Volume 38, Number 19 · November 21, 1991
In the New Republics
By Michael Ignatieff
The Baltic countries have been independent for three months now, and what a strange halfway house their independence is. During a recent visit to Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia I saw Soviet guards at the Tallinn docks checking visas of passengers coming off the Helsinki ferry. Soviet militia and Latvian border guards share the same miserable portable cabin out in the featureless fields, where Latvia ends and Lithuania begins. Around the Supreme Council buildings in all three republics, the barricades still remain, as if nobody can quite believe the tanks won't return. Behind the barbed wire and concrete slabs, Baltic politicians are working day and night to set up new, free institutions, uneasily aware that political liberty remains conditional as long as they remain, in effect, under Soviet military occupation.
Feature, 4482 words
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