The lesson of the Baltics: Don’t trample on the little guy

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Rev. Dr. Fritz Traugott Kristbergs is the president of the executive committee of the Latvian National Federation in Canada.

On Aug. 24, 1939, Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop signed a document that would cost the lives of millions of people worldwide.

The agreement, best known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact after its two signatories, committed Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to neither aiding nor allying with an enemy of the other for 10 years – a promise that Adolf Hitler would break in 1941. But the pact also included a secret protocol to create spheres of influence by divvying up Eastern Europe among them: Germany would get parts of Lithuania, and the Soviets would get Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Bessarabia. In 1940, the Soviet Union annexed those states, condemning their people to a half-century of brutal occupation. The world only learned about this protocol at the Nuremberg Trials after the Second World War.

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Yet today, despite the agreement’s monumental consequences on our world, the remembrance of its signing passes largely unnoticed. It might have fallen from the collective memory altogether, except for the continuing efforts of the Baltic states and their diasporas to remind the world of the pact’s bitter lessons, which still have resonance today: that we must never again callously disregard smaller states and their peoples and cultures.

As early as 1969, protests against the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact played a central role in the emerging independence movements in the Soviet-occupied Baltic states. The most significant of these early protest documents was written in 1979, on the 40th anniversary of the pact’s signing, in which 45 Baltic freedom leaders appealed to the United Nations to condemn the illegal Soviet occupation; similar appeals were published in December, 1979, and January, 1980. But the Soviets refused to acknowledge the existence of the secret provision.

Then, in the summer of 1989 – a period in which Mikhail Gorbachev was pushing his campaign of bringing new honesty to Soviet history (or glasnost) – the Soviet government finally acknowledged the secret agreement. In doing so, writes Anatol Lieven, one of the foremost chroniclers of the Baltic independence movements, the Soviets “had in effect admitted the illegitimacy of Soviet rule; any subsequent Soviet political activity in the region could now be … an attempt at the reimposition of military rule, without any democratic or legal justification.”

Protests against the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact initiated and inspired subsequent independence movements in the Baltic states, culminating in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania declaring their independence in 1991. In 2009, the Czech poet and statesman Vaclav Havel and a group of leading human-rights activists succeeded in having the European Parliament declare Aug. 23 – the day to which the signing of the pact was backdated – as the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism, one of only two official remembrance days in the EU. In Canada, Aug. 23 was declared Black Ribbon Day as the national day of remembrance in Canada of the victims of Stalinism and Nazism.

Since its founding in 1949, the Baltic Federation of Canada, representing the diaspora communities of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in Canada, has joined with other Central European diaspora communities to commemorate Black Ribbon Day. The goal is to keep alive the memory of the millions of victims of Stalinism and Nazism, and to remind the world of the lessons this nefarious pact has apparently yet to teach us.

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After all, the thinking that animated the original pact can be readily seen in Russia’s illegal and brutal war against Ukraine, and in Moscow’s insistence that Ukraine is not really a nation nor a separate culture worthy of existence. By meeting without Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky in last week’s summit in Alaska, Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump have mirrored the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact’s spirit of having large states determine the fate of smaller, less powerful ones. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mr. Putin has claimed that the Baltic states willingly joined the Soviet Union.)

Similarly, at the heart of the Republican criticism of U.S. support of Ukraine is a belief that Ukraine is a distant, irrelevant concern for Americans. In the 1930s, this thinking was prevalent too, including through Father Charles Coughlin’s pro-Hitler radio rants against U.S. involvement in any European conflict. Today, Fox News seems to be the voice of American isolationism, exalting its own culture while degrading or dismissing the worth of others.

Canada’s history, too, has been marked by transgressions of a similar spirit. Our relationship with Indigenous peoples has often been marred by a dismissal of their basic cultural rights and existence, with the painful and disgraceful legacy of residential schools and the Sixties Scoop being but two of many examples. Their land and culture, as that of the Baltics and other peoples, was of no consequence to the colonial and imperial powers.

In his 1951 essay The Lesson of the Baltics, the Polish poet and diplomat Czeslaw Milosz recounted a friend’s cruel admonition: “If you keep thinking about the Baltics and the camps, do you know what will happen to you? … You will have ruined your life worrying about trifles!” But for Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and other millions of victims of Stalinism and Nazism, the pact and its consequences are not trifles; they left deep scars on their souls that demand remembrance.

But the remembrance of that betrayal of nationhood and culture should not be limited to three small European nations nor to events of the past. As Mr. Milosz presciently reminded us, we “have the gift of seeing simultaneously what was happening in Omaha and Prague, in the Baltic states and on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.”

With the lessons of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact at the forefront of our minds, may we use that gift to assert the enduring and irreplaceable value of all nations, peoples and cultures.