The post-Soviet societies in the Baltic nations were very different from those of the 1920s. In 1989 only 12 or 13 percent of the workforce in the three republics was engaged in agriculture, 32 to 41 percent in industry. The metalworking industries obviously depended on Soviet supplies and markets, while food and timber enterprises used local resources. Institutions of the 1930s could not be revived easily. The countries faced difficult decisions on returning socialized property to former owners and on privatizing enterprises established in Soviet times. Behind these general questions lay even more difficult ones concerning guilt, atonement, and punishment of individuals and groups for collaboration with the Soviet authorities. In any given dispute, all of these factors interlocked in varying ways, both rational and emotional.

The question of minorities arose in new dimensions. Russians, who had been part of the majority in the large Soviet state, now resented being a minority in a much smaller state. In Lithuania, where the eponymous nationality constituted 80 percent of the 3.6 million inhabitants, the government accepted the so-called ''zero-option,'' granting citizenship to any persons living in Lithuania on a given date. Latvians, only 52 percent of the 2.5 million inhabitants in their state, and Estonians, 60 percent of the 1.5 million inhabitants of their country, adopted more restrictive laws, thereby evoking strong protests from Moscow. That the three Baltic republics continued to enjoy higher living standards than Russia mitigated the complications of this continuing problem.

Another aspect of citizenship laws concerned the rights of emigres to return to their homelands. A number of those who had settled in the West wanted to return and to participate in public life. Some nationals who had not previously returned from Siberian exile came back. Many emigre institutions and publications moved to the homelands. At the same time it became obvious that the various branches of the national culture had grown apart, carrying differing and even conflicting intellectual baggage with them. In addition, to limit the potential problems posed by their Russian inhabitants, the states hesitated to make every emigre a citizen automatically, and they forbade their citizens from holding citizenship in another state.

The social history of the Baltic nations has been heavily dependent on the kaleidoscope of its political history. The original inhabitants of the region fell prey to the ambitions of neighbors. In the first phase, the upper classes of the native peoples assimilated into the predominant foreign cultures, German in the north and Polish in the south. The three Baltic nations began to emerge as political factors in the region during the Russian Empire. They enjoyed a brief period of independence between the two world wars, when they developed their national cultures with the support of their administrations. The half-century of Soviet rule, extending from the 1940s to the 1990s, threatened their continued existence as ethnic-territorial units. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, they received the opportunity to start again, this time with considerably stronger foundations than they had commanded in the 1920s. . . .

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