ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at various ways that different colonial layers in the Baltics shaped the ground for the Soviet takeover and the contours of its local reception. It outlines the main features of the Estonian and Latvian colonial experience and provides links to the Lithuanian experience, especially in the modern nation-building era, when the trajectories of these three ethnicities began to converge. The cruelty of the Baltic Germans being then as proverbial as the kindliness of the tsar, the local peasants largely concluded that the cruelty of their landlords must have been conducted unknown to the good tsar. The Soviet version of Baltic history presented Baltic Germans as enemies and oppressors of the local peasantry. The tradition of Baltic song festivals is, we might say, a thoroughly postcolonial phenomenon—not only did the tradition develop from a decolonial motivation, but its mode and function are clearly products of colonial circumstances.
