Una Bergmane, Research Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki, discusses Baltic states' independence from the Soviet Union; democratization versus empire; viewing Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine through the echoes of Soviet history; the possiblity of a military clash between Russia and the Baltic countries; and the implications of performative insanity in Russian domestic rhetoric.

“The question of Gorbachev’s relations with the Baltic republics [during the Perestroika years] is not just a story about the relations between the centre and periphery it is also a story about a deep tension at the heart of the Perestroika project, the tension between democratisation and the preservation of empire.”

During the Soviet period "Russian-speakers who arrived in Estonia and Latvia from other Soviet republics were not encouraged by the Soviet state to learn the local languages or to integrate themselves in Latvian or Estonian societies. They were encouraged to claim the privileges afforded to Russian speakers in the Soviet Union... This created the sense in the Baltic countries that... this imperial bond with Moscow has to be cut... as an existential imperative... There was this urge to reaffirm other identities other than the Soviet identity."

When it comes to Ukraine "everybody in the Baltic countries understands that it could have been us... if something had happened a little bit differently in the 1990s... we would face the same choice as the Ukrainians do now... whether to live in the Russian zone of influence... which is a life in the zone of influence of Putin's regime... or face a war of agression."

Una Bergmane: More about The Politics of Uncertainty: The US, the Baltic States and the Collapse of the Soviet Union

Una Bergmane on Fading Russian Influence in the Baltic States

Una Bergmane on International Reactions to the Soviet Use of Force in the Baltic Republics in 1991

Una Bergmane on twitter: @unabergmane

Jessica Genauer on twitter: @jessicagenauer

More about the host: Jessica Genauer