This article was originally published in Danish on May 31, 2023.
BOOK REVIEW:
Vilis Vītols: On Russia. A Neighbour’s Experience
SIA UG1, Riga, 2022
Reviewed by Povl H. Riis-Knudsen
I stumbled upon this book by chance in a bookstore in Riga during my last visit there. Let me say this right off the bat: This is the worst book about Russia I have ever read. Vītols’ family suffered greatly under communism and was deported to Siberia, etc., and the man himself has spent 55 years of his life abroad, mainly in Venezuela. Because of his family history, he hates Russia, but has completely lost his perspective—both on world history and on the history of Latvia. Both are bad, and the attempt to explain history as a long series of Russian crimes is pathetic.
Vītols goes far back in history to “prove” that the Russian people generally consist of violent, unsympathetic, drunken, and uncivilized semi-Asian hordes, true “Untermenschen”—to borrow a title from a pamphlet from the Third Reich era, a pamphlet that was, however, quickly banned and withdrawn even there. The same fate should befall Vītols’s drivel. We hear about how terrible both Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great were as human beings—but his stories, especially those about Peter I, are, of course, controversial and described by Russian historians as fabrications and myths. I am not in a position to judge that, and it is also completely irrelevant. Times were different back then and had different norms—not just in Russia, but also in the rest of Europe. And just as the “Wild West” had its own law of the land, so too did the desolate regions of Siberia, where people were generally left to establish order themselves with whatever means they had at their disposal. Moreover, great empires have never arisen through coffee-table diplomacy, but on the battlefield. One might ask why empires need to be great, but there are both economic and security-related reasons for this. In any case, however, that was a long time ago. Stalin naturally gets his turn in the mill—and he deserves it—but Stalin was not Russian. Like Beria, he was Georgian, and some of the worst executioners were Jews1. The people who suffered most under Stalin, however, were probably the Russians2.
He also mentions Russia’s “oppression” of the many small ethnic groups within the shifting Russian borders. True, many of these ethnic groups are extremely small and scattered—they would have no chance of survival on their own. And the fact that their languages even have a written form is thanks to Russian linguists. That these languages are under pressure is obvious to anyone who has visited autonomous republics or regions.
In a union or federation, there is free movement, and this inevitably leads to a mixing of populations. For example, the entire oil and gas industry depends on Russian experts, and in the business world, the language is simply Russian. As a linguist, I find this regrettable—but it is a trend that is difficult to stop. The Russian state actually allocates significant funds in an effort to preserve endangered local languages and cultures, but the effect is limited. These are “superfluous languages”—even in Russia, people would rather learn English or, in the future, perhaps Chinese. It takes coercion to preserve, for example, Chuvashian, which is a philologically interesting language that holds official status in the Republic of Chuvashia on the Volga, with a population of about 1 million. It’s an uphill battle! It requires compulsory education, and that’s difficult, because people coming from outside see no point in learning Tuvan. But what about our own dialects? They’ve disappeared in two generations. The same fate will befall Danish, but it may take three generations. Danish, too, is a “useless language” when everyone knows English—and the goal is for everyone to know it.
In reality, there are probably no autonomous republics in the Russian Federation that have any desire to achieve independence. There is really no basis for any “liberation.” Now many will mention Chechnya, but Chechnya had, after all, achieved de facto independence; however, the Americans’ attempt to establish a caliphate in the Caucasus put an end to that. That was the limit! Not a single word in Vītols’ book draws parallels to other countries or to world history as a whole. At the beginning of the 19th century, the British Empire covered 20% of the world’s land area, spread across all continents, and 25% of the world’s population. The French Empire covered 10% of the world’s land area. Add to that the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch colonial empires, the Belgian Congo, and so on. Let’s be honest: They weren’t the result of coffee-table dialogues either, and the oppression was brutal and total. And then there was the slave trade, the extermination of the American Indians and the Australian Aborigines… the list goes on. None of this is mentioned. And that makes the book completely unreliable. It portrays it as if Russia were the only colonial power and the only one that had used military force to secure its territory.
The worst part, however, is that Vītols doesn’t even know the history of his own people. Latvia was an integral part of the Russian Empire—with all the economic and cultural benefits that entailed. And the Latvians themselves participated in the administration of this empire. Even worse, however, is that the country’s population itself rallied massively behind the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution and actively opposed genuine independence. This independence was, however, achieved with the help of foreign volunteers, including Germans, Estonians, and Danes3. In fact, Latvian Bolsheviks won up to 70% of the vote in elections. This figure naturally declined during the first period of independence, but there was certainly a solid base of support even in 1945, and while Soviet historians may claim that Latvia voluntarily joined the Soviet Union—which is perhaps an exaggeration—there were in fact many Latvians in the Soviet administration. The oppression of the Latvians was also carried out by Latvians! And the same is true in the other Baltic countries. When you visit the Occupation Museum in Vilnius, Lithuania, it is also quite striking here how many Lithuanians participated in the machinery of oppression—and there were also people from the other Soviet republics. The Soviet Union was not just Russia!
And when we speak of “Russian cruelty,” one finds precisely in Mikkel Kirkebæk a description of Latvian cruelty during the War of Independence following the fall of the Tsarist Empire:
“The fighting in the Baltic States was so fierce and bitter as I had never experienced it before, neither in World War I nor in all my battles as a member of the Freikorps. There was no real front line; the enemy was everywhere. And when clashes occurred, they turned into bloodbaths and complete annihilation. The Latvians distinguished themselves in particular. Here I saw for the first time the cruelty shown toward the civilian population. The Latvians took terrible revenge on their own countrymen if they had cared for or helped German soldiers or Russians from the White Army. They set fire to their houses and let the inhabitants burn alive inside. Countless times I witnessed these horrific scenes: burned-down huts with the charred and scorched bodies of women and children. The first time I saw it, I stood there petrified. At the time, I believed I was witnessing the pinnacle of humanity’s insane destruction.”4
[The quote appears in Danish in the book. The ed. has translated it into Danish for use in this article.]
And who wrote this? None other than Rudolf Höss, later camp commander at Auschwitz, a man to whom cruelty was hardly a foreign concept. The quote comes from his memoirs, written in prison while he awaited execution by hanging, published in 1959. Danes have a very romanticized view of the Baltic states. They should read Kirkebæk’s book to better judge these countries.
That there are fools like Vilis Vītols is not surprising. He is a hateful old man who has simply created his own reality. He is a monster and should be displayed in a glass jar in the Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg alongside the other monsters. His book is only relevant because of the praise from well-known figures on the back cover, and because they went to the trouble of translating it into English and had the Latvian Member of the European Parliament, Sandra Kalniete, write a long Russophobic foreword, brimming with hatred.
This bodes ill for the future. 35% of Latvia’s population is Russian, and books like this reinforce the oppression of the Russian population in Latvia (and Estonia, which has an almost equally large proportion of Russian speakers). From the days of the Soviet Union, Russians are accustomed to living among strangers. They have no problem with that. Nor do they have any problem living in Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania—but they simply want to be respected and allowed to speak Russian (which everyone in those countries understands, at least the slightly older generation), watch Russian television, and read Russian newspapers and books. The Latvians reproach them for not learning Latvian. Yes, I can’t understand why they don’t either, but that’s because I’m a language person. Russians have never needed to learn foreign languages, and once you’re older, it’s not so easy. The children learn it in school, of course. But the fact is also that most Russians (not all) live in areas where life as a whole takes place in Russian—areas where even the Latvians speak Russian, simply because it’s the language used at work, in stores, and so on. In Latvia, a large area of the eastern part of Latgale, including Latvia’s second-largest city, Daugavpils, is entirely Russian-speaking—and the second language there is Latgalian, which was the administrative language during the interwar years but has since been relegated to the very back of the line and isn’t even taught in schools. In that province, there will likely be a Russian majority. Shouldn’t this majority be allowed to vote to join Russia, if that is what they want? And don’t talk about historical borders here. Latvia has only been an independent state during the interwar years, and even then the border was rather arbitrary. Could one imagine a “Ukrainian” situation here? I certainly could, but Latvia is a richer and better society to live in than Ukraine, Europe’s corrupt poorhouse. There is no material incentive to switch countries. So as long as one treats its Russians properly, there will be no problems. But that is precisely what is no longer being done. And what applies to Latgale also applies to northeastern Estonia. In the Narva area, 90–95% of the population is Russian. Do they have no rights? And NATO membership is a false sense of security. When the West has to withdraw from Ukraine, there won’t be much appetite in Washington for a new adventure in the Baltics. Biden would likely struggle to find Latvia on a map.
But of course, there is another perspective. What if the Russians decide to move to Russia? How would Estonia and Latvia manage without 30–35% of their population? These are already small countries in terms of population, and the Russians are well-educated skilled workers. We live in exciting times, and individuals like Vilis Vītols help make them even more “exciting.” I actually have great sympathy for the Baltic peoples. History has not been kind to them, but just like the Poles, they are currently behaving in a highly inappropriate manner. Their future depends on a friendship with Russia (which is neither the Russia of the Tsarist era nor the Soviet Union). And so is Poland’s. The Poles have no friends, for they hate everyone around them and covet their territories. A western border on the Elbe, an eastern border well into Ukraine and Belarus, with the amputation of large parts of Lithuania and the annexation of the Kaliningrad region. There is a reason why Poland’s neighbors have divided the country among themselves several times throughout history! As I said: We live in exciting times—perhaps a bit too exciting, but on the other hand, we need to clean house. Nothing cleans house as thoroughly as a nuclear war.
Notes
- Kevin MacDonald: “Stalin’s Willing Executioners: Jews as a Hostile Elite in the USSR” in The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 3, 2005. ↩︎
- See, e.g., Svetlana Alexievich: Secondhand Time, 2013. ↩︎
- See: Mikkel Kirkebæk: Den yderste grænse I-II (The Outer Limit I-II), Lindhardt og Ringhof 2019. ↩︎
- Kirkebæk II, s. 464. ↩︎