SUMMARY:

The articles treats the problem of the early-Khruschev era’s national policies in the Soviet Baltic republics, and the role historical arguments and assessments of the potential of historical and cultural legacies played in defining these policies by the Party leadership in Moscow and by republican party leadership on the ground. The author argues that the public resonance of Khruschev’s report to the XXth Congress of KPSU was not carefully and consciously calculated. For the Baltic republics, 1956 did not signify a new epoch but rather a continuation of the“new national policy” initiated by Beria in 1953, which aimed at securing social and political support in these newly acquired territories. This policy demanded provisions for native languages and the promotion of locals to high posts in the republican party hierarchies. A comparative reading of local Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian archives and documents of the KPSU Central Committee allows Tannberg to reconstruct a complicated dynamic of pushing the “new national policy” from the top, and sabotaging or inverting it on the republican level. The article pays attention to cultural and historical factors that determined different responses by the Baltic party leaderships to Moscow’s demands. Tannberg shows that Khruschev’s “thaw” in the Baltic republics lead not only to a re-evaluation of Stalinist “repressions,” but also to a partial re-evaluation and rehabilitation of pre-Soviet statehood, especially its cultural contexts. Still, a close reading of the 1957 discussion of Estonian national cultural heritage from the period of independence allows Tannberg to conclude that the republican party leadership retained control over historical and legal judgments. The article concludes that both the “new national policy” as well as an official anti-nationalist policy of the Soviet state in the context of post-Stalinist USSR contributed to mobilizing Baltic societies—a process that culminated in the popular “awakening” of the late 1980s.