Strongman, The

better PR but better behaviour. (I will look at this in detail in Chapter 9.) My impression from working closely with them is that they genuinely do not comprehend why many East Europeans – and particularly the Balts – remain deeply uneasy about their big neighbour.
    Naturally no one at the Prague summit spoke openly of their fear of Russia. But you did not have to dig very deep into history to understand its roots. Almost all of the East European leaders attending Václav Havel’s show had personally, like him, lived through the horrors of Soviet occupation and life in a totalitarian regime. There were many open sores. The Poles felt the Russian government had not done enough to acknowledge (far less apologise for) the murder by Stalin’s secret police of thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals at Katyn in 1940. The Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians had not just been occupied by the Soviet army but incorporated into the Soviet Union, where they had had to fight for their survival as nations. Thousands of their people had been sent to the Gulag. Their tiny republics had been swamped with Russian citizens, who brought with them their language and culture, and a Moscow-based Communist Party bureaucracy that turned them into second-class citizens. Native Latvians comprised less than half the population of their own capital city, Riga. There was widespread resentment of the Russian presence, and the three Baltic nations were the first to rise up against Soviet rule when Gorbachev’s reforms opened the lid a little in the 1980s.
    But their independence, restored in 1991, did not put an end to all the problems. Russia came to terms politically with the situation, but more than a million Russians lived in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and the Kremlin felt it had a right and duty to protect them. The new independent governments did themselves no favours by not always treating their Russian minorities with much consideration. In their hearts, most Balts felt the Russians should never have been there in the first place: it was they who had colonised the Baltic and subjugated its people, so they had only themselves to blame. Language and citizenship laws which rendered most Russians stateless in Latvia and Estonia were criticised by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the European Union demanded changes as a condition for the two countries’ accession. Over the years since independence, Russia had kept up a litany of complaints about civil rights in Latvia and Estonia (Lithuania’s Russian population was much smaller and had few complaints). At times the rhetoric was very hostile, so it should have come as no surprise to the Russians that Baltic nations were welcomed with open arms into NATO.
    By common consent, it was Vaira V ī ķ e-Freiberga, the Latvian president, who stole the show at the Prague summit with a powerful, eloquent speech, delivered without notes. She herself had not personally endured the years of Soviet rule, as she had escaped with her parents at the age of seven, just as the Red Army ‘liberated’ her country and imposed communism there. But her words summed up what the event was all about:
    Latvia lost its independence for a very long time, and it knows the meaning both of liberty and the loss of it. Latvia knows the meaning of security and the loss of it. And this is why being invited in an alliance that will ensure our security is a momentous moment that will be writ large in the history of our nation.
    We in Latvia would like to build our future on the rock of political certainty, not on the shifting sands of indecision. We do not want to be in some sort of grey zone of political uncertainty, we would like to enjoy the full sunshine of the liberties and the rights that NATO has been defending so long. We do not want to be left out in the outer darkness, and we would not wish this to happen to any other nation who has expressed the desire to join those nations that hold the same values, that follow the same ideals, and that are ready for the same efforts and the same strivings. Our people have been tested in the fires of history, they have been tempered in the furnaces of suffering and injustice. They know the meaning and the value of liberty. They know that it is worth every effort to support it, to maintain it, to stand for it and to fight for it.
    Her audience – all male heads of state – almost stopped breathing as she spoke. Alexander Kwa ś niewski,