Housden Martyn. Forgotten Pages in Baltic History: Diversity and Inclusion. (On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, Freedom, and Moral Imagination in the Baltics) (ENG)

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(http://www.komisija.lt). A second reason for the lull in activities relates to a

significant cut in funding since 2005. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly,

in 2007 the Commission suffered a dramatic political setback―or even

“deliberate sabotage” as its Chairman Emmanuelis Zingeris termed it in a

media interview (Whewell, 2008). In 2007 the Lithuanian prosecutor

general‟s office started a criminal investigation against one of the

Commission members, Yitzhak Arad, the long-time director of Israel‟s

Holocaust Memorial Authority, Yad Vashem and himself a survivor of the

Holocaust in Lithuania. The case for which he was to be summoned for

questioning concerned the activities of anti-Nazi partisans against civilians in

a village in Eastern Lithuania in 1944. As a 16-year-old, escaping from the

ghetto in Vilnius, Arad had joined the partisans, but claimed not to have been

involved in any killings of civilians. (Whewell, 2008; Melman, 2008) Arad,

who is a renowned scholar of the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union

(Arad, 2009), had until then actively participated in the ICL‟s research and

contributed to scholarly exchange and deliberation. However, in the face of

this judicial assault Arad withdrew his membership, as did some of the other

foreign members. The international outcry about Lithuania‟s attempts “to re-

write history” and start prosecuting Holocaust victims as criminals ultimately

led to the de facto suspension of the Commission‟s research activities

altogether. Things had become too political and the presidential Commission

crumbled.

So, keeping issues of diversity and inclusion in mind, what can we

learn from these three examples of “institutionalised interaction” between

Baltic and non-Baltic historians? First, we might conclude that these

commissions are not in fact the right place to look for true scholarly

exchange, as they are primarily political bodies. Established by the Baltic

heads of state, primarily they served the political purpose of refuting old

myths and false historical assumptions used against the young democracies.

Moreover, the results of the commissions‟ investigations were supposed to

enable Baltic officials to respond more adequately to outside criticism, both

from Russia and the West, concerning the legal and political handling of past

crimes. The historians among the commission members certainly did not like

this political dimension to their work and many tried to present themselves as

non-political truth-seekers. The Lithuanian case, however, demonstrates all

too clearly how quickly their efforts would collapse under political pressure.

Looked at from this perspective, the Estonian commission‟s work

becomes the most consistent. Scholarly deliberation that would have aimed at

including contradictory voices and painting a complex historical picture open

for continuous revision was totally kept out of the game. Instead, there was a

clear-cut division of labour, with Estonian researchers providing historical

facts without any critical discussion on the one side and, on the other,

external actors giving a political assessment of these facts, based on

international legal norms and their own estimations. No professional historian

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270

was therefore forced to do the difficult balancing act between his professional

ambitions and ethics and political constraints from in- and outside the

country. Such a purely fact-finding purpose, however, was not the original

task as it had been formulated during the constitutive meeting of the EICICH.

This brings us to a second point that I would like to stress: the unclear

mandates of the commissions. In the Estonian case this concerned the public

role of the commission. On the one hand, Lennart Meri created an external

(exclusive) commission charged with “objectively” assessing historical facts

about past totalitarian crimes. On the other hand, he set the commission the

task of helping to “overcome the stereotypes about groups that were at the

basis of many of these crimes” and to “contribute to reconciliation within our

society” (Meri, 1999). He left it open, however, how the EICICH could

possibly achieve such a task without including the wider Estonian public in

the interpretation and assessment process.

In the Latvian case the lack of mandatory clarity was more related to

the exact role that the foreign members were supposed to play in the CHL.

Consequently, there were rather divergent expectations among the

commission members about what the international commissions could and

should achieve. These expectations concerned first of all the commission‟s

ability to contribute to serious scholarship and cross-cultural scholarly

exchange. Norman Naimark, one of the foreign members of the CHL, once

remarked that he viewed the role of foreigners in the Commission as

primarily serving to help the Latvian historians talk with each other on

difficult issues of the past.

This assessment might be correct when looking at

the early years of Latvian re-independence, when the mass murder of Jews

during the Nazi occupation as well as possible Latvian involvement in these

atrocities were totally new questions for local historians. In those years it

was, indeed, often at externally organised events that local scholars talked

about the more uncomfortable questions in relation to their country‟s past.

However, by 1999 when the three commissions were first convened such

outside assistance was no longer really necessary. Thus, to limit the role of

foreign members in the History Commission to that of merely facilitating

national historians‟ conversation would be too narrow. In fact, such an

assessment is most certainly not shared by other foreign members of the

CHL, such as Erwin Oberländer. As I noted earlier, he organised the 2009

conference in Riga precisely in order to go beyond the exclusive, Latvian-

centred historical discussions and:

“…to encourage Latvian historians to concentrate more than

hitherto on the international comparison as a basic method of

historical research.” (Oberländer, 2009)

In the Lithuanian case, the lack of mandatory clarity had less to do

with the Commission‟s role in wider Lithuanian society. Quite the opposite,

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for right from the beginning and to a much greater extent than its two

northern neighbour organisations, the ICL engaged actively in educational

activities, in teacher training and tolerance education. In this area the ICL, in

fact, still continues its work, resembling more and more the function of a

middle-size NGO, not least given its limited budget. What ultimately caused

the ICL to end its research efforts was more the lack of a political mandate.

Though chaired by a long-time MP and political heavyweight (E. Zingeris),

the ICL largely stayed out of broader history-related political controversies,

even when these directly concerned one of its members. Expectations

obviously differed widely about the political role this presidential

commission should play, both domestically and internationally, in- and

outside the commission. We can only speculate about the political motivation

behind those who filed the request to investigate the involvement of

commission member Arad in wartime partisan actions. But it seems quite

likely that these people did not appreciate the rather inclusive character of the

ICL‟s research activities (concerning Holocaust research), marked by a true

willingness of all parties involved to find an understanding and compromise

if necessary. For some people this was not acceptable and the Lithuanian

“national” perspective was too little respected.

There is a third lesson that I would draw from the comparative

analysis of historians‟ relations in the three Baltic history commissions. It has

less to do with practical issues of politics and commission mandates than

with deeper philosophical questions concerning different traditions of history.

Let us assume for a moment that the commissions, at least those where

foreign and local historians sat together, had all the practical means and

political leeway to engage freely in scholarly exchange, joint research and

negotiation of divergent assessments of the crimes that were committed under

two totalitarian regimes. Would they have found a common language and

understanding of each other‟s viewpoints? Or would it rather have been like

Andrejs Plakans (2010, p. 10) once described it:

“The fact that we can sit in the same rooms around one table for

any length of time and converse at length about a wide variety

of subjects, perhaps even in a common language, is in itself no

guarantee whatsoever that we have had a meeting of minds.”

This is not to be misunderstood as implying that there should be a “unanimity

of views” or even a coherent story. As Saulius Suziedelis, an émigré

Lithuanian member of the ICL, rightly states, “this is neither possible nor

desirable” when faced with genocide and totalitarian terror regimes

(Suziedelis, 2007, p. 4). Rather, what Plakans meant and what I would like to

draw attention to are the different traditions in the study of history that would

most likely prevent a “meeting of minds” among Western-educated and

Baltic historians even under ideal conditions. In what can now be called an

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historic and most anticipatory speech to the opening of the 12

Conference

on Baltic Studies in 1990, Plakans, then president of the American

Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS) discussed

different forms of “convergence” in future homeland- and émigré-Baltic

academic relations. He mapped out three main areas: the physical, the

institutional and the intellectual convergences. While the first two, he

predicted, would be easily achieved due to modern means of transportation

and communication, the intellectual conversion of two fundamentally

different academic traditions would be much harder―especially in the field

of history. Latvian historians, he continued, had a “habit of thinking about the

past in terms of historical laws of development and of the historian‟s

obligation to uncover those laws.” He counterposed this tradition with that of

Western “relativism in making statements about the past” and with “the

general erosion of the belief in absolutes” among Western historians

(Plakans, 2010 [1990], p. 12).

With regard to the Baltic History Commissions, the tension between

two traditions of scholarly history, that of “truth-believers” and “relativists”

if you will, might not have been the main factor that obfuscated scholarly

work on the practical research level. All sides were equally interested in

documenting the hitherto undocumented and unrecorded crimes of past

regimes and individuals. However, as soon as it came to interpreting and

contextualizing the facts, the discussions became controversial.

Differing

opinions about the extent to which historical sources can really speak for

themselves, about the selectiveness of the interpretative process and, last but

not least, about the predisposition of the historian himself in this process,

might have further complicated the conversation. The idea that the truth

about the past can be established once and for all very much reflects the spirit

in which many Baltic historians perceive their own professional activity.

The Baltic History Commissions certainly went a long way towards

realising the physical and institutional “convergence” of historians interested

in 20

century Baltic history. Their ability also to reach intellectual

convergence was rather more limited due to the above political and

mandatory factors. In order to find out what has nevertheless been achieved

in this respect over the past twenty years, we need to step beyond the

frameworks of the presidential commissions and take a broader look at what

has been otherwise going on in the field of history.

Generational shifts and an emerging dialogue of equals

The history commissions in the Baltic States are, of course, not the only

places where cross-cultural exchange between historians of Baltic and non-

Baltic background has taken place over the past years. As I noted earlier, they

are perhaps not even such a good place to look for honest scholarship and

exchange of views. Moreover, looking at the average age of the commission

members, both local and international, these institutions were clearly

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dominated by historians who were educated and socialized at a time of rigid

ideological divisions. In a recent study, Pertti Grönholm and Meike Wulf

distinguished several generations of historians in post-Soviet Estonia, based

on their early socialization and shared experiences (Grönholm and Wulf,

2010). Of the four generational cohorts they identify, the so-called “Post-

War Children” and the “Transitional Generation”, born in the 1950s and

1960s, have dominated the history scene in the Baltic States during the first

twenty years of re-independence. Grönholm and Wulf characterize these two

generations as being “raised, educated and fully socialized in the new Soviet

system” (Ibid, p. 355). They often accommodated or resigned themselves to

the reality of the undemocratic state, which included a way of “double

thinking”―a discrepancy between public and private narratives of the past.

The historians of these generations chose different ways of coping with this

reality and with intellectual and ideological restrictions: professional coping

strategies ranged from conformism and opportunism to inner emigration and

passive resistance. According to Grönholm and Wulf, these different

strategies manifested themselves not only in written texts, but also in

“professional choices and social relations”, including calculating social

networks and the use of irony and “double-talk” (Ibid., p. 356).

During the independence movements of the late 1980s especially,

many historians of the “Transitional Generation” took an active part in the

events that evolved around dates of historical significance and that had been

kept alive in private narratives. This was a short period of extreme openness,

when not only hitherto forbidden memories and historical documents could

be publicly revealed, but also hidden, often uncomfortable stories could be

told (such as that of local participation in crimes of foreign powers).

However, this period quickly ended once state independence had been

achieved:

“The logic of the newly „nationalizing state‟ (…) imposed

different constraints on the work of post-Soviet historians as

they had to abide by the principle of national restoration and

consolidation. Since the late 1980s national history writing has

been increasingly hegemonised by new orthodoxies and one-

dimensional thinking” (Ibid, p. 369).

As a result of this, the field of professional history―and especially

that of 20

century history―in all three Baltic States has over the past 20

years become largely dominated by a focus on political (national) history, on

state leaders, policies and structures. Moreover, the former ideological grip

on the discipline of history now keep many of the leading historians in the

Baltics from approaching the past from more ideational or conceptual

perspectives.

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274

All of this might help to explain some of the origins of early discords

between Western-trained and Baltic historians. However, it does not explain

why the established Baltic 20

century history is still dominated by political

history and themes such as subaltern and minority histories, everyday-life or

cultural history, economic history or ideas and actions of non-state actors still

remain marginalized. The narrow approach of current Baltic history becomes

even more apparent in regard to projects that cross the disciplinary

boundaries towards the social sciences and philosophy. One of the reasons

for this is quite practical: Baltic academic societies are small and so is the

academic market. Those historians who filled the newly established

institutional positions in the early 1990s were predominantly of the above-

mentioned “Transitional Generation.” They are thus rather young and far

from leaving these positions any time soon. Historians of a younger

generation (born in the late 1960s and 1970s), are educated under totally new

conditions, many studied abroad and bring fresh ideas to their studies. Yet,

they are often forced to pursue their academic interests outside their own

discipline, in semi-academic institutions such as museums and archives or

outside academia altogether. Though this deprives them at times of certain

institutional benefits and useful contacts, the experience might prove

beneficial for the future development of historical writing in the Baltic States.

The question in this context is whether, with this new generation of

historians, the communication between historians in- and outside the Baltics

is moving towards a more even partnership and “intellectual convergence.”

I will limit my reflections here to historical circles in Estonia and

Latvia, rather than taking in the whole picture that would include young

Baltic scholars studying and working in the field of history at Western

universities. Due to the practical reasons mentioned above, many students of

history have, indeed, decided to pursue careers at Western European or

American universities. Their perspective on the Baltic past has adapted

naturally to the necessities of the respective academic communities (and

publishing formalities) in which they work, often forcing them far more than

their peers at home to view Baltic history from a more distanced and

comparative perspective. The fact that they have become part of Western,

mostly English-based, discourses often alienates them further from the

discussions pursued at home and limits their contribution to them. Yet some

of these younger scholars have returned and have tried to find a niche in their

native societies. This means that it is, in fact, rather difficult to distinguish

clearly between homeland- and international-Baltic historiographical

developments or between “Baltic”-educated and Western-educated historians.

Nevertheless, I will still concentrate on local developments.

Again, the conference in Riga might provide us with an initial clue. As

it turned out, the format envisaged for this conference, which paired up

foreign with Latvian scholars as presenter and commentator, proved rather

difficult to implement. Whether initially intended or not, the conference

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organisers ended up asking primarily young, up-coming researchers to

comment on the foreign historians‟ presentations. Interestingly, most of these

young historians worked outside universities, at the State Archive or the

Occupation Museum. Only one held a position as associate professor at the

University of Latvia. Several other young scholars of history sat in the

audience. Of course, this is only a subjective impression, but it seemed as if

they truly enjoyed engaging in comparative discussions on conceptual

questions. These included, for example, the delineation of boundaries of

collaboration and resistance in a context of alternating totalitarian

occupations or the different Western countries‟ decades-long experiences

with the „politics of memory.‟ The latter issue is increasingly attracting the

attention of young Estonian and Latvian scholars of history and political

science, not least due to recurrent controversies surrounding Second World

War monuments and commemoration practices as well as other

representations of the past (cf. M. Mälksoo, 2009; Petersoo and Tamm, 2008;

Strenga, 2007 and 2008; Ijabs, 2010). Moreover, in Estonia young historians

are exploring theoretical and philosophical questions of “how to study

history” in general and Estonian history in particular and have started to

communicate this also to the wider public (Tamm, 2007; Kreem, 2007;

Piirimäe and Piirimäe, 2000). Finally, the field of studying the past in the

Baltics has been largely enriched by the works of young researchers partly

active in other disciplines, studying social and cultural history, doing oral

history as well as carrying out textual and socio-psychological analysis of

autobiographical narratives (

Kõresaar, 2010; Kõresaar, Lauk and Kuutma,

2009; Bela-Krūmiņa, 2006; Kaprāns, 2009).

Not many Baltic contemporary historians include the results of these

studies and discussions in their own work. There is still a certain professional

reservation about studies that focus on subjective historical accounts or on

the philosophical dimensions of history, not to mention the politics of their

field of study. Yet, in this the Baltic historians are not so different from their

colleagues in the West. In other words, the scholarly reality of Western

history that has to accept that other disciplines are staking out a claim to the

study of the past, with sometimes rather interesting results, has reached the

Baltics as well. Whether a younger generation of historians is taking this as a

chance to break up the old paths of how Baltic historians “do” history, or

whether they continue to view their discipline in rather narrow terms, remains

to be seen. In my encounters with younger Baltic historians I no longer sense

the defensiveness I felt whenever I talked with historians of the older

generations. Sure enough, some of them still think that an outsider does not

really understand the predicaments of recent Baltic history and thus arrives at

wrong conclusions. However, the predominant attitude is that of eagerness to

engage in an exchange of views.

How much of a chance young Baltic researchers get to have such

exchanges, however, depends on more than just generational change,

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institutional and economic factors are equally crucial. In terms of institutional

provision for young researchers, Estonian academia is quite well positioned

as it contains a transparent system of grant and employment opportunities

that is open to Estonian and non-Estonian scholars alike. Indeed, it has

attracted quite a few returning Estonians as well as foreigners, not least in the

field of history. Moreover, through external review and high benchmarks,

Estonian researchers are encouraged to publish their findings in international,

competitive journals and thereby participate in a larger discourse. Whether

this has any concrete bearings on the character of local historical discourses

and public debates, however, is another question that is anything but easily

answered.

In Latvia, such a competitive system of research funding does not yet

exist. The academic system still lacks a functioning system for supporting a

young generation of scholars―what the Germans would call Nachwuchs-

förderung―through grant opportunities that would allow young researchers

to undertake independent work and take part in international conferences. For

outsiders (including émigré Latvians) it is also rather difficult to find a place

within the existing university structures. As a consequence the young

generation of Latvian historians (with a few exceptions) has not yet gone far

beyond the narrow frames of the native academic community, both in

physical terms as well as in intellectual. The current economic situation,

unfortunately, limits the local resources for undertaking research especially in

the humanities and social sciences even further.

The wheel, however, will not turn back. Twenty years of historical

research and (even if sometimes turbulent) international scholarly exchange

has changed the landscape of history writing about the 20

century

significantly. Relations between Baltic and non-Baltic scholars of

contemporary history will remain beset by controversy, if only for the reason

that looking at a particular region from outside always reveals aspects that the

local researcher considers irrelevant or even wrong―and vice versa. But

increasingly, the conversation about dissonances and conflicts of opinion

takes place in a spirit of inclusiveness, of:

“…a deep appreciation of each other‟s thought processes and

then a decision to minimize the importance of those aspects of

them that can never be merged.” (Plakans, 2010, p. 10)

This is what Plakans described twenty years ago as a fundamental

requirement for “intellectual convergence” in academic relations between

Baltic and Western historians. I think that this is something we are slowly

moving towards.

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Notes

1. In this essay I reflect on questions that I have continuously encountered in

the course of my studies on the emerging Baltic historiographies since the

early 1990s. As it is my aim to raise and discuss recurrent issues of Baltic

historiography in- and outside the Baltic States, I chose deliberately to taper

some of my arguments and perhaps exaggerate slightly. I do not, however,

intend to give a complete account of Baltic 20th century historiography, nor

do I engage in theoretical considerations about the deconstruction of Baltic

historical memory or the development of epistemological communities. My

thanks go to Valters Nollendorf and Joachim Tauber for providing me with

valuable information about the internal workings of the History Commissions

in Latvia and Lithuania as well as to Karsten Brüggemann and Dovile

Budryte for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Financial

support for this research came from a Targeted Financing Grant, no.

SF0180128s08, from the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research.

2. See the recently published conference proceedings: Nollendorfs and

Oberländer (eds.), 2010.

3. Private conversation with Valters Nollendorfs, September 2009.

4. All final reports were subsequently translated also into Estonian and

Russian. The Commission members were the former diplomat and journalist

(Finland) Max Jakobson (Chairman), the former Minister of Foreign Affairs

Uffe Ellemann-Jensen (Denmark), an political analyst and columnist Paul

Goble (USA), the Chairman of the American Jewish Committee‟s Foreign

Policy Commission Nicholas Lane, (USA), Professor Emeritus of Political

Science at George Washington University Peter Reddaway (USA), the

Chairman of the human rights organisation Memorial Arseny Roginsky

(Russia), and the former conservative Member of Parliament Freiherr

Wolfgang von Stetten (Germany). See also the Commission‟s webiste at:

http://www.historycommission.ee/

5. The irritation among Lithuanian historians about the obvious lack of

interest in “Lithuanian issues” on the part of their Western colleagues was

also observed by Joachim Tauber, one of the foreign members of the ICL.

Private conversation, Lüneburg, 8 March 2010.

6. Naimark pointed this out during a conference on “Historical Commissions:

Comparative Perspectives,”organised by Columbia University Seminar on

History, Redress, and Reconciliation, the Center for the Study of Human

Rights, and the East Central European Center, Columbia University, 12/13

March 2010. See also:

http://hrcolumbia.org/historical/ (last accessed

4.5.2010).

7. This assessment was confirmed during several private conversations with

commission members active in both the Latvian and the Lithuanian

commissions.

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278

8. This is not to imply that conceptual approaches to the past are so popular

amongst many Western historians either. Especially in public discourses

about the past, political history clearly dominates also in “the West”.

However, within the academic field of history a healthy diversification of

different approaches has long taken place, opening history towards

philosophy, cultural studies and the social sciences.

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