Among the most powerful images to come from the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was the Baltic chain in which nearly two million people linked hands across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on August 23, 1989 and to demand the return of the three states’ independence from the Soviet Union. This event brought into sharp focus not only the scale of Baltic political mobilization against Soviet rule, but also the degree to which this mobilization was bound to historical reference points, historical grievances, and historical legacies. More than any of the other nationalist movements in the former Soviet Union, the Baltic states had in the events of 1939-40 a very clear historical focal point for their disgruntlement with Soviet rule, which was also explicitly corroborated by a majority of the Western world through the latter’s so-called non-recognition policy (or refusal to diplomatically recognize the incorporation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union). Thus, the Baltic states saw their struggle for independence very much as a straightforward process of historical justice, since the past wrongs were supposedly clear-cut and well defined.
Yet, this external image of uniformity belies an internal reality of disparity to the extent that these historical commonalities did not actually play themselves out in an identical manner when it came time to develop post-independence political identities as well as to choose specific democratic institutions. Rather, the historical narratives of Soviet occupation and the restoration of independence were applied to differing degrees in the three states, whereby Estonia and Latvia followed a more hard-line path, while Lithuania proved more flexible. Thus, in this article I will argue that in addition to fostering differing political identities, these divergences also had an effect on the choice of political institutions and as a result the three states now share much less in common than they did when they stood together in their Baltic chain.
The broader thesis is the following: beginning from an initial period of considerable parallelism and even reciprocal political learning, the Baltic states have diverged markedly in their political-institutional trajectories, as a result of which it is increasingly difficult to speak of a single Baltic political entity. Although there are still factors that bind the three states (like their simultaneous accession to NATO and the European Union), there remain differences, which exist also at different analytical levels. The variance is the most stark in basic institutional terms: while Lithuania has emerged as a semi-presidential democracy with a relatively unique dual majoritarian and proportional electoral system, Estonia and Latvia have remained staunchly parliamentary democracies and have retained largely proportional voting for parliament. Secondly, one can notice differences in party system stability, with Lithuania most stable, Latvia least so, and Estonia approximately in the middle. Lastly, there are disparities in governmental stability, comparable to the stability of the party system rank, namely, with Lithuania first, Estonia second, and Latvia third.
As the first sections of this paper will show, the differences in political identity and consolidation among the three Baltic states began to appear already in 1990 and their complete extent became fixed in 1992 with the adoption of formal constitutional frameworks, electoral laws, and other political institutions. Yet, to understand these differences in a more conceptual manner, I will trace their origins back to differing “paths toward democratization” based on the useful typology developed by Alfred Stepan.^[1] I will argue that the differences evident between Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania stem in part from differing paths of democratization undertaken by the three states and that these varying paths had consequences for the content of institution-building as well as general political development during subsequent years. More to the point, if during the initial years of 1987-88 one can observe a largely common period of society-led protest in all three countries, after the beginning of 1989 there was a gradual, but steady separation in political dynamics between Lithuania, on the one hand, and Estonia and Latvia on the other. From this point on, Lithuania continued with a transition path similar to what Stepan called “redemocratization initiated by military-as-government” (or in this case, Communist Party-as-government), while Estonia and Latvia increasingly veered toward a path Stepan described as “internal restoration after external reconquest”. In this latter model, the key difference lay in the fact that elites decided to postpone a number of important institutional decisions out of a principle that first the Estonian and Latvian states as legal entities had to be restored before full politics could evolve. As a consequence, the patterns of politics, which have emerged in the Baltic states since the collapse of communism, have been characterized by differing sequences of political development and consolidation arising from variations in transitional politics. In turn, the three states now demonstrate few of their previous similarities and shared developments. Rather, each country is increasingly exhibiting its own version of political-institutional choice.
Ultimately, I argue that the Baltic states represent an interesting contrast of how similar historical events are “narrativized” into politics, meaning how historical events are interpreted in order to influence political choices. For Estonia and Latvia, the idea of Soviet occupation became much more embedded in and determinant of how both democratic transition and democratic consolidation were to be carried out, while in Lithuania this post-occupation identity remained more on a symbolic level and was thus less consequential for future institutions and politics. In synthetic terms, I will maintain that history can be seen as having been “improvised” in Lithuania, since political elites opted for a direct type of redemocratization and thus embarked on a new political era, while in Estonia and Latvia history was largely “revived” since democratic transition was based much more on restorationism and was therefore much more complicated. In this respect, the Baltic states offer examples of both “improvised” and “revived” history.
In what follows, I will trace political-institutional developments in the Baltic states across seven stages up through the year 2000.^[2] The first will review those political events and issues that fostered a sense of common Baltic destiny during the late 1980s. The following stages, however, will demonstrate how differences grew between the three states during the transition period and examine what effect these differences had on party politics as well as democratic regime choice. I will also expand on the typological model put forth by Stepan. I will conclude with some thoughts about the theoretical import of my analysis.

STAGE 1: BALTIC COMMONALITIES: 1986-1988

Viewed with hindsight, the crumbling of Soviet rule in the three Baltic states seems like it was crafted from a cookie-cutter. In each republic, the modes of early public mobilization as well as gradual political organization largely overlapped. In Stepan’s terms, these moments were part of a classic “society-led transition”, where following a slight opening of political opportunity civil society was released from constriction and burgeoned forth to breath again and assume a position as the lifeblood of the nation (as opposed to the authoritarian period where politics ruled over society). The Baltic peoples, too, exemplified this kind of upsurge between 1986 and 1988, and in very similar ways. In this section, five such commonalities will be examined to illustrate this synchronous evolution.^[3]

Environmental mobilization

Within a year of Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1985 proclamation of glasnost and perestroika in the USSR, intellectual and cultural circles in all three Baltic states began to stir with discussions of the problems of the Soviet system and to test the new liberal waters. While most of these early opinions were expressed at closed-door official plenums or meetings, they did build confidence among the people that change was in the air. Of course, given the state of decline of the Soviet system by this period, this emerging societal activism could have channeled itself into any number of different grievances. In the event, environmental issues came to the fore first owing to the Chernobyl disaster in April 1986. During late-1986 and early 1987, all three of the Baltic states converted this new ecological sensitivity into popular mobilization against large-scale, Moscow-imposed industrial projects. For the Latvians, for example, opposition grew to a Soviet plan to dam the Daugava River, which runs through the heart of the republic and reaches the Baltic Sea at the capital Riga. A campaign was launched by two journalists, Dainis Ivans and Arturs Snips, which eventually included an unprecedented letter-writing campaign against the project as well as a number of unofficial protest gatherings. North of the border in Estonia, people mobilized in opposition to a similar Moscow-planned venture to mine phosphates in the northeast region of Virumaa. Fears of environmental catastrophe again animated the Estonian protests, alongside claims that the project would prompt new waves of Russian immigrants to the tiny republic. In both cases, investigative journalism proved a key mechanism of popular mobilization, as Juhan Aare in Estonia – much like Ivans and Snips in Latvia – revealed not only the precise details of each environmental project, but also the complicity of republican leaders in each case. In Lithuania, environmental concerns rose to the fore in October 1986 when Vytautas Statulevicius, the vice president of the Lithuanian Academy of Science, first protested a plan to build an oil-drilling platform off the Courland spit, the narrow strip of land running from the Kaliningrad area up the coast into Lithuanian territorial waters. In much the same manner as in Latvia and Estonia, activists challenged the optimistic claims of Soviet planners in relation to the project and instead drew attention to the danger of ecological damage to the coastline and marine life. These threats were in turn linked to the meaning of the spit in Lithuanian folk culture and hence to ethno-national well-being. Again, letter-writing campaigns were launched until the project was finally shelved.

Calendar demonstrations

A second commonality of the three states was the rapid succession of so-called calendar demonstrations, at which average people would gather to observe a particular political anniversary. Given considerable overlaps in the history of the Baltic states during the 20th century, it was not surprising that the three nations would quickly find common or analogous historical dates around which to recognize moments of national suffering or triumph, as well as to make demands for long-lost justice. Although discussion of historical truths and lies had already begun in the Baltic press soon after the arrival of glasnost in 1986-87, it was these calendar demonstrations that allowed average people to mark relevant historical issues in their own way and through direct participation. In turn, the public gatherings allowed interactive discussion of political and other issues to take place, further promoting mobilization.
The first example was given by Latvia, where the dissident opposition group Helsinki-86 organized their first public meeting on June 14, 1987 to commemorate the mass deportation of Balts by Stalin in 1941. The gathering attracted several thousand people who listened to a number of speeches by the leaders of Helsinki-86 as well as laid flowers at the base of the Freedom Monument, a symbol of Latvian national identity. Quite significantly, the Riga meeting was also attended by an Estonian dissident, Tiit Madisson, who took the idea back to Estonia and began an underground effort to organize a similar demonstration on August 23, the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The idea also spread to Lithuania, and on the appointed day common meetings were held in all three Baltic capitals calling for the Pact’s publication in the press as well as denunciation by the relevant state parties.
In the months that followed, a wide range of anniversary dates were seized upon to repeatedly assemble people for political discussion. In Latvia, a demonstration was inspired by the November 18th anniversary of Latvian independence in 1918. During February 1988, Estonians gathered for two meetings, one on February 2 to commemorate the signing of the Tartu Peace Treaty, in which Russia recognized Estonian independence in 1920, and another on February 24 to mark Estonian independence day, just as Latvia had done a few months before. Lastly, Lithuania also revived its independence day on February 16, 1988 with a meeting, which attracted an estimated 10,000 people.

Intellectuals’ leadership

Amidst this mounting and usually dissident-led tide of popular mobilization, a third shared trait began to emerge as cultural leaders in the three republics gradually took over the main leadership role, both in terms of public organization as well as representation vis-à-vis local Soviet authorities. By undertaking this mediation function in each society, the cultural figures helped not only to expand popular participation in the new political climate, but also to channel this mobilization into effective political change, both in terms of policy as well as personnel. This was also the most extensive moment of political synchronicity among the three states and it represented the highpoint of their initial society-led paths to democratization. It was at this moment that Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania would burst on the Soviet as well as international scene with their first large-scale protests and direct organization into political movements. It was also a time of growing interaction among the Balts themselves.
In specific terms, the common scenario for the society-led breakthroughs in all three states entailed first a special meeting of so-called creative unions or other intellectuals where leading cultural figures would discuss (and often denounce) Soviet policy in different areas. These areas included ethnic relations, language policy, demographic imbalances, housing policy, industrial over-expansion, health problems, and, of course, political repression. In each case, the gatherings would be highly publicized (sometimes carried live on local broadcast media) with the result that republican leaders faced their first public expression of no-confidence and on occasion open calls to resign. Compared to the hitherto existing climate of complete Communist Party control, this public opposition was unprecedented.
Estonia kicked off this process on April 1-2, 1988 by holding a special Plenum of Creative Unions in the main parliamentary hall on Toompea Hill. The gathering brought together several dozen prominent artists, writers, architects, painters, sculptors and academics for a public discussion of the republic’s ills. A wide range of grievances was addressed during the course of the two-day event. With each passing moment, the demands of the various speakers mounted. By the end of the session one participant, Heinz Valk, spoke openly about the need to rethink the entire basis of Soviet rule in Estonia and to express direct no-confidence in the leadership of the republic’s Communist Party first secretary, Karl Vaino. A personal challenge to the Soviet rulers had been launched.
Exactly two months later, a similar plenum was organized in Riga. While in part the Latvians’ discussions centered on the same grievances as those of the Estonians, the well-known political commentator Mavriks Wulfsons added a surprise twist to the meeting by denouncing in particularly stark terms the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and by calling the subsequent Soviet takeover (for the first time before such a broad audience) “an occupation”. As one participant in that meeting would later characterize Wulfsons’s speech, suddenly “in society’s mind, the notion of a Latvian state interest as such returned.”^[4]
In Lithuania, the coming together of the intellectual and cultural elite took place on June 2, during a meeting of some 200 people in the small town of Verkiai outside Vilnius.^[5] Ostensibly the debate was meant to answer the question “How can we overcome the bureaucracy?” However, the actual discussions soon spilled over into debates about the general political climate in the republic. Moreover, in the Lithuanian case, it is worth noting that the intellectuals were seconded in their emerging leadership role by an increasingly organized branch of informal, grassroots leaders, who also met on May 30 and June 3. It was from among these leaders that the first proposals would come to carry the hitherto society-based mobilization process onto a more organizational footing, meaning the creation of a formal opposition movement.

Organized Movements

Indeed, the momentum generated by the cultural figures’ rise to the forefront of social mobilization kept increasing and within a few weeks (or sometimes days) of each plenum efforts were undertaken to institutionalize this mobilization through the creation of special popular fronts or opposition movements. These mass groups would almost immediately become the voice of the people before the Soviet authorities, especially after local Party leaders sought to manipulate (as per usual) the election of delegates to the 19th CPSU Conference in June. In the face of such actions, political discontent in all three republics grew further. Again, Estonia set the pace when a leading social analyst, Edgar Savisaar, proposed the creation of the Estonian Popular Front during a television discussion program on April 13, just 11 days after the conclusion of the Creative Unions’ Plenum. Within a matter of days, the Front had established a central coordinating office and was developing regional centers in other cities along with support groups in individual enterprises and institutions across the country. As Marju Lauristin, a prominent leader of the Front, would later recall, the objective was to harness the power of truly mass popular mobilization, but without this becoming unruly or chaotic. Any disintegration into random confrontation with the Soviet authorities would have surely set back, if not doomed, perestroika and glasnost, at least in Estonia. For this reason the model of creating a popular front in order to consolidate the society-led transitional path proved to be such a prevalent strategy.^[6]
Indeed, by the time both Latvia’s and Lithuania’s cultural figures gathered for their meetings in early June, the Estonian Popular Front was already an entirely established organization and its representatives had even traveled repeatedly to the remaining two Baltic states in order to spread the new message. Thus, both the Latvians and Lithuanians knew that their otherwise innate discussions could very well evolve into the actual institutionalization of a political opposition. By the same token, however, the Estonians’ activity provided advanced warning to other players in the game, i.e. both to the Soviet authorities in Latvia and Lithuania, but also to the more radical, dissident groups, who wanted to push the liberalization process forward at greater speed. Thus, although the Latvians and Lithuanians learned in this sense from the Estonian experience, they also faced a more complex array of opposing forces (both dissidents and Soviet authorities) seeking to influence the course of change.
In the Latvian case, the first move was made by dissident leaders, one of whom, the journalist Viktors Avotins, circulated a formal proposal for the creation of a popular front during the June 1-2 Creative Unions’ Plenum in Riga. However, since none of the speeches at the meeting formally took up his call, the idea did not immediately catch on. Three weeks later, Avotins and 14 other activists issued another underground appeal to found a Popular Front, but again the proposal was stymied by the authorities who distrusted some of the dissident signatories and who therefore did not allow the text to be published.^[7] Indeed, by that time the Latvian Communist Party leadership had fully recognized the dangers of creating an independent opposition organization. As a result, they attempted to engineer their own support organization for perestroika, which would be made up of the same Soviet social organizations already existing (e.g. trade unions, youth organizations, creative unions, etc.) In this competitive atmosphere, there soon emerged a moderate, but independent group of cultural leaders who on July 19 were allowed to publish their popular front appeal, from which the future organization was born.
The struggle between “informals”, moderates, and Soviet officials similarly took place in Lithuania, as leaders of an unofficial group of economists as well as an environmental youth club pressed for a large-scale public assembly on July 3, which would discuss proposed changes to the republic’s constitution. The gathering turned raucous at times; however, by the end of the session, a 36-member Initiative Group for the creation of Sajudis, the Lithuanian movement for perestroika, was born. In the following weeks, this Group would equally undertake the task of drafting a political program as well as develop its grassroots base.^[8]

Personnel changes

The final component to the Baltic states’ parallel processes of society-based mobilization entailed the actual toppling of the old Brezhnevite elite in each republic and its replacement by more progressive and usually native-born leaders. This was the first real outcome of the shift in popular mobilization from dissidents to cultural leaders: the much more broad-based, but still well-harnessed movements could force the ouster of these leaders much more powerfully. This victory, in turn, provided further impetus for change since energies could now be channeled into developing longer-term reform programs and reorganizing society as a whole.
The first domino fell in Estonia, where the new Popular Front was already up and running in May and June, when the Estonian Communist Party began its selection of delegates to the 19th CPSU Conference. When the conservative first secretary, Karl Vaino, orchestrated the election of a number of apparatchik delegates over more popular progressives, the Front cried foul. It announced a daring challenge for the hand-picked delegates to meet with the people during a mass outdoor meeting on June 17. As this sense of confrontation mounted, reformers within the Bureau of the ECP appealed to Mikhail Gorbachev for the removal of Vaino as a way of calming the situation. Gorbachev concurred and on June 16 Vaino Väljas was elected the ECP’s new first secretary. The Popular Front had its first victory.
Naturally, this quickly created a precedent for Latvia and Lithuania; however, given the delays in the formation of opposition movements, the real pressure for the removal of these two republics’ old guard also did not come until the opposition organizations had held their founding congresses in early October. The Latvian leader Boris Pugo was replaced by Janis Vagris on October 4; the Lithuanian stalwart Ringaudas Songaila lasted until October 19, but then he, too, resigned and was succeeded the next day by Algirdas Brazauskas. With this last political breakthrough, the three Baltic states had again traveled a common and mutually-reinforced road from initially scattered dissident protest to gradually coalescent intellectual-led political movements. What’s more, this new force had further succeeded in decapitating each republic’s Communist hierarchy and in opening up new vistas of political opportunity. The next question would be where this political activity would be channeled in terms of more direct reform and ultimate democratization strategies.

STAGE 2: TRANSITION FROM SOCIETY-LED TRANSITION

Through the end of 1988, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania continued to progress largely in tandem. After Mikhail Gorbachev announced in October a series of reforms to the Soviet Constitution, which would strengthen his power base, the three Baltic republics protested and the popular opposition movements in particular began a petition campaign against the amendments. On November 16, the local Soviet parliaments in Estonia and Lithuania were prompted to consider declarations of republican sovereignty in order to make clear their opposition, although only Estonia actually adopted its document. Lastly, all three republics took steps to make their titular language the official language throughout the republican territory, another move to assert independence from the Soviet system.
Yet, once these essential (and in some cases forced) actions were complete, the shift toward a more proactive and thought-out program of activity began to reveal divergent currents among the three Baltic societies. To be sure, the opposition movements in the three republics continued to work closely together, both on a local level as well as in Moscow, where a large number of opposition leaders were elected in March 1989 to the Congress of People’s Deputies. Within this latter institution, for example, the Balts lobbied fiercely for official recognition and investigation of their central historical grievance, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. After a special Congress-appointed commission issued a report in August 1989 substantiating the Balts’ claims regarding the Pact, the victory helped to further convince people that the three republics’ place was no longer in the Soviet Union. Heavy turnout in the subsequent Baltic chain was another consequence of this continued feeling of a shared fate.
Still, the ultimate questions of how and by whom the full democratization process would be carried out in each republic remained unanswered. As Stepan argues in his typology, such society-led transitions are rarely enough to produce complete redemocratization.^[9] Instead, more elaborate procedures are usually needed not only for extraditing former rulers from power, but also for laying the groundwork for democratic leaders to take over. In particular, this process involves determining the status and role of different actors (including that of the non-democratic regime itself) as they carry out the transition. This key variable can range from the authoritarian regime having a very influential status and role in the transition to one of being a mere caretaker as democratic forces rapidly take over.
In Stepan’s typology (where his focus is on the transition from military dictatorships), this spectrum is reflected in his differentiation between the military playing its role either through (a) a civilianized leadership, (b) the military as government, or (c) the military as institution. Moreover, these three possibilities represent an essentially increasing degree of authoritarian regime influence on the democratization process. When the military acts as an institution in guiding the transition, it exerts the most open and direct control; when it allows a military cabinet or even a civilian government to represent the regime, it distances itself from the process and is more willing to let the transition result in more significant change. In the case of communist transitions, the military is obviously substituted by the Communist Party. However, the Party, too, can conceivably engage in the transition process either as an institution, a government, or through civilians. In the first case, the question of abandoning the Party’s constitutional monopoly on power was in general the most difficult issue to resolve. For example, one could say that the democratization process at the all-Union level of power proceeded precisely in this manner: even after the August 1991 coup, Gorbachev still believed that the Party had an institutional role to play in the transition. By contrast, in most of the communist satellite states of Eastern Europe as well as in many of the Soviet republics, the transition moved along the path of “Party as government” where Party leaders handed over the redemocratization process to a government cabinet. In this scenario, the members of the government, to be sure, continued to be members of the Party; however, they were never directly subordinated to the Party Politburo or any other organ. Lastly, in cases where the Party had lost almost all of its influence, it was often forced to appoint a technocratic or non-Party government, which in Stepan’s terms would be a “civilianized” transition. The Polish transition involving Tadeusz Mazowiecki was one such instance.
The point of this elaboration on the various paths to redemocratization is to show that following the society-led transitions in the Baltic states during 1987-88, the three republics moved into a second stage of transition, which was most representative of the “Party as government’ type of redemocratization. In all three republics, the hitherto quite formalistic Council of Ministers or executive branch of government was revived into a meaningful actor, in particular after more respected authorities replaced discredited officials. While the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian Communist Parties continued to monitor as well as influence the pace of redemocratization, many of the next-stage liberalizing reforms were worked out in government ministries or offices, not in the Party Central Committee. The Party apparat increasingly began to wither away.
Latvia was the first Baltic republic to appoint a new Prime Minister, Vilnis Edvins Bresis, in October 1988. Although it was also true that the Communist Party in Latvia remained the most conservative and certain elements within the Central Committee (such as Alfreds Rubiks) wanted clearly to maintain an institutional influence over the transition, Bresis was able to act as an effective premier, launching, for example, a number of early economic reforms. Next in this cycle came Estonia, who replaced its Brezhnev-era Prime Minister Bruno Saul with Indrek Toome in November 1988. Toome had been Ideology Secretary in the ECP Central Committee, but in his new capacity he quickly showed a more technocratic style, which gained him general respect. Lastly, in Lithuania, Prime Minister Vytautas Sakalauskas who had been appointed in 1985 actually retained his post up until the February 1990 elections and the rise to power of Sajudis. Although Sakalauskas’s image had been tarnished on several occasions (as it was he who announced, for example, Soviet plans to start drilling for oil off the Lithuanian coast), he was skillful enough to go along with the new political trends in order to retain popular confidence up until Sajudis’s victory.
In sum, this stage of the transition once again showed a high degree of parallelism, as in each case the Communist Party for the most part desisted from playing an active role in the transition after early 1989. In all three republics, the popular opposition movements likewise gathered strength, both during the March 1989 elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies as well as during local elections held in December of that year.

STAGE 3: ALTERNATIVE FRAMES

Yet, 1989 was also the year when Estonia and Latvia would begin to diverge from Lithuania, most critically because of the emergence of an additional redemocratization frame. In Stepan’s typology, this alternative scenario resembled most the path to redemocratization termed “internal restoration after external reconquest”. By early 1990, this framework would essentially supplant the “Party as government” formula and as a consequence it would set the two republics on a rather different cycle of political development and consolidation during the years ahead.
Within Stepan’s classificatory scheme, the model of “internal restoration after external reconquest” was epitomized by countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, and Denmark after World War II. In these cases, the authoritarian regime was in fact based on an occupying power (Nazi Germany) and after this power had been eliminated through foreign liberation, the pre-occupation democratic regime was restored with relatively little conflict. To be sure, one would be hard pressed to argue in the case of the Baltic states that the three republics were somehow “reconquered” by external forces. None of the territories subject to Soviet rule was ever liberated by the West in a military sense. However, in the evolution of politics in Estonia and Latvia there did emerge a powerful interpretive frame for the redemocratization process, which invoked in very direct terms the notion of an internal restoration of pre-Soviet democratic rule along with the claim that only this path would be legitimate and acceptable. Specifically, this restorationist formula argued that since the three Baltic states had been illegally occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union as a consequence of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, it was now clearly the right of those three republics not so much to secede from the USSR, but rather to restore their pre-occupation statehood as well as democratic order just as Denmark or Norway had after Nazi rule. Despite the fact that the Soviet occupation had lasted nearly five decades (as opposed to five years of foreign domination in Denmark’s or Norway’s case), the principle of restoring the past regime was (according to this frame) the same and that the Baltic cases should therefore be treated as such.
Moreover, this frame concerned essentially two levels of politics. The more general level involved the three republics’ fight to reclaim their independence from Moscow. On this score all of the political leaders in the Baltic republics (both in the popular opposition movements as well as among the reform communists) were in agreement and it was these arguments which they presented uniformly in Moscow as well as in the West when they began campaigning in earnest for a restoration of independence in 1989-1990. Yet, beyond this fundamental issue of applying historical justice toward relations with the Soviet Union, the restorationist logic found a second level of meaning when applied to the question of defining the internal democratization process itself in the three republics. For, if the communist regimes were illegal in terms of having been the result of an illegal occupation, a further corollary of this principle was that the local governments themselves were fundamentally illegitimate and therefore should be excluded entirely from the redemocratization process. These regimes were essentially equal to the quisling regimes of any other occupied state and thus should be automatically excluded as valid political actors. According to the restorationist doctrine, neither the Communist Party nor Soviet governmental structures in the republics could be allowed to play any role in defining the transition process, since these structures were nothing more than fixtures of an illegal power. Ultimately, the argument went, power had to go back to the people directly and only thereafter could true democratization be charted.
This was the democratization frame that was first put forth in February 1989 by a new movement in Estonia called the Citizens’ Committees. The Committees derived largely from former dissident circles that were more radical in their anti-communist views. Yet because what the Committees developed was in fact a complete and alternative framework of transition, their activism constituted much more than a simple movement to outbid the Estonian Popular Front or other groups.^[10] On the contrary, they built their own organizational structure based on a campaign to register pre-war citizens of Estonia and their descendants. Relying on this registry, they argued for the election of a new representative body, known as the Congress of Estonia, which would act as a kind of constituent assembly in order to deliberate the future of “post-occupation” politics. In this way, tainted Soviet structures (even the Estonian Supreme Soviet) could be bypassed and legal purity maintained. After the first local committees were formed and the full-scale registration campaign began, the idea spread also to Latvia, where the movement was kicked off in March 1989. By year’s end, both movements had registered hundreds of thousands of pre-war citizens or their descendants and by 1990 they were each preparing for actual Congress elections as a new form of national representative institution.
In many ways, the Committees’ principled stand on restorationism was pedantic and perhaps even excessive. One could clearly argue that going back five decades in time was simply not realistic or reasonable. By the same token, the movements’ doctrine was entirely coherent to the extent that legally the Soviet takeover of the Baltic states had been unlawful and therefore this situation merited a proper resolution. More to the point, viewed in the light of Stepan’s typology, legal restorationism was a completely different path to redemocratization, since it prescribed different actors to participate in the transition and different procedures for the achievement of democracy. For the restorationists, these central players were the independently elected Congresses and the procedures for democratization involved allowing the Congresses (not the local Soviet structures) to reconstitute political power in society. Furthermore, not only did the Committees’ recipe involve restoration, but in a figurative sense one could even say that it included an element of “external reconquest”, since the longtime Western policy of non-recognition of the Baltic occupation represented a tool, which the Balts hoped the West would use to pressure Moscow into freeing the three states. To be sure, it would often prove the case during 1990-91 that the West was not ready to allow this non-recognition to determine its entire policy on the Baltic question. In any case, however, the existence of this long-standing principle meant that the future of the Baltic states was much more an international issue than that of any of the other Soviet republics. As a result, there would clearly have to be some kind of “external involvement” as part of the restoration of democracy in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

STAGE 4: FROM ALTERNATIVE FRAMES TO ALTERNATIVE POLITICS

Returning to this paper’s main argument, the meaning of the legal restorationist movements in Estonia and Latvia lay in the fact that the more this historical narrative took hold in the two republics, the more it would begin to nudge the two nations toward an understanding of transition and transitional politics that was very different from that of Lithuania. This divergence, in turn, would prompt a number of occasions of alternative politics among the three states. Although in most cases existing analyses have covered these individual differences, in this section I will argue that a framework derived from Stepan’s typology provides a more comprehensive assessment.
By early 1990, when preparations began in Estonia and Latvia for actually electing the Citizens Committees’ Congresses, the two republics had very strongly oriented themselves toward this new redemocratization path. To be sure, public opinion in Estonia and Latvia was not always and unequivocally on the Committees’ side. For example, most Estonians and Latvians continued to believe that the Supreme Soviets in each republic should still be renewed. They did not believe that power should go entirely into the hands of the Congresses. However, the Committees had built up a considerable degree of reverence, and their moral influence in terms of preventing a slip into “secession” from the Soviet Union or the accordance of international recognition to the existing Soviet structures was considerable. By contrast, Lithuania essentially continued on its original path of redemocratization via the “Party as government’ model. More specifically, in Lithuania the Communist Party recognized that it would give up power essentially for good come the February 1990 elections to the republic’s Supreme Soviet and that the Sajudis movement would represent the beginning of a new era of completely democratic and free politics. Again using the language of transition theory, the February 1990 Supreme Soviet elections in Lithuania were in reality the “founding elections” which would crown the republic’s redemocratization process, while in Estonia and Latvia the understanding (or dominant frame) was that neither the election of the Congresses nor the election of a new Supreme Soviet (which despite the existence of the legal restorationist doctrine still took place in March 1990) would actually end the transition process. Rather, these bodies signified merely an additional interim phase, which only later would shepherd the two republics to full independence and to true democratic politics.
The essential value of this differential interpretation of the Baltics’ paths to democratization comes when we try to make sense of their different declarations of independence, which the three republics adopted during the ensuing months. Conventional accounts of the three states’ initial proclamations of sovereignty from Moscow portray Lithuania as simply the boldest and most headstrong of the three republics.^[11] Moreover, once Gorbachev imposed a severe economic blockade on Vilnius as punishment for the latter’s unilateral decision, outside observers interpreted Tallinn’s and Riga’s much more cautious declarations of independence as simply prudent concessions made to stave off similar sanctions. Yet, when viewed through a prism of differing paths to democratization, Estonia’s and Latvia’s decision to proclaim merely a “transitional period” to independence (rather than immediate and automatic independence) makes more sense, since it was domestic pressure to follow a legal restorationist (instead of “new republic”) path, which by this time made declaring full independence unfeasible. For example, in Estonia leaders of the Congress of Estonia demanded specifically that the newly elected Supreme Council not assume any kind of “founding” legitimacy or independence-usurping role.^[12] Rather, the Congress insisted that the Supreme Council continue to perform only a caretaker, administrative function until full independence was achieved. Likewise in Latvia an understanding was achieved between the two rival organs that the two institutions would work together, although by and large the Supreme Council retained a dominant position.
The upshot of this issue was that it was the doctrine of legal restorationism—and not simply the fear of repression from Moscow—that held Estonia and Latvia back from declaring full independence in March and May 1990. To be sure, Lithuania would feel abandoned and frustrated at being the only Baltic republic to fully stand up to the Kremlin. But in reality this was as much a factor of Lithuania’s more straightforward path to redemocratization (which by March 1990 was complete) than it was of any apparent cowardice (or, for that matter, sagacious moderation) on the part of Latvia and Estonia. The parting of ways between Lithuania and Estonia and Latvia in their patterns of redemocratization and political development had begun to take decisive shape.