Abstract
The first section of the ‘Introduction’ is devoted to the Soviet legacy of the Baltic states. The Soviet occupation was harsh, involving a radical transformation of political, economic and cultural life. Even today, staggering numbers of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians can report a family history of deportations, imprisonment and executions. The second section outlines the drastic demographic shift to the detriment of the majority populations, which accompanied the flow of migrant workers from Russia and other Soviet republics into the region. The chief focus of this book is on political culture, and the third section provides a snapshot of the theoretical frameworks underpinning the book, before the rest of the chapters are introduced, together with the survey data applied in the text; two of them initiated and undertaken by the book authors in 2014 and 2015.
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Notes
- 1.
The Czech Republic and Slovakia had been part of Czechoslovakia (dissolved in 1992), and Slovenia was part of the Yugoslav Federation that broke up in 1991–1992. Croatia, another Yugoslav break-away republic, has since followed suit. It became a member of NATO in 2009 and of the EU in 2013.
- 2.
With a population of some 290 million, the Soviet Union had a nomenklatura of about 750,000, corresponding to approximately one-third of the 2.5 million administrative positions of any importance in the vast Soviet empire (Pravda 1989: 16). The small Baltic republics accounted for only a fraction of the Soviet nomenklatura ; 3400 out of 750,000 or 0.45 per cent (Matonyté and Mink 2003: 36).
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Duvold, K., Berglund, S., Ekman, J. (2020). Introduction. In: Political Culture in the Baltic States. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21844-7_1
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