ABSTRACT
That the three Baltic states appeared together after the first world war, disappeared simultaneously into the Soviet Union in 1940, and reappeared with the collapse of Soviet power in 1991, was more the product of external factors than the result of internal similarities. Estonian is a member of the Finno-Ugric linguistic group rather than the Indo-European to which Latvian and Lithuanian belong. Latvia has a more divided recent past than the other two states, since its component parts, southern Livonia, Courland, and Letgale, had separate administrative lives under the tsars. Lithuania differs in that Catholicism is the creed of the majority whereas in Latvia and Estonia Lutheranism predominates. In Lithuania the pre-revolutionary landholders had been Polish or Russian, whilst in Estonia and Latvia they had been predominantly German; and in Lithuania the emancipation of the serfs did not take place until 1861 whereas in the other areas it had been enacted shortly after the Napoleonic wars.
