Celsius Centre for Scandinavian Studies

Vol 2 1998 - Review by Tony Griffiths

The Baltic and the outbreak of the Second World War

John Hiden and Thomas Lane (eds)

Cambridge University Press
PO Box 85
Oakleigh Vic 3166 Australia

This comprehensive account of the Baltic Security question contained contributions from Mieczyslaw Nurek, Rolf Ahmann, Anita Prazmowska, Patrick Salmon, Bogdan Koszel and Alfonsas Eidinta, as well as two chapters by the editors Hiden and Lane themselves.

The book originated in a conference held at the University of Bradford in 1990. The original intention of the conference was to mark the fifth anniversary of the outbreak of World War II. But with the kaleidoscopic changes involved in the disintegration of the former soviet union, the significance of Hiden and Lane's anthology now lies elsewhere. Hiden begins from the standpoint that historians of international relations between the wars have been preoccupied with events in London, Paris, Berlin and Moscow. Few, observed Hiden, have been long detained by the view from Helsinki and Stockholm, let alone that from Tallin, Riga and Kaunas. Hiden laments that it was as if the Baltic republics, like the other small states in South East and East Europe, had an existence which could be measured only in forms of what 'great' powers did to them.

So it is with some satisfaction that the author notes:

As Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania mark the 50th anniversary of the Soviet takeover in 1940 by insisting on independence talks with Gorbachev's government, the Baltic region can be seen to be anything but peripheral. Nothing illustrates this more effectively than the way in which today's Baltic republics have made the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of August 1939 a focal point in their renewed struggle for statehood. In doing so they have prised open cracks in the Soviet constitutional order itself.

It is always invidious for a review to single out one of a number of conference papers published in an anthology, but Patrick Salmon's chapter on Great Britain, the Soviet Union and Finland at the beginning of World War II has some particularly interesting observations within it. Salmon points out that while at the outbreak of war in September 1939 Finland was one of the least important countries from the British point of view, by the early months of 1940 it had become the principal piece of Allied strategies interest.