Abstract
This chapter examines confrontation with Russia in light of the history of media wars in the Baltic countries. Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians have often found themselves at odds with greater powers trying to assert primacy over media, which serve as a proxy for and instrument of autonomy and authority. Information wars are not new to the Baltic countries. They have been sites of conflict time and again, part and parcel of power struggles in the region. Power has often been expressed and recognized in the pages and on the screens of mass communication. Media are now an important instrument of Russian foreign policy as it seeks to reassert itself and pursue a more aggressive and expansionist path. Baltic governments are working to secure their information space in tandem with their sovereignty. It is not an easy needle to thread, but it is a challenge that has been faced before under different circumstances in the Baltic states.
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Notes
- 1.
While Lithuania, less demographically affected by Soviet-era migration policies, offered citizenship broadly, the toll of occupation on the indigenous population in the northern two countries resulted in strict limits on naturalization and non-citizenship for a portion of the post-Soviet population (Krūma, 2010). While non-citizenship offers many analogous rights as citizenship, it bars holders from voting and working in the civil and security services. The stopgap of “non-citizen status” has lingered, and only after decades of children being born as former citizens of a nonexistent state has the policy legally begun to phase out, symbolically starting to rectify the postindependence disenfranchisement felt by many ethnic minorities (Ekmanis, 2020).
- 2.
In 1987, New York Times journalist Geneva Overholser (1987) noted the common anecdote about Soviet broadsheets Pravda and Izvestia during the period of glasnost and perestroika: “In Russian, ‘pravda’ means truth and ‘izvestia’ means news, and the old joke about the Soviet press was that there’s no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia.”
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Chakars, J., Ekmanis, I. (2022). Echoes of the Past: Media and History in the Baltic Battlespace. In: Chakars, J., Ekmanis, I. (eds) Information Wars in the Baltic States. The Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99987-2_2
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