Dominic Kirkham reviews The Glass Wall: Lives on the Baltic Frontier by Max Egremont Picador (London 2021) Pbk. 320 pages
The Baltic states are once more a focus of global concern, a flashpoint of military conflict, even nuclear Armageddon. What may have once been regarded as remote, far-away places of marginal concern are now very much instrumental in the decision making of the EU and NATO alliance. It is these states, particularly Latvia and Estonia, that are the focus of this book which is part travelogue, memoir, and rumination based on numerous interviews and character studies. Though I have travelled in Eastern Europe and Russia, and studied their history, I bought the book because I had no clear mental picture of these two states. I was amply rewarded.
These always were, and still are, very much ‘frontier’ states shaped by both the Teutonic West and Russian East, a place where the clash of civilisations – European Christendom and Slavonic Orthodoxy – continues today in Putin’s ‘Holy War’ with its blend of militant Orthodoxy and nationalism. The result is a history of mind-boggling complexity – with its ‘glass wall’ of ever shifting alliances, and loyalties, and incomprehensible savagery: there is hardly a family that does not have a tragic memory of a relative who was arrested, exiled, ‘disappeared’, or murdered, particularly in the Soviet era.
No easy lessons can be drawn from this conflicted history nor moral judgements made, other than perhaps the frightening speed with which societies can slide into savagery once social structures crumble. In Latvia and Estonia such structures had traditionally been provided by a Germanic baronial elite that had settled the area during the great Northern Crusade that began in the thirteenth century.
Though we tend to focus on the Crusades as a phenomenon related to the Middle East this is quite misleading. Even over a period of three centuries, their effect here was ephemeral and ultimately a failure – thought their memory remains toxic. Far more enduring and significant were their effects in the Baltic. It is here, particularly in Latvia, that we see the how the drama of one iteration of an imperial Christianity (Christendom) unfolded. Its dual strategy of conversion and colonisation would later become the template for Europe’s global expansion.
At the time this civilising mission was seen to be necessitated by the heathenism of the indigenous people. In fact it was little more than a land grab: the reviews Livonian Knighthood, or Ritterschaft, which controlled Latvia and southern Estonia was drawn from a hundred and sixty eight landowning families who imposed a ruthless order from their castles and manors with the additional agency of the church, originally Catholic then Lutheran. ‘The enemy’, according to one contemporary (1225) witness, would be “forced to give up their wicked habits …They deserved to be killed.”
This domination was resisted at the time, and is now widely regarded as having lead to “a thousand years of enslavement,” that ended only with the defeat of Germany in 1918, the rise of Bolshevism and the clamour for independence. It was the restoration of this Germanic world – again with the excuse of bringing a superior culture – that provided the key context to Hitler’s campaign, Operation Barbarossa, an undertaking he also saw as a crusade to defend and expand civilisation.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s and the re-emergence of independent Baltic states there has been a further transformation accompanied by an awakened interest in ancient traditions and beliefs that were very much related to the natural world, to the ‘spirits’ of the forests, sky and rivers. In this world the feminine deities were often more powerful than their male equivalents, with the masculine winds controlled by a mother goddess: the emblematic ‘Stone-Age Madonna’ dates back to the sixth millennium BCE.
Though Latvia and Estonia are now wholly secularised states the search for a modern identity paradoxically seeks out such places as the settlements on the Estonian island of Saaremma that date back to the fourth millennium BCE and reveal a wealth of carved tools and amber jewellery of the original Finno-Ugrians. Was this, asks Egremont, something of a ‘golden age’ before eastern Slavs came from Russia and the Vikings from the west? Rather, almost from the outset, this is the story of a frontier land crushed between greater powers, It is a story by no means concluded nor its outcome assured.