settled for Palestine. Much more than Motty, whom the FBI cleared, Max is still seen as a culprit by others besides the deceased Schwartz. Did Max, when his family fortune failed, support the Freudians from clandestine resources funneled from Red headquarters? Were they basically useful idiots? Wilmers, with her background in modernist high culture, has a weakness for the (psycho-)analytic, which quick-wittedly leads her to refute such accusations and defend Max, “wielding her pen like an ice pick”, as one critic put it. Max is her newfound intimate kin. While Motty was a fabulous, though rather simple, capitalist, Max was the ultimate man of world. The Freudian slip belongs to the 20th century’s historical drama, and to this very day, guilt by association is in the interests of many involved here. To her credit, this avenue is not chosen by Wilmers.

Instead, Mary-Kay Wilmers’s sensitivity is put to the test when it comes to Leonid Eitingon (1899—1981) and his family, related to her either rather distantly or not at all (most likely the former). For Leonid, who was without question Jewish, and came from poor circumstances, the October revolution and its aftermath proved to be the chance of a lifetime, or the beginning and end of a career. He joined the Checka as a trainee in Minsk, partly changed his name to Naum Aleksandrovich, and after a few years settled in Moscow for future global adventures with the GPU/NKVD/OGPU/NKGB/MGB. After a brief start with Anna Shulman in Minsk, he established the rest of his family in Moscow, with two, three, or perhaps four “wives” (he had children with Anna and two others). Towards the end of the book one gets the impression of a rather close-knit union of four children and one stepdaughter from Harbin living in his flat in Moscow, altogether three women and two men. Things had been written about this dangerously bad guy of the old days before Wilmers uncovered new material from archives and confronted his descendants with it. Through Leonid, the drama of the “short twentieth century” is re-enacted, from Lenin’s funeral to Leonid’s rehabilitation in the aftermath of Gorbachev’s dissolution of the empire. Leonid is also given a key role in the memoirs of his KGB superior, General Sudoplatov, published after the end of the Soviet Union (in English by 1994). Moreover, Leonid Eitingon got his own Russian biographer in 2003, a decade after his posthumous rehabilitation. Leonid was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1941 and Stalin publicly declared that “as long as I live not a hair of his head shall be touched”. Nevertheless, at the end of the tyrant’s life Leonid was first a victim of the Doctors’ Plot and then, after a brief interlude in freedom in 1953, spent another twelve years in prison in Vladimir as a “Beria man”. Back in Moscow, he spent the rest of his life fighting for his rehabilitation — in vain. The new material about Leonid adds a lot to the overall story, but less to the family connections, which remain dubious, though not impossible. These three Eitingon life stories are intertwined to such a degree that Schwartz’s suspicions might have been confirmed in the early 1990s once the archives had been opened. Wilmers does her best to establish the remarkable connections but most of the links still seem uncertain. Maybe another trawl in the KGB archives will provide the necessary evidence. Were Max and/or Motty more or less directly involved in, or at least aware of, Leonid’s secret operations, or are the bonds that tie much more layered? At least until the archives tell us more, the second option seems the most plausible.

Be that as it may, the book contains another story that is of special importance for the overall account: the female members of the family who throughout the book provide the oral information and thereby add several mini-biographies-cum-chronologies to the plot. Those who are still with us are introduced as part of the present yet with a past in a different era. The central figure is of course the author herself, whose presence in the book has amused journalistic reviewers and annoyed more traditional narrators. On her mother’s side, Mary-Kay is the granddaughter of the wealthy Eitingons of the 1920s and 30s, while her father’s side represents impeccable Anglo-German-Jewish wealth (solid, prosperous business, no gamblers, fluent in French). Until he passed away in 1980, she declares that she adored her rational father and his orderly family while the Eitingons with their heavy accent could be rather embarrassing for a young American girl growing up in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Thus, most of her childhood was spent with her mother’s family in New York, where Motty and his second wife babysat for her younger brother. Fortunately, she escaped to Europe as her father advanced in his multinational firm. At 18, she went to Oxford to learn Russian and in the late 1950s from there to Moscow with a university group under a college don. The story could have remained untold as the future author went into publishing in London — Faber, the Times Literary Supplement and The Listener — and did not use her Russian until the early 1990s, when she started to meet a recently settled Belorussian woman in order to recapture the second or third family language by exchanging (female) life-histories with an unrelated migrant from the diseased Second World.

At that time, Leonid, Max, and Motty were all long gone. So were most of the elders apart from a few women with rather faded memories from Leipzig, Łódź, or Moscow. It is her cousins and second cousins who are acknowledged as informants, four out of six named Eitingon (three Russians), those married into, or out of, the family to distinguish them from other interviewees. It is the two Moscow Eitingons, who together with the rest of the family in the capital took on the burden of rehabilitating Leonid when he had passed away, who stand out and remind us of the complicated nature of the present past to which most persons now living belong. A special place in the book is accorded Zoya Zarubina, Leonid’s stepdaughter whom he brought back from Harbin to Moscow together with his second wife Olga (Naumova, Zoya’s mother from her first marriage to Vasily Zarubin, a Chekist like his wife and her second husband). Zoya is portrayed as the author’s “Eastern” equivalent, who lived through the Sputnik/Gagarin years, the best decade for children of the elite (though for them the 1990s probably meant other and in many cases even better opportunities) as well as for ordinary Soviets. Zoya and the author met in the early 1990s and continued to talk over the years, though Zoya’s tale first appeared in 1999 in an interview book with an American journalist. Once a low-ranking member of the Special Forces, she had to leave when her stepfather was imprisoned. She survived in relative freedom, trained academically in foreign languages and maintained her network. She was a schoolmate of Alexander Shelepin, head of the KGB during the late Khrushchev and early Brezhnev era, and remained in close touch with the party hierarchy during and after her stepfather’s incarceration. In Soviet parlance, she is a woman of steel, the real survivor of a cruel system, also after its collapse, no bitterbitch.

In Wilmers’s narrative, she is the fourth main character of this collective plot, the author herself being number five or six. Other characters include her mother as well as the two Galia Eitingons in Moscow, to say nothing of the author’s Western aunts and cousins, who appear frequently as soon as Max or Motty is in the limelight. Missing (apart from the younger Galia) are those who grew up in the 1970s, with their own memories of the Cold War and the late Soviet era. There is an invisible divide here. Nevertheless, women occupy a special position in this collective family biography: the second sex and the longest of all revolutions are essential parts of this microscopic yet grand narrative of the previous century. Their presence also makes possible an East-West comparison of female emancipation and gender equality; the class societies themselves as well as male domination and sexual emancipation/liberation come into view — the broader spectrum of human existence during this period. Moreover, life in the upper echelons of New York, female life in particular, was very different from what emerged during the last decades of the Soviet Union. While female Eitingons in the West went from an untroubled homebound existence to a rather comfortable outward living (for instance they never spoke of money because it was always there), their Moscow relatives experienced fundamental anxiety and, in First or Second World terms, relative impoverishment, despite belonging to the nomenklatura. Still, it is striking that Leonid’s relatives held on to a four-room apartment in central Moscow throughout his prison years. Not that the enlightened rules were fully implemented during the short Soviet siècle — not at all. Nevertheless, the everyday life of women improved in some ways in the latter part of the Soviet era, reflecting the formal goals of the early revolutionary period. Domestic violence, for instance, was kept at bay, as were alcoholism, hooliganism, and unemployment. Prostitution was restricted though buying sex was never banned. Human gains were achieved during the Soviet epoch and Putin, Medvedev and their successors will have a long way to go before the civilizing process is back on track. Wilmers harbors no illusions about Soviet life, but has the capacity to be measured and is not overwhelmed by loyalty to her Western environment.

Furthermore, the book has a lot to say about Jewish life — orthodox and secular, liberal and socialist — before, during, and after the mass extermination in Central and Eastern European. This was the Jewish century, when the sons and daughters of this tribe ended up either in the camps, the kibbutz, or the US as the three male characters of this story neatly demonstrate. In the book, there are also oceans of love and affection — brotherly, childish, familial, fatherly, parental, and sisterly — that would make any sociologist of emotions green with envy. Loyalty is close by. Whatever there is of Freud, hatred is suppressed to the last drop. Then there is, of course, a lot of calculation and cold-bloodedness. Composure. Deceit. Desire. The libido in all its guises is in no sense confined to the sons and daughters of Sarah and Abraham, but it is they who occupy the stage from the first page to the last (though the book is not explicit about the Jewishness of Zoya). The 20th century fate of the Jewish people pervades the book, the many who left few signs after their extermination, and the few — by no means all of them wealthy — who managed to escape. Leonid’s centrality entails frequent mention of Jewish communists: most of those who ultimately fled were caught by either side, most often their own, with known ends. The everyday practices and rituals of Jewish life are also a recurrent theme. For instance, the secular Freud remarked that there was something truly Jewish about present-giving when Max Eitingon did him a favor or sent another package of Dostoyevsky. The gifts and reciprocities are part of a larger picture of suffering, affection, and ambitions. In particular, Wilmers touches on the affluent Jewish afterlife in America and Israel-Palestine in ways that do not always conform to what is currently deemed cultivated. She is never mealy-mouthed.

For the academic specialist, whether historian or social scientist, The Eitingons is a troubling book. The puzzle is there, but its pieces do not always fit together. It is unquestionably analytical; full of pertinent questions but few definite answers; well-read in contemporary business, intellectual and military-political history. Nevertheless, any synthesis is so far fictitious. A close (or syntopical, in Mortimer Adler’s terminology) reading reveals an understanding of the past as well as the present world as uncultivated, yet nevertheless entailing a differentiated though sequential, never linear, civilizing process full of action and human experience, aspirations, emotions and expectations. The author can be seen as a female John Scotson (in Outsiders) taking part in an investigation of human relationships under the direction of Norbert Elias. Or, she is both Scotson and Elias, writing side by side, the participating observer and the distant analyst. The Eitingons is definitely written for a readership wider than the traditional academy, for an educated lay public as well as a young generation with little or no personal experience and knowledge of the world before and behind the Berlin Wall. It takes nothing for granted and makes few concessions to the lazy bookworm. It is uncompromising in its search for the ways of the real world, the truth (if that word still is acceptable), where deception, inhibition and suspicion belong to the rules of the game. Her fascinating account puts some male members of the clan at center-stage but in the end, the women also stand out, though more could have been said about them. The Eitingons is non-fiction turned into fiction and back again, postmodern oral history at its best. And much more than that: it is love, money and, most frequently, murder during the cardinal dramas of the 20th century. ≈

A similar Repin portrait of Witte, painted a few years later, hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. It adorns the cover of the biography by Francis W. Wcislo, Tales of Imperial Russia. If Dominic Lieven allowed a detail from the monumental painting in St. Petersburg to be the cover illustration for his major study of the ruling classes in late Imperial Russia1, Wcislo has, with his choice of both cover art and artist, emphasized that this person, who was generally regarded under Nicholas and his predecessor as the greatest Russian statesman of his time, must receive a worthy and fitting representation. He, this Witte, was later known as “Russia’s Bismarck” and the German “Iron Chancellor” was doubtlessly someone Witte considered a role model. But just like Bismarck, whose leadership of the country was strongly tied to and dependent on his king and kaiser, and who fell hard when a new ruler took the throne, Witte’s status as the first among the Tsar’s liege men became untenable about ten years after the death of Alexander III, when Witte, then the prime minister, had no choice but to shoulder responsibility for the Russian defeat at the hands of the Japanese, the peace negotiations after the war, and the civil unrest among the Russian working class. He was first given the title of count and then his walking papers, relegated to an obscure role as an adviser in the Imperial treasury administration.

During the last ten relatively uneventful years of his life, he dictated lengthy memoirs aimed at vindicating himself in the eyes of posterity and defending his intimate collaboration with Alexander. He no doubt fantasized about a comeback. Such a notion never would have crossed the bristly and indecisive Nicholas’s mind. His father and predecessor had been a relatively crude, uneducated fellow who liked Witte’s objective and candid ways; in his memoirs, the slanderous and heavy-handed minister would deal harshly with his contemporary colleagues and competitors for Imperial grace and favor. It is precisely these published memoirs that Wcislo has used as the primary source for his depiction of the ultimate careerist in a multinational, caesaro-bureaucratic mega-empire, which throughout Witte’s active years was in a state of constant expansion and seemingly entrenched backwardness. His task became to employ the oppressive tactics of the despot to keep all the disparate parts in some kind of balance and to use the state baton to direct the flows of capital, especially foreign capital, towards their right utilization. He became the conductor of organized state capitalism, a social engineer of extraordinary skill under extremely authoritarian conditions. It is the dreams and fantasies of such a person, his ambitions and self-image, that Wcislo is trying to capture. It is Sergei Witte’s own story, or stories, that he is seeking to construct and interpret.

Under autocracy, political leadership necessarily took on a bureaucratic form, and Witte seems to come relatively close to the archetype of a rationally acting Weberian civil servant. His background and education were ideally suited to the purpose. His forebears on both the maternal and paternal sides had been Imperial officials in the provinces, just a touch below the highest level. His father was of the lesser nobility, with roots in the Baltic-German lands and, further back, in the Netherlands, while his mother was descended from a Russian princely family in decline (the Dolgorukis). As aristocrats, they were enlightened, internationally minded, and had a clear understanding of their role as Europeans — Russians, that is — in their dealings with conquered peoples in the Caucasus and Central Asia: one must certainly tame and civilize, but the goal was not to create equitable relations, but rather to regulate into existence hierarchies that would endure and ensure the function of traditional rule. A kind of frontier atmosphere prevailed. This was essentially the same view embraced by the governments of other European colonial powers; the difference, of course, being that the empire of the Russian realm was contained within its own borders and not across the seas. Accordingly, the disruptive elements on the periphery had more serious repercussions for the exercise of central power than they did in Western imperialist nations. This, in turn, demanded a completely different overview, control, and subtle sensitivity. The slightest error could be devastating and end up devouring resources sorely needed elsewhere for investments in things like industry and functioning markets. As Geoffrey Hosking has pointed out2, the suppressed regions could be given far too much attention at the expense of the titular nation. This view was actually shared by conservative officials (in Russia and elsewhere), while the more liberally minded stood out as the most dedicated expansionists.

After misspent secondary school years in Tbilisi, Witte was enrolled at the university in Odessa in 1866. Rather than study law, he chose science and mathematics, concentrating on the latter subject. Witte made rapid progress and seriously considered becoming a scientist, a choice of occupation his aristocratic kin considered unthinkable for a person of his social standing. Instead, he turned to business and what was then, around 1870, perhaps the most dynamic industry in Russia, the railroad. The building and operation of rail transport was critical in a gigantic territorial state — to ensure the smooth functioning of markets for surplus goods, to connect the various parts of the realm, and to ensure that its problem children could be kept in check by military means. Witte’s theoretical knowledge was precisely what was needed here. Mathematics was necessary to calculate things like the strength of the rails, transport speeds, suitable traffic frequency, energy use, and optimum passenger numbers. And this well-educated scion of the nobility soon advanced to the position of chief executive for a railway corporation headquartered in Kiev that was intended to connect the European parts of the realm with Asia. In an even more central position, it was he who put his signature on the mighty Trans-Siberian Railway. He was, in a nutshell, a technical success, but also a commercial one. In addition, he had obvious intellectual inclinations — an aunt of his had written noted novels in the first half of the 19th century and Elena Blavatskaia, later active abroad as the famous theosophical guru (“Madame Blavatsky”) who could make the spirits talk and tables dance, was his cousin. In other words: he knew how to behave in the drawing room.

When Alexander III called him to serve in the government offices in St. Petersburg in 1889, Witte was a lion of society, but he was also drawing an incredibly high salary. As he moved up with blinding speed to one of the highest ranking classes (genuine cabinet minister), those at the highest levels made sure to compensate him financially for the losses he made when he left his executive position — a flagrant case of favoritism, it would appear. But Alexander needed Witte. And Witte believed that massively strong imperial power of the kind Alexander wielded was necessary if industrial capitalism was to have a chance in Russia. In the 1880s he had published a couple of economic/political tracts, in the fiscal tradition of Friedrich List, in which he argued vehemently in favor of state interventionism and trade protectionism as unconditional prerequisites for a country with a large and pitiable population to rise out of underdevelopment and lethargy. A little state-provided flogging was what was needed. And yet repression could not be the primary means to the end. Investments in public infrastructure released positive energies that could attract enterprising men. This revolution from above à la Bismarck founded a tradition in Russia that was to endure and be further developed under new political conditions once the story of tsardom had come to an end. With Witte, one might say, science came to power — that is, to the court — in Russia. The communist rulers and courtiers would also lay claim to a scientific approach in their behemoth social experiment (“scientific socialism” and “the technical-scientific revolution”) and in this respect (and others) one can clearly see a continuity from one epoch to another. Unlike so many American presidents, educated in the law, the Soviet leaders Brezhnev and Kosygin were both engineers.3 In their own way, they were technocrats, like Witte, and members of a “new class”, a socialist, ruling bureaucracy that had only rudimentary similarities to the governing leaders of an imagined workers’ state.4 And Russia is still having difficulty shedding this political autocratic heritage.

Now, our Count Witte was by no means a liberal or a democrat. Francis Wcislo makes it clear that Witte did not believe in any sort of division of power and was convinced that autocracy and industrial capitalism were not only compatible, but equally desirable. By rewarding technical expertise and bureaucratic skill instead of connections, in the modernist manner, he may have contributed to alienating the old aristocracy, which had long held an unquestioned monopoly on top posts in the army and public administration, and resented working alongside the new, middle-class elites, from Imperial rule and undermined faith in it — an argument put forth by P. A. Zaionchkovsky and Roberta Thompson Manning. He seems, however, not to have been a sworn enemy of corruption, at times seeing out-and-out bribery as the lubricant needed to keep the machinery running and get people moving. The author argues that Witte also resembled his idol Prince Bismarck “in his continuing obsession with the press and his manipulation of its opinion through cash subsidies to journalists out of ministerial funds”. This statesman was a hard worker, an assiduous writer and convener of meetings, and in that respect he may have differed from the old East Elbe Junker who was wont to take leave of his governmental duties for months at a time to rest on his estate. Nor was Witte quite the lover of food and drink that Bismarck was.5 He was the inspiration for and initiator of the major pan-Russian world expo in Nizhni Novgorod in 1896, intended to put Russia on display as a competitive industrial and imperial nation, a model to learn from, and this undeniably says something about the breadth of his contribution.6

This book about Sergei Witte — about his life and times and work, his thoughts and reflections — is written in an exquisite, perhaps occasionally studied, literary language. It is probably also a sign of the times in historiography that the author has taken the trouble to highlight the many linguistically gifted and scientifically prominent women — researchers, like his grandmother, in one or two cases — who were in Witte’s intimate sphere during his formative years. ≈

Therefore, Mark Bassin, Christopher Ely, and Melissa K. Stockdale did us a great service when they organized a conference devoted to the topic “Space, Place, and Power in Modern Russia”, the proceedings of which have now been published in one volume. Instead of delivering an ordinary commemorative publication for Abbot Gleason, in whose honor the conference was held, the authors have presented a collection of multifaceted and stimulating essays that exemplify what a history book can achieve when it always keeps the spatial dimension in mind. What Nick Baron a few years ago called “a new spatial history of Russia” is, according to the editors in their foreword, not quite so new: after all, prominent Russian historians, particularly Vasily O. Klyuchevsky, have considered space, especially physical geographic space, to be of central importance, and have interpreted the genesis of the Russian Empire as the history of progressive colonization, as a product of imperial space. The editors rightly point out that when this is considered, this “new spatial history” is indeed not so new; however, they do not explain how it came about that the spatial dimension has disappeared in the most important narratives of Russian history — in Russia as well as in the West. In Soviet history books space was categorically reduced in the main to “political system” or “economic geography”; in Western history books it was dealt with under the rubric “environment” — usually in the introductory chapters dealing with geography and climate.

Space is, however, in the newer reading of Edward Soja, Derek Gregory, Henri Lefebvre, and others, not only geographic space but also historic-social-cultural space; not only a passive stage or a closed container, but lived, produced, “created” space, which knows genesis as well as decline. The editors refer to the boom in mostly ideological conceptions of space in post-Soviet Russia, and point out the vacuum that the one-sided Soviet-Marxist fixation on production and political control had left behind. How extraordinarily innovative and productive a sociologically informed local history could be had been demonstrated by the post-revolutionary revival of kraevedenie (local studies) — for example the work of Ivan Grevs and Nikolai Antsiferov, who in many respects were the contemporaries of Fernand Braudel, but in Russia itself were quickly forgotten and repressed (Antsiferov spent many years in the Gulag), and in the West were never recognized. Only the Eurasian school with its innovative and also idiosyncratic theoretical approach is acknowledged (without reference to any others) in the essay by Mark Bassin.

The principal advantage of the present volume does not, however, lie in a critical review of Russian historiography from the point of view of an analysis of its “spatial atrophy” (Carl Schmitt), but in the exemplary demonstration of concrete, sometimes brilliant, field studies. Each of these studies provides proof of the explanatory power of history written with a consciousness of space and place. John Randolph’s study of the main route from St. Petersburg to Moscow shows how a specific spatial corridor was able to come to represent the whole country — that is, Russia — in the eyes of other countries. At the same time, it is a marvelous contribution to the history of Russian mobility. Richard Stites has established, with his very clear and extremely complex study, that the ballroom is the place of society in both the capital and the provinces. Patricia Herlihy shows how the effects of the reports of the American Eugene Schuyler molded the Western understanding of Russian Turkestan. Robert Argenbright’s contribution about the agit-trains and agit-ships that brought Soviet power to the provinces — at least in terms of propaganda —  during the civil war is a fascinating study of the production of Soviet territoriality in a space that was not yet fully under control.

In the third section of the volume, too, we can see the possibilities of history written with a consciousness of space. Christopher Ely reads urban space as a “document” of the era of Alexander I, and Sergei I. Zhuk interprets the transformation of the spiritual, even “holy landscape” of Ukraine during the last part of the Tsarist Empire. Cathy A. Frierson analyzes the radical change of the cityscape dominated by churches and monasteries in post-Soviet Vologda. Isa A. Kirchenbaum reads the changes in street names and public spaces as an indicator of social transformation.

Above all, it is the case studies that show what a “new spatial history” could achieve. There, too, it becomes clear that from this perspective the supply of sources available for writing history increases enormously — street names, architectural styles of buildings, public spaces, interiors, and so on — and that the repertoire of types of research and presentation is changing in the direction of observation and exploration of spaces — which after all cannot be understood solely by reading texts and archive documents.

This reviewer finds it somewhat regrettable that the literature available for space history outside Anglo-Saxon and American literature was not taken into account, and also that there is no mention of pioneer works of “a new spatial history avant la lettre” — such as Roger Pethybridge’s study on the importance of the railway network for the spread of the Russian Revolution. ≈

There used to be hundreds of them, scattered all over Yugoslavia. The Spomeniks were monuments commissioned by former Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito during the 1960s and ’70s to commemorate the Second World War. The striking sculptures, most of them built in reinforced concrete, were designed in a futuristic, brutalist style by different sculptors and architects. The monuments were erected on sites where battles had taken place, where concentration camps had stood, or adjacent to war cemeteries. Their impressive grandeur also symbolized the new unity of all the southern Slavs. (The name Yugoslavia in fact comes from the word for south, jug, and the word for Slav, slaveni.)
Unlike the average war memorials of Eastern Europe, the Spomeniks are non-figurative, abstract sculptures, not busts of heroic leaders or patriotic workers.

After Yugoslavia dissolved in the early 1990s, the monuments were abandoned. Many of them were destroyed on purpose during the war; the rest were left to crumble, their symbolism lost and unwanted.

These often-breathtaking monuments are, to a surprising degree, unknown to people outside the region. Jan Kempenaers first came across the Spomeniks by pure chance while he was taking photos in Sarajevo just after the war.

“On rainy days, I would spend time in the library. One day, I was looking through an encyclopedia and came across photos of some of the monuments. I made some photocopies, filed them away, and then forgot about them. Years later I found the photocopies and decided to go see the monuments.”

The Spomeniks attracted millions of visitors through the 1980s, many of them school children who visited the monuments as a part of their patriotic education, others war veterans and grieving relatives who had lost loved ones during the war. Today, they are rarely visited at all.

“The locals are not interested in them. To the older people I guess they symbolize the previous regime. They just want to forget them. They don’t see the quality of them”, says Jan Kempenaers.

He photographed a great number of Spomeniks during his journeys, and then picked the ones he liked the most to appear in the book. His favorite is the massive monument on the cover of the book, situated in Tjentište in Sutjeska Valley in eastern Bosnia. It commemorates the Battle of the Sutjeska, which took place between May 15 and June 16, 1943. The goal of the attack by the Axis forces was to eliminate the central Yugoslav Partisan formations and capture their commander, Josip Broz Tito. The failure of the offensive marked a turning point for Yugoslavia during the Second World War. Over 6,000 partisans and 2,000 civilians were killed in the battle.

“Awful things happened there. The Axis troops killed all partisans who could not escape, including a complete hospital”, says Jan Kempenaers.

The monuments are often situated in pristine countryside locations, and Jan Kempenaers has chosen to capture them in misty weather, sky always overcast, or at sundown.

“A nice blue sky makes it an image that refers to exotic places, like in a travel magazine. I don’t like that. If the weather was too good I wouldn’t stay, or I would take photos at night to get the right atmosphere. I want the photo to show the whole thing, with no shadows”, he explains.

His mission was not that of a documentary photographer, but of an artist. He did extensive research and learned a lot about the history behind the monuments, but his aim was not merely to document them.

“My main concern is making interesting images. I only photographed the ones that I liked, the ones with an interesting shape.”

Prior to the Spomenik project, Antwerp-based photographer Jan Kempenaers mainly focused on portraying urban landscapes, in large-scale detailed photos. The Spomeniks got him interested in abstract art, and recently he has been experimenting in abstract photography. The project also raised questions about how we see monumental sculptures.

“I asked myself, ‘Can these monuments be seen as pure sculptures now, without the symbolism they represented when they were built?’”

Jan Kempenaers’ photos of the Spomeniks have gone viral on the Internet, attracting lots of attention from people all over the world. He has exhibited the photos in Belgium, New York, France, and Amsterdam — but so far not in any of the countries of former Yugoslavia.

“Maybe some people would be interested, but I don’t know … It is still complicated. The monuments refer to bringing together the different ethnic groups of the region, and obviously that is a very difficult question now after the war. Older people see these monuments as a symbol of something they would rather forget. Young people are just not interested.”

The reactions after a Croatian architecture magazine and a local newspaper wrote about his photos are telling:

“People who commented on the articles said, ‘That must be a very weird guy, to come all the way here to photograph these old monuments’”, he says with a laugh.≈

Note: Jan Kempenaers has been affiliated with the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, University College, Ghent, since 2006, and is doing a PhD in the visual arts about picturesque landscapes. His books Picturesque (2012, Roma Publications) and Spomenik (2010, Roma Publications) present the results of his ongoing artistic research. His books can be ordered from www.orderromapublications.org .

On Christmas Eve 1998, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who is now serving as the president of the Republic of Estonia, published an article in which he developed the idea of “Yule Land”.1 Ilsaves used this poetic name to signify the region where the name for Christmas is derived from a common root: in Britain “Yule”, in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark “jul”, in Finland “joulu”. This region also includes Estonia, where Christmas is called “jõul”, but excludes other countries in the region, such as Germany (“Weihnachten”), Latvia (“ziemasvetki”), Lithuania “kaledos”, or Russia (“rozhdestvo”).

Ilves’s aim is not to make an interesting linguistic or historical observation but to point out that the countries that form “Yule Land” have a lot in common. Most importantly, these countries seem to share basic values that are reflected in various characteristics that can be objectively measured, such as a low level of corruption or enthusiasm for technological innovation. Ilves points out that in all these aspects, the Scandinavian countries and Finland are at the top worldwide, and Estonia is approaching their level very fast, having left other post-communist countries far behind.

The concept of “Yule Land” is an example of a conscious reconstruction of mental geographies. It is based on an entirely plausible assumption that “regions” do not exist in nature but are formed in people’s heads. In order to make sense of the surrounding world, we have a natural tendency to group together phenomena that seem to have something in common. This is also the way we handle the overwhelming number of states and nations in the world.

Such groupings are not necessarily objective, for it is always open to debate which characteristics are essential and which are merely accidental. People might think that geography itself offers the most certain guidelines to mental mapping of regions, but this is usually an illusion. For example, the role of seas has varied greatly in history: they have divided countries into separate regions, but they have also bound countries together, as Fernand Braudel has famously shown with the example of the Mediterranean. Similarly, the Baltic Sea has, for most of last millennium, functioned as a connector rather than as a separator.

Therefore, geography alone is never a sufficient indicator. We need, instead, to look at how people interact and what binds them together. This leads us to the second most important component of region-making: politics, or, more precisely, state- and empire-building. Empires, indeed, influence region-building in the long run, because the policies of the central authorities result in similar effects in the various parts of the state. It has to be pointed out, however, that it is in the nature of empires that they contain a number of different nations and political communities, which preserve their own character, traditions, and often even distinct legal system and forms of administration — this is, in fact, why they are called “empires” and not “states”. Thus, it can often happen that the political ties of authority and obedience — which are easy to observe — overshadow much more fundamental characteristics that distinguish the parts of an empire from one another or connect them with other regions across the boundaries of the political map.

A further problem bearing on objectivity is that once the regions are constructed, they stick in our heads and languages, and are hard to get rid of, even when the reality on the ground has changed. All these problems can be observed in the case of Estonia, and have, indeed, prompted Ilves and others to reconstruct the mental geography of this part of the world. The “regionalization” of the Baltic area in the past century has been determined by a political history that has cast a long shadow over all other characteristics even to the present day. After Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania broke away from the Soviet Union, it took ages for the world to stop calling them “post-Soviet republics”, gradually realizing that there is not really too much in common between these countries and, for example, Belarus or Kyrgyzstan.

What is wrong with the “Baltic region”?

The widely used label for the three countries is now “the Baltic States”. So, why invent “Yule Land” if another, seemingly neutral concept has already been adopted? Why are the Estonians not so enthusiastic about viewing themselves as part of the “Baltic region”, and why are they looking elsewhere for regional belonging?

One important reason seems to be that the term “Baltic” still carries a lot of its Soviet legacy and is therefore a constant reminder of the less fortunate period in the history of the region. It is worth remembering that before World War II Finland was also seen as a Baltic state. Finland as an independent state had — just like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — emerged from the ruins of Tsarist Russia, and it had similarly been the object of the Hitler-Stalin Pact that left all these countries to the Soviet “sphere of interest”. However, Finland’s resistance enabled it to avoid Soviet occupation and after the war it successfully managed to be included in the “Nordic space” — nobody would call Finland a “Baltic state” any more. Thus “the Baltics”, as we know the region today, is first and foremost the creation of the Soviets, which is not a legacy that people are very keen to hang on to.

It is also important to remember what that legacy reminds us of: it is the sense of vulnerability and the need to look for wider spheres of belonging. This, of course, was the reason the Baltic states were so enthusiastic about joining NATO. And the security argument has been central even in the cases of joining the organizations that were designed for aims other than security, such as the EU or the monetary union. Every new layer of integration with wider European and trans-Atlantic structures has been seen, without much debate, by the Baltic nations as beneficial to their security and therefore desirable.

The word “Baltic” itself also lacks any meaningful connection to the Estonian national identity. It has always been a foreign word. Many European nations call the body of water “the Baltic Sea”, but the Estonians have their own name for it: “the Western Sea” (Läänemeri). “Baltic” is also commonly used to signify a distinct family of languages within the Indo-European language group, but again, the Estonian language does not belong to this group. Linguistically, the Estonians are very close to the Finns, which is another factor prompting them to look toward the North in search of kin, rather than toward the South. And, finally, the term “Baltikum” is a creation neither of the Estonians nor of the other indigenous populations on the eastern side of the Baltic Sea, but was invented by the German elites who lived in these countries from the thirteenth until the early twentieth century.

The origins of the concept “Baltikum”

Thus, when we look for the roots of the Baltic identity, we need to look at the formation of a national group that does not even live in this area any more. The older generation of the Baltic Germans — in German, “Deutschbalten” or sometimes just “Balten” — still has a distinct identity that is based on the common homeland of their ancestors. It has to be said, however, that these ancestors started to call themselves “Balten” as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. Before that, their provincial identity was much stronger than the national one. The Germans formed the governing and land-owning elites in three Russian provinces along the Baltic Sea (hence “the Baltic provinces”) — Estland, Livland, and Kurland. These provinces, the territories of which correspond roughly to present-day Estonia and Latvia, had their own distinct political structures, administration, and legal traditions.

There was nothing unusual about this; in fact, it was typical of early modern conglomerate states that new territories that were acquired via a contract or a treaty maintained their distinct character under new overlords. The Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire had their origins in the sixteenth century when the Old-Livonian state system was dissolved in the turmoil of the Livonian War. The province of Estland emerged when the towns and nobilities in the northernmost possessions of the Teutonic Order surrendered to the king of Sweden. Livland formed from the parts that surrendered to the king of Poland. The last Master of the Order kept some territories to himself in the form of a duchy that owed allegiance to Poland — this was the origin of Kurland. Livland became Swedish during the seventeenth century; both Estland and Livland were acquired by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century, and, finally, Kurland became a part of Russia with the partition of Poland in late eighteenth century.

Despite the administrative and political divisions, the idea that in a certain sense these provinces belong together was preserved throughout the Early Modern period. Seventeenth-century chroniclers often employed the word “Livland” as a common denominator for all these provinces, emphasizing that in this usage the term covered the provinces of Estland, Livland, Kurland, and Semgallen, and should not be confused with the distinct province of Livland. Such usage, however, appears to belong to the vocabulary of bourgeois and clerical writers only. The nobility, on the contrary, opposed the habit of treating the provinces as a single unit, and attempted to reinforce the provincial identities at the cost of the regional one.

One of the methods of doing this was to extend the history of the province far beyond the time of present rulers, sometimes by very inventive means. For example, a chronicle written at the end of the 17th century by high-ranking noblemen in Estland argues that the distinct identity of the province goes back to pre-Christian era, when pagan rulers governed the powerful kingdom of “Eastland” (Östland). That state was conquered and Christianized by Danish kings who in 1080 founded the Duchy of Estland. This duchy then figures as an autonomous historical actor that throughout history has changed protectors voluntarily in exchange for a confirmation of its historical privileges.2

Similarly, the nobility opposed the occasional attempts by central authorities to impose the common identity of the empire as a whole on the Baltic provinces. Such a conflict of identities can be observed in the course of the controversy over “reduction” (the resumption to the crown of the estates of the nobility) in late seventeenth-century Livland. The most vehement opponent of the reduction, Johann Reinhold von Patkul, was sentenced to death by the Swedish High Court in Stockholm. Patkul managed to flee the Swedish realm and later justified his actions in published writings. One of the accusations of the Swedish prosecutors had been that Patkul had betrayed his fatherland (“patria”), by which they, of course, meant Sweden. Patkul responded that he had acted as a true patriot, because his “patria” was not Sweden, but Livland, and he had risked his life for the sake of Livland, as an honorable patriot was obliged to do.3

The Baltic provinces and the North

In the course of the Great Northern War, Sweden’s Baltic provinces were conquered by Russia. Provincial nobles and city magistrates swore allegiance to the Tsar who confirmed their privileges and restored possessions lost with the reduction. It is only natural that the nobility had no fond memories of the Swedish period. Accordingly, they did not emphasize the Swedish legacy as a part of the identity of the Baltic provinces in the Russian Empire, despite the fact that in the actual life of the area that legacy was rather strong, considering that a large number of Swedish laws were valid until the nineteenth century. The self-image of Baltic nobles was very strongly based on their rights and privileges, which, in their view, pre-dated Swedish rule, were illegally threatened by the Swedish kings, and then rightfully restored by Russian tsars in the capitulation agreements of 1710. The generosity of the tsars towards their new subjects was reciprocated with the loyal service of Baltic Germans in the Russian military and administration. They managed to accommodate the dual identities — provincial and imperial — without too much difficulty.

This “happy marriage” ended abruptly in the middle of the nineteenth century when the “Slavophile” Russian politicians started working towards greater unification of the Empire. This entailed the abolition of the special status of the Baltic provinces. Under this serious threat, the German elites in three distinct provinces realized their common interest and the need to act together. The word “Baltic” started appearing in journal titles, polemical writings, historical works, and elsewhere. The sense of common identity was strengthened by the national movement in Germany, which prompted many Baltic Germans to view themselves as people with a special mission to spread “Deutschtum” in the less civilized part of the world.

The Baltic Germans never identified themselves with anything “Nordic”. In fact, in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, “the North” was an entirely undesirable label, since the northern nations were generally considered savage and uncivilized. “Nordic” meant the same as “barbaric”. During the Thirty Years’ War, an anti-Swedish broadsheet was printed in Germany that scared the readers with the Northern barbarians that fought in the Swedish army. It depicted three figures — a Lapp, a Livonian, and a Scot, all in their national garments and traditional weapons, but all looking equally fearsome.4 In the same vein, Russia, which was also widely viewed as a barbaric country, was located towards the North rather than the East — it demonstrates how mental geographies affect where people think countries are actually situated.

Only during the eighteenth century did “the North” start to acquire a more positive meaning. One of the earliest and most important positive connotations was the concept of “Northern liberty”. The idea that the North had been the bulwark of liberty against the spread of southern tyrannies was developed and promoted by Enlightenment thinkers, such as Montesquieu and Diderot.5 In particular, the personal liberty and political participation of the peasant class was a remarkable testimony to the eminent position of the value of freedom in Northern societies. The peasant curia of the Swedish Riksdag was quite unusual, even in a European context. Elsewhere in Europe, where any representative assemblies existed at all, the peasants were “represented” by their noble landowners.

This Nordic tradition of peasant liberty was totally foreign to the Baltic Germans, who viewed themselves as paternalistic caretakers of their childlike subjects. For Swedish rulers, on the other hand, the “un-Christian” and “inhuman” treatment of the peasants in their Baltic provinces was a constant source of consternation in the seventeenth century. They did not manage to abolish serfdom in noble manors, but the projects drafted in Stockholm to ease the lot of the peasants was one of the primary reasons why the period of Swedish rule was viewed as “the Good Old Swedish Age” by emerging Estonian historiography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In the search for alternatives to Russian and German nationalist imperialism, the Scandinavian societies seemed the most attractive regionalist alternative.

Thus, the Estonian nationalist movement was complemented by a very strong Nordic dimension. In addition to emphasizing the positive role that Sweden had played in Estonian history, the nationalist historians developed an account of earlier history that demonstrated the close connections and similarities between the eastern and western coasts of the Baltic Sea. The period before German conquest became known as the Estonian Viking Age, which also captured the popular imagination and prompted a number of literary works that depicted the valiant deeds of the Estonian vikings. According to popular myth, one of these deeds was the destruction of the old Swedish capital of Sigtuna in 1187 by the vikings from Ösel (see text box on Sigtuna). Thus, the Estonians sought to be similar to the Northerners not only with regard to the achievements of their modern society but also with regard to the more dubious “pan-European” achievements in their past.

Inter-war Estonia and Nordism

When we look back at the formative period at the end of World War I, the emergence of the independent Baltic states often seems like a predetermined outcome. In fact, it was not the only alternative discussed by the local political elites in this period. The options included the establishment of a Baltic duchy with a German prince as a monarch (advocated by conservative Baltic Germans), having Estonia join Soviet Russia (advocated by some Estonian Bolsheviks), and the creation of a union state with Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania, or one with Finland alone. Also, a union state with Sweden was a matter of serious discussion by Estonian politicians.

 All these discussions reflect a certain distrust in the viability of a small state in the then competitive, and often aggressive international world. This is why even after the sovereign Estonian state was established, the search for wider regional attachment — specifically in the form of a military alliance — continued as intensely as before. The most desirable option in the eyes of many politicians was a broader Baltic union that would include Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and perhaps even Poland. However, Finland did not commit to such an alliance, since it was more interested in closer cooperation with Sweden and other Scandinavian countries; and the Swedes discouraged the Finns from linking their fate with that of their southern neighbors. The Poles were left out of the negotiations due to their conflict with Lithuania over the possession of Vilnius. Hence, what was left of this broader regional alliance was a political union between the three Baltic states that was concluded in 1934.

This Baltic cooperation was, however, not universally approved. One of the most vehement opponents to this alliance was Ilmar Tõnisson who argued that there is no such thing as “the Baltic states” (see the text box). He wrote in 1937 that the Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians have nothing substantial in common and the attempts to put them together had been not merely artificial but indeed harmful to Estonian interests. According to Tõnisson, the “Baltic region” was invented by Baltic Germans with the aim of preserving their political superiority. Later on, this regional concept was advocated by the Latvians, because Baltic cooperation was in their geopolitical interest. The Estonians, however, should detach themselves from their southern neighbors and become a Nordic country. Although Tõnisson did not hide the Estonian interests that would be served by this agenda, he emphasized that idea was viable because it would be based on an actual affinity of culture, language, and national character. Moreover, the Nordic countries would not object to such an extension of the concept of “Norden” (literally “the North” in most Nordic languages) because the addition of Estonia would only strengthen their military cooperation, whereas the addition of Latvia and Lithuania would draw them into the possible future clash between Nazi Germany and Soviet Union.6

Good New Nordic Age

The vision of a “Good Old Swedish Age” has never disappeared from the Estonian imagination. In the 1990s, it took some bizarre forms. For example, the success of the Royalist Party at the parliamentary elections in 1992 can only be explained by the universal admiration of the Swedish royalty and its legacy in Estonian history. The seriousness of the party can be judged by the fact that their election program included the idea of inviting the “disinherited” Prince Carl Philip to serve as the King of Estonia.

Nowadays this vision has transformed into a desire to establish a modern and wealthy Nordic society with its democratic and humane values. When Estonian political commentators occasionally ask whether we really want to become a “boring Nordic state”, most people emphatically say, “Yes!”. In this part of the world, to have a bit of a boring period in history would be quite nice for a change.

The reconstruction of mental geographies by extending the concept “Norden” is a part of these efforts. It is, however, quite clear that the Baltic states will never become Nordic just by talking about it — nor, for example, through the replacement of the horizontal color stripes on their national flags with crosses, as has been suggested by an Estonian journalist. The way towards a Nordic society can only be through internal change and development. ≈