The political distance that the world has traveled over the last 40 years cannot appear much larger than in the Baltic states. In 1984, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had spent decades locked inside the Soviet Union, but today they exist independently as capitalist democracies–and, as members of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, economic partners and military allies of the United States.
In fewer words, just about everything that the old men leading the USSR wanted to suppress has happened in these three countries. Knowing this has made walking around here this week a little more enjoyable, as it did in visits to Tallinn in 2021 and Riga in 2022.
Friday morning, I took in an additional reminder of why 2024 is not like 1984: a visit to the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights. The name refers to invasions by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but this exhibit space in a 19th-century government office building–which until 2018 went as the Museum of Genocide Victims despite devoting little of its space to the Holocaust–mainly serves as an indictment of Stalin and his successors.
Room and after room recounts how the Communist regime rounded up Lithuanians for alleged crimes against the state and the party and exiled them to prisons and camps as far away as Siberia. Some of the most affecting exhibits showcase what these internal exiles did to retain a tiny bit of their former lives, such as assembling rosaries from bits of stale bread and sending letters back home that first received strikes through sentences from a censor’s pen and then had to be mailed without envelopes.
The museum also notes the partisan warfare Lithuanians staged in forests for years after World War II, a doomed effort that the country later pointed to as proof that it had never consented to its incorporation into the USSR as the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic.
A sequence of exhibits upstairs details how Soviet repression grew more organized and bureaucratic under Khrushchev and Brezhnev–one room holds a set of shelves of KGB rubber stamps, while another features cheery cards, posters and booklets celebrating the KGB’s 50th birthday.
They also unpack how advances in technology allowed increasingly intrusive monitoring of Soviet subjects, which reminded me of the exhibits at the Stasi Museum in Berlin, and of foreign visitors, which made me wonder what records linger of me from my 1989 post-high-shool trip to the Soviet Union.
The lowest levels of the museum reveal the grimmest evidence: rows of prison cells (one made over into a documentation of the local chapter of the Holocaust that saw Nazis and Lithuanian collaborators murder proportionally more Jews than anywhere else in Europe), some set up for solitary confinement and various forms of torture, as well as a chilling basement room in which Soviet functionaries shot prisoners.
I exited feeling a profound gratitude at living in a democracy with guarantees of human rights in its constitution. And at the fact that generations have grown up only reading past-tense accounts of the Soviet Union.
This victory over what President Reagan called an “Evil Empire” remains incomplete. The other countries that escaped Moscow’s rule are far less free–especially Belarus, barely 20 miles to the east. And under Putin’s dictatorship, Russia itself now seems to aspire to be an evil empire modernized with crony capitalism and, as highlighted by all the Ukrainian flags flying in Vilnius, the pointless sacrifice of tens of thousands of its own men in the invasion of Ukraine.
But when so much of the news today can inspire doomism, it is worth taking a minute to reflect that the awful Soviet regime that once seemed an immovable object is gone, swept into the dustbin of history.
(Disclosure: All three trips to the Baltics involved travel comped by hosts, in 2021 as part of a press trip, in 2022 because I spoke at the TechChill conference in Riga and in 2024 because my visit involved both my speaking at the Fintech Day conference and arranged visits to a variety of local startups.)
