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This year, NATO marks its 75th anniversary, while the Baltic countries celebrate 20 years as members of the alliance. Dr. Lukas Milevski speaks about the history of that inclusion, and shares his thoughts about the future.
Milevski is a tenured assistant professor at Leiden University, where he teaches strategic studies in the BA International Studies and MA International Relations programs. He has published widely on strategy, including two books with Oxford University Press: The Evolution of Modern Grand Strategic Thought (2016) and The West’s East: Contemporary Baltic Defense in Strategic Perspective (2018).
Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.
Transcript
Indra Ekmanis: Hello, and welcome to Baltic Ways, a podcast bringing you interviews and insights from the world of Baltic studies. I'm your host, Dr. Indra Ekmanis. And today we speak with Dr. Lucas Milevski, a tenured assistant professor at Leiden University, where he teaches strategic studies. This year marks 75 years of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and 20 years of the Baltic states' inclusion in that alliance. Dr. Milevski gives us his insights into the history, and what may be next for the Baltic states as part of NATO. Stay tuned.
IE: Thank you so much for joining us today on Baltic Ways. Perhaps we can start with you telling us a little bit about yourself, your background and how you came to be involved in this field of study.
Lukas Milevski: I'm Lukas Milevski. I'm presently an assistant professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. And for an American audience, it's worthwhile to mention that in the Netherlands, assistant professor is a tenured position. And I research and write about military strategy in general, theory, history, contemporary analysis, as well as contemporary military defense.
I am a Latvian American dual citizen, so I've also maintained both a personal and a professional interest in Baltic defense. I published my first piece on that topic way back in 2010 when I was still a master's student. I published a book on the subject, The West's East: Contemporary Baltic Defense in Strategic Perspective, in 2018, and have continued writing on the topic regularly ever since for various venues, including FPRI's own Baltic Bulletin.
IE: Well, thank you for sharing that background. We are here to talk a little bit about NATO today. NATO this year celebrates its 75th anniversary in April. In March, the Baltic states also celebrate 20 years of being in the alliance, having joined in 2004. As we commemorate these milestones, how would you describe the organization's evolution, its history with the Baltic states from your perspective?
LM: So 75 years of history is quite a bit, especially for an international alliance. And I'm sure there will be plenty written on this history to mark the 75th anniversary. So what I'll do now is just sketch out certain inflection points in NATO's history and the degree to which the Baltic states featured in those points or experienced consequences as a result, whether positive or negative.
So the first inflection point is obviously 75 years ago itself, when NATO was founded. In the words of Lord Ismay, who was its first Secretary General, NATO was founded to keep the Americans in, the Germans down, and the Russians out. We don't consider that second purpose relevant anymore, but the other two have remained wholly relevant.
The Baltic states during this time were, of course, occupied by the Soviet Union, and simply formed part of the enemy for NATO. The next real inflection point was the end of the Cold War and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, which allowed the Baltic states to spring out of national captivity, and begin plotting their own national courses again. Unsurprisingly, this pointed them toward NATO, which in any case, had lost its primary reason for existence and only awkwardly found itself seeking organizational purpose in intervening in the Western Balkans as Yugoslavia collapsed. During the 1990s, there was a Western defense professional debate about Baltic membership in NATO, which played out in various venues, including professional and academic journals.
Notably, there were some quite prescient arguments that leaving them out of NATO would ultimately be destabilizing as they would present power vacuums, which would only invite invasion at some subsequent undetermined later date. You know, essentially exactly what happened to Ukraine.
IE: Right.
LM: The next key inflection point was the terror attack on, terror attacks on 9/11, which finally gave NATO a mission again, counterterrorism, and incidentally the only invocation of Article 5, NATO's mutual defense clause, in the history of the alliance, by the United States. In the early atmosphere of the war on terror, Russia was a quasi ally, and this atmosphere helped, perhaps enabled, the Baltic states to slip into NATO and the European Union simultaneously in spring 2004 — March for NATO, May for the EU.
The relatively warm atmosphere between NATO and Russia, and NATO's counter terrorism and counter insurgency focus, somewhat precluded NATO membership from meaning terribly much for the Baltic States. There is no real contingency defense planning for national defense, for example. Because the only threat was Russia, and the West mostly did not see Russia as a possible threat, the Baltic states and maybe some other Eastern Flank countries excepted. The one exception to this relative negligence was the Baltic air policing mission, which began right from the Baltic accession to NATO and continues to the present day. It took until the next inflection point in 2008, Russia's invasion of Georgia, to shake NATO's complacency about Russia, albeit not by that much.
IE: Yeah.
LM: Baltic defense planning became permissible, but without a proper political decision, more sort of as an annex to defense planning for Polish defense. And then NATO and most of its constituent countries sank back into unwarranted complacency. The story somewhat repeated in 2014. Russia invaded another country, NATO responded, including this time by redefining Russia as a potential enemy and moving some tripwire forces into the Baltic states.
IE: Can you say what that means? What a tripwire force is?
LM: Idea of a tripwire force is simply to have forces from other member countries present in the region so that if Russia were to invade, they'd not just be shooting at local Baltic armed forces, but also those of ideally each of the other member states as well. And this would then immediately, in principle, involve those other states in Baltic defense.
So NATO moves some tripwire forces into the Baltic states. This was probably mostly due to strenuous U.S. pressure on European member states, which seemed rather unwilling at the time. Nonetheless, this was done, and then afterward NATO slipped back into a certain degree of unwarranted complacency, again, particularly the European member states and the Western European member states.
And finally, most recently, 2022 and the renewed Russian invasion of Ukraine. Baltic defense is again high on the agenda. NATO's four deployed forces, the tripwire forces, are to be expanded from battalion size to brigade size, basically from 1,000 men to about four to five thousand-ish. And the unwarranted complacency about Russia has yet to return.
Hopefully it won't, but of course we don't know the future. As a result of this infection point as well, Finland and, finally, Sweden have also joined NATO, thereby turning the Baltic [Sea] into a NATO lake and increasing military and naval security in the region. But what we really see as a history is that NATO has only gradually, and mostly unwillingly, paid any attention, let alone serious attention, to Baltic defense.
Fortunately, for most of that history, it turned out not to be a fatal mistake. And we can now hope, and perhaps work, to develop NATO defense planning and policies finally to ensure real Baltic defense. This is work not only by NATO or the larger states, but also, and of course crucially, by the Baltic states themselves, and we do see that this is happening.
IE: Yeah. It strikes me that, you know, we have many headlines in U.S. outlets since 2022 and the Russian invasion — full scale invasion of Ukraine — featuring Baltic leaders. Just the other day I heard Kaja Kallas on, on NPR's “Morning Edition,” for example. And so this has become kind of a mainstay.
I wonder if you can tell us — we talked about that now the Baltics are here in NATO for two decades — and over the last two decades, how has NATO's presence influenced regional security dynamics in the Baltic region? Maybe, the addition of Finland and Sweden and the creation of Lake NATO, if you will. But also how have the Baltic states themselves influenced NATO?
LM: So NATO's presence in the Baltic Sea region, particularly with the accession of the Baltic states, resolved the one major geopolitical issue which I already mentioned, the notion of the power vacuum in between NATO and Russia, at least in this region, which could have — and knowing Russia — would have eventually invited trouble. And so in principle, this issue is no more. But in practice, as I was sort of saying, in terms of defense planning and everything, this remains a work in progress. So besides this key point, NATO's presence in the Baltic region over the last 20 years hasn't really affected security dynamics all that much, I think, for a number of reasons.
First of all, besides the Baltic region's national forces — the local Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian forces and so on — the NATO presence itself has been quite minimal for most of those two decades. The air policing mission since 2004, the tripwire forces from 2016 onward, but the additional NATO non-Baltic physical, material, military manpower capability to affect security dynamics meaningfully has not really been there.
It's only now, you know, in the past few years that we've been seeing some actual substantial change. As I also already mentioned, for most of the past 20 years, NATO has not been focusing on territorial defense, but it's been looking halfway across the world, generating expeditionary capabilities to wage war in Afghanistan.
So the alliance had little time, little capability, and little desire really to consider the Baltic seriously. Third, for the early years of the war on terror, Russia was, as I said, something of an ally. And moreover, it was also wrestling with its own internal security issues. Its war with Georgia in 2008 showed major problems in its armed forces, which it spent the next few years fixing, or at least thinking it was fixing them.
And as a bit of an aside on this war: This, the Russian perspective, is very distinct. They feel like they almost lost the war because of how poorly their armed forces performed, hence the need to reform them. And then of course, after Georgia, it focused on supporting the Assad regime in Syria and then add into all this is its perpetual fixation with Ukraine in 2014, even prior to 2014. And of course, after 2014 as well. So there's a good recipe for Russia also perhaps not dedicating an enormous amount of attention to the Baltic states either, and I'm no fan of Russia, but I think it's notable nonetheless that at the worst of the 2008 financial crisis, and Latvia was hit harder than most, there was no special Russian attempt to exploit the crisis to topple the Latvian or any other Baltic government.
You know, nothing beyond the usual corruption, money laundering, subversion, and general criminality. Why not is a different question, and one which we can't answer. You know, even if we had Putin here on a table, and we cracked his skull open with a hammer and chisel, presumably we would find that he had a brain, but that wouldn't tell us anything about his thoughts. So we don't know why they didn't do anything, but it is perhaps notable that they didn't really do anything — at least nothing special.
Finally, if you look at the defense literature, once Western military analysts began paying attention to the problems of Baltic defense again after 2014, the recurring theme which you see is one of apprehension: That Russia has the advantage in the Baltic Sea region. Because with its missiles — anti-ship missiles, anti-air missiles — it could create a Baltic bubble, from which, it could deny access to NATO forces. So there's a distinct sense in which it's actually been Russia which maintains an advantage in the Baltic Sea region.
And this is only beginning to change now as a result of the war and its consequences. Both in terms of Finnish and Swedish accession to NATO, as well as in terms of damage to Russia's own armed forces. And in terms of Baltic influence, I see relatively little. As mentioned, improvements of Baltic defense have generally followed Russian aggression, and usually have been as little as NATO believed it could get away with, especially the Western European countries. Is that changing now? We'll see.
IE: Yeah, well, tell us tell us in a little bit about — I mean, I feel like there was a lot of conversation early on in after the renewed invasion about the Baltics kind of having this “we told you so mentality,” to their Western Western European partners and to their American partners too in some to some degree. And then, yes, we have seen kind of these incremental shifts in the way that NATO is taking their Eastern Flank a little bit more seriously. You mentioned the increase in their tripwire forces. But what about tangible sort of feeling on the ground? How do you assess NATO's ability to deter a potential threat and uphold security? What are some of those key challenges, or maybe opportunities, in the Baltics? You talked about the Russian advantage. And maybe aside from NATO, what are the steps that the Baltic states are taking on their own? We have a lot of talk about defense investments in the Baltic states themselves. So, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
LM: Yes. Well, to start with deterrence, the problem with deterrence is that, sort of, to deter, the infinitive verb is grammatically correct, but strategically inaccurate. We cannot deter. The other side chooses to be deterred. We can provide the reasons for them to choose to be deterred, but beyond that, it's fundamentally out of our hands. And we have a hard time knowing what the other side is thinking. You know, again, think of poking around Putin's brain, it tells us nothing. Worse still, he has to believe that anything we try to do is to strengthen deterrence. You know, truly, if we're putting forces into the Baltic states, it's for the purposes of deterrence and not something else, invasion.
IE: Right.
LM: But what the Russians are doing is giving constant signals that they don't trust the NATO presence in the Baltic states. They feel like a country under siege and generally speaking, they're paranoid of surprise attacks. So in communicating this to us, are they telling the truth or are they just cynically trying to dissuade us? Or is a little of Column A, a little of Column B, depending on the person speaking at that moment? We don't know, but this complicates the picture.
It does not, however, mean that we should appease them and not try to strengthen deterrence. We obviously should. That's part of NATO's core mission. So then, going to what NATO is trying to do or what it can try to do — NATO's fundamental posture to try to instill deterrence rests on Article 5, the Mutual Defense Clause, as well as extended nuclear deterrence. In abstract, the latter is always a hard sell, just like it was during the Cold War. The notion of extended nuclear deterrence is that, essentially, the United States would protect Europe with a nuclear umbrella. It's extending its hand, willing to take nuclear blows to protect its allies. But would the United States, or for that matter Britain or France, you know, really sacrifice Washington, D.C., London, or Paris for the sake of Tallinn, Riga, or Vilnius?
That's impossible to know, but at the same time, it's not a possibility that the Russians can ignore. So, allies never find it particularly compelling, and this was true during the Cold War as well, but adversaries do still have to take it seriously. Article 5, meanwhile, depends on NATO's ability actually to sustain a major military operation in the Baltic states, something which it is still in the process of trying to develop. It might also rely on keeping substantial forces positioned in the Baltic states, something which it is also developing. I mentioned the forward deployed forces expanding from battalion to brigade size, which will help with that. Germany is planning on deploying an entire brigade into Lithuania. And so this will all help with that.
Is this enough to present a sufficiently credible threat of successful defense that the Russians would think better of any hypothetical future invasion? We simply don't know. Prudence is pulling us in two ways. We don't want to leave the Baltics undefended because that might invite invasion. But at the same time, we don't want to put too much in because the Russians might take that really seriously the wrong way. We need to find somewhere a middle ground, notwithstanding all of NATO's and especially all, all other American commitments elsewhere in the world.
So, it's a thorny problem.
IE: Yeah.
LM: As for the Baltic states themselves, they face a wide variety of challenges to improving their own defense. The most fundamental one is that the Russian threat can be quite multi-dimensional, and so the Baltic states need to have some sort of capability to answer, to some degree, each of those dimensions, even without NATO support, to buy time for NATO support to arrive.
You know, we're talking from land invasion with heavy armor to airborne coup de main, such as what Russia tried to do in the very first days of their invasion, renewed invasion of Ukraine back in February 2022. Russian air and missile strikes against land, sea, and air targets, cyber attacks, and electronic warfare, and many other forms of attack.
You know, Russia can make the life of a Baltic defense planner really difficult, just as it currently is for Ukrainian strategists. So the Baltic challenge is spreading their limited budgets around in ways which are, or at least appear to be, good enough. At least good enough to be able to blunt an initial attack and buy time.
So for this reason, Latvia and Estonia jointly procured a German IRIS-T medium range air defense system, which has been doing excellent work in Ukraine to help contribute against the missile plane and the possibility of an airborne coup de main threat. If you have air defense, it's less likely that Russian helicopters will get through, that Russian missiles will get through, and so on. Baltic states are developing a Baltic defense line, and they are expanding their armed forces, including reintroducing conscription, in Latvia's case, to help defend against a major ground invasion. They are procuring coastal defense systems to deny Russia the ability to attack them by sea.
And this is all very good. It's very important. It's demonstrating a clear will to defend to the rest of NATO that the Baltic states will defend themselves in the hypothetical event of invasion. And so it puts additional political and moral pressure on the rest of NATO also to step up more. But of course, the Baltic states, on their own will, will simply never be enough to defend successfully against a country with a military the size of Russia's.
This is an unavoidable fact. And this is the final challenge for the Baltic States, that ultimately they cannot guarantee their own national security, their own national survival by themselves without NATO support if Russia were really to try to challenge it with a major invasion.
IE: Yeah. You mentioned this kind of goodwill, or moral pressure that is also part of the Baltic states' defense plan in some ways. And I am thinking about that in their accession and the way that the Baltic states responded and showed up, for example, in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks. So, I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about how the Baltic states have contributed to NATO's missions and operations. Whether or not their participation has shaped any of the alliance's strategies or priorities.
LM: So ever since they regained independence and developed their own armed forces, the Baltic states have tried to be good citizens of the liberal international order and have committed forces to international operations, including NATO, but also EU missions, UN missions, other allied missions — of course, within the scope of their own available resources.
For most missions over the past 30 years, the Baltic commitment has been small, both comparatively and sort of absolutely. And of course, the degree of commitment for each mission in which the Baltic states individually or collectively have been involved has also varied over time.
So just to sort of touch on a few examples, they sent soldiers to the various missions resulting from the violent collapse of Yugoslavia. Even today, Latvia and Lithuania are still contributing to KFOR in Kosovo. Lithuania has one soldier there, but with a Seimas mandate for up to five, while Latvia has committed 136 military personnel to that mission.
Estonia, meanwhile, participated in the French Operation Barkhane in Mali, originally dedicating 50 troops and raising the number to 95 in 2019, until the end of the operation there in 2022. And Estonia's participation in Barkhane was appreciated in Paris and led to a considerable amount of French goodwill.
So this indicates the importance of not just NATO missions, but looking beyond NATO missions, to other missions, because, yes, a lot of countries are part of NATO, they're also part of EU, membership overlaps, and even contributing to other states' national missions can have beneficial consequences within the NATO context.
IE: Sure.
LM: Most prominently, of course, the Baltic states had all contributed troops to the wars in Iraq as part of the Coalition of the Willing, as well as to the International Security Assistance Force, the NATO force in Afghanistan. So from the Baltic point of view of the past 20 years, which is totally understandable, the United States was always going to be the single most important guarantor of Baltic military and national security.
The subsequent question — the degree to which Baltic involvement has led to influence — is much less clear. For one, you know, much of that would happen behind closed doors. But it is fair to say that there were some early attitudes toward the Baltic states, which were quite fundamentally not promising, notably from some Western European countries.
The most infamous example is probably Jacques Chirac's outburst, as president of France in 2003 — and this was admittedly, you know, a year before Baltic accession to NATO and the EU — dismayed by the Vilnius letter, which a number of current Eastern Flank countries drafted in support of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and publicly criticized those Eastern Flank countries, or now Eastern Flank countries, for failing to take the opportunity, and this is a quote, to 'shut up.' So there's always been this sort of sense that the older member states, particularly in Western Europe, simply know better than the newer Eastern Flank members, including, totally absurdly, about Russia.
This has proved a rather difficult cultural bias for the Baltic states and other Eastern Flank countries to overcome. And one in which the star player in any Baltic success, as I've already said, really has been Russia for consistently defying European expectations and European excuses for Russian behavior.
So from 2022 onward, the older Western European member states have finally, and I do think it's finally, begun learning a bit of humility, which opens up more space and willingness to listen to others. The U.S. pattern in all this has been notably different pretty consistently for most of the past 25 years. New administrations entered the White House seeking cooperation with Russia. Bush, after 9/11, when he looked into Putin's eyes and saw his soul, famously. Obama, when he sought to reset relations with Russia. Trump, with his near total subservience to Russia. Yet almost as consistently, the outgoing administration had become totally disillusioned about Russia as a result of outrageous Russian behavior. Bush after the invasion of Georgia, Obama after the invasion of Crimea and Donbass. Only Trump didn't experience that. And with the Biden administration, which came in in 2020, it at least entered office finally already wary of Russia. So the U.S. track record is actually quite different from the Western European track record. It's much more variable, much more uneven, but at key moments, it's been much more in favor of Russia, of Baltic defense, and of supporting the Baltic states.
IE: Yeah. So NATO leaders are going to gather in D.C. in July, for the summit that marks the 75th anniversary of the alliance. But we're also coming up on the American elections in November. So I wonder how you see the US elections impacting NATO, especially as we are looking again at a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and what you might see for the future of NATO in the coming years — particularly for the Baltics, but more generally too.
LM: This is, of course, the big question, and the correct answer is, it's impossible to say. It'll be hard enough to imagine, even when we know who the next president will be, let alone now. But we can talk about what we know now, and try to think about the future.
Because both Trump and Biden do have presidential track records now. And Trump's isn't as bad as everyone imagined beforehand, but that's largely because policy is slow to change. And throughout much of his administration, the Department of Defense was following plans already laid down and confirmed and set in motion by the previous Obama administration. Moreover, Trump actually had intelligent adults in the room with him for much of his administration, and the Senate in particular remained very pro-NATO. Both of which limited the negative consequences.
In the unfortunate event of a Trump victory in November, the basic policy reality that change is hard to achieve will remain in force. But he is unlikely to have in the room nearly the same number or quality of intelligent adults as before. The Republican contingent in the Senate may also become less pro-NATO as well, with Mitch McConnell passing the torch — his pro-NATO attitudes being one of his very few virtues.
On the other hand, you know, we can, and if you like, should, hope for a Biden victory. Then hopefully there won't be much change, at least for another four years. So just a continued trajectory for strengthening Baltic defense further. Or we might even plausibly expect, or hope for, at least, change for the better, as the Republican Party, which has been held hostage by Trump over the past half year or so in particular, will lose the need to try to deny Democrats political victories in the lead up to the national election, which is something they're doing now.
But besides the variable of the U.S., there is still Europe, and it remains a variable as well. One increasingly highlighted as Trump has had contact with Orbán recently.
IE: Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary.
LM: Yes, who is also quite pro-Russian. But so in Europe too, a certain degree of pro-Russian feeling is spreading. Most recently With Robert Fico, a Slovakian populist, being elected prime minister in Slovakia. Moreover, many European countries still are not hitting the 2 percent of GDP mark agreed upon nearly a decade ago now, in September, 2014. And even if they were, the money spending practices of certain number of states is quite suspect. Now, regardless of the amount of money, the German defense budget is in an absolute state and one which more money on its own simply will not change at this moment. You need to change the processes, the bureaucracy, and the practices first before more money will make much of a difference. We have seen, however, a recent headline from Trump saying that if European NATO members were to pay more then, he'd be more amenable to staying in NATO.
So he's shown some degree of flexibility, whether that's just for show or real is a different question. But nonetheless, Trump is trying to soften some bits of his sort of anti-NATO rhetoric. And even as the war continues in Ukraine and even assuming NATO countries individually and in cooperation are able to return to supporting Ukraine effectively, the next years will see NATO as an alliance, or its member states as individuals, addressing a wide variety of problems to both improve the quality and the quantity of the defense which can be provided — to the Baltic states, to Europe in general. Every Western military is probably feeling a certain sense of crisis in the face of what they see going on in Ukraine right now. And, going, sort of going back to the professional literature which I read on military strategy and all that, there have been some expressed doubts as to whether or not the U.S. could actually wage war. A major war going back to well before the Russian invasion in 2022 and what we see going on now and the difficulty of winning on the battlefield and so on and so forth. There's a lot of thinking going on, so a lot of this doesn't have much to do necessarily with political leadership, but it's just how militaries are trying to reimagine how they might want to, or perhaps might need to do things on and off the battlefield in order to continue being effective organizations for national defense. So the presidential race is a big story, but there's plenty of other stories, as well.
IE: Yeah. So reminding us there's plenty going on beneath the surface beyond political leadership changes. Well, Dr. Milevski, I want to thank you so much for being with us on Baltic Ways, for giving us your insights as we are approaching these significant milestones, this significant year for NATO, for the Baltics in NATO. And we really appreciate your commentary.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
LM: Thank you for having me.
IE: Thank you for tuning in to Baltic ways. A podcast from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. A note that the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI. I'm your host Indra Ekmanis.
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Dr. Janet Laidla shares her work on charting the roles and contributions of women at the University of Tartu from the early days of the Estonian Republic, and what it means today.
Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.
Read more:
* Estonia's first female doctorates were educators and physicians | News | ERR
* Eesti esimestest naisdoktoritest said eeskätt arstid ja õpetajad | Ajalugu | ERR
* Laidla, Janet; Anepaio, Lembi (2024). Esimesed doktorikraadiga naised tänapäeva Eesti aladelt [The First Female PhDs from the Present-day Estonian Area]. Õpetatud Eesti Seltsi aastaraamat / Annales Litterarum Societatis Esthonicae, 28−67. https://oes.ut.ee/publikatsioonid/
Transcript
Indra Ekmanis: Welcome to Baltic Ways, a podcast bringing you interviews and insights from the world of Baltic studies. I'm your host, Dr. Indra Ekmanis. Today, we listen to a conversation with Dr. Janet Laidla, lecturer in Estonian history at the University of Tartu. Dr. Laidla's recent research has focused on the history of women at the university and the essential roles they have played in both academic and non academic work. Stay tuned.
Thank you so much for joining us on Baltic Ways. Perhaps you can start with a bit about your background and how you came to be involved in Baltic studies.
Janet Laidla: Thank you so much for inviting me. It's a bit of a long story. So bear with me, because I have a bit of an unconventional academic career path. It started out conventional enough. So I did my BA and MA in history at the University of Tartu in Estonia, and then right after went straight to PhD also in history, also at the University of Tartu.
But in my fourth year of PhD, in early modern chronicles, I got a bit stuck. So instead of graduating, I went out to look for a job. And eventually I was hired by the University of Tartu Museum. And there I worked in different positions and for several years I was the head of the Old Observatory. I enjoyed that a lot.
But instead of history I was promoting astronomy for 10 years, and my research was more concentrated on the history of science [rather] than the history of 17th century chronicles. I still had a small position at the Institute of History and Archaeology as lecturer, and although I always planned to defend my PhD eventually, I got around to it when the university changed the rules and said you now have to have a PhD to be a lecturer.
But as I said, my focus had already changed, so after graduating I was moving slowly at first towards the 20th century. And, because I had been working on the early modern period, I now also had to seek out new networks. And I had been aware, through a lot of my colleagues, of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies. But, well, a few years ago, I decided now it's time because I was working in similar topics that my colleagues who were members were now working on.
IE: Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that transition from studying early modern historiography, and then you went into history of astronomy and sciences, and now your focus is on studying women in academia. Perhaps you can trace that path for us a little bit.
JL: Well, the University Museum is not only about history of science, it was also about the history of university, and I had been interested in the history of university, especially women students for a while, specifically the period of the 1920s and the '30s, the interwar period.
And for the university centenary in 2019, where we celebrated the hundred years of Estonian-language university, we were preparing an exhibition at the National Archives on academic women. And we were so surprised that there was so little research on that subject. So basically, this is how I ended up with the topic that I'm really passionate about. However, my first research paper I did in my first year of university was actually on the position of women in Greek society. So in a way I was going back to the roots.
IE: A full circle sort of a journey then. Well, can you tell us a little bit about your current work, looking at women, studying and working at the University of Tartu? You mentioned that you started looking at the interwar period. Maybe you can tell us a bit about the role of the university during those first years of the Estonian Republic and how it developed and how it came to admit women also into different fields of study.
JL: The University of Tartu has a long and illustrious history going back, well, almost 400 years. So it already played a role in the national awakening in the 19th century of Estonian and also Latvian and many other nations of the Russian Empire. And of course it was important for the young republic. Its official name was the University of Tartu of the Republic of Estonia. So the state was literally in the name. Also, there was the political decision, to change the language of instruction to Estonian that we celebrated. So Estonian at the time was not a language of scholarly use. The secondary education had mostly been in German or Russian.
And so the university was tasked, alongside other organizations, to create the vocabulary needed for research. And the university also concentrated on Estonian culture, Estonian history, literature, but also Estonian geography and nature, natural resources, instead of the whole Russian Empire, or the world.
It was not as provincial as it sounds, of course, there were still world renowned scholars like Ernst and Armin Öpik, Ludvig Puusepp, Johann Villip, Walter Andersson, and others. But when we talk about women — women had been admitted as auditors since 1905 and full students since 1915, which is much later than in the US or the UK, for example.
But in the Russian empire, and also, in fact, Germany, the struggle for female higher education had been going on over the 19th century. Many women also from Estonia went to Switzerland and there were the higher courses in Tartu, but also in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and some of them are kind of like women's colleges. But this is like a topic that I plan to have a closer look at in the future.
So the university in 1919 did not reverse the decision to admit women — it was already admitting women, it had been admitting women for, for some years already. And I think it would have been an unpopular decision if they had decided to no longer admit women, but I mean, not everybody was in favor as well. It was like not 100 percent that all the male academics were like, “Yes, let all those women come in.”
IE: Maybe you can share a little bit about how the career paths of women in these academic positions at University of Tartu evolved over time — some of the trends that you saw.
JL: So, even before you had some women working as assistants in the university clinics, or assistant assistants at the astronomical observatory, Maria Orlova, for example. But, in 1919, they started with a temporary lecturer of English. She was called Jenny Leidig, and she had been appointed already in 1905 [edit: 1906]. But then the state said, the government said, “No, no women in academia, in the staff positions, I mean, we don't even have them as students, so what were you thinking?”
So in 1919, you had Jenny Leidig. You had some assistants in the clinics, and there was this young woman, Lidia Poska-Teiss, who also applied to become an assistant in — first she was working at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, but then sort of moved into medicine. And, over the period of the 1920s and the '30s, you could say that the number of and the percentage of female staff grew steadily.
By 1938, it was around 16 percent of the whole staff. That includes all of the clerical, the secretary positions and the libraries and so on. But we can say that perhaps around 13 percent of the staff were doing at least some research and teaching. And over time, some women rose from junior to senior assistants.
The first woman to be invited to become a professor was in 1939. She was, however, not appointed, again by the state. For different reasons, gender had probably less to do with it. So Alma Tomingas basically became the first auxiliary professor in 1940. And she was a pharmacologist.
IE: In your work, you also speak a little bit about the challenges facing women in their career progression. And those challenges — one being dealing with gender and patriarchal society, but also other social and economic and political factors. Can you tell us a little bit about those and their impact on women at the University of Tartu?
JL: Basically, it was as complicated as it is now, in a sense. A fair part of the society still saw women's place at home. Single women, and also men in Estonia, in the marriageable age were frowned upon.
IE: In terms of coming into the university?
JL: Well, sort of basically coming to university because either you were there to find a husband or you were there to sit in a cafe and, you know, waste your life.
And also the fear that if you had a higher education, you would not marry because that myth stayed around for quite a bit of time. However, there were still many working mothers — also at the university. So economically, it made sense in many cases that both of the parents worked, except right after the Great Depression, where, especially in civil service, only one of the spouses was supposed to work.
It could be the woman, but of course more often it was the man. So, and also the university — all this apparent progress aside, the steady rise of women and staff numbers — there is no question of the fact that the university and the state saw research as mainly as a male profession, because the graduate research scholarships that are listed in the staff lists were given almost exclusively to men.
Vera Poska-Grünthal, she was a specialist in social law, is a notable exception. This of course, led women to search for alternative opportunities, for example, through the International Council [edit: Federation] of University Women. Hilda Taba, who worked in the US, is a very good example. But this also needs a little bit of a deeper investigation.
A lot of women were working in temporary, low paying positions at the university. If you see that there's a job opportunity in, say, high school, or you can become a barrister, or open your own practice in medicine, work for a hospital, you figure that this will perhaps give me a higher salary. But definitely it might give you more financial security. The Baltic German women went to have careers in Germany. So there were a lot of issues at play here. So it was quite complicated. And of course there were stay at home moms and wives, it's just that I'm interested in professional women.
IE: Of course. Can you speak a little bit more about these sorts of non-academic roles that women held and how they played into the overall culture at the university?
JL: Yeah, interestingly, women had worked for the university long before they were admitted as students. From the first part of the 19th century, you had the midwives working for the university. From the second part, you had the housekeepers at clinics, you had the first secretaries. And the beginning of the 20th century, as I mentioned, the assistants at the Astronomical Observatory and the clinics. In the 1920s and '30s, there were also a lot of women working as secretaries in the offices, also at different libraries and with collections.
And some of these women working especially in the collections might have also pursued research and they also could have done some teaching. I think the archaeologist Marta Schmiedehelm is a good example of this. So in my opinion, the line between academic and non-academic is blurred. And this is why I don't want to dismiss the non-academic positions from my research as many other scholars have done.
IE: Yeah, absolutely. The work and the history of women at the university extending far beyond what we think of as formal academic roles. That's an important point to make. I wonder if you can tell us about the overall situation, and some of the key takeaways that you're finding in your research or areas perhaps that you want to continue to explore.
JL: Well, some of the things that I have found from study of the University of Tartu during the interwar period, when I sort of engage them with the previous research on the subjects done in the US, the UK and Germany — then, in some places, the women were engaged in the so called feminine fields, such as home economics, for example. But in Tartu there were no clearly defined feminine fields because they did not have the home economics department for starts. But there are definitely non-female fields. So the faculties of theology, agriculture, and law were dominantly, if not exclusively, male fields. So women were more numerous in the faculties of medicine, veterinary medicine, mathematics and natural sciences.
But it's sort of interesting because I think that the factor here is also the hierarchy, like how many levels of positions you have. For example, in humanities, you have lecturers, docents and professors. So in humanities, women only have the lower positions, at least until 1939. But in these other areas where you have the temporary assistants and junior assistants, senior assistant, docent, if you have more layers, then you actually can see women sort of starting from the bottom and going up.
Of course, men also start from the bottom and go up and sometimes they linger in the lower positions and sometimes they are similarly demoted or leave the university. So I think that I need to do some more data analysis to really understand how the sort of the restructuring or the structure or the hierarchy of the position works for women at the time and perhaps how it works for women now.
Also, the preliminary survey of the social status also suggests a more varied social background for the academic women in Estonia, in comparison to some other Western European countries. several are indeed from lower and upper middle class, but there are also a fair number of working class women and farmer's daughters.
Now, farmer's daughters, there is a range, so they could be quite wealthy in Estonia, or relatively poor. So there's other factors as well. And, in many places, marriage ended the academic career. So academic women were single, but there's a significant number of married couples working at the university, such as Elfriede and Vilhelm Ridala, Elisa Käer-Kingisepp and Georg Kingisepp, Gerhard and Natalia Rägö, Salme and Ilmar Vooremaa, and so on. Many others were also married, just not to fellow academics, including Lidia Poska-Teiss, that I mentioned earlier. And of course there are fathers and daughters. So we get to mothers and daughters only in the 1940s.
That said, there are several women students who remember being told that if they are serious about their research, they should not marry. One by Professor Gustav Suits, whose wife Aino worked at the university as a lecturer for over 15 years.
IE: Oh, a bit ironic then!
JL: Yeah, sort of, I know that this discussion took place before Aino took up the position of lecturer, so maybe he changed his mind when he, because Aino was also a mother, she was a working mother, they had children and so she had to somehow cope with everything.
IE: It's interesting that you talk about this kind of range of economic backgrounds with the women who entered into these roles. Do you have any inclination as to why there is that type of access, that range?
Janet Laidla: So I think it has something to do with Estonia, being the young republic, that sort of, sort of declared itself classless or where class wasn't as prominent. Also for many of these women, the secondary education, and also the university education was a way of social mobility. And they were out there to get a job, because the university education was costly, and they thought that it would be an easier way to work for the university while studying at the university. So they sometimes weren't motivated so much by the sort of idea of an academic career, they didn't see it as entering academia, as perhaps we sometimes do now that you have this career path ahead of you. It was just a job as any other. But this was a preliminary study and I would need to go further in order to make any kind of more profound arguments based on this. But it was interesting to see. But it was also expected, thinking about Estonian history, and what the Estonian state declared in the beginning it was about to do. I think that was one of the things that perhaps makes the Estonian state and probably some other similar case studies stand out on the background of the Western European situation.
IE: I wonder what you think of all this work that you're doing — the study of the interwar period — how do you think it translates into today? How can it impact the way that we are thinking about women in academia now? I'm thinking a little bit about a study that I recently read about the United States, where there are fears of a “demographic crisis” regarding too many women in comparatively, in academia. The argument was that there's not necessarily a balance anymore. And I wonder what it's like in Estonia. And at the same time, keeping in the back of our mind that there are plenty of areas where we are not seeing parity or equity. So, curious about your thoughts on that.
JL: Well, it's also a complex issue. Yes, I actually heard that argument recently. When we had the women in science days, one of the discussants was saying that soon we will be talking about the lack of men in university, so they will become a minority. Not yet in Estonia.
Of course, things have changed where in 1940, we had one professor. And now we have around 30 percent of professors at the University of Tartu are women. So we're getting closer to balance. Thinking about recent research, Michelle Ryan wrote a paper in Nature in 2022 saying that one of the misconceptions we have is that we overestimate the progress.
So perhaps, perhaps it was based on statistics, perhaps it was another overestimation of the representation of women. And I'm thinking perhaps partly we underestimate the number of women working at the university in the past. So we overestimate now because we think that there has been this huge progress.
And then you might say, and that, yes, that's the numbers, but their positions and their contributions in comparison today were insignificant. But nowadays we understand research much more as teamwork, as a collaborative effort. So perhaps, the women of the past their contributions were not as insignificant. I mean, the records did not file themselves, the notes and manuscripts did not type themselves at the time. And we also know these later controversies concerning, for example, Rosalind Franklin or Jocelyn Bell Burnell. And I'm not saying that we'll find something like that here in Tartu as well, but still.
Coming back to the overestimation or the fact that women are becoming dominant, that there's a fear that women might start to dominate academia some — well, it then tells you something about academia. Because the IT sector used to be a female area in the beginning, because the computers and it all started from the universities. It started from Harvard University where the computations and also the glass plates the astrographs were making were analyzed by a group of women, called the Pickering Harem. And also Tartu had its own sets of women computers and they were called computers.
It's the whole “Hidden Figures” story at NASA and so on. So in the beginning, these sort of computer programs and computing, well, not in the beginning, but at some point this was women's work. And then it started to pay something. It started to be prominent. It started to be, you know, the salaries got higher. And then for some reason it became a dominantly male field. And now we're looking to include women in STEM, but also IT. So maybe we should do some soul searching and see if the working positions in academia are then not highly paid or prestigious enough that men are no longer interested.
So it's not about women taking over. What I see when I look at professional women is that they are often stuck into low prestige, low paying jobs. So if, you know, if they're overflowing the academia, it says something about academia in the future. But well, at least in Tartu, we're a fair bit away from that.
And it's also sort of about numbers. It's another thing that Michelle Ryan said that it's not the percentage of staff, you have to look at the positions. And I mean, are the sort of the heads of, you know, these Ivy League universities and colleges, the top positions, are they being taken over massively by women? Or is it just that you have women in administrative positions, the low paying the teaching positions. Is the overall percentage more than 50 or are you having women in the higher positions?
IE: Yeah, absolutely. And you speak really well to that idea of those hierarchies and also the unrecognized labor that really does support broader academic achievement. Filing. Typing. Being a sounding board. It is important and significant to recognize that labor as well.
Perhaps you can tell, tell us a little bit more about the future of your work.
JL: The Tartu example is very interesting and also there is a lot of material because the University of Tartu collected masses of information on its staff and students — so, much more than many other institutions around the world, so you can do different things with the material. But I would also like to do some comparative history. For example, Zane Rosīte is doing similar studies, for her Ph.D. at the University of Latvia. I am looking to compare the Tartu case with Latvia because they are so close. But I'm also looking to compare my Tartu case with the universities in Finland, New Zealand, and Australia. And now you might be wondering why these countries.
Well, the obvious factor, of course, is the early vote for women. But also the size of population, the number of universities, the empire factor is also there, and in a way, all four countries trying somehow to redefine themselves before the Second World War. Two of them becoming independent, and two of them sort of becoming definitely more autonomous within the empire. So I think it would be interesting to compare these. I don't think many people would agree Estonia and Finland as being a frontier in the 20th century, but somehow sort of these frontier, co-educational institutions in these four countries to see what else comes out from this comparison.
IE: We will certainly look forward to seeing the results of that future work from you as well. You know, this has been such a fascinating discussion. And I think it's such an interesting and significant topic. It's really necessary to understand our histories, the histories of our institutions, the role of women throughout the course of those institutions, which has so often been undervalued or understudied at the very least. And this is making a significant contribution to that work. So I appreciate the discussion very much — especially in this time where we're seeing slow and incremental, but still important progress. I often think of the Baltics as one of those key regions that advances the visibility of women in leadership positions — thinking very much about those strong women Kaja Kallas, Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, Dalia Gribauskaite — so it's interesting to have this perspective as well.
Janet: Yes, because sort of we assume that the position of women, especially in the 20th century, has been linear, sort of progressive, but it hasn't actually. Also in academia, it hasn't. And there is a PhD thesis on the University of Washington in the US, for example, where she starts out in the 19th century and ends in, I think, 1970s. And she so shows how it has been up and down. It hasn't been this linear progress that I'm showing and, and here the fact that it's linear is really interesting.
But of course in Estonia, there's a different kind of break in the 1940s. And this apparent understanding that in the Soviet Union, the gender question had been solved. And, I don't know if I'll really go into the Soviet period as well, but, well. It isn't as easy as that, definitely. So even if we are making progress at the moment, I think, especially in the US, you're feeling that when women's rights in general are in question. And then it's definitely sort of if you have reached some level, it's not, “Yes, we can also only go forward from here.” No, you can actually go back.
I think it's something that needs to be kept in minds — every victory we have won is not certain.
IE: It is certainly not a guarantee for that progress to be guaranteed. That's such an important point. Well, again, I am so thankful for the opportunity to be in discussion with you. Thank you so much, Dr. Laidla for joining us on the podcast. We certainly look forward to your future work
JL: Thank you for having me. Thank you so much.
IE:Thank you for tuning in to Baltic Ways, a podcast from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. A note that the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.
I'm your host, Indra Ekmanis. Subscribe to our newsletters at AABS dash Baltic studies dot org and FPRI dot org slash baltic dash initiative for more from the world of Baltic studies. Thanks for listening and see you next time.
This transcript has been slightly edited for clarity.
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Baltic Ways is brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
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Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.
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More information about The Politics of Uncertainty: The United States, the Baltic Question, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union
Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.
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Baltic Ways is brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.
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Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.
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Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.
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How have things changed politically and socially for Russian speakers in Latvia since the war in Ukraine — and over the last few decades? Dr. Martiņš Kaprāns, senior researcher at University of Latvia's Institute of Philosophy and Sociology and recent recipient of the AABS Saltups Fellowship, shares his perspectives on current events and changes in Russian-speaker identity formation.
Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.
1) Kaprāns, M., Mieriņa, I. 2020. “Minority reconsidered: Towards a typology of Latvia’s Russophone identity.” Cheskin, A., A. Kachuyevski (Eds.) The Russian-speaking Populations in the Post-Soviet Space: Language, Politics and Identity. New York: Routledge.2) Kaprāns, M. (29.11.2022.) “Toppling Monuments: How Russia's War against Ukraine has Changed Latvia’s Memory Politics.” Cultures of History Forum.
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Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.
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Dr. Volodymyr Dubovyk is a professor of international relations at Odessa I. Mechnikov National University and an expert in U.S.-Ukraine relations, Black Sea regional security, and Ukrainian foreign policy. He speaks about the view from Ukraine, how his work has shifted during the war, and takeaways for Ukraine from the Baltic states.
This interview was recorded on June 7, 2022.
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As Russia's war in Ukraine continues, Europe faces an energy trilemma: Combining competitiveness, security and climate targets. Dr. Andrei Belyi joins the podcast as an expert consultant on European and Russian energy policy.
Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.
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Al-Chalabi, F. (2010). Oil policies, oil myths : Analysis and memoir of an OPEC 'insider'. London: I.B. Tauris.
Belyi, A. (2015). Transnational Gas Markets and Euro-Russian Energy Relations (International political economy series). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
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Resources mentioned:
www.ukraine-latvia.com
https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/
Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.
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Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.
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Read more:
Uses of ‘the East’ in international studies: Provincialising IR from Central and Eastern Europe, Journal of International Relations and Development
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Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.
Read more: Saulius Sužiedėlis (2018) The International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania: successes, challenges, perspectives, Journal of Baltic Studies, 49:1, 103-116, DOI: 10.1080/01629778.2014.937906
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Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.
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Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.
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