GRUTAS (Lithuania): Stalin still rules in one corner of the Baltics, but his steely gaze holds no terror for three ex-communist republics on the verge of joining NATO.
The Gulag-style Gruto Park in southern Lithuania urges Baltic citizens not to forget their past as they “return to Europe”, but many want to wipe out all memory of five decades of Moscow’s rule, and the park has armed guards to keep vandals out.
“I had to live through the Soviet occupation, that’s enough for me,” pensioner Antonia Mikaloniene said, pointing at the park while gathering mushrooms in the nearby forest.
Inside, grim mementoes of half a century of Soviet rule are preserved for posterity, including a dozen giant statues of Lenin and a cattle-wagon used to deport people to Siberia.
But the park could only muster one and a half Stalins.
The man who occupied the Baltics and deported hundreds of thousands to the Siberian wastelands does not deserve to be remembered, many locals say, still angry that their small nations were lost behind the Iron Curtain.
After regaining independence from Moscow in 1991, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia immediately embarked on painful reforms aimed at qualifying them for both NATO and European Union membership.
The Baltics see EU entry, probably in 2004, as the key to getting their economies back on their feet.
As for joining NATO, there seems little need for discussion.
Nearly 60 per cent of the three states’ combined seven million population, which include sizeable Russian minorities, say only NATO will do.
“Neutrality is so unrealistic, it’s not even brought up in serious discussions,” said Vytautas Landsbergis, who led Lithuania’s freedom movement and was president at independence.
He is certain NATO leaders will invite the Baltic states to join the alliance when they meet in Prague on November 21 and 22.
“If they don’t name Lithuania in Prague, it would be totally unexpected and felt as the greatest betrayal,” he said.
The Prague meeting is also expected to extend membership invitations to Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania.
SMALL ARMIES: When Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s “glasnost” reforms eased Moscow’s iron grip in the 1980s, the Baltic states edged closer to their dream of independence.
On August 23, 1989, two million Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians joined hands to form a 600 kms human chain through the three capitals of Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn.
Lithuania then spearheaded the Baltic freedom movement by declaring full and immediate independence in 1990.
Shocked by the move, Moscow cracked down hard on the independence movement in January 1991, killing 20 people in Vilnius and Riga, but failed to crush the dreamers buoyed by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Since then, the three countries have built their armies almost from scratch and are ready to offer NATO airspace surveillance, peacekeepers, a defence college and minesweeping.
The Baltic states hoped to be part of NATO’s first wave of eastward enlargement that saw Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic join the alliance in 1999, but they were blocked by Russian opposition to NATO expanding to its border.
Undeterred, the three pushed on, taking military spending above NATO’s demand of two per cent of GDP, despite ailing welfare systems and tight economies, adamant to make their total of 20,000 full-time troops a boon, not a burden.
NATO entry for Estonia and Latvia will strip away a buffer zone between Russia and NATO in the former Soviet Union, creating a new border between the two old Cold War foes.
And, with the poor Russian enclave of Kaliningrad between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea coast, Moscow will even have an awkward outpost surrounded by NATO and EU territory.
“This is something new for NATO, but not for us,” Landsbergis said.
SURE ABOUT PRAGUE: The Baltics are confident of their NATO chances now that Moscow has relaxed its hardline and US President George W. Bush has called for the alliance to expand “from the Baltic to the Black Sea”.
Most take Bush’s plan to visit Vilnius straight from the Prague summit as the surest sign yet that their bids are on track. Diplomats and cafe owners are gearing up in case Bush pops in on the “victory lap”.
Estonian Prime Minister Siim Kallas said Baltic membership of NATO would mark the end of a difficult transition and a new beginning firmly anchored to Europe.
Landsbergis said it was all part of coming home to a family of values such as democracy, free market economy and respect for human rights from which they had been brutally cut off.
“The Soviet Union was not a family, but a prison,” he said.
Estonia and Latvia both struggle with large Russian minorities often sceptical about Western integration, but Kallas said there was no ethnic divide in Estonian society.
The same birch-and-spruce forest where Mikaloniene strolls to fill her mushroom basket gave Baltic-wide shelter to the “Forest Brothers” who waged a guerrilla war until 1953.—Reuters