Post Soviet Baltic reading: "With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows" by Sandra Kalniete

I have professional dealings with Sandra Kalniete, though she does not (yet) know me personally. She is a Latvian Member of the European Parliament, and is a familiar name to most in the Parliament because of the constant stream of emails emanating from her office publicising exhibitions, films and other events focusing on Latvian history, usually its bleaker aspects. In my case, things are a little more specific, as I was one of a number of addressees of a letter from a group of MEPs, but coordinated by Mrs Kalniete, complaining that the small history section of the Parliament's visitor centre, the Parlamentarium, for which I am responsible, places almost exclusive emphasis on Nazi atrocities in World War II, with scant mention of those committed by the Stalinist regime of the Soviet Union. (As so often, the holocaust and Auschwitz are cited as the lowest point of human history from which Europe had to recover in the post-war period.)

This complaint is indeed is a relatively common one of Members from Central and Eastern Europe, and in particular from the Baltic States, against what they see as a cultural and historical bias towards a Western European narrative of history requiring correction, or at least balance.


I have recently come to understand this attitude better than I did after a recent visit to Tallinn, Estonia, during which I went to see the "Museum of the Occupations" (note the plural). This museum, which has a slightly amateurish, rather thrown-together, but nonetheless (indeed consequently) very heartfelt feel to it, commemorates the suffering of the Estonian people under three successive periods of occupation: first Soviet (1939-41), then Nazi (1941-1944), then again Soviet (1944-1989). Visiting the museum though, one is left under few illusions as to where most of the historical anger is directed, as the vast majority of the space is given over to the Soviet occupations, which, admittedly, accounted for far longer periods.

It is undoubtedly true that many Western Europeans would hesitate to put the two oppressors on the same level. The Nazi regime, we have always learnt, was uniquely evil, its crimes surpassing qualitatively those of any other regime. This attitude, sustained also by a lingering Western tradition from the 60s and 70s of (misguided, but real) left-wing sympathy for Soviet communism, seems to many in the East to be unduly lenient towards the Soviet system, felt there to be every bit as brutal and oppressive as that of the Nazis, even though based on different ideological pretexts. For many in Eastern Europe, it is high time westerners opened their eyes to the historical realities.

I was talking about all of this recently to a Latvian friend, looking for her take on the whole thing as a young Latvian who had known life in the Soviet Union as a teenager, but who had not experienced the particular harshness of the Stalinist period. It was in the course of this conversation that she said she would provide me with some reading matter on the subject, which would help me understand better where memory-activists such as Sandra Kalniete were coming from. Sure enough, one day, as it happened when I returned from that trip to Tallinn, I found on my desk With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows.

Kalniete was herself born in Siberia, her parents both being deportees. The book is principally an account of the lives of her own family, in particular her parents and grandparents, who were victims for the Stalinist policy of mass deportation from Latvia of anyone the regime labelled as a threat, undesirable or associated somehow with a person considered undesirable. (Similar policies were also implemented in the other Baltic states.) The tale is a tragic one of terrible deprivation, of civilised and innocent people brutally and arbitrarily removed to almost pre-historic living conditions in the Siberian Gulag. Many did not survive, while many of the survivors would have counted it as a mixed blessing still to be alive. The tale, related from a highly personal, but well-grounded perspective, is moving and poignant, and indeed goes a long way to correct any illusions - in fact more ignorance than illusion - about the fate of the Baltic peoples under Soviet occupation. Certainly this reader knows much more about the period than he had hitherto suspected.

Though not a work of scholarly history (emotions are to the fore and some idealisation of Latvia and Latvians is probably understandable), this book is nonetheless at pains to ensure it gets its facts straight, and backs them up with abundant sources and citations. This is a genuine and valuable testimony of a brutal period of history which is, yes, misunderstood or often just ignored in the West. I, for one, am grateful to my Latvian friend for putting this book in my hands.

And, yes, I do now have a considerably better idea of why Sandra Kalniete sends out all those emails.

Recommendation? If you're interested in this period of history and/or if you're curious about the Baltic states and their mindset, this book is definitely worth a read.

PS. For another book tackling the same period in Estonia in fictional form, try Purge by Sofi Oksanen.