History and culture
Our quest is to to find and preserve long forgotten pieces of paper holding accounts of the Baltic past, produced during the times they describe—or accounts by those who were there to experience events. The purpose? To see the Baltics through the eyes of their times, no hindsight, no spin doctoring. Our search for objectivity also extends to present, to disseminate reputable scholarship to counter the mischaracterizations and misperceptions which still envelope the Baltics nearly two decades after they regained independence.
The Baltic past is rich in ancient cultural treasures and in the geopolitical lessons it teaches, as relevant to today as when Count Shuvalov, Russian governor-general of the Baltic provinces, first stated:
“The historical mission of the Baltic provinces is to serve as a battlefield for the problems of the highest politics in Europe.”
That role continues even today as the Baltics find themselves between an autocratic-leaning Russia flush with energy revenues and a Western Europe seeking to fashion them into a geopolitical "front-line" of democracies.
Yet, the significance of the Baltics is not that they have been a battlefield for eight centuries—their significance is that those eight centuries are but a fraction of the millennia the Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians have lived and thrived along the Baltic coast as stewards of some of Europe's oldest and richest cultures.
Our digital collection brings the Baltic past out of obscurity to light for a new century and millenium.
Contemporary perspectives Baltic views and insights
The views expressed in the articles linked to below are those of the authors alone. The purpose is not to agree or disagree, but to explore points of view for new perspectives, to better inform our debate on the issues facing the Baltics today.
- Estonia Counts her Blessings — Reflections on the survival of Estonia, an essay by Juri Estam
Feb 23 '08[February 23 2008]