39. BALTIC TRIANGLE
Germany was not the only question of international politics to compli-
cate Washington’s dealings with Moscow. In summer 1989 Bush
introduced a Baltic Freedom Day to the American official calendar,
setting 14 June for an annual commemoration of Stalin’s deportations
of Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian citizens. America had always
asserted the right of the three Baltic Soviet republics to their indepen-
dence. They fell victim to the Nazi–Soviet Pact in 1939 when Hitler
and Stalin agreed – in secret protocols whose existence was always
denied by the Kremlin – on spheres of interest in Eastern and East-
Central Europe. Poland was divided between the USSR and the Third
Reich, and Stalin annexed Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in 1940.
When Hitler invaded the USSR in mid-1941, the three countries fell
under German occupation until the Red Army marched back into
them in 1944 and enforced their reincorporation as Soviet republics.
America and its NATO allies in the post-war years continually pro-
tested against the brutality and illegality of this action. But they failed
to match words with practical sanctions. The superpowers for decades
preferred to deal with each other without treating the Baltic question
as a sticking point. Bush’s amendment of the calendar appeared to
abandon this passive posture. To Gorbachëv’s eyes, he was threatening
the USSR’s territorial integrity.
Gorbachëv told Mitterrand that the White House was playing with
fire; he accused Bush and his officials of being motivated more by
‘ideology than by realistic policy’. Mitterrand tried to soothe him
by saying that Bush was only trying to mollify his conservative critics.
As soon as Bush and Gorbachëv made close personal contact, he
predicted, the obstacles to progress would disappear.^1
Nearly all Soviet leaders, including Gorbachëv, started from the
thought-curbing premise that it was only right and proper that Lithu-
ania, Latvia and Estonia should remain as Soviet republics. They
dismissed the fact that the three countries had been independent