Abstract
In 2017, NATO released a documentary short on the Baltic forest brothers to several social media outlets, primarily aimed at English-speaking audiences. The documentary lionized the forest brothers as heroic freedom fighters, part of a wide-scale Baltic resistance movement during World War II. In response, over the next several weeks of 2017, the Russian government unleashed a campaign against the NATO film and the forest brothers, claiming the resistance movement was Nazi in orientation. This chapter explores why such a disinformation campaign was waged against the forest brothers, and how this particular issue of Baltic resistance during World War II has become part of a divisive and controversial historical record in the region. In short, the Russian Foreign Ministry and its varied mouthpieces have effectively landed on an issue that is still being understood and studied in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. This has given this particular issue a degree of salience that makes for an ideal disinformation campaign.
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Notes
- 1.
For a detailed analysis of their research, visit: https://medium.com/dfrlab/history-revisited-the-forest-brothers-e49cdcadb7bf [Accessed 13 May 2021].
- 2.
Journalist Rūta Vanagaitė had written a best-selling self-help book for women and made something of a second career with her research on Lithuanian collaboration with the Nazis. Teaming up with “Nazi hunter” Efraim Zuroff, the two set out to discover Lithuanian ties to the Holocaust. The book in question, Mūsiškiai (translated: Our People), would also become a best-seller, before massive backlash sank her career and, in her own view, made her a public pariah in Lithuania. (For more information, see Gessen’s, 2017 The New Yorker profile, “How a Single Remark Stole a Lithuanian Writer’s Livelihood.”)
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Ellis, J.M. (2022). Russian Disinformation: The Forest Brothers, Baltic Resistance, and NATO. 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_3
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