Introduction

Abstract

This book is a comparative case study in the historical sociology of modern social restorations. This is a new field in comparative social research designed to extend and complete comparative historical sociological research on social revolutions. Comparative research on revolutions is a well-established research field, as at least four generations of theory have changed to date (cf. Goldstone 2001, 2014; DeFronzo 2006, 2021). It originated with the comparison of 1789 French and 1917 Russian revolutions (Shlapentokh 1999), culminating in the famous study by Theda Skocpol (1979), which is one of the most influential and cited works in comparative social research (Goodwin 1996). Puzzlingly, as yet no authors have taken into due account the fact that both great modern social revolutions did in fact end (in 1815 and 1989 correspondingly) with restorations of the prerevolutionary regimes.

This book is a comparative case study in the historical sociology of modern social restorations. This is a new field in comparative social research designed to extend and complete comparative historical sociological research on social revolutions. Comparative research on revolutions is a well-established research field, as at least four generations of theory have changed to date (cf. Goldstone 2001, 2014; DeFronzo 2006, 2021). It originated with the comparison of 1789 French and 1917 Russian revolutions (Shlapentokh 1999), culminating in the famous study by Theda Skocpol (1979), which is one of the most influential and cited works in comparative social research (Goodwin 1996). Puzzlingly, as yet no authors have taken into due account the fact that both great modern social revolutions did in fact end (in 1815 and 1989 correspondingly) with restorations of the prerevolutionary regimes.

This applies also to The Problem of Restoration: A Study in Comparative Political History by the Austro-American historical comparativist Robert A. Kann (1906–1981), which remains the sole attempt to transform the concept of restoration from a purely historical notion, applied mainly to the 1815–1848 epoch in European history, into a theoretically articulated sociological concept on par with revolution, state or democracy (Kann 1968).¹ Kann conceived restoration as the final component in a larger pattern of social change, featuring the sequence of original (A), intermediate (B) and restored (C) social systems, where the restored system affirms, constructs or claims continuity with the original (or ancient) system that was disrupted by the revolutionary transition from the original to an intermediate system.

Kann applied his framework in the study of 11 restoration cases, starting with the first (in the sixth century BC) restoration of the Jewish homeland and closing with the Bourbon restoration in France (1815) and restoration of the German Empire (1871). He simply did not live long enough to witness the post-communist restorations of capitalism and (in some cases) of a ‘bourgeois democracy’ together with an independent state. In addition, his pioneering work was published at the wrong time: in 1968, at the very peak of the New Left with its cult of revolutionaries (such as Che Guevara) and revolutions. Those times have now passed, but mainstream social research remains grounded in the assumption that revolutions alone are a progressive form of social change, while restorations are merely brief episodes of stagnant reaction and are doomed to fail (Kondylis 1984).

While this may apply to some restorations, I argue that this does not apply to all restorations. Some restorations may fail or be regressive, but the same applies to revolutions. The Russian revolution did end as a disaster and a historical deadlock, instead of creating a society free from exploitation, oppression and alienation. There was neither a free market, nor representative government, nor protection of civil rights (the rule of law) under the Jacobin dictatorship in 1793–1794. Neither the Thermidor regime, which was a self-perpetuating oligarchy of the regicides who survived the Jacobin terror, nor Napoleon’s post-revolutionary dictatorship was able to implement the ‘ideas of the French Revolution’ (popular sovereignty, liberty, equality, fraternity).

I argue that the progressiveness of both revolutions and restorations should be assessed based on their performance in enhancing human wellbeing. Thus, it is a matter of empirical measurement rather than of definition. This was also Kann’s approach, who inquired about conditions for the success and failure of restorations. Kann defined the success of restoration as its duration for at least two generations (70–80 years), claiming that successful restoration is impossible if the original system did not last for at least one generation (35–40 years) and the intermediate system endured for at least one generation.

Differently from Kann, I distinguish between the endurance success and performance success of restorations. The endurance success of C means that it endures longer than B or A. The performance success of C means that it increases human wellbeing more than A or B and thus is progressive in the absolute (increasing rather than decreasing wellbeing) or relative (acceleration of wellbeing increase) sense. Successful restoration creates an improved version of the original system, safeguarding against the recurrence of a revolution and outperforming intermediate systems produced by revolutions.

The fatal drawback of Kann’s ground-breaking work was the heterogeneity of his cases, coming from four different epochs of Western history. However, before the French Revolution of 1789, there was no emic distinction between revolutions and restorations (revolutions were perceived, staged or presented by revolutionaries themselves as restorations of ‘the good old days’). It was the French Revolution that brought the idea that it could be possible and right to overturn the existing social order by force on the grounds of abstract principles rather than historical tradition or existing law. Therefore, I suggest that comparative social historical research of restorations should start from the analysis of modern restorations. This set of cases encompasses restorations of states, political regimes and economic systems, following revolutions of the French (‘bourgeois’) and the Russian (‘socialist’) type. Under modern conditions, states exist (and can be restored) only as internationally recognised units in the international system; thus, a comparison of international order restorations should also be included.

I explain in more detail how my theorising of social restorations differs from Kann’s path-breaking attempt in the very first chapter of the first part of this book. The main purpose of my revision of Kann’s framework is to make the historical sociology of restorations approach usable in order to rejuvenate the research field known as ‘transition studies’. Transition studies are a transdisciplinary research field that emerged in the 1980s, aiming to provide precepts for democratisation and market reforms.

The core precepts of economic transition are famously known by the name ‘the Washington consensus’, which imply austerity, macroeconomic stabilisation, market liberalisation and deregulation and mass privatisation. The credibility of ‘the Washington consensus’ was undermined by the spectacular failure of neoliberal market and democratic reforms in Russia, on the one hand, and the success of the transition to a market economy in China, despite the incompatibility of Chinese economic policy with ‘the Washington consensus’ (Rodrik 2007). According to the historical sociology of restorations approach, post-communist transformations are just a subset of modern social restorations.

Due to their short-term chronological perspective and social-engineering approach, transition studies overlooked the fact that capitalism, and in many countries democracy also, did exist before state socialism, which even in Russia was established only in 1929–1933, following the ‘new economic policy’ (NEP) period, which can be described as a partial restoration of capitalism (a market economy based on effective private property over means of production). This neglect of a capitalist past before post-communist market transition may be explained by the long duration (1917/1929–1991) of the intermediate system, encompassing the life span of nearly two human generations. Its long duration made this past appear as irrelevant to the post-communist present. In fact, Kann argued that restoration cannot succeed if the intermediate system endured for at least one ‘political generation’ (35–40 years, according to Kann).

This is nearly as long as the accomplished state socialist system did endure in those countries (1949–1989) where it had been imported from the Soviet Union in 1939–1948, suggesting that a different duration of the intermediate system may be a key variable explaining cross-country variation in the outcomes of capitalist and democratic rehabilitation of decaying socialism. By describing market and democratic reforms as ‘rehabilitation’, I take inspiration from those fields where restoration is a professional activity framed by a body of codified knowledge with an elaborated terminology, which is otherwise lacking in the fledgling social scientific research on restorations: namely, restoration ecology and cultural heritage protection.

Restoration ecology is grounded in the distinction between the reference (or historical) system (corresponding to Kann’s ‘original system’), baseline system (Kann’s intermediate system), model system (a projection of the desired outcome of restoration) and reference sites, which combine with the historical system to inform the model system. The outcome of restoration (Kann’s restored system) can be just the rehabilitation of a degraded baseline ecosystem, implying an increase in the ecosystem’s biodiversity and productivity, or restoration as a variant of rehabilitation, where there is a similarity between the outcome and the reference systems. When restoring works of art and buildings, similarity alone is not enough: there should be continuity between the reference and restored systems, which implies the presence of a critical mass of survivals from the reference system in the restored system.

In the restoration of social systems, the most important surviving elements are human survivors from the original system. Drawing upon conceptualisations of restoration in the field of cultural and environmental heritage protection, two varieties of social restorations are distinguished. In token restorations, there is overlap (or demographic continuity) between the populations from the original and the restored systems (e.g. capitalist restoration in those countries where socialism was established after 1939). In type restorations, there is no such overlap (e.g. capitalist restoration in Russia and most other former Soviet Union republics (fSU)), as by 1991 nearly all contemporaries of the original capitalist system had already died out. Importantly, the opposition of token and type refers not to the colloquial sense of token, connoting ‘superficial’ or even ‘fake’. Rather, it is used in the ontological and logical sense, where type refers to the general sort of thing and token to its particular concrete instances (according to Charles Sanders Peirce).²

However, demographic continuity only provides for the possibility of token restoration, meaning institutional continuity between the original and restored systems. Despite this possibility, token restoration may not take place if appropriate policies are not performed. The performance of restoration includes symbolic and legal actions that aim to construct continuity between the actual and the ancient social system. They include the restitution of property rights (or paying compensation) to the victims of revolution and retribution to still living or already dead revolutionaries. In the last case, retribution is only symbolical and includes the destruction or desecration of their sites of memory (lieux de memoire; Nora 1996). On the other hand, symbols and sites of memory of the ancient regime that were destroyed by the revolutionaries themselves are restored, supplementing them with those that symbolically reward the opponents of the revolutionary regime, or the losing counterrevolutionaries (see Stan 2009; Stan and Nedelsky 2013).

With no restitution of property rights, the transition to capitalism via privatisation can still be described as a capitalist restoration, provided a capitalist economic system existed before the establishment of state socialism. However, this is only a type restoration, which means that post-communist capitalist systems display a generic similarity to pre-communist capitalism, but there is no continuity of the economic system that existed in the same area many years ago. Token restoration of capitalism is practicable only if there is a sufficiently large share of survivors from the original systems and their direct heirs.

After two or more generations have passed (which was the case in the republics of the fSU under communist rule from 1917 to 1921), this was no longer the case by 1989–1991. However, in some cases (e.g. Moldova, Albania and some republics of former Yugoslavia), there was no property restitution and thus also no token restoration, despite sufficient demographic continuity between populations of the original and restored systems. Market reforms in countries with no capitalist past amount to a capitalist rehabilitation of their economies. Capitalist and democratic rehabilitations are the broadest concepts, encompassing token and type restoration as their varieties.

The interrelation of my key concepts of social rehabilitation and social restoration (encompassing its two varieties) is visualised in Fig. 1.1, providing also an algorithm for identification of their cases. This interrelation is exemplified by the restoration of capitalism, which was a feature of post-communist transformations. However, the same theoretical logic applies to restorations of political regimes (e.g. democracy) or state independence, as will be explained in more detail in the second chapter of the next part of this book (see also Norkus 2023). So, now I can proceed to explain why, out of almost 30 country case studies of post-communist transformation, the Baltic countries were selected as paradigmatic cases of post-communist restorations.

Fig. 1.1

The interrelation of social rehabilitation and two varieties (token and type) of social restoration, using capitalist restoration as an example. Author’s own production

The Russian and French revolutions are and will remain central cases for the comparative historical and social study of revolutions. In the fledgling research on restoration, the French restorations in 1814 and 1815 are and will remain central cases as well. However, this does not apply to the Russian post-communist restoration. Due to the long duration of the intermediate system, only type restoration of capitalism was possible in Russia (without any institutional continuity of original capitalism, established by the restitution of property rights). In the international system, contemporary Russia defines itself (and is internationally recognised) as the continuator of the Soviet Union, rather than claiming continuity of the Russian Empire. Restoration of the Romanov dynasty has no influential support as a recipe for post-communist rehabilitation of its political system.

The study of restorations in the Baltic states is much more instructive. Firstly, the Baltic restorations were the most all-encompassing in comparison with those in the other former communist states (because there was a ternary restoration of an independent state, of democracy and of capitalism). Secondly, they belonged to the most performance successful (at least, by 2020) token restoration group of cases, despite the considerable duration of the intermediate system. Thirdly, the restored Baltic states used the richest repertoire of practices to (successfully) claim and affirm their continuity with the states that became de facto extinct in the summer of 1940. Fourthly, the Baltic states belong to the first victims of the Soviet export of socialist revolutions, becoming Sovietised already in 1940. Therefore, by 1990 demographic continuity between populations in the original and restored systems was thinnest among all those countries where token restoration was performed. Therefore, they are the best benchmark cases disclosing critical or threshold values of demographic continuity when token restoration is still possible.

Of special interest are the shares of survivors from the original system in Latvia, due to its most consistent and resolute implementation of restorationist policies. Uniquely among all post-communist countries, they included restoration of the 1922 Constitution (Satversme) and the 1937 Civil Code. Importantly, by 1940 Latvia was no longer a democratic state because this constitution was suspended by the autogolpe coup of 15 May 1934, masterminded by the Prime Minister of Latvia Karlis Ulmanis (Ščerbinskis and Jēkabsons 2012; Norkus 2016). Thus, the post-communist restoration in this country involved not only restoration of the state’s independence and capitalism but also of democracy with 56 years passing since its demise until 1990—the year when the first free and competitive election took place.

In 1990, the Latvian population had only 7.29% of people who were at least 15 years old in 1934 (born in 1919 or earlier), 10.77% who were at least 10 years old (born in 1924 or earlier) and 22.23% who were born in 1934 or earlier (HMD 2022). These figures are not large, but based on them I would like to nevertheless claim that at least 7% of survivors from the original system who were aged 15 years or older at the time of its revolutionary breakdown, at least 10% of survivors who were at least 10 years old and at least 20% of survivors born before the breakdown are threshold values separating social systems where token restoration of the original system is sociodemographically possible from those where only type restoration can occur. These threshold values were performatively inscribed into the social ontology of post-communism by the near-unanimous recognition of the continuity of the restored Baltic states with their interwar namesakes by international community (with sole exception of Russia) and confirmed by the social and economic progress of the Baltic countries that is examined in detail in Parts III–V of this book.

This examination involves the repeated application of the outperforming original system test (OOST) and outperforming intermediate system test (OIST). The distinction between the restoration’s endurance success and its performance success entails the division of these tests into measures of restoration endurance success and measures of restoration performance success. The assessment of the endurance success is based on the criterion of restoration endurance success (CRES):

• CRES (criterion of restoration endurance success): Restored social system (C) is completely endurance successful if it endured longer than original social system A and intermediate social system B. If restored system endured longer only than original system A or intermediate system B, it is only partially endurance successful.

By this criterion, the restored Baltic states have already proven their partial performance success because, as of 2023, they have endured longer (some 33 years) than their original independence (1918–1940, 22 years). However, the test of their complete endurance success will continue until 2040 when they will have endured longer than the complete period of foreign occupations (1940–1990), which was accompanied by a socialist revolution imported from abroad and imposed from above (Senn 2007). This is also the time when the ultimate assessment of their performance success can be assessed. This assessment is performed by the OOST and OIST guided by the criterion of restoration economic performance success (CREPS), criterion of restoration health performance success (CRHPS) and criterion of restoration somatic performance success (CRSPS).

The main idea behind these tests is that the performance success of modern restorations is indicated by an acceleration of economic and social progress in the restored system compared to the intermediate or original systems. Thus, the application of these tests involves the comparison of rates of economic, health and somatic human wellbeing progress under the restored, intermediate and original systems. Importantly, these varieties of human wellbeing progress have valid indicators: gross domestic product per capita at purchasing power parity (GDPpc PPP), life expectancy and human body height measurable on the ratio scale (and so allowing for cross-time comparisons). Also importantly, cross-national, authoritative datasets are available, even if they do contain many data gaps or data of uncertain reliability (Engerman 1997).

These databases and datasets include the Maddison Project Database (MPD), Human Mortality Database (HMD), Human Life Table Database (HLTD) and Non-communicable Diseases Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) databases or datasets. In the releases of these quantitative data sources, which were available at the time of the completion of this book, some important time series close with 2018–2019. Therefore, applying the OIST for the assessment of the actual performance success of Baltic restorations, we compare the first 28 years of restoration (1990–2018) with the last 29 years (1960–1989) of state socialism under Soviet occupation. This comparison is supplemented by the assessment of the early restoration success, based on a comparison of the 1973–1989 and 1989–2007/2008 periods. There is also another way to justify why I close my analysis with 2018, which should be perfectly acceptable to readers from the Baltic countries. In 2018, they celebrated the centenaries of their statehood. Thus, this particular anniversary also perfectly justifies the scope of the time windows in the cross-time comparisons.

These tests and criteria are described in the fourth chapter, which also contains a description of the complimentary tests together with an explication of reasons for their use. They include the American standard test (AST) to assess economic performance success, the Japanese standard test (JST) for assessment of health performance and the Dutch standard test (DST) to assess somatic progress. In the interwar period, international observers perceived Finland as the fourth Baltic country. Since 1940, their paths of development have diverged because a cruel, real-life experiment commenced after the Soviet occupation, wherein similar countries had to develop under different economic systems for a period of 50 years.

This is why, in the social imaginations of the indigenous populations of the post-socialist Baltic countries, Finland has been attributed both as the place of their lost future (in 1940–1990) and a real utopia (after 1940). Therefore, when monitoring and assessing the performance success of the Baltic restorations, general criteria (CREPS, CRHPS, CRSPS) and special (AST, JST, DST) performance success tests are supplemented by regional ‘Finnish standard’ tests. Applying these standards, the early, actual and ultimate performance success of the Baltic restorations is measured by the decrease of the lag behind Finland as of 1990; ultimate success is reached in this regard when this gap is closed (i.e. the other countries caught up) or it is reduced to its 1938 levels by 2040.

The lack of relevant cross-time comparable data from the interwar and late socialist periods is a formidable obstacle for the application of both general and regional criteria of restoration performance success to all formerly communist countries. For most post-communist countries, it is possible to find ready-made data in the authoritative sources listed above and belonging to international cross-country comparative research infrastructure. However, their information on the Baltic countries contains gaps or dubious data. The reason for these gaps is interruptions in the de facto continuity of the Baltic states. The most glaring data gaps were filled by original research, including the collection of primary historical statistics and the derivation of total output and life expectancy estimates. Much of the primary data appears in LiDA, the Lithuanian digital archive of human studies and social sciences data.³ These datasets are online supplements to this book.

The original research used in this book includes cross-time and cross-country comparable estimates of the GDPpc of the Baltic countries in 1913–1938, Estonia in 1950–1989 and a life table for Lithuania in 1925–1934 (excerpts are presented in the supplement of this book, containing also estimates on interwar Estonia and Latvia by Kalev Katus). Parts III and IV provide details of their derivation. I use NCD-RisC 2016; 2020 estimates in Part V. However, they are critically evaluated and compared with the available historical sources, including unpublished sources from archives that have escaped the attention of human biologists running the NCD-RisC databases.

The cross-time comparative quantitative analysis of the economic, health and somatic performance of the restored Baltic states is prefaced in Part II with a case-oriented qualitative comparative process-tracing of the de facto extinction of the independent Baltic states, struggles for their restoration and their ultimate success due to the failure of the August 1991 putsch to save the diminished Soviet empire. The post-communist Baltic states succeeded both domestically and internationally at achieving recognition of their continuity with the interwar Baltic states, despite the critically low values of overlap of populations of the interwar Baltic states and the late Soviet Baltic republics in 1990–1991.

Therefore, their restoration practices are exemplary (possibly also for would-be restorers in the future). They include the introduction of legislation to establish and maintain institutional continuity between the interwar and post-communist Baltic states, consistent transitional and retrospective justice policies (researched by Pettai and Pettai 2015), exclusion of Soviet-era immigrants from gaining citizenship rights and claims placed on Russia, as the successor state of the Soviet Union, for the restitution of interwar borders (in the case of Estonia and Latvia) and the payment of reparations for damages incurred during occupation (in the case of Lithuania).

Comparative analysis of Baltic social restoration practices in Part II also includes a discussion of cross-country variation in these practices, as well as an attempt at explaining this variation. Post-communist Latvia chose the most straightforward way of establishing continuity with interwar independent Latvia simply by reenacting its 1922 Constitution and interwar Civil Code. Estonia decided to construct an uninterrupted relay of legitimate state top-authority holders from June 1940, when the invading Soviets captured and made President Päts their puppet, to 1992, when the new Constitution of Estonia was enacted. This relay starts with the last Prime Minister of independent Estonia Jüri Uluots, who went into hiding after his dismissal on 20 June 1940; he considered himself as the Prime Minister provisionally acting as president, according to the 1937 Estonian constitution. It continues with Estonian governments in exile from 1944, which are retrospectively recognised as the sole legitimate authority in the restored independent Estonia.

The Lithuanian way of constructing continuity between the interwar and restored Lithuanian state has been retroactive legislation, recognising military leaders of the anti-Soviet resistance movement (1944–1953) as the sole, legitimate state authority between 1940 and 1990. They worked to establish an underground partisan state that preserved effective control over most of rural Lithuania until 1950. These activities culminated in the meeting of partisan commanders on 16 February 1949 where an underground provisional government of Lithuania was established under Jonas Žemaitis-Vytautas. According to legislation accepted by the parliament of restored Lithuania in 2009 and supplemented in 2018, Žemaitis-Vytautas and (after his capture and execution by the Soviets) his deputy Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas are considered as the ‘Heads of State of Lithuania’ in 1949–1957.

However, although independence of the Baltic states was restored based on strict restorationism (the postulate of legal continuity between the interwar and post-communist Baltic states), this was not the only possible outcome. One of the aims of Part II is to demonstrate that a distinction between the two varieties of restoration (token and type) helps us to better understand the divisions and internal struggles within the Baltic independence movements in 1940–1990 themselves. According to my interpretation, these movements differentiated into orthodox tokenists (exponents of the legal continuity between the interwar and restored states) and heterodox typists, who accepted the restoration of independence as the establishment of new states, legally continuous with the Soviet Baltic republics rather than the interwar Baltic states.

Rein Taagepera’s plan (advanced in the late 1960s) to upgrade the status of Soviet Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania from union republics to that of nominally independent ‘popular democracies’ (like Hungary or Poland) is an early example of typism (Taagepera 2013). Typism dominated in the Baltic popular fronts until late 1989, and the position of the Lithuanian National Communist Party under Algirdas Brazauskas was also typist. A tokenist approach to independence restoration in Estonia and Latvia was promoted by the Citizens’ Committees movements in Estonia and Latvia and by the majority in the Lithuanian Reform Movement. By March–April 1990, popular fronts in Estonia and Latvia had also shifted towards tokenism. Due to favourable external circumstances (failure of the 1991 August coup in Moscow), tokenism could finally prevail.

However, Baltic tokenists had to accept compromises that violated their programme. These compromises included accepting the legitimacy of elections taking place under continuing occupation (the last Russian troops departed in the mid-1990s or (from Latvia) even later), failure to complement de-occupation with decolonisation (the repatriation of Soviet-era immigrants perceived as ‘colonists’) and acquiescence with the impossibility of reinstating the eastern borders of Estonia and Latvia as they were in 1940. A typist approach would have prevailed if the Soviet Union would have survived the August coup, forcing the governments of the rebellious Baltic republics to partly accept Soviet secession legislation, promulgated in April 1990 by the Soviet parliament. Type restoration of independence would have also only been possible if the Soviet empire would have had to face its terminal crisis some 10 or 20 years later (by 2000 or 2010), when sociodemographic continuity between the populations of the Soviet Baltic republics and the interwar Baltic states would have approached zero, making occupation regimes climacteric.⁴

When assessing the economic performance success of the Baltic restorations (in Part III), the application of the OOST is of particular interest because the Baltic countries faced similar challenges in 1918–1922 and 1989–1992 due to the deep integration of their economies in the semi-closed (by 1913) or completely closed (by 1989) economic worlds of the Russian and then the Soviet empires. Importantly, by 1913 mainland Latvia (and to a lesser extent Estonia) belonged to the few industrialised areas of the Russian Empire, and by 1989 the GDPpc of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania surpassed (according to MPD) output levels not only in the remaining 12 Soviet republics but also in the Soviet satellites in Central Europe.

During both periods, integration into the world economy was accompanied by drastic structural change. During the interwar period, in Estonia and Latvia, this was manifest as de-industrialisation and re-agrarianisation, mimicking Denmark’s economic development strategy. During the post-socialist restoration period, there was de-industrialisation and expansion of the service sector, with the surviving industrial enterprises integrating into international commodity chains as subcontractors.

After the industrialisation of Lithuania and re-industrialisation of the other two Baltic countries during Soviet occupation, their economic convergence was complete by 1989. However, in the 1990s, new cleavage lines appeared, separating Estonia from the other two Baltic countries. In 1994–2008, Estonia displayed the strongest growth due to less transformational contraction of its economy in 1990–1993 and its early success in attracting FDI. Of major advantage was its geographic proximity to Finland, favouring closer economic integration between the two countries, while the other two restored Baltic countries did not have such a highly advanced patron. However, during the Great Recession of 2008–2011 (also known as the global financial crisis (the GFC)), Finland suffered a ‘double-dip’ crisis that depressed post-crisis growth in Estonia too. Therefore, by 2018, Lithuania was able to catch up to Estonia again, while Latvia had to bear the cost of the failure of its national banking sector, which in the 1990s had promised to bring the country within reach of Switzerland—the centre of high value-added financial services for the complete post-Soviet area.

All three Baltic countries passed the OOST, displaying higher annual output growth rates in 1989–2018 in comparison with the 1913–1938 period. The restored Baltic states also outperformed in 1989–2007 (Estonia and Latvia) or Lithuania (in 1989–2008) the late Soviet Baltic republics (in 1973–2008). The obstacle in being able to assess their actual economic performance success is a lack of economic growth data in 1960–1972 for Latvia and Lithuania. However, I was able to apply the OIST for the 1960–1989 and 1989–2018 periods to Estonia, using my own estimates of its growth in 1950–1998. They are based on the important contribution by Klesment et al. (2010), who claimed that the MPD estimates of Estonia’s output per capita during the Soviet period are exaggerated and provided alternative estimates for 1950–1989. Accepting their claim only for the 1973–1990 period, I used their ‘physical output index’ to derive estimates of Estonia’s GDPpc in 1950–1998 comparable to those in the MPD 2020 from a different (1973) benchmark. Based on these estimates, during the first three decades of restored independence, Estonia’s growth was stronger than during the last three Soviet decades.

If the GDPpc of Latvia and Lithuania will continue to grow in 2018–2040 at the rates displayed in 2011–2018, they will successfully pass the ultimate OIST in 2040 and also catch up to Finland and decrease the lag behind the United States according to the AST. Estonia’s growth rate in 2011–2018 is not sufficient for these achievements. However, based on the original research on the impact of the Great Recession on the labour markets of the Baltic countries (Morkevičius et al. 2020; see also Norkus 2018), I argue that despite the slowdown of Estonia’s growth after the Great Recession, it is the best endowed to become an advanced technological frontier country by 2040. Proximity to Finland may have protected it from the negative long-term impact of outbound migration, which severely affected Lithuania and Latvia, depriving it of human capital embodied in the educated population of a younger age, which is migrating en masse to more advanced EU countries.

Indirect support for this claim may be provided by Estonia’s present leadership according to the increase of female and male life expectancy in 1989–2018 (see Part IV, which presents life expectancy data and applies them to health performance success tests). By 2018, all three Baltic countries passed the OIST for actual health performance success. However, only Estonia was successful in decreasing the life expectancy gap behind Japan as of 1989 (i.e. passing the JST). Estonia was also the only Baltic country able to pass Finland’s standard test for increase in life expectancy. Very differently, by 2008 Lithuania was the only token-restored capitalism country that failed to pass the OIST for early restoration health performance success.

Like in most socialist countries, life expectancy in the Baltic countries stagnated or declined (this applies to males) during the late socialist decades. In all three Baltic countries, male life expectancy decline also continued during the first years of restoration due to an increase in deaths from external causes (violence, car accidents, alcohol poisoning, etc.). However, in Estonia this trend was replaced by a steady increase in life expectancy already from 1996, standing in close correspondence with that of strong economic growth. Very differently, in Latvia and Lithuania male life expectancy stagnated or even further declined despite significant economic growth.

In Latvia, the male top life expectancy level under socialism was superseded only in 2008–2009, and in Lithuania only in 2012, when Lithuanian output per capita was 54.3% above the 1990 level. This suggests that in Latvia and Lithuania, the relationship between economic growth and life expectancy displayed the hysteresis effect: the return of life expectancy to the former level was possible only under a much higher GDPpc level than was needed to reach this level for the first time. The most probable cause of this effect was the particularly deep and long transformational economic recession in these Baltic countries. Nevertheless, life expectancy increase in 1989–2018 was larger than in 1960–1989, when it stagnated or declined after rapid growth in the 1950s.

None of the restored Baltic states were able to pass the OOST for health performance success. However, in this respect they did not differ from other post-socialist countries, where Stalinist socialism was imported after 1939. In nearly all of them, 1913–1938 coincided with the second phase of mortality transition (‘receding pandemics’), marked by the rapid growth of life expectancy despite depressed economic conditions during this period. This phase continued in some of them under state socialism, making the ultimate passing of the OIST a very daunting task. However, this is not the case for Estonia and Latvia, where life expectancy increase in 1938–1989 was not very large because the possibilities to increase life expectancy by decreasing mortality from infectious diseases were largely exhausted already during the first period of independence, while World War II and the first postwar years were a time of major absolute regression (cp. Mertelsmann 2011).

During the interwar period, there was close correspondence between the economic and life expectancy rankings of the Baltic countries: Latvia took the top position, Lithuania was last and Estonia ended up in between. Remarkably, by 1938 the life expectancy of Latvian males and females was above Finnish levels. Estonian females enjoyed slightly higher life expectancy than their Finnish peers, and Estonian males were nearly the same. As by this time Finland already had an economic edge over the other Baltic countries, Latvia’s top ranking in health expectancy can be explained by its leadership in building a welfare state due to the strong political position of the Latvian Social Democratic Workers’ Party up to the authoritarian coup in 1934. In Finland, its advancement was halted by the political legacy of the Civil War in 1918, and in Estonia by that of the communist putsch in 1924, both legacies empowering rightist parties (Norkus et al. 2021).

Another remarkable feature that transpired in the comparison of life tables of all three Baltic countries during the interwar period is the larger gender gap between male and female life expectancy in Latvia and Estonia in comparison with Lithuania (in particular) and Finland. This pattern in data is explained by the early onset of demographic transition in Estonia and mainland Latvia (except for Eastern Latvia or Latgale). Differently from Western Europe, where it was driven by mortality drop, in the Baltic provinces (the Estonian, Livland and Kurland governorates of the Russian Empire), fertility decrease preceded or was simultaneous with mortality decrease. The drop in fertility did increase female life expectancy because death due to birth complications had been a major death risk factor for adult females before the rise of modern medicine and advancement of the welfare state, making obstetric services universally available.

I explain the early start of demographic transition as an outcome of land property rights arrangements created by the agrarian reform in the Baltic provinces in 1849–1868. According to my overall institutionalist argument, these arrangements created powerful incentives to postpone marriages and control fertility for both the advantaged (minority) and disadvantaged (majority) parts of formerly enserfed populations. Very differently, the agrarian reforms in Eastern Latvia and Lithuania (as well as in other provinces of the Russian Empire) discouraged the dissolution of extended families, allowing for the fragmentation of landed property and perpetuating the Malthusian dynamics of agrarian overpopulation.

I use the same argument in the last, fifth part of the book to resolve the ‘Estonian antebellum paradox’, which I have named so to connect it to the famous (in anthropometric history) ‘antebellum paradox’, referring to the decline of the height of Americans in the decades before the US Civil War (1861–1865) under conditions of rapid economic growth (Komlos 1995; Steckel 1995). There were similar paradoxes in the countries of Western Europe undergoing industrialisation and urbanisation too, where for some time heights were also in decline despite economic growth. The Estonian ‘antebellum paradox’ was a paradox of over-performance: according to the broadly used Baten and Blum (2015) dataset, Estonian males born during the last decade of the nineteenth century and who had grown up by 1914 were the tallest males in the world.

As in the early nineteenth century Estonia did not belong to the most economically advanced areas populated by people with European genetic stock, this may compromise the central idea in the anthropometric history of human height as a proxy for economic living standards. Presenting the findings of the first attempt to use anthropometric data of the Baltic countries for the aims of comparative socio-economic history, in Chap. 12, I hope to ‘save’ anthropometric history from the debacle unfolding on the shores of the Baltic Sea.

After statistical testing of the explanations advanced in work on the American version of the ‘antebellum paradox’ with the dataset, expanded with data on the Baltic countries, I found that a demographic explanation was the most promising: due to early demographic transition, most Estonian boys born in 1890–1899 were raised in small families, providing better care, nourishment and a more hygienic home environment for their few children than larger households in more economically developed countries. This explanation is corroborated by small N case-oriented comparisons, finding that the heights of males from mainland Latvia with similar agrarian reforms and demographic developments are very similar to those of their Estonian peers but different to those in Eastern Latvia, despite the similarity in genetic stock.

Part of the solution to the ‘Estonian antebellum paradox’ is the inventory of the available historical statistical anthropometric data, correcting errors in the Baten and Blum (2015) data on the height of Estonian males and checking the data quality in NCD-RisC (2016, 2020), which provides shorter (starting with other individuals born in 1896) but more encompassing data series on the former communist countries, closing with height data of 18–19-year-old males born in 2000–2001. Applying the OIST and OOST to this data, I found an acceleration of height increase over post-communist individuals in comparison with the last males to have grown up under socialism in all three Baltic countries. In Estonia and Latvia, there was also acceleration in comparison with males born in 1910–1922 who grew up during the first period of independence.

In the annual cohorts of individuals born after the restoration of independence, male body heights in the Baltic countries increased by more than 1 cm/decade, while this figure stagnated in the benchmark country of the Netherlands (0.20 cm/decade). If present trends will continue, passing the ultimate OIST in 2038–2040, Estonian males born in 2020–2022 will be taller than their Dutch peers. The replacement of the ‘Dutch standard test’ by the ‘Estonian standard test’ may crown the confirmation of the somatic performance success of Estonian restoration using anthropometric data.

The concluding discussion provides explication of the broader relevance of the findings in my application of the historical sociology of restoration to post-communist Baltic transformations in the Baltic studies research field and outlines further venues for research within the framework of the comparative historical sociology of restorations.