Are the Baltic Sea states, as former Estonian president Lennart Meri once put it, the factory of Europe’s future? Oliver Moody’s brilliantly written, convincingly argued and compelling book makes a good argument that it is in the plucky, resilient and often overlooked littoral states of the Baltic that the spirit of Europe burns strongest.

According to Moody, since the beginning of the war in Ukraine the Baltic countries – encompassing here not just Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, but also Finland, Poland and Sweden – have ‘articulated and realised a positive vision of how to put the West back on the front foot, and a compelling idea of what Europe could be: more hopeful, more assertive in defence of its values and interests, more conscious of solidarity with other liberal democracies, more open to the potential of technology, more confident of its own distinctive strengths, less constrained by fear’. Echoing Robert Graves’s characterisation of the dying Roman Empire in his poem ‘The Cuirassiers of the Frontier’, Moody argues that the rotten tree of Europa lives only in its rind. 

The Baltic countries’ position today as the most principled defenders of Europe’s fundamental values has been earned through a lot of hard and bloody history. More than any other European nations, the littoral states of the Baltic found themselves ground between Nazism and communism. What with the Bolshevik Revolution, civil war, precarious interwar independence, Nazi and Soviet occupation, decades of subservience to Moscow and, finally, a struggle to disconnect from civilisational and economic dependence, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland suffered the full gamut of 20th-century horrors. Finland consolidated its independence only by resisting, wholly unexpectedly, Stalin’s Red Army in the Winter War of 1939–40; it escaped further Soviet aggression by assuming a position of prone neutrality during the Cold War. The modern history of Scandinavia may be less traumatic, but the Swedes, Finns, Danes and Russians have their own grudges going back three centuries. 

In recent times, Russia – the state on the periphery of the Baltic Sea with the smallest shoreline and the largest hinterland – has been the greatest bugbear of its neighbours. Moody states that his book is about ‘the return of the ancient struggle with Russia for mastery of the Baltic, how the West can win it and how its outcome will be decisive for the future of Europe and the wider West’. A distinguished foreign correspondent for The Times, he is too good a journalist to fall completely for the alarmist narrative all too often sounded by politicians from the region that the Baltic countries are next on the list of Putin’s conquests. Russians know they cannot conquer the Baltics. Moody quotes Reiner Schwalb, the former German military attaché to Moscow: ‘The will has to be backed up by the capabilities. Russia does not have these capabilities.’ What Moody is less clear on is whether Russia even has the will. He cites ‘many experts’ who argue that ‘not only Putin but also a large portion of the Moscow establishment regard the Baltic states as annoying lost sheep to be brought home by a second “gatherer of the lands”, much as the tsar Peter I first conquered them at the start of the eighteenth century’. Yet here, crucially, Moody misquotes Putin: in his 2021 essay on the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, Putin referred to Peter the Great specifically as a ‘gatherer of historic Russian lands’. Those do not include the Baltic states. Putin, by his own account at least, is first and foremost a Russian ethno-nationalist rather than an old-school imperialist, though his information ecosystem is populated by nutters with more extreme views than his own. 

Nobody, in fairness, could dispute the fact that the Baltic states have good historical reasons to fear Russian imperialism and treachery. Since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has waged ‘an industrial-grade “shadow war” on Europe, with ever-increasing intensity’. This has included hacking the devices of the directors of a Finnish intelligence agency and Germany’s two largest political parties, sabotage of infrastructure, assassinations, arson, graffitiing underpasses, spreading propaganda via social media bots, vandalising the Estonian interior minister’s car and launching cyberattacks on the Latvian public broadcaster. These actions range from cheap ways to tie up resources, sow paranoia and exacerbate tensions to borderline acts of war. 

Moody’s truly impressive achievement in this book is to provide a detailed explanation of the background to the Baltic conflicts. His study is full of surprising details: for instance, he reveals Winston Churchill’s casual willingness to sacrifice Finland to Stalin and the fact that, ‘relative to its population of 1.3 million’, Estonia has ‘more unicorns – start-ups valued at more than $1 billion before they go public, such as Bolt, Skype and Wise – than any other European nation’. 

Moody’s chief fault is an excess of sympathy towards the countries he examines. Keeping score, he duly notes that, when the Nazis arrived in Latvia, ‘virtually all of the country’s 70,000 remaining Jews were killed, with help from local collaborators. Viktors Arājs, a Latvian policeman, was put in charge of a unit of roughly a thousand “patriotic” volunteers, who murdered some 26,000 Jews in Latvia and Belarus.’ He admits that in 1944, some 110,000 Latvians were mobilised to fight the advancing Soviet troops, but he omits from this number the 87,550 who formed the SS Latvian Legion (motto: ‘God Bless Latvia!’) and a further 23,000 who served as Wehrmacht auxiliaries. He also doesn’t mention the fact that the SS unit is still annually commemorated on Legionnaire Day, which was officially a day of remembrance from 1998 to 2000.

The brutality and ruthlessness of the Soviet occupation of the three Baltic states is covered in heartbreaking detail. But Moody misses some of its complexity. For instance, the mother, grandmother and great-grandmother of Kaja Kallas, formerly the Estonian prime minister and now the EU’s top diplomat, were dragged out of their house during the deportation of the country’s elite in 1949. Over twenty thousand Estonians were sent to Stalin’s Gulag, where one in twenty died. But Moody does not mention the flipside of the Kallas family story: Kaja’s father was a high-flying Soviet apparatchik who worked at the Finance Ministry Planning Committee of the Estonian Socialist Soviet Republic and the Communist Party of Estonia’s official newspaper before becoming chairman of the Central Union of the Estonian Trade Unions and a member of the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Soviet Union.

Perhaps Moody’s most glaring misrepresentation relates to the treatment of Russian exiles in Latvia after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Up to a million Russian activists, journalists and other regime opponents fled for their lives, and many thousands found a home in Latvia – including a slew of independent journalists. But in December 2022, the Latvian authorities expelled the entire staff of TV Dozhd, Russia’s leading anti-Kremlin TV channel, over a presenter’s characterisation of Russian soldiers as ‘ours’ in an advice segment for viewers seeking to help relatives who had been forcibly drafted into Putin’s army. The treatment of exiles fleeing the Putin regime has been far too close to racism for comfort.