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Ron Asmus, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, liked to say that the Baltic states had to run a marathon to join NATO but could rely on the support of their American 'coaches.' Estonian diplomats have used the word 'babysitter' to describe their American colleagues. While it is true that the result of NATO enlargement was never inevitable, the uncertainties of the process were diminished by cooperation between candidate countries and the forces inside the US who pushed for enlargement. Without delving into their motives, this article traces the role of the US as 'coaches' and 'babysitters' in making the Baltic states' 'run' toward NATO a nearly perfect marathon, despite all the pitfalls and doubts along the way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the light of the dramatic escalation of the Russian war on Ukraine since February 2022, questions concerning the handling of Russia in the post-Cold War era, and the enlargement of NATO in particular, are timelier than ever. This article scrutinises the views of George F. Kennan, one of the most influential critics of the decision to expand NATO. It is widely accepted that Kennan's opposition to NATO was grounded in realism about international affairs. A careful study of the development of his thinking, based on his private papers and archival sources from many countries, suggests that his perceptions of developments inside Russia and his imagination of the countries in Central and Eastern Europe were more important than any foreign policy doctrine. Kennan's criticism was grounded in his 'geopolitics of sympathy', understood as a fusion of mental maps, sympathies and personal connections towards the region affected by NATO enlargement. However, Kennan's geopolitics must be considered in conjunction with his ideas about international order, in particular with his defence of empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the Baltic Strategic Institute for Security Studies (BASIS). The institute was one of Estonia's first think tanks and an initiative of the former President of Estonia Lennart Meri. BASIS was founded on 28 October 1993 with the aim of establishing better contacts between Estonia and Western countries. The aim of the article is to give an overview of BASIS, the contacts it managed to establish, (especially with NATO), and its activity. The most notable event organised by BASIS was its inaugural conference held from 15 to 17 December 1993, which featured six different topics ranging from Estonia's security situation and cooperation between the Baltic states to NATO-Russia relations and possible future geopolitical changes. The conference featured many well-known political figures such as the Lithuanian and Latvian presidents, Algirdas Brazauskas and Guntis Ulmanis, the Swedish diplomat Lars Fredén, the historian Max Jakobson, and NATO representative Erica Bruce, who was the director of NATO's Information and Press Bureau at the time. Other members of the Council of BASIS included the former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the political scientist Samuel Huntington. It was quite clear that BASIS wanted to become a well-known and respected think tank in the Baltic area. However, the lifespan of BASIS was cut short, and all its possible achievements were stopped in their tracks as it turned out that one of its council members, Harry Männil was suspected of collaboration with German occupation forces in Estonia during World War II. Männil denied all allegations but the damage to the Institute was done and two of its members, Henry Kissinger and Paul Goble, left the council. Due to the damage to its reputation, it was difficult to find financing for the Institute's further activities. Furthermore, BASIS had a successful competitor in Latvia (the Latvian Institute of International Affairs), which operates to this day and demonstrates what BASIS could have developed into with better financing, organisation, and perhaps also luck. As a result, BASIS serves mainly as a reminder of what could have been. The general idea of being a think tank sponsored largely by the private sector was idealistic, considering the population of Estonia and the country's dire economic situation in the 1990s. Even so, the entire undertaking cannot be considered a failure. Meri's objective in connection with BASIS was to help integrate Estonia more firmly into the Western world, to improve Estonia's reputation, and to make Estonia more widely known in the world. BASIS also created an unfortunately short-lived platform for contact and dialogue between NATO and Estonia that served the objectives of Estonian diplomacy at the turn of 1993 and 1994. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of the 'New Thinking' (NT) marked a radical departure from the foreign-policy traditions adhered to by Soviet leaders since the Bolshevik Revolution. Launched by General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986, his policy approach of NT changed the nature of East-West relations paving the way for the end of the Cold War. A lesser known facet of NT was the perestroika (restructuring) of Soviet foreign policy – especially the devolution of decision-making from the centre to the union republics. It first intended to release the potential of the Soviet people and improve the 'economic mechanism', but soon it became a communist survival strategy in the context of glasnost and demokratizatsiya that had unleashed the centrifugal forces of nationalism. Indeed, NT proved to be a great gamble: by empowering the republics to conduct their own foreign affairs, it allowed national movements to bring their claims to international fora which in turn undermined the legitimacy of the regime. In this vein, NT not only played a pivotal role in defusing East-West antagonism, but ultimately contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union – with all its wider implications for the Baltic arena, Northern Europe, and the world at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue focuses on censorship, but it is difficult to treat censorship without also considering propaganda. This article discusses both censorship and foreign propaganda as complementary tools in the Soviet Union's arsenal for manipulating public opinion in foreign countries. The purpose of such action was to shape the behaviour of those states to further Soviet interests. The article focuses on the use of propaganda and censorship in Soviet efforts to settle the "Baltic question"- the question of the future of the Baltic countries - in the 1940s. This was the time when the wartime alliance was crumbling and giving way to a cold-war confrontation. The article is based on Russian archival sources. The Molotov collection (F. 82), materials of the department of propaganda and agitation of the Central Committee (CC) of the CPSU (F. 17, opis 125), and of the CC department of international information (F. 17, opis 128) are stored in the Russian State Archive of Socio-political History (RGASPI). The collection of the Soviet Information Bureau (F. R8581) is located at the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). The article also draws on previous research on Soviet propaganda, such as Vladimir Pechatnov's and Wolfram Eggeling's studies on the work of the Soviet Information Bureau (SIB) and on discussions in the Soviet propaganda apparatus in the early postwar years. However, this article digs somewhat deeper and alongside general developments, also looks at a particular case - the Baltic problem in the Soviet contest with the West for winning hearts and minds. It analyses Soviet policies without attempting to uncover and reconstruct all the twists and turns of the decision-making processes in Moscow. The archival material is insufficient for the latter task. Nevertheless, a look into the making of Soviet propaganda, the techniques and practices utilised to bring Soviet influence to bear on an important foreign-policy issue (the Baltic problem), is interesting for scholars working not only on propaganda and censorship but also on the history of the Soviet Union and Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The Baltic question was related, among other things, to the problem of repatriating people from the territories of the Soviet Union who had been displaced during the Second World War and were located in Western Europe at the war's end. Moscow claimed that all these displaced persons (DPs) were Soviet citizens. This article helps correct the view, expressed for example by the Finnish scholar Simo Mikkonen, that the Soviet propaganda campaign to attract the remaining 247,000 recalcitrants back home started after a UN decision of 1951 that condemned repatriation by force. This article clearly shows that propaganda policies aimed at the DPs were in place almost immediately after the war, resting on the war-time experience of conducting propaganda aimed at national minorities in foreign countries. However, Mikkonen is right to point out that, in general, repatriation after the Second World War was a success, as approximately five million people in total returned to the USSR. The Baltic refugees were a notable exception in this regard. Research shows that despite displays of obligatory optimism, Soviet propagandists could critically evaluate the situation and the effectiveness of Soviet agitation. They understood that war-time successes were the result of the coincidence of a number of favourable factors: victories of the Red Army, Allied censorship and propaganda, the penetration by Soviet agents of the British propaganda apparatus, etc. They knew that the British media was extensively controlled and served as a virtual extension of Soviet censorship and propaganda. Nevertheless, the Soviets were wrong to assume that in the West, the free press was nothing but an empty slogan. Moscow was also wrong to expect that the Western media, which had worked in the Soviet interest during the war, could as easily be turned against the Soviet Union as it had been directed to support the USSR by political will. In actual fact, the Soviet Union started receiving negative press primarily because earlier checks on journalistic freedom were lifted. The Soviet Union may have been a formidable propaganda state internally, but in foreign propaganda it was an apprentice. Soviet propagandists felt inferior compared to their Western counterparts, and rightly so. In October of 1945, an official of the SIB noted jealously that the Foreign Department of the British Information Ministry had two thousand clerks and there were four hundred British propagandists in the United States alone. Another Soviet official in the London embassy noted in February of 1947 that they had so few staff that he was working under constant nervous strain. Soviet propagandists were aware of the problems but could not effect fundamental changes because of the nature of the Stalinist regime. The issue of foreign journalists working in Moscow was a case in point. The correspondents were handicapped in their work by extremely strict censorship. They could report mostly only those things that also appeared in Soviet newspapers, which was hardly interesting for their readers in the West. There had been suggestions that some restrictions should be lifted so that they could do more useful work and tell more interesting and attractive stories about the Soviet Union. Eventually, during Stalin's first postwar vacation in the autumn of 1945, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov took the initiative and tried to ease the life of the press corps, but this only served to provoke the ire of Stalin who proceeded to penalise Molotov in due course. This showed that the system could not be changed as long as the extremely suspicious vozhd remained at the helm. Not only did correspondents continue to send unexciting content to newspapers abroad (which often failed to publish them), the form and style of Soviet articles, photos and films were increasingly unattractive for foreign audiences. Such propaganda could appeal only to those who were already "believers". It could hardly convert. Moscow considered the activities of Baltic refugees in the West and the publicity regarding the Baltic problem a serious threat to the stability of the Soviet position in the newly occupied Baltic countries. Already during the war, but even more vigorously after the war, the Soviet propaganda apparatus realised the importance of tuning and adapting its propaganda messages for audiences among the Baltic diaspora. The Soviet bureaucracy expanded its cadres to enable it to tackle the Baltic "threat". Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian officials were dispatched to the central organs in Moscow and to Soviet embassies abroad to provide the necessary language skills and qualifications for dealing with Baltic propaganda and working with the diaspora. The policy was to repatriate as many Balts as possible, but it was soon clear that repatriation along with the complementary propaganda effort was a failure. The next step was to start discrediting leaders of the Baltic diaspora and to isolate them from the "refugee masses". This effort also failed. The "anti-Soviet hotbed" of "intrigues and espionage" - the words of the Estonian party boss Nikolai Karotamm - continued to operate in Sweden, the United States and elsewhere until the end of the Cold War. All this time, the diaspora engaged in anti-Communist propaganda and collaborated with Western propaganda and media organisations, such as the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and even Vatican Radio. In the 1980s and 1990s, the diaspora was instrumental in assisting Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to regain their independence from the collapsing Soviet Union. They also helped their native countries to "return to Europe" - that is to join Western structures such as the European Union and NATO. Therefore, the inability to deal with the Baltic problem effectively in the 1940s caused major concerns for the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War and contributed to its eventual demise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]