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THE PALGRAVE MACMILLAN SERIES IN
INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL COMMUNICATION
SERIES EDITOR: ALISTER MISKIMMON
Information Wars in
the Baltic States
Russia’s Long Shadow
Edited by
Janis Chakars · Indra Ekmanis
The Palgrave Macmillan Series in International
Political Communication
Series Editor
Alister Miskimmon
History, Anthropology, Philosophy & Politics
Queen’s University Belfast
Belfast, UK
From democratization to terrorism, economic development to conflict
resolution, global political dynamics are affected by the increasing
pervasiveness and influence of communication media. This series examines
the participants and their tools, their strategies and their impact.
This series is indexed in Scopus.
Janis Chakars • Indra Ekmanis
Editors
Information Wars
in the Baltic States
Russia’s Long Shadow
Editors
Janis Chakars Indra Ekmanis
Neumann University Foreign Policy Research Institute
Aston, PA, USA Philadelphia, PA, USA
ISSN 2945-6118 ISSN 2945-6126 (electronic)

The Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political Communication
ISBN 978-3-030-99986-5 ISBN 978-3-030-99987-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99987-2
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Praise for Information Wars in the
Baltic States
“Russia’s malign influence in Europe isn’t only visible in the military forces it has
repeatedly sent across its neighbors borders. It is also evident in the information
arena. This book shows how Russia has subverted media outlets, spreads disinfor-
mation, and promotes the Kremlin’s geopolitical interests. This book is crucial for
understanding contemporary information warfare, the threat Russia poses, and
how the Baltic states are responding.”
—Chris Miller, Assistant Professor, The Fletcher School, Tufts University, USA
“This timely volume explores how information warfare in the Baltic states could be
a precursor to armed conflict. It shows how Russian disinformation targets differ-
ent Baltic media markets and tests the effectiveness that various organizations,
including the ‘elves’ of Debunk EU, state broadcasters in Russian, and the infor-
mation warfare experts at NATO have used to blunt its impact. Required reading
for understanding the information ‘battle space’ in Europe.”
—Mitchell A. Orenstein, Professor of Russian and East European
Studies, University of Pennsylvania, USA
“This book is an exceptionally timely collection of analyses from journalists, aca-

demics, military and media experts, all steeped in Russia’s asymmetric information
war. While focused on Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, Chakars and Ekmanis offer a
historical framework that helps us understand nearly a century of first Soviet, then
Russian activity manipulating information. The book also provides a valuable con-
text for the current strife in Ukraine, with an approach that reminds us that while
the stakes are as high as they’ve ever been with Russia and the Kremlin’s disinfor-
mation campaigns, what is happening now is nothing new. It’s just far more
sophisticated and complex. The experience of the Baltics shows us how sharply
those campaigns have evolved, and how really no country on earth is immune.”
—Marco Werman, journalist/host of public radio’s The World
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Janis Chakars and Indra Ekmanis
Part I The Weight of History 9
2 Echoes
of the Past: Media and History in the Baltic
Battlespace 11
3 Russian
Disinformation: The Forest Brothers, Baltic
Resistance, and NATO 35
Joseph M. Ellis
Part II The Weight of Ethnicity 53
4 Making
Sense of Public Media in Times of Geo-Political
Crisis: Latvian Public Media and their Ethno-Linguistic
Majority and Minority Audiences 55
Jaˉnis Juzefovičs
vii
viii Contents
5 Building
Bridges: Estonian- and Russian-Speaking TV
Audiences and the Value of Estonian Public Service
Broadcasting, 2010–2020 81
Andres Jõesaar
6 Building
or Banning? Russian-Language TV in Latvia 93
Solvita Denisa-Liepniece
Part III The Digital Challenges 121
7 Bots,
Trolls, Elves, and the Information War in Lithuania:
Theoretical Considerations and Practical Problems123
Asta Zelenkauskaite
8 Robotrolling
in the Baltic States141
Monika Hanley, Aki-Mauri Huhtinen, and Miika Sartonen
Part IV The Responses 167
9 Disinformation
Analysis and Citizen Activism in the
“Post-Truth” Era: The Case of DebunkEU.org169
Viktor Denisenko
10 The
Perils of Defense in an Information War: Media,
Minorities, and the Threat Next Door187
Sergei Kruk and Ilva Skulte
11 NATO’s
Response to Information Warfare Threats205
Monika Hanley
Part V The Complications 225
12 “Let
Them Flee to Sweden: There, Everyone Looks at
Them More Politely”: Gay Propaganda and LGBT Rights
in the Baltic States227
Clinton Glenn
Contents ix
13 The
Best of Enemies: Identity, Recursion, and the
Convergence of Kremlin and Estonian Strategic
Narratives in the Global Populist Discourse263
Noel Foster
Part VI Epilogue 295
14 Epilogue:
Baltic Journalists Respond to Disinformation297
Gunta Sloga
Index305
Notes on Contributors
Janis Chakars is Associate Professor of Communication and Digital

Media at Neumann University. His research on media and the Baltic states
has appeared in the International Journal of Communication, Journalism
History, American Journalism, the Central European Journal of
Communication, International Research in Children’s Literature and else-
where. He is a past vice-president of the Association for the Advancement
of Baltic Studies. He holds a PhD from Indiana University.
Solvita Denisa-Liepniece is an assistant professor at Vidzeme University
of Applied Sciences in Valmiera, Latvia. She has been a visiting scholar at
NYU, Yale University, and University of Antwerp. Denisa-Liepniece
served as a country expert for several international organizations focused
on media and audiences in the Baltic countries. She also worked as a pro-
fessional journalist for Latvian Public Broadcasting. Her research interests
are strategic political communication, intercultural communication, and
journalism. She completed her PhD at the University of Antwerp in 2013
with research on political communication in post-Soviet Belarus.
Viktor Denisenko is an associate professor at General Jonas Žemaitis
Military Academy of Lithuania. He defended his PhD dissertation “The
image of the Baltic States in Russian periodical press in context of geopo-
litical changes (1991–2009)” at Vilnius University in 2016, where he also
holds a faculty position. His research interests include propaganda, infor-
mation warfare, and strategic and political communication. Denisenko is
the author of the book Propagandos Apsupty (Surrounded by Propaganda,
2021, Vilnius University Press).
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Indra Ekmanis is a Baltic Sea fellow at the Foreign Policy Research

Institute and the editor of FPRI’s Baltic Initiative. She was previously a
research fellow at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute and a Fulbright
researcher in Latvia. Ekmanis covered migration, European issues, and US
domestic politics as an journalist for US public radio. Her academic work
focuses on social integration, minority rights, nationalism, civil society,
and democratic transition, with an area of specialization in the Baltic Sea
region and post-Soviet space. She holds a PhD in International Studies
from the University of Washington.
Joseph M. Ellis is Associate Professor of Political Science and chair in the
Department of History and Political Science at Wingate University. He
holds a PhD from Temple University. Ellis studies post-Soviet political
transitions, with a specialty in the Baltic states, in particular Estonia. From
2018 to 2020, he served as the vice-president for conferences for the
Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, where he is a special
advisor. He has presented and published his work both nationally and
internationally.
Noel Foster received his PhD in Politics from Princeton University in
2021 and is a postdoctoral fellow in Technology and International Security
at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation in Washington,
DC. His primary research interests lie in the intersection of grand strategy
and domestic politics, with a focus on asymmetric conflicts and the foreign
policy of revisionist states. In particular, he studies the mechanisms of
polarization behind revisionist states’ strategic use of influence operations
and disinformation using a mix of qualitative, experimental, and computa-
tional methods. His other recent work ranges from how Russian state-
sponsored news content polarizes voters in the Baltics to paralyze policy
decision-making in the target states to Russian and Chinese COVID-19
diplomacy.
Clinton Glenn is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at McGill
University, Montreal, Canada. His dissertation research examines the
material urban fabric of the three Baltic capitals through an exploration of
LGBT pride marches under the banner of Baltic Pride. His dissertation
research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada, the European Union Development Fund
through the Archimedes Foundation/Estonia, and the Education
Exchanges Support Foundation of Lithuania. His work has been featured
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
in esse: art + opinions; Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving

Image Studies; Lambda Nordica; Digital Icons: Studies in Russian,
Eurasian, and Central European New Media; and SQS: The Journal of
Finnish Queer Studies, and he has published a book chapter in the edited
volume LGBTQ+ Activism in Central and Eastern Europe: Resistance,
Representation and Identity (editors Radzhana Buyantueva and Maryna
Shevtsova).
Monika Hanley is a disinformation and media literacy researcher at the
Center for Media Literacy and was a Fulbright Scholar at the NATO
Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga, Latvia, from
2019 to 2020. She is pursuing a degree at the University of London in
Human Rights Law and has previously worked as a journalist in Latvia.
Aki-Mauri Huhtinen is a military professor in the Department of
Leadership and Military Pedagogy at the Finnish National Defence
University. His areas of expertise are military leadership, command and
control, the philosophy of science in military organizational research, and
the philosophy of war. He was the director of the Technology and Scientific
Development Branch of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of
Excellence in Riga, Latvia, through 2021.
Andres Jõesaar is Associate Professor of Media Policies at Tallinn
University. He also acts as the head of the media and communication
study area at Tallinn University’s Baltic Film, Media and Arts School. He
was one of the founding members of the private commercial television
channel Reklaamitelevisioon and the general director of the commercial
television channel TV3 Estonia. From 2000 to 2011, he was the director
for the online and mobile content services in the Estonian branch of the
international telecommunication company Tele2. Between 2000 and
2011 Jõesaar was the chairman of the Council of the Estonian Public
Broadcasting. His main research interest is media policy, media economy,
and audiences. Jõesaar has a PhD in Media and Communication from the
University of Tartu.
Jānis Juzefovičs is a senior researcher at Rı ̄ga Stradin ̧š University. His
research interests focus on the study of media audiences in the Baltics. He
holds a PhD in Media and Communication Studies from the University of
Westminster in 2014. Before joining the Rı ̄ga Stradin ̧š University, he has
worked on a University of Tartu research project examining civic identity
and transnational media practices of the Russian-speaking populations in
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Latvia and Estonia during times of geo-political uncertainty. He is the

author of the book Broadcasting and National Imagination in Post-
Communist Latvia: Defining the Nation, Defining Public Television (2017).
Sergei Kruk is Professor of Communication Studies at Rı ̄ga Stradin ̧š
University and author of dozens of publications on Baltic media and soci-
ety. His most recent book project was his edited volume Pluralism Anxiety.
Acting Socially in Latvia (2018). He holds a doctorate from the University
of Paris and degrees from the University of Oslo and University of Latvia.
He worked as a journalist for the Russian-language service of Latvian pub-
lic radio from 1988 to 1995 and wrote the book Radiožurnālistika (Radio
Journalism, 2005).
Miika Sartonen is a PhD student at the Finnish Defence University. He
has authored and co-authored articles on military influence.
Ilva Skulte holds a doctoral degree in the History of Language from the
University of Latvia. Since 2001, she has been working at the Department
of Communication at Rı ̄ga Stradin ̧š University. Prior to that she worked as
a journalist for the daily and weekly press in Latvia, including ten years at
Kultūras Forums, where she served as editor.
Gunta Sloga is an award-winning Latvian journalist and editor, who has
won wide recognition for reporting and investigations for the flagship
Latvian daily newspaper Diena and other media outlets. As a commissioning
editor for Latvian Public Television she oversaw the development of high-
quality factual entertainment, original drama, and other content, and helped
formulate the public broadcaster’s strategic direction. Sloga has been active
in journalism nonprofits aimed at strengthening quality journalism and led
the media program at the Soros Foundation Latvia, which supported new
media initiatives and professional dialogue. She has been a strong supporter
of the freedom of speech and independent media in Latvia. Sloga is the
executive director of Baltic Centre for Media Excellence, a regional resource
center for journalists and a hub for media literacy initiatives.
Asta Zelenkauskaite is Associate Professor of Communication at Drexel
University and author of the book Creating Chaos Online: Disinformation
and Subverted Post-Publics (forthcoming, University of Michigan Press).
She holds a PhD in Mass Communication from Indiana University,
Bloomington, with two minor specializations in information science and
linguistics. Her research focuses on the ways in which communication
occurs through computer network environments as well as mobile
telephony.
List of Tables
Table 4.1 How often do you use Latvian public media to learn about
international political affairs? 62
Table 4.2 How often do you use Russian state media to learn about
Table 4.3 How often do you use Western media to learn about
Table 4.4 Perceptions about the role of public media in times of
information warfare: Neutrality, objectivity 64
Table 4.5 Perceptions about the role of public media in times of
information warfare: Editorial autonomy 64
Table 4.6 Thinking about the conflict between Russia and the West,
which side are you on? 65
Table 4.7 While Latvian public media and Russian state media differ in
their coverage of international political affairs, there is no
difference in the way they operate: Both do propaganda 66
Table 4.8 When covering international political affairs, Latvian public
media are … (%) 67
Table 4.9 When covering international political affairs, Russian state
media are … (%) 68
Table 4.10 When covering international political affairs, Western media
are … (%) 75
Table 5.1 Trustworthiness of media platforms based on language
in 2019 86
Table 5.2 ERR’s net promoter score—importance of ERR for Estonian
state?—results88
Table 5.3 Net Promoter Score—how important is ERR for you
personally?—results89
xv
xvi List of Tables
Table 5.4 Change in percentage points of the evaluation given to the

activities of ERR 2019 versus 2014 90
Table 10.1 Two most important issues parliament and government
should solve to increase your feeling of security 197
Table 10.2 Trust in the news media, mean 199
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
At the start of 2019, about 60,000 followers in Latvia and Estonia—a

considerable number for such small countries—lost access to 22 Facebook
pages in a spate of shutdowns that shuttered more than 350 pages and
accounts worldwide. “We’re taking down these Pages and accounts based
on their behavior, not the content they post,” wrote Nathaniel Gleicher,
head of cybersecurity policy at the social media company (2019). Yet, the
content was part of an information war being waged by Russia in the
Baltic states and beyond. Of these accounts, many were linked to Rossiya
Segodnya, a Russian state-owned media company, and its online counter-
part, Sputnik, which operates websites across the region (Ekmanis, 2019).
A year later, Sputnik closed its offices in Estonia, victim to a wave of sanc-
tions enforcement in the Baltic states that led to the disruption of Russia-
connected media. Minister of Foreign Affairs Urmas Reinsalu said at the
time, “What I want to emphasize is that we have not taken measures
J. Chakars (*)
Neumann University, Aston, PA, USA
e-mail: chakarsj@neumann.edu
I. Ekmanis
Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia, PA, USA
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
J. Chakars, I. Ekmanis (eds.), Information Wars in the Baltic States,
The Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political
Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99987-2_1
2 J. CHAKARS AND I. EKMANIS
against the portal’s media content. They are financial sanctions aimed at
economic activity” (ERR, 2020).
The incidents highlight the particular challenge democracies face when
confronting internationally networked propaganda—balancing free
expression with national security. China has its Great Firewall, and other
authoritarian countries, including Russia, have taken lessons from it. In
2022, Cambodia, with a GDP less than any Baltic state, announced the
creation of a “National Internet Gateway” through which all traffic—for-
eign and domestic—must pass. Such measures are anathema to open soci-
eties, but state intervention is evident in bastions of freedom of speech
too. While Cambodia may have started the year proclaiming a new high-
tech censorship machine, Sweden kicked it off with the launch of its
Psychological Defence Agency. Its Operations Department is tasked with
identifying, analyzing, and responding to “the impact of undue informa-
tion influence and other misleading information directed at Sweden or
Swedish interests” (Swedish Psychological Defence Agency, 2022). It
continues:
An important part of the work is to produce situational analyses and reports

on actors and activities that may pose a threat to vulnerabilities in society—
and to propose relevant countermeasures. In collaboration with other rele-
vant agencies, the department develops methods and technologies for
identifying and responding to the impact of undue information influence.
These goals are not so far removed from those of the NATO Strategic
Communications Centre of Excellence, which was established in Latvia 7
years prior to Sweden’s initiative. Thus, developments on both sides of the
Baltic Sea show increasing attention to information as a security issue.
Facebook, now Meta, meanwhile continues to shut down inauthentic
accounts around the world, with no end in sight: 759 Facebook accounts
in September 2021, 896 in October, and 774 in November, with addi-
tional shutdowns on the company’s Instagram platform. More than 50
networks engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior were taken down
throughout 2021. In Meta’s end of year report, Gleicher wrote,
The global threats we tackle have significantly evolved since we first started
sharing our findings about Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior in 2017. In
addition, adversarial networks don’t strive to neatly fit our policies or only
violate one at a time. To account for this constantly shifting threat
1 INTRODUCTION 3
e nvironment, we build our defenses with the expectation that they will not
stop, but rather adapt and try new tactics (2021).
States cannot count on Meta, or other platforms, to solve their problems.

Indeed, these social media giants brought them many of the difficulties
they now face. Further, the current information war is not just about coor-
dinated inauthentic accounts, as significant as these may be. It is old media
as well as new. It is waged on television as much as on Twitter. It involves
international alliances, individual states, citizens, and, importantly in
Estonia and Latvia, residents without citizenship. Therefore, this volume
works to draw together many facets of the broader issue.
Information war is far from unique to the Baltic states or even Russia
and the Baltic states. The USSR once decried the foreign radio voices
invading its territory. Today, the United States bemoans Russia’s social
media assault. The Baltic states sit between the two, a partner to the for-
mer and divorced from the latter, but still under its long shadow and
looming presence. This position makes these societies extra worthy of our
attention, and Russia’s increasingly assertive foreign policy puts the Baltic
states at the center of world drama. As members of NATO and the EU,
and as former Soviet republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are uniquely
in the way of Russian ambition—but perhaps also a bridge as well as a
barrier.
In its 2016 Foreign Policy Concept, a document laying out its vision of
and for the world vis-à-vis itself, the Russian Federation saw international
conflict as having a “civilizational dimension in the form of dueling val-
ues.” Indeed, it finds adherents to those values in the Baltic states. It
pledges defense of its diaspora—an identity both self-selected and
imposed—and finds this population in its sovereign neighbors as well.
Russia also forecasts greater “regional conflicts and escalating crises”
(Russian Federation, 2016). It blames the expansion of NATO for insta-
bility in its defined neighborhood.
Russia’s prognostication of escalating conflict is less prescient than it is
prescriptive. As we write this introduction in January 2022, President
Vladimir Putin has moved some 125,000 troops to Russia’s border with
Ukraine. The US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has warned that
Putin is setting the table for an invasion fueled by “sabotage activities and
information operations” (United States, Office of the Press Secretary,
2022). And indeed, in Russia’s telling it is not the troops poised uninvited
on the edge of a sovereign country, or its demands that NATO reverse an
open-door policy and security guarantees in the Baltic states, that consti-
tute the threat. Rather, Russian rhetoric leans on the so-called aggressive
course of the West to lay blame for these escalating tensions (Choi, 2022).
As notable historian Timothy Snyder (2022) writes, “The one consistent
element of Russian propaganda is that Russia has suffered and that it is the
West’s fault—your fault. When Russia does something inexcusable, you
are meant to be shocked, blame yourself and make concessions.”
Indeed, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has proclaimed Russia’s aver-
sion to potential conflict—“If it depends on Russia, there will be no war.
We don’t want a war” (The Moscow Times, 2022)—while Kremlin
spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has bemoaned the West’s “hysteria” and
spread of information “laced with lies” (Antonov & Siebold, 2022). These
refrains would be almost laughable were they not so familiar and so terri-
bly tragic. Repetition is among the most powerful tactics of a disinforma-
tion campaign, and framing itself as a perpetual victim of Western
aggression and “Russophobia” is a templated response that the Russian
disinformation “ecosystem persistently injects into the global information
environment” (United States, Office of the Spokesperson, 2022).
Russia is daring the West yet again, as it has before with its many viola-
tions of Baltic airspace (both physical and informational) and other incur-
sions in its desired sphere of influence. Of course, the greatest fear is that
information war might turn into real war—a reality already present in
Ukraine. The illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ongoing fight-
ing in the east—a conflict that has simmered and sparked in the trenches
for the better part of a decade—are no theoretical influence operations.
The Baltic states are sending American weapons to Ukraine in defense
against today’s new aggression. But with the dark veil of Russia’s long
shadow ever present, various forces in the Baltic states have also been
mobilizing in the information space. This book examines that process.
Dismantling the destructive refrains of disinformation while balancing
access to free speech and fair press is a process that is neither linear nor
prescriptive—the path toward information order is far from plain. This
volume is reflective, therefore, of a variety of challenges, responses, suc-
cesses, and failures in the fight against untruth and its consequences for
society. The authors of this volume hail from across the spectrum of prac-
titioners involved in understanding and countering dis- and misinforma-
tion, including media experts, journalists, military officers, historians, and
political and social scientists. These perspectives do not always form the
same picture of the information landscape. We find this to be a strength of
1 INTRODUCTION 5
the volume—disinformation is a many-headed monster that demands a

multi-pronged analysis.
In the first section of this book, authors focus on the weight of history.
Janis Chakars and Indra Ekmanis look back at the “birth” of Baltic nations,
as characterized by the emergence of national newspapers. The chapter
traces the battles over the press in the Baltic littoral from the national
awakenings of the mid-nineteenth century, through the Soviet period, to
today. In Chap. 3, Joseph Ellis considers the narratives of World War II
history in modern Twitter battles, looking at the case of the forest broth-
ers in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and their instrumentalization by
NATO and the Russian Federation.
Section two considers the issue of ethnicity that so often dictates the
division—in language, policy, and access—that characterizes disinforma-
tion tensions in the region. This is particularly so in Estonia and Latvia,
where significant populations use Russian as their first language. While
social multilingualism is by far the norm, the linguistic cleavages between
titular and Russian speakers are often exploited. In Chap. 4, Jānis Juzefovičs
explores the ways different ethnolinguistic audiences in Latvia make sense
of the country’s public media institutions in times of geopolitical crisis and
how media users rely on their own analytical skills for truth-discovery.
Andres Jõesaar (Chap. 5) analyzes the impact of the launch of ETV+, the
Russian-language public service channel, and the success of Estonia’s pub-
lic broadcaster to meet the information needs of both its Russian- and
Estonian-speaking audiences. Concluding the section with Chap. 6,
Solvita Denisa-Liepniece traces the history of Russian-language television
in Latvia, and the rocky efforts to maintain access to locally produced
Russian-language news in the turn from terrestrial to digital access.
The volume then turns more fully to the digital challenges of the infor-
mation war. Asta Zelenkauskaite probes participation in online spaces and
the prominence of inauthentic participants in the exchange of informa-
tion. She argues in Chap. 7 that it is imperative to understand the process
of this media manipulation and calls for adapting theories and methodolo-
gies to better understand how social media chaos can warp civic participa-
tion. In Chap. 8, Monika Hanley, Aki-Mauri Huhtinen, and Miika
Sartonen present the digital challenge of inauthentic media manipulation
in action, compiling the results from 5 years of analysis tracking robotic
trolling targeting the Baltic states and Poland following the deployment of
NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence in the region.
In section four, attention is focused on responses to information disor-

der by citizens, governments, and international institutions. Viktor
Denisenko (Chap. 9) considers the case study of DebunkEU and
Lithuanian “elves”—a grassroots response to disinformation analysis mar-
rying AI capabilities with citizen activism. In Chap. 10, Sergei Kruk and
Ilva Skulte analyze political discourse surrounding media bans and the
disconnect between government policy, public opinion, and trust in news
media in Latvia. They argue that the state has instrumentalized the threat
of Russian disinformation and that government reaction to the issue could
upset democratic traditions. Further, media overrepresent government
voices in a way that threatens pluralism and promotes unsupported under-
standings of media influence. In Chap. 11, Monika Hanley contributes an
overview of the history, mission, and initiatives of the NATO Strategic
Communications Centre of Excellence, established in Riga in 2014.
In section five, Clinton Glenn (Chap. 12) examines the transnational
nature of rhetoric in his research on LGBT rights in the Baltic states. The
controversial nature of the issue has opened the door for networks of anti-
LGBT discourse to play across the former Eastern Bloc and pull the Baltic
states into a tug of war between Russian conservative rhetoric and Western
institutions. Noel Foster continues this line of inquiry in Chap. 13 to ana-
lyze the rhetorical convergence between the Kremlin and anti-Kremlin,
right-wing populist parties in the Baltic states. Such convergence risks iso-
lating the Baltic states from NATO and European allies, he argues, as in
the case of EKRE, the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia. Finally, the
epilogue (Chap. 14) closes the volume with the perspective of journalists,
as Gunta Sloga traces the efforts on the ground to confront disinforma-
tion by those charged with reporting on the facts.
In today’s communication contest with Russia, the balance of forces is
lopsided. The Russian media industry is many times larger than that of
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania combined. People in the Baltic states can
and do watch Russian television and film, whereas the situation is not
reversed. Russia has an army of bots, but no evidence has yet surfaced
from the Baltics of similar measures against their neighbor to the east. The
ability of Russia to tell stories about Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania and have
them heard is simply greater than vice versa, and the state’s geopolitical
narrative is rarely questioned within Russia. Even if Baltic broadcasters
were on every Russian TV and VKontakte was infused with Baltic-born
counternarratives, any effect would not be guaranteed.
1 INTRODUCTION 7
However, recently, several significant Russian organizations have set up

shop in the Baltic states with the aim of changing the narrative back home.
The news organization Meduza appeared in Latvia in 2014 after Russian
journalist Galina Timchenko was fired from Lenta.ru, allegedly for her
coverage of events in Ukraine. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s Anti-
Corruption Foundation now keeps its offices in Lithuania, complete with
a television production studio. If this information war is to end, and with
it bring the prospect of greater peace and security for the Baltic region and
beyond, the impetus may have to come from Russians themselves. The
efforts of Timchenko and Navalny—along with figures like Dmitry
Muratov of Novaya Gazeta, who was awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize
for his “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondi-
tion for democracy and lasting peace”—may play an important role. In the
meantime, the Baltic states remain on the defensive, their security bol-
stered by the European Union and NATO, two organizations reviled by
Russia, and a target of the Kremlin’s information attacks.
The current information wars are an example of age-old phenomena.
Across time and space, information has always been contested. Media fre-
quently become objects of political conquest. Afterall, media present defi-
nitions of how the world is and ought to be. They showcase understanding.
How things are understood is fundamental to everything else, and so
battles are joined over the making of meaning. In today’s world of infor-
mation deluge, the battles grow ever greater, no more so than on the
eastern edge of the Baltic Sea, ground zero for the vicissitudes and vacilla-
tions of the information war with Russia.
References
Antonov, D., & Siebold, S. (2022, January 25). NATO sends reinforce-
ments and US puts troops on alert as Ukraine tensions rise. Reuters.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/nato-s ends-s hips-j ets-e astern-
europe-ukraine-crisis-2022-01-24/
Choi, J. (2022, January 26). Russia warns of ‘retaliatory measures’ if security
demands are rejected. The Hill. https://thehill.com/policy/international/
russia/591467-russia-warns-of-retaliatory-measures-if-security-demands-are/
Ekmanis, I. (2019, January 31). (De)friending in the Baltics: Lessons from
Facebook’s Sputnik crackdown. Foreign Policy Research Institute. https://
www.fpri.org/ar ticle/2019/01/defriending-in-the-baltics-lessons-
from-facebooks-sputnik-crackdown/
ERR. (2020, January 1). Sputnik ends operations in Estonia. https://news.err.

ee/1019231/sputnik-ends-operations-in-estonia
Gleicher, N. (2019, January 17). Removing coordinated inauthentic behav-
ior from Russia. Meta. https://about.fb.com/news/2019/01/removing-
cib-from-russia/
Gleicher, N. (2021, December 20). Meta’s adversarial threat report. Meta.
https://about.fb.com/news/2021/12/metas-adversarial-threat-report/
Russian Federation. (2016, November 30). The foreign policy concept of the Russian
Federation. Посольство России в Великобритании. https://www.rusemb.org.
uk/rp_insight/
Snyder, T. (2022, January 28). Putin’s case for invading Ukraine rests on phony
grievances and ancient myths. The Washington Post. https://www.washington-
post.com/outlook/2022/01/28/putin-russia-ukraine-myths/
Swedish Psychological Defence Agency. (2022, January 1). About us. Myndigheten
För Psykologiskt Försvar. https://www.mpf.se/en/about-us/
The Moscow Times. (2022, March 31). Russia not to blame if war breaks out,
Lavrov says. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/01/28/russia-not-to-
blame-if-war-breaks-out-lavrov-says-a76183
The Nobel Prize. (2021, October 8). The Nobel Peace Prize 2021. https://www.
nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2021/press-release/
United States, Office of the Press Secretary. (2022, January 14). Press briefing by
press secretary Jen Psaki and national security advisor Jake Sullivan, January
13, 2022. The White House. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/
press-briefings/2022/01/13/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-jen-psaki-and-
national-security-advisor-jake-sullivan-january-13-2022/
United States, Office of the Spokesperson. (2022, January 21). Russia’s top five
persistent disinformation narratives. United States Department of State.
https://www.state.gov/russias-top-five-persistent-disinformation-narratives/
PART I
The Weight of History

CHAPTER 2
Echoes of the Past: Media and History

in the Baltic Battlespace
“Does he know that the birth of a national newspaper means the birth of
a nation?”
In 1930, Eugen Jannsen, youngest son of the progenitor of Estonian

journalism, defended his father’s honor against the reproach of literary
historian August Palm in the pages of the magazine Eesti Kirjandus. The
charge against Johann Voldemar Jannsen—the founder of Eesti Postimees,
the first Estonian-language daily paper—was enabling foreign interests to
control the information environment of Estonians. The great twentieth-
century Estonian writer, Jaan Kross, dramatized the episode in his 1971
story, “An Hour on a Revolving Chair.”
J. Chakars (*)
Neumann University, Aston, PA, USA
e-mail: chakarsj@neumann.edu
I. Ekmanis
Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia, PA, USA
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 11

Switzerland AG 2022
J. Chakars, I. Ekmanis (eds.), Information Wars in the Baltic States,
The Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political
Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99987-2_2
The specific charge against Jannsen père, as Kross has Eugen refer to his
father, was accepting money from the Baltic German nobility ruling over
the indigenous Estonian peasantry in exchange for self-censorship and
editorial influence, enabling German control of how Estonians under-
stood the world in which they lived. The younger Jannsen rages as he
swivels on his chair, “Does he know what the first national newspaper
means for a country? Does he know that the birth of a national newspaper
means the birth of a nation?” (1983).
Kross’ tale holds up not just because of his compelling prose and inven-
tive style (the text is even interspersed with music). It commands attention
not only because it deals with the dawn of Estonia’s national awakening
and the intrigue of competing national factions. (Carl Robert Jakobson,
Jannsen’s protégé-turned-rival, even gave Jannsen’s talented poet daugh-
ter the name by which she would be forever famous, Koidula or dawn.)
The story is powerful, especially in the age of disinformation, for the
enduring questions it raises about media.
Kross’ question anticipated the intuitively powerful argument of
Benedict Anderson: that it was print-capitalism and the elevation of ver-
nacular language that enabled the formation of national identity or “imag-
ined community” (1983). How else might what Jannsen named the Eesti
rahvas (Estonian people) in his newspaper come to see themselves as such?
How else might the maarahvas (rural people), spread across 585 estates—
also the number of subscriptions he quietly took from the German nobil-
ity—and unlikely to ever meet each other, see themselves as one big
national superfamily? In the “mass ceremony” of reading the same words
across the land, one could begin to imagine their place in a national com-
munity (Anderson 1983, p. 39).
Jannsen made his peace with the foreign pressure of Baltic Germans,
while also advocating for his people. His contemporary critic, the one-
time Postimees contributor Carl Jakobson, used his short-lived, but influ-
ential newspaper, Sakala, to skewer the Baltic Germans and seek common
cause with Russians against them (Maier 2006). Importantly, however,
each pioneering journalist not only saw the press as a key instrument for
the development of the Estonian nation, but understood this process as
taking place in a complex of political forces and communicative practices.
For Kross, writing in the Soviet period about the nineteenth-century
national awakening and a debate over it during interwar independence,
“Authority would not be authority if it did not try to control thought,
whether this power was the Imperial Directorate of the Press, or the
2 ECHOES OF THE PAST: MEDIA AND HISTORY IN THE BALTIC BATTLESPACE 13
Livland nobility, or the Estonian republic of [Prime Minister] Herr [Jaan]

Tõnisson” (1983, p. 201). This attitude is not uncommon in the Baltic
countries today.
***
Welcome to the information wars in the Baltic states, where what is eked
from a printing press, passes over the airwaves, slides through ethernet
cables, or bounces from cell phone towers rises to the level of a national
security dilemma involving great powers from East and West. The history
of the Baltic states is virtually the history of foreign interference, punctu-
ated by astoundingly devastating wars over hundreds of years initiated by
neighbors and leaving today the native inhabitants of these lands unsur-
prisingly nervous about their fate. A matrix of foreign intervention, media,
and nationalism has long marked the Baltic peoples as they sit on the
precipice of Europe and Russia, poised between Scandinavian and Slavic
countries.
To understand how Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—three countries
with just over six million inhabitants—figure into great power politics, we
may recall a pair of statesmen and prognosticators: Carl Bildt and George
Kennan. In 1994, Bildt, the then prime minister of Sweden, penned an
essay for Foreign Affairs. “The Baltic countries will be the litmus test of
[Russia’s] new direction,” he wrote (p. 72). The Baltics countries then
again comprised the border between Russia and the West, with indepen-
dence from five decades under Soviet rule recently achieved in a third
national awakening spanning the 1980s through 1991. Geographical and
historical circumstance built on the legacy of their interwar indepen-
dence—that which was sparked by the first vernacular newspapers uniting
those “imagined” rural communities—poised the Baltics to resume inte-
gration with international institutions as sovereign entities in the 1990s
and 2000s.
If Moscow fully accepts the independence of the Baltic states and fully
respects their rights, one can be fully sure that Russia has entered the family
of nations. But if it questions their sovereignty or undermines this indepen-
dence, that would signal that Russia might once again become a threat to
the international system. (Bildt 1994, p. 72)
In 2009, Baltic and other leaders from the recently expanded European
Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization published “An Open
Letter to the Obama Administration from Central and Eastern Europe.”
It appeared in Gazeta Wyborcza, the newspaper headed by the Polish for-
mer dissident, Adam Michnik. In it, they warned that Russia had again
become a threat to the international system. “Our hopes that relations
with Russia would improve and that Moscow would finally fully accept our
complete sovereignty and independence after joining NATO and the EU
have not been fulfilled,” they wrote (Adamkus et al. 2009).
In 2019, the political scientist Mitchell Orenstein wrote that the letter
fell on deaf ears in US President Barack Obama’s administration as it tried
to hit the reset button in relations with Russia. But in the 10 years that
followed the epistle, it had become clear that Russia had long been waging
a hybrid war, trying to “divide Western liberal institutions, promote xeno-
phobic extremism, and destabilize Western democracies.” East European
countries sounding the alarm had been the overlooked “canaries in the
coal mine” (2019, pp. 9–10).
Bildt had forewarned that the security concerns of the Baltic states
would test the will and capacity of the United States to deal with Russia.
The “stakes are high” because the Baltic countries had often served as the
harbingers of change in Europe. It was so upon the 1939 signing of the
secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact carving up Europe
between the Soviets and Nazis and leading to World War II, and it was so
when the Baltic countries initiated their nonviolent Singing Revolution in
1988 that precipitated the crumbling of the USSR.
In the view from Stockholm in 1994, two key stumbling blocks to
Russia-West equilibrium appeared to Prime Minister Bildt. First was the
continued presence of Russian troops in the Baltic states. These forces are
now gone. Second was the continued presence of Russian-speaking immi-
grants. Their migration to the Baltics was the result of what he called a
Soviet policy of “ethnic cleansing,” whereby indigenous populations,
especially in Estonia and Latvia, were replaced by Russian-speaking ones
(p. 76). Post-Soviet Russian-speakers, for their part, became what David
Laitin called “a beached diaspora,” as borders realigned with the interwar
map, and with them, citizenship continuity laws from the same era (1998).1
1
While Lithuania, less demographically affected by Soviet-era migration policies, offered
citizenship broadly, the toll of occupation on the indigenous population in the northern two
countries resulted in strict limits on naturalization and non-citizenship for a portion of the
Still, Bildt marveled that despite the painful history that brought them
together, native Latvians and Estonians maintained smooth relations with
their Russian neighbors and coworkers. Thus, he early on recognized a
process of what Indra Ekmanis has called “banal integration” in Latvia
(2017, 2019).
Bildt was cautiously optimistic for the relationship between Russia and
the West, which would be tested by the reintegration of the Baltic states in
Europe. However, it would depend on Russia accepting the historical
truth of the Baltic occupation and thwarting “red-brown revanchists in
Russian domestic affairs” (1994,p. 84). He quoted US diplomat George
Kennan’s, 1951 take on the Baltic question, also in the pages of Foreign
Affairs, which, impressed by their prescience, then reprinted them in
March 1990.
We are all agreed, for example that the Baltic countries should never again
be forced against the innermost feelings of their peoples into any relation-
ship whatsoever with a Russian state; but they would themselves be foolish
to reject close and cooperative arrangements with a tolerant, nonimperialis-
tic Russia, which genuinely wished to overcome the unhappy memories of
the past and to place her relations to the Baltic peoples on a basis of real
respect and disinterestedness. (1951, p. 360)
Bildt saw no reason why such a place could not be reached, but warned
that, if it was not, “we are headed for great trouble” (1994, p. 85).
Like Bildt, who used the Baltics as a proxy, Kennan, too, was actually
writing about the United States and Russia. The Baltics were mainly a site
of contention between East and West. In 1951, Kennan predicted that the
Soviet system would not last, but was not sure what it would become. He
was certain, however, that Russia would never look like the West. When
change finally came to the USSR, likely entailing “the overthrow of the
system,” he cautioned against “applying litmus papers to their political
complexions to find out whether they answer to our conception of ‘demo-
cratic’” (1951, pp. 368, 356). Nevertheless, there were reasonable
post-Soviet population (Krūma, 2010). While non-citizenship offers many analogous rights
as citizenship, it bars holders from voting and working in the civil and security services. The
stopgap of “non-citizen status” has lingered, and only after decades of children being born
as former citizens of a nonexistent state has the policy legally begun to phase out, symboli-
cally starting to rectify the postindependence disenfranchisement felt by many ethnic minori-
ties (Ekmanis, 2020).
expectations of international conduct that Western powers could insist

upon—Russia should recognize that not all foreigners are spies, all foreign
businesses are not out to undermine the state, and the “outside world is
not really preoccupied with diabolical plots to invade Russia and inflict
injuries upon its people.” Russia should dispense with its paranoia, but the
West should expect it to vigorously defend its legitimate interests (1951,
p. 357). Further, the West should expect that “many features of the Soviet
system will stick” (1951, p. 355).
Kennan warned against wading too deeply into the grievances of the
many peoples of the Soviet Union against Russia, including Ukraine, but
insisted that those who held independence before World War II should
have it back fully. Thus the architect of the containment policy—like so
many others—drew his line in the sand through the Baltic states.
In the end, the Baltic countries were the leading edge of a great move-
ment, a “parade of sovereignties” as Mikhail Gorbachev called it, that led
to the abolition of the Soviet Union (1995, p. 345). Kennan feared
Russia’s imperial ambition and saw its concern for Ukraine; likely he would
not have been shocked by Russia’s recent machinations there in 2022 and
2014, or in Georgia in 2008. Kennan also saw that already by 1951, an
information war was being waged, with a primary battlefield echoing
across the ether as the emigre Voice of America (VOA) edged through
Soviet jammers.
Then within the purview of the US State Department, VOA began
those Baltic services in 1951, broadcasting an hour and a half daily in each
of the Baltic languages. Kennan argued, however, that a voice was all the
radio should be, not a sword (1951, p. 370). VOA could not broadcast
hard-hitting propaganda, and though plans to report in Baltic languages
over Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty came in that same year, it was only
in 1975 that Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian RFE/RL services came
onto the airwaves. RFE/RL counterbalanced Voice of America, acting not
as an amplifier of American news and opinion, but as a nationally oriented
service. RFE/RL worked as a “broader voice—a voice of the free people—
a radio which would speak to each country behind the Iron Curtain in its
own language, and from the throats of its own leaders who fled for their
lives because of their beliefs in freedom,” as Gen. Lucius Clay put it in
1950 (Holt 1958, p. 15).
The history of independence, national identity, and rather acute sense
of historical grievance fed a dissident movement from the very beginning
of Soviet occupation that became fertile ground for the mission of the
Radios fighting the information battle on the airwaves. The Baltic states
were part of the “Western frontier”; “populated mainly by non-Russians
and impregnated with the living memory of national sovereignty, it was an
obvious target for Western broadcasts” (Weiner 2010, pp. 299–300).
Indeed, Augusts Voss, First Secretary of the Latvian Communist Party,
argued that because the Baltic states joined the USSR later, they differed
from Union republics and were “particularly vulnerable to radio broad-
casts” (Trapans 1988, p. 94).
A young Sarmīte Ēlerte listened to those American broadcast voices in
Latvia. The future reporter and politician wondered if what she heard was
real. There were actions, attitudes, and even people on those airwaves that
had no shape in the observable world around her (Chakars 2010). Still,
the voice had a certain ethos or credibility for offering truth other than the
ironically named Pravda.2 Ēlerte went on to lead Diena—the first newspa-
per in Latvia to set Western conventions of reporting as its aim—through
the moment when briefly it appeared that the return to independence
might be arrested. In August 1991, Soviet military forces aimed at Latvia’s
key points of media and communication. Diena sounded the alarm with
the headline, “Everyone! Everyone! Hour X has struck!” Again, as so
often in Baltic history, media and national sovereignty were linked.
A Pattern of Political Instrumentalization

Media in the Baltic states, whether broadcasting or broadsheets, have long
been seen as tools and measures of power. Consequently, the litmus papers
of autonomy and sovereignty for Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians
have shown their colors in mass media and who controls it. Though the
subject of much discussion in Jaan Kross’ later tale, Johann Voldemar
Jannsen’s 1857 newspaper was not the first in what is now Estonia. That
distinction belongs to Ordinari Freytags Post-Zeitung founded in 1675.
His was not the first in Tartu. Almost 200 years prior, the Revalsche Post-
Zeitung was published, also in German. Eesti Postimees was not even the
first newspaper published in Estonian in the city. In 1806, a trio of German
ministers started a newspaper called Tarto maa-rahwa Näddali-Leht. The
2
In 1987, New York Times journalist Geneva Overholser (1987) noted the common anec-
dote about Soviet broadsheets Pravda and Izvestia during the period of glasnost and pere-
stroika: “In Russian, ‘pravda’ means truth and ‘izvestia’ means news, and the old joke about
the Soviet press was that there’s no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia.”
significance of Jannsen’s achievement lay in the fact that prior to his suc-
cessful endeavor, Estonians had little ability to speak for themselves.
Germans could describe the reality of Estonians, but not vice versa.
In his studies of the Middle East, Edward Said explained this general
process as part and parcel of colonialism and postcolonial power relations.
Media are part of the mechanics by which oppression, dominance, and
prejudice are justified and exercised (2003). Thus, the establishment of
newspapers, in which indigenous voices presented in the fashion of the old
master’s discourse and in his medium, constituted a refutation of cultural
inferiority, as well as a device by which Estonians could organize and see
themselves as a nation like any other. That indigenous language newspa-
pers were eyed warily, or outright attacked by the nobility, shows the con-
temporary understanding that these were powerful instruments to be
constrained by those in power. The nineteenth-century Baltic was tiered
by aristocratic and imperial authority, whose policies also made sure that
the press was an object of political conquest and contest. For Lithuanians,
who along with Poles had rebelled in 1863 and faced a full ban on printing
in the Latin alphabet, this meant that the development of indigenous jour-
nalism occurred largely outside the Russian Empire. Tilsit in East Prussia
(today’s Sovetsk, Kaliningrad), as well as New York and Chicago in the
United States, became the centers of Lithuanian-language publishing, dis-
tributed by a wide network of smugglers, around 2000 of whom were
caught by tsarist police (Høyer et al., 1993).
Practically all of the Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians who came to
be remembered as heroic champions in the Baltic national awakenings and
emerging nationalism of the nineteenth century worked in journalism and
publishing: Vincas Kudirka, Jonas Basanavičius, Juris Alunāns, Krišjānis
Barons, Krišjānis Valdemārs, Carl Robert Jakobson, Johann Voldemar
Janssen, and Jaan Tõnisson, to name a few. The titles they produced con-
stitute great markers of historical memory: in Estonian, Postimees and
Sakala; in Latvian, Pēterburgas Avīzes and Dienas Lapa; and in Lithuanian
Aušra, Varpas, and Šviesa. Indicating the special role of the press in
Latvian society, the great writer Jānis Rainis, also editor of Dienas Lapa,
called it a “spiritual weapon” (quoted in Dimants, 1994, p. 20). Most
remember the first strike of this weapon, as Jaan Kross did, as enabling a
national identity, and then as Benedict Anderson did in his analysis of the
broader phenomenon as enabling subsequent nationalism. The press was
the tool by which people who would never meet each other could come to
understand each other as connected as a people. Through its ritual con-

sumption, they participated in the life of this community.
The goals of the nation, however, were never singularly understood in
the Baltics, as anywhere else, and so the “weapon” of the press was drawn
against other members of the nation, as well as “foreign” adversaries, be
they German, Russian, or otherwise perceived as a threat. Thus, Jannsen
and Jakobson—as Kross so inventively describes—drew swords over how
to advance the nation, as well as who its allies and enemies might be. All
this occurred under conditions of autocracy and censorship. The ideas that
filtered into the Baltic about nationhood were the same as those taking
hold in Europe, but the system by which those ideas could be expressed
was different. The development of the press in the Russian empire was
different. There was no “printing revolution,” and Peter the Great, con-
queror of the Baltic, set in motion policies that sought to instrumentalize
the press in the interests of his state (Marker, 1982). The history of mass
media in the Baltics—like their history of war and state—is thus the his-
tory of multiple factions recognizing a point of control or liberation, and
seeing the opportunity to interpret reality and organize collective action
intrinsic to political and social development.
The press was a key site for political work. The role of nationalist activ-
ist, politician, intellectual, and journalist often ran together (Zake, 2005).
These thinkers and writers mistrusted the people from outside the titular
nation who dominated the economy, and the competition of democratic
politics that prevented a devotion to the idea that the state was for the
cultural, social, and political development of the indigenous people. It is
perhaps not surprising that all the future dictators of the Baltics engaged
in journalism—Estonia’s Konstantin Päts founded the newspaper Teataja;
Lithuania’s Antanas Smetona worked for Vilniaus Žinios and Lietuvos
Ūkininkas; and Latvia’s Kārlis Ulmanis edited the Baltic Farmers’
Association magazine, Zeme. All were accustomed to viewing press and
politics as connected. After concentrating power, they then placed severe
restrictions on the press. Each of these men also saw controlling informa-
tion within their countries as an existential matter for the state, which had
achieved the nationalist dream of self-determination for the titular nation-
alities of the Baltics. However, the battles for independence led to a sensi-
tivity about information wars even before the coups of 1926 (Lithuania)
and 1934 (Latvia and Estonia). Laws against advocating the overthrow of
the political order existed in all three countries, for fear mainly of the
Bolsheviks across the border and the sympathies of local leftists.
Press control as an existential matter for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania

had internal and external dimensions. In the independence war years,
papers like Brīvā Zeme in Latvia and Smetona’s Lietuvos Aidas were explic-
itly made to affirm the validity of the state, even while foreign armies still
fought in the region. Later on, the fragility of these new countries—and
the competing interests of the many political parties within them—created
further cause for concern over security and stability. In 1933, just before
Päts’ coup d’état, a state of emergency was declared in Estonia, and the
government lashed out at the press for undermining faith in the state.
Rahvaleht responded with a printing in which the first letter of each line
spelled out “Lick your ass, censor.” The government responded by sus-
pending its publication. A year later, the press of Estonia was under com-
plete control of the government, which also created a division for state
propaganda.
But interwar-period journalists also saw a duty in fostering love for the
newly independent Baltic states among the people. Indeed, a meeting of
journalists in Tallinn in 1921 set that as a goal in addition to the need to
provide accurate information. In the 1920s, journalists of all three Baltic
countries formed a Baltic Press Union, with a foreign policy aim of creat-
ing better cooperation between their countries. In 1934, they tried again
with a Baltic Press Entente intended to coordinate and mobilize public
opinion to ensure stability and security. Therefore, despite the vicissitudes,
both politicians and journalists have long been cognizant of the nation-
building role of the press. In Epp Lauk’s estimation, “Linking journalistic
interests to those of the state was never interpreted as a conflict between
the independence of the media and its loyalty to Estonia. Throughout its
history, Estonian journalism has served national interests and endeavors”
(Høyer et al., 1993, p. 135). It is a sense that lingers—for better or
worse—in the Baltic ether today as well (Juzefovičs, 2017).
In the end, it was not the clarion call of the press that wrested power
from the hands of the Baltic dictators. It was a much darker wave of repres-
sion that would follow the censorship of the 1930s as the Baltics again
became the “bloodlands” for great power struggles between East and
West (Snyder, 2010). The facts of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states
during and after World War II are well known, even if contested by Russian
authorities and disinformation—then and today. In 1939, the USSR and
Nazi Germany concluded a pact with secret protocols granting the Baltics
to Joseph Stalin. The Baltic dictators then followed disastrous policies of
appeasement, acceding to Soviet demands and caving to ultimatums
until—with troops on the ground—sham elections led to total conquest,

unprecedented terror and repression, and the loss of independence, save
de jure governments in exile.
The Soviet understanding of the press left lessons and scars for the
Baltic peoples. A highly perceptive media analyst as well as political strate-
gist, Vladimir Lenin—not entirely unlike the Baltic dictators—saw the sig-
nificant interpretive potential of the press. Without a newspaper, action on
the ground “loses nine tenths of its significance,” he wrote (1960, p. 219).
He famously saw the press as a propagandist, agitator, and organizer, and
it was its organizing potential that particularly struck him. The press, for
him, provided a kind of scaffolding around a political movement or politi-
cal order by which people not only learned a way to view things, but found
their way to contribute to the work of building a state. Perhaps most
importantly, he saw the press as contributing to a hegemonic order of
ideas that compelled people into acceptance of ideology. Antonio Gramsci,
the theorist most often cited for his ideas about hegemony and media,
actually credited Lenin for that observation, calling it Lenin’s “greatest
contribution to Marxist philosophy” (2011, p. 187). Following this
understanding of the importance of information wars, Lenin put maxi-
mum effort into Bolshevik media and after the revolution supplanted what
he saw as the bourgeois hegemony of the press with a socialist one that
allowed no quarter for deviant thought. Lenin believed, like Eugen
Jannsen in Jaan Kross’ story, that true freedom of the press could not
exist. He believed that it would always be a manifestation and tool of
power. Authority would not be authority if it did not try to control
thought.
***
But in that pursuit of thought, Lenin’s desires ultimately failed in the

Baltic states. Living memory of their unique experience of statehood and
relative prosperity, their long-developed sense of national identity, and de
jure status as independent nations meant Estonians, Latvians, and
Lithuanians never really collectively ceded to the authority of Soviet
thought and were specially positioned to reassert their rights to freedom.
From the start that meant a battle over information.
Activists, politicians, journalists, and intellectuals came together again
in the late 1980s in a nationalist drive to restore independent statehood.
The process reflected the information wars of the time. In Latvia, for
instance, nationalist activist endeavors of the early perestroika era were at

first ignored and then condemned in the mainstream media. A case in
point was Helsinki-86, a small group of dissidents formed in 1986 in the
port city of Liepaja, named for the Helsinki Final Act by which the USSR
pledged to respect the self-determination and human rights of all peoples.
The group’s early activities were ignored by the Latvian party-controlled
media but received attention from the Voice of America and RFE/
RL. Street demonstrations were then blamed on US-sponsored broadcast-
ing and hooligans (Chakars, 2013).
When Baltic cultural and political elites claimed leadership in the cause
of national revival, mass media rapidly switched from serving as organs of
the Communist Party and its Soviet institutions to acting as instruments
for reform and eventually independence. In the process, media followed
patterns based on previous understandings of press and politics. Journalist
and scholar Inta Brikše concluded that it was ironic that the anti-Soviet
movement fulfilled Lenin’s vision of the press as propagandist, agitator,
and organizer (1998). Journalists, especially in broadcasting, often put
themselves at the service of the movements’ political leaders—they also
served in political positions, as had been the case in earlier awakenings
(Kruk & Chakars, 2010). Some journalists chafed under pressure from the
political leaders of the movement, but the disputes tended to follow fac-
tional rather than fundamental lines, such as the divides between the
Popular Fronts and Citizens’ Congresses of Latvia and Estonia, which
differed in their views of who should constitute the citizenry and decide
upon the restoration of the state (Chakars, 2010). The clearest sign that
media were at the center of late-Soviet-era information wars lies in the fact
that they were principal targets of attack and defense when Soviet forces
attempted to use force to restore the old order in January 1991 in
Lithuania and Latvia, and all three Baltic countries in August.
The Baltic anti-Soviet revolution had remained relatively peaceful
through 1990, but in January 1991, it turned into a violent siege on civil-
ians and institutions by armed Soviet forces. The time of the Barricades in
1991 became worldwide news, largely thanks to the efforts of Western
radio and local journalists. In Lithuania, January 13, 1991, became known
as Bloody Sunday, when 14 people were killed and hundreds injured dur-
ing Soviet advances on Lithuanian radio and television stations. In response
to similar machinations in Latvia, leader of the popular front Dainis Īvans
used radio media to call on individuals to protect strategic objects in Riga
with barricades against the Soviet Black Berets (OMON). On January 20,
OMON began shooting into Bastejkalns, the park at the entrance of the
historical center of Riga. Two members of a documentary crew filming the
siege (Andris Slapiņš and Gvīdo Zvaigzne) captured some of the most
emotionally intense footage of the assault, even as they themselves were
fatally wounded by OMON bullets.
The critical period of the Barricades was elevated in national and inter-
national consciousness by the work of foreign broadcasters, including
VOA and RFE Baltic services. Because of such coverage, the news of the
Bastejkalns siege came within minutes to the State Department. While
international attention was critical, just as important was the dissemina-
tion of news of the Barricades and OMON events to other national ser-
vices within RFE/RL. Through cross-reporting, other listeners in the
Soviet sphere were informed about the goings-on in the Baltic states.
Despite Kennan’s admonishment that the radio should be a voice and not
a sword, as Beissinger’s, 2002 theory of tidal wave revolutions would sug-
gest, the Baltic experience had an exponential impact on the independence
movements across the Soviet sphere of influence—the radio waves of
change were increased exponentially as the Soviet system tumbled.
***
Three decades on from reestablished independence, the Baltic countries

still hold many of the scars of Soviet-era information wars, wounds
reopened as the battle accelerates from the airwaves to the information
highway. Some of the historical gashes that have become critical to Russian
President Vladimir Putin’s narrative of attack were too long kept open by
the Baltics themselves. In the effort to reestablish that “imagined com-
munity” built on nation, the reemergent states sought to distance them-
selves from the “occupying forces” of Soviet-era migrants. Afraid for the
indigenous nation and its survival in the 1990s after war, deportation, and
decades of linguistic and cultural repression brought on by the USSR,
statesmen sought to redraw the bounds of the nation, reestablishing pri-
macy of the native (Baltic) vernacular over that of the (Russian) occupier.
The consequence has been an alienation of a new diaspora of sorts:
Russian-speakers caught between moving borders and crumbling state
identities. In Estonia and Latvia especially, restrictive citizenship and lan-
guage policies have led to decades of discontent for many Russian-speakers,
who today make up around a quarter of the populations in those states.
Political, personal, and linguistic integration is certainly gaining root in

the Baltic countries. Counter to the hype of ethnic discord splayed across
headlines after elections or hot-button protests, everyday life in the Baltic
countries is not defined by ethnic antagonism (Ekmanis, 2017). Still,
Russia, particularly under Putin’s autocratic reign, has worked to recolo-
nize for itself Russian-speakers in its “near abroad” through its persistent
drip of noxious information, highlighting its own perceived glory while
reframing Baltic past and present in a fascist light. This is not just an after-
effect of paternalistic Baltic policies of the 1990s elevating the primacy of
the Baltic national identity; Lithuania—where post-Soviet policies were
more inclusive of post-Soviet peoples—has also fallen squarely within the
target of Russia’s hostilities—from propaganda to energy shutoffs. To the
powers that be in Russia, the concept of Russkii mir (Russian world)
knows no bounds or borders—and certainly not the Baltic line in the sand
drawn by Western statesmen.
Though rarely violent, comparative political disenfranchisement—his-
torically righteous and legally defensible or not—has opened a crack for
the parasites of information wars to wriggle through, preying on the griev-
ances of a population suspended in limbo between countries, cultures, and
loyalties. The West saw a physical manifestation of Bildt and Kennan’s
early warning shots already in 2007, when Estonia became “the first front
in the modern Russian information war” (Jankowicz, 2020, p. 21). The
riots over moving a Soviet-era Bronze Soldier in Tallinn were reported in
the West as evidence of long-simmering ethnic strife leading to weeks of
cyberattacks on the Estonian government emanating from Russia. But the
eruption of chaos around of the Bronze Soldier in April 2007 was set off
by a series of sparks—lingering from World War II, but reignited by
Vladimir Putin, his rehabilitation of Soviet red-letter days, incendiary
international speeches, and the launch of outlets like Russia Today (cloaked
in the mantle of showing another side of Russia, but dedicated to narra-
tives of division and confusion).
But while the large Russian-speaking populations in particularly the
northern-most Baltic states are tempting to perceive as hotbeds of grow-
ing discontent by both Putin and analysts alike, it is not affinity for Russian
culture that dictates the efficacy of Russia’s information warfare. Copious
evidence of Russian-speakers’ increased integration into their home
(Baltic) countries—both civically and socially—should weaken the fear
that ethnic Russians are lying in wait for the “magic bullet” of Russian
propaganda to turn on the Baltic states. Tempting though it is to
rehabilitate a “hypodermic needle” theory of media influence, the reality

of media practices and geopolitical orientations of Russian-speakers—like
their Baltic peers—are more likely to be characterized by diversity and
hybridity, despite the ethnic anxiety of politicians (Juzefovičs, 2019). The
power of information wars surpasses the bounds of language and geogra-
phy—one need only look to the deep dysfunction of the US discourse for
proof positive. Until 2007, the West had “collectively considered the Balts
Russophobes,” writes Nina Jankowicz (2020, p. 30). It has taken another
decade for the grimmer reality foretold by Bildt and Kennan to hit home.
“People finally understand that probably, we were right,” Estonian jour-
nalist Paul Rebane told Jankowicz after the US election of Donald Trump
and the UK’s Brexit referendum—hotly divisive contests fueled by the
fans of dis- and misinformation (2020, p. 30).
Continuity and Change in the Baltic

Information Wars
Since the national awakenings of the nineteenth century and the birth of
indigenously produced journalism, Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians
have believed in a pronounced link between media and the development—
even existence—of their nations. The information space of the Baltics indi-
cated the realm of reality and possibility. Political realities determined not
only who published what, but how society and the people in it were
defined and described. Media have served as the litmus test for politics and
cultural survival. Further, the politics of the Baltic have long been colored
by the power and presence of “foreigners”—be they colonial, imperial, or
migrant. This is the context by which information wars have always been
waged in the region. Sensitivities about media stem from its instrumental-
ization as a primary tool of social construction and political contest.
Squeezed by great powers, Baltic leaders have long been concerned about
not only the media of their territories, but the messages about them ema-
nating from beyond. Therefore, during the drive to regain independence
from the Soviet Union, Balts paid special attention to what Western media
said about them, hoping for allies in their quest. So it is today that con-
cerns about Russian media conversely exhibit their fears about the fragility
of independence underpinned by acceptance into the West (Chakars,
2016). As with the first national awakenings, the awakening of the 1980s
had internal and external referents and imbued media with an existential
importance. Today, Russian policy-making and posturing have again pro-

voked concerns about sovereignty and the political instrumentalization
of media.
In Baltic history, the battles over the press have often been based on a
kind of propaganda model that assumes media can be controlled tightly
and that people will uniformly respond to repeated messages. Therefore,
GlavLit, the official censorship organ of the USSR, could create Homo
Sovieticus—just as Smetana, Ulmanis, or Päts might enable the ideal
Lithuanian, Latvian, or Estonian. Today’s information environment in the
Baltics is much different. As democracies, it is more difficult to hinder the
flow of information. But it is also an age of increased cross-border com-
munication, be it by satellite or Internet. The residents of the Baltic states
can and do consume media from many places. Russian media for enter-
tainment or information are easily accessible. Russia is seen as a looming
threat and its media as an instrument and a sign of its intentions, almost
without regard for how audiences attend to such media.
Pervyi Baltiiskii Kanal (PBK), the First Baltic Channel, has been the
most popular channel among Russophone audiences in the Baltics, with
particularly large audiences in Estonia and Latvia. Sometimes it had the
largest market share of all people in the latter (LSM, 2016). Yet, on March
19, 2020, its news anchor, Julia Plyen, said goodbye from Riga, ending
16 years of locally produced Russian-language news. The channel, which
mainly rebroadcast programming from Russia, is now fully off the air in
Latvia. In July 2020, the state regulator accused it of two violations against
its license for unauthorized broadcasts of foreign programming and failure
to produce enough original local news programming. In October 2021,
its broadcasting license was revoked after yet another violation—dissemi-
nating disinformation considered a threat to public health in the midst of
the COVID-19 pandemic.
A chain of events led to this moment. The channel’s parent company,
Baltic Media Alliance, was accused of violating European Union sanctions
against Yury Kovalchuk, friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin and
co-owner of Russia’s Channel One, considered a Kremlin mouthpiece.
The First Baltic Channel had its bank accounts frozen and could not pay
its employees. No pay, no original locally produced news in Russian for
Latvia’s large Russian-speaking population.
The channel, its head, and its Latvian half-owner, Oleg Solodov (the
other 50% of the company is owned by Russian Aleksei Plyasunov), may
have violated sanctions to provoke its shutdown, but PBK had long been
controversial. In a commentary shortly before it shuttered, Latvian media

scholar Anda Rožukalne bemoaned PBK’s biased coverage in favor of the
Russia-friendly Latvian political party Saskaņa (Harmony), and the way it
turned news into a place for divided camps, rather than pluralist dialog and
information (Americans might bemoan the state of cable news similarly)
(Rožukalne, 2019). Ainārs Dimants of the National Electronic Mass Media
Council (Nacionālā elektronisko plašsaziņas līdzekļu padome, NEPLP)—
and also a media scholar—noted that despite the government’s dithering
about creating a public media channel for Russian-speakers, the loss of
PBK could increase the audience of the public service channel LTV7,
which also broadcast news in Russian. He ominously predicted this could
be done within 3 years, the same amount of time it would take Russia to
prepare a military invasion of Latvia (Ir, 2015).
PBK’s was not the first time Russian-language programming had been
shut down in the Baltic states, and it would not be the last. At the end of
June and start of July 2020, Latvia and Lithuania banned the Russian state
channel RT for EU sanctions violations involving Dmitry Kiselev, a
Kremlin-backed TV presenter known for spreading propaganda in support
of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Never mind that RT is not often watched
in the Baltic states and does not broadcast there in local languages.
Shutdowns of Russian media occurred after the Russian invasion of
Ukraine as well. “The problem is that RT is a part of this infrastructure of
propaganda, this system of spreading hostile narratives on Kremlin-owned
channels,” communications scholar Solvita Denisa-Liepniece told The
World, a US public radio international news program (Hills, 2020). “RT
is spreading disinformation, we have proof from different researchers. The
problem is that we cannot be over-focused on RT. This is a very difficult
system of information activities, and we have to monitor also other ele-
ments in this machinery of disinformation and propaganda,” she
continued.
To be sure, Russian media exhibit a pattern in which misleading stories
are told about discrimination against Baltic Russians and history is rewrit-
ten to undermine Baltic claims of Soviet occupation and mistreatment
(Muižnieks, 2008; Rislakki, 2008). But research also shows that the non-
indigenous populations of Estonia and Latvia do not respond to Russian
media as if injected with seditious serum. Further, Lithuania does not have
a significant minority population. Of course, indigenous Balts are also not
likely to be persuaded that they have no claim to an independent home-
land. Further, all three Baltic states are fully integrated members of the
European Union and, especially important from a security perspective,

NATO, which has constructed special centers in Latvia and Estonia for
strategic communications and cybersecurity, in addition to sustained troop
presence. Yet, the security question casts a shadow over all Russian disin-
formation, and for good reason.
In June 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin made plain his views of
the Baltic states and hopes for a world order in the pages of the conserva-
tive US publication, The National Interest. Regarding the occupation of
the Baltics, he writes:
In autumn 1939, the Soviet Union, pursuing its strategic military and
defensive goals, started the process of the incorporation of Latvia, Lithuania
and Estonia. Their accession to the USSR was implemented on a contractual
basis, with the consent of the elected authorities. This was in line with inter-
national and state law of that time. (Putin, 2020)
The essay is titled “The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World
War II.” In it, Putin attacks the European Parliament and its 2019 resolu-
tion on the Importance of European Remembrance for the Future of
Europe, which dared to cite the USSR as an aggressor in World War II,
and not just a liberator. He accuses the West of learning the wrong lessons
from World War II and in the process risking “harsh payback.” Along the
way, the Baltic states explicitly and implicitly come under fire. Lithuania is
ungrateful for getting Vilnius back, thanks to the Soviets. The removal of
monuments to the victors of the Great Fatherland War (as happened in
Estonia) is “shameful.” Putin implies the complicity of Latvians and
Lithuanians in the Holocaust, which in reality certainly had collaborators,
but without the Nazi occupation and engineering of genocide, such an
extensive tragedy in the Baltics is impossible to conceive. He obliquely
refers to Balts who served in the German army, considering it “bewilder-
ing” that they are “suddenly equated with Second World War veterans.”
Thus, he revives the Soviet smear of the Baltic states as infused with fas-
cists, but otherwise enamored of its Russian big brother and wanting to
rejoin the family after a generation of independence. These are tropes of
Russian disinformation, but these narratives are not just generated by
Internet bots or state-controlled Russian TV. The Russian president is
open about his evaluation and used a vulnerable American media platform
to tell the world.
Lest the Baltic states dismiss such rhetoric with a “sticks and stones may
break my bones, but names will never hurt me,” Putin also makes clear his
foreign policy goals. Multilateral cooperation and power invested in insti-
tutions like the European Union are bad, in his view. What the world got
after World War II and what the world needs are exemplified by the UN
Security Council and the veto power of its permanent members. In this
arrangement, the planet is controlled by a few great powers, who do not
necessarily get their way when their interests clash with another member.
However, this of course also means that each great power has a free hand
in all other instances, and small countries have no recourse through collec-
tive security. It is this foreign policy agenda—aimed at undermining the
Western institutions that the Baltic states put their faith in (principally the
EU and NATO)—that scares the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian gov-
ernments. This also means that perhaps the most important audience for
Russian disinformation about the Baltic states might not be in Daugavpils
or Narva, where large Baltic Russian-speaking populations reside. It might
actually be in Washington, London, Moscow, and even Beijing.
In a survey of Russian media coverage of Latvia in 2002–2005, Nils
Muižnieks and a team of researchers observed consistent criticism of the
Latvian state and its policies and history (2008). In terms of politics,
Latvia was framed as a threat for its treatment of Russian compatriots, for
bringing NATO to Russia’s border, and for undermining historical
“truths” about the Soviet liberation of the Baltics. Such coverage is in tune
with Kremlin political objectives, which reject Western encroachment in
Russia’s traditional zone of influence and control. While coverage of
Latvian culture and economics was less hostile, the inordinate attention to
Russia’s small Western neighbors has provoked commensurate fear among
Baltic leaders—particularly since the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the
onset of war in Ukraine. As Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy
and Public Affairs under US President Barack Obama, Richard Stengel
met with Baltic defense officials. Each made direct connections between
Russian media portrayals, NATO commitments, and subsequently Baltic
self-determination. A Lithuanian colonel told him, “They try to manipu-
late history to show the Russian narrative is supreme. The parallels with
what they did in Crimea are clear and dangerous. Why would they start an
information war if they aren’t planning a real war?” (Stengel, 2019,
p. 134). Stengel found himself incessantly repeating “Our commitment to
Article 5 is ironclad.” That is the treaty article that secures the Baltic states
against Russia, but it has never been tested on the soil of a NATO
member. Concerns loomed large, especially following the election of

Donald J. Trump. As the now-infamous US Department of Justice report
concluded by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III notes, “The Russian
government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and
systematic fashion” in an effort to support the election of vocal NATO-
skeptic Trump (2019).
Russian disinformation efforts in the United States are typically
designed to exacerbate existing divisions within the country and under-
mine faith in its institutions. It is the same in Europe with regard to the
values and merits of the European Union. Flemming Hansen of the
Danish Institute for International Studies argues that Russia is pursuing an
opportunistic game of unending hybrid warfare. In this view, soft mea-
sures such as disinformation are aimed at weakening others. These efforts
are ongoing and preparatory for the time when hard measures, such as
military intervention, are possible and advantageous, such as in Ukraine.
Important to this is what he, following the parlance of Russian strategists,
calls the “chaos button,” the ability to sow confusion on the ground or
otherwise among your adversaries (2017). Similarly, Ajir and Vailliant
(2018) demonstrate that information warfare is a codified, theorized,
institutionalized, well-supported, and ongoing facet of Russian policy,
which they argue is meant to destabilize the West and restore Russian
greatness beginning with its so-called near abroad.
Indeed, one of the first actions taken by the Latvian dissident group
Helsinki-86 speaks to the concept of the near abroad. In a letter to Mikhail
Gorbachev, they wrote:
We request that you, Comrade Gorbachev, help realize Article 69 of the

Constitution of the Latvian SSR which says that the Latvian SSR keeps the
right to choose secession from the Soviet Union. … Your nation possesses
unbelievable vastness of land from the Baltic Sea to Japan. … Do you really
need 1.5 million Latvians and a tiny piece of land at the Baltic Sea? (Pelkaus,
1999, p. 527)
Their question points to the absurdity of Russia’s concern for Latvia and
its tiny neighbors, but the answer to it, even for Gorbachev, was “yes.” He
did not wish to see Baltic independence restored. In 2005, President
Vladimir Putin, in a state of the nation address, called the fall of the Soviet
Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Thus, the
Baltic states find themselves in the shadow of Russian ambition once again.
Thus, the West is in rivalry with the East once more. Thus, Russia has
failed Carl Bildt’s litmus test.
In 2020, Latvia issued an update to its State Defense Concept (Valsts
aizsardzības koncepcija). It stressed the need to secure the country’s infor-
mation space and urged action on individual and state levels. To inoculate
individuals against disinformation, they need to be provided better media
literacy skills. The state must develop the tools to counter disinformation
campaigns (2020). This book examines the Baltic information wars in
terms of the geopolitical and internal concerns, and the reactions they
have provoked. Media are now, as they often have been in Baltic history,
instrumentalized, politically contested, and prominent in debates about
Baltic sovereignty and development.
***
At its core, effective communication is the production of shared meaning.

That is why Jannsen’s newspaper was so important to the development of
the Estonian nation. At the same time, in the Baltics there has often been
competition over how to understand society by competing interests. The
interests of great powers have also been a looming presence in the infor-
mation space. The ability to achieve shared meaning among competing
forces and states has been difficult. It is still so, and in the Baltic region,
we are witnessing a communication breakdown with ramifications beyond
the borders of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
The repercussions of Russia’s foreign policy and disinformation cam-
paigns may not be felt in the loss of Baltic independence. However, even
without a doomsday scenario, there already is and will be fallout from the
information wars. In the face of Russian disinformation, Baltic govern-
ments are mobilizing their responses with media literacy campaigns,
domestic Russian-language broadcasting, Russian media bans, and more.
NATO is taking action with strategic communication measures. Citizens
act as elves to take on trolls. New institutions seek to unmask the sources
of disinformation presumed to brainwash those who encounter it. Media
and politicians cross swords over values and histories, while trust in them
weakens. The battles are echoing through the ether: Welcome to the
information wars in the Baltic states.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
W. C. Nicholas, one of the foremost Jeffersonians of Virginia, and John
Breckenridge of Kentucky, who had returned on a visit to his native State. It
does not appear that Madison participated in this conference, although he
was in complete accord with its purpose. There the plan was perfected to
launch a movement of protest against the Alien and Sedition Laws through
the Legislatures of the various States in resolutions pronouncing them
violative of the Constitution and void. While Jefferson, recalling the
occasion a quarter of a century later, thought that he had been pressed to
frame such resolutions, it is unlikely that the plan did not originate in his
own mind. He had an uncanny faculty for calling forth suggestions from
others to meet his views. On one point his memory was clear—there was to
be the utmost secrecy as to the part he played. That he did prepare a draft is
thoroughly established; that the draft finally submitted to the Kentucky
Legislature, while based on the Jeffersonian draft, was the work of John
Breckenridge has been convincingly maintained.[1577]
This dashing young leader of the Kentucky Democracy had been a
marked figure from his earliest youth. More than six feet in height, spare and
muscular in build, with the strength and grace of carriage born of his
wilderness training, he looked the leader of men. His hair, a rich chestnut
tending to auburn, disclosed something of his ardent temperament and was
not unlike that of his idolized chief. His brown eyes could be stern or tender.
His address was easy and dignified, and his manner not without that touch of
gravity which creates confidence in the follower. There was much of
tenderness and everything of generosity in his nature to explain the love
which enveloped him wherever he went.
Born of Scotch-Irish stock in Virginia thirty-eight years before, his had
been an extraordinary career. Scarcely was he out of college when, without
any effort on his part, he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates at
the age of nineteen. When the House refused him his seat because of his age,
his loyal constituents elected him again. Again refused his seat, he was
elected for the third time, and seated. During the next five years he
distinguished himself by his industry and ability no less than by the charm of
his personality. It was about this time that the young man ascended the hill to
Monticello to sit at the feet of the god of his idolatry. Jefferson was
impressed by ‘the large scope of his mind,’ his great store of information,
and ‘the moral direction’ of his ideas.[1578] There had to be something
extraordinary in the man to whom Gallatin looked a little later as the man
best qualified to continue the work of Jefferson, Madison, and himself.[1579]
At the bar Breckenridge distinguished himself by his erudition, his
industry, and the fluency and force of his arguments, which were notably
free from the floridity then so popular in the South. Elected to Congress
when thirty-three, he had abandoned his seat to remove to Lexington,
Kentucky, where he acquired a large plantation and settled down to the
practice of his profession. Almost immediately he was deeply engaged in
politics. He was made President of the Democratic Society of Kentucky and
became one of the most engaging of the Democratic leaders of the pioneer
State. Returning to Kentucky with the Jefferson draft, he made some
changes, and on November 8th presented the Resolutions to the Legislature.
The debate was brief, and on the 10th they were adopted.
The Virginia Resolutions, written by James Madison after conferences
with Jefferson, were introduced in the Legislature of that State by the
celebrated John Taylor of Caroline. These, too, were speedily adopted after a
brilliant debate in which their sponsor and Giles crossed swords with the
eloquent George Keith Taylor.
The primary purpose of these Resolutions was to concentrate attention on
the Alien and Sedition Laws. They were to be sent to the Legislatures of all
the States where they would be thoroughly discussed. Jefferson was too wise
to have expected a favorable response from Legislatures dominated by the
Federalists. But there would be debate, agitation, newspaper controversy—
the hated laws would have the searchlight turned full upon them. Historians
have been interested in these Resolutions because they set forth in the most
impressive manner the compact theory of the Union on which the
nullificationists and secessionists were to seize much later as justification for
their course. We are interested here in the contemporary view and the
political aspect. The reader of to-day is apt to overlook the fact that they
were primarily intended as a protest against interference with the freedom of
speech and the liberty of the press, and only ‘incidentally they gave
expression to a theory concerning the nature of the federal union.’[1580] That
this was the general contemporary interpretation is shown in the actions of
the other Legislatures. Thus Maryland, Federalist, rejected the Resolutions
as ‘highly improper’ because ‘a recommendation to repeal the Alien and
Sedition Laws would be unwise and impolitic.’[1581] Thus Delaware,
Federalist, dismissed them as a ‘very unjustifiable interference with the
general government.’ Thus New Hampshire, Federalist, declared the
obnoxious laws ‘constitutional and ... highly expedient.’ The Federalists of
Rhode Island pronounced them ‘within the powers delegated to Congress
and promotive of the welfare of the United States.’
Only in Massachusetts did the Federalists make a comprehensive and
argumentative reply to the effect that the constitutionality of measures could
only be passed upon by the Supreme Court. The Alien and Sedition Laws
were defended as in no wise interfering with the liberty of the press. And
here, strangely enough, Democrats were found to support the Resolutions in
speeches of no mean merit. In John Bacon of Berkshire the Jeffersonians had
their sole representative in the State Senate. Formerly a minister of the Old
South Church, and a speaker of some ability, he delivered a carefully
prepared speech assailing the constitutionality of the oppressive laws, and
gave it to the press.[1582] Dr. Aaron Hill of Cambridge, a Jeffersonian in the
House, acted similarly in that body—and on both Hill and Bacon the
floodgates of falsehood and abuse were opened. In an open letter to Bacon in
the ‘Centinel,’ he was charged with having been a Tory, with having
quarreled with the congregation at the Old South, with having owned, as
slaves, a married couple, and with having sold the husband into a distant
State.[1583] When Bacon proved the charges shamelessly false, the
‘Centinel’ took no notice.[1584] Dr. Hill fared quite as badly when students
from Harvard exercised their learning by smashing the windows and
casements of his home.[1585] And it was at this juncture that Thomas Adams,
of the ‘Independent Chronicle,’ was indicted and Abijah Adams was thrown
into a cell for criticizing the action of the Legislature.[1586]
Everywhere the Federalist papers made the Resolutions the occasion for a
justification of the Alien and Sedition Laws; everywhere the Jeffersonians,
usually refraining from a discussion of the theory of the Federal Union
advanced, made them the pretext for a denunciation of the laws. And
significantly enough, it was reserved for the favorite Federalist organ of
‘Porcupine’ to preach and all but urge secession. Replying to a
correspondent who had denied the right of secession, ‘Porcupine’ said:
‘Does he imagine that the industrious and orderly people of New England
will ever suffer themselves to be governed by an impious philosopher or a
gambling profligate imposed upon them by Virginia influence? If he does, he
knows very little of New England. The New Englanders know well that they
are the rock of the Union. They know their own value; they feel their
strength, and they will have their full share of influence in the federal
government, or they will not be governed by it. It is clear that their influence
must decrease; because ... the Middle and Southern States are increasing in
inhabitants five times as fast as New England is. If Pennsylvania joins her
influence to that of New England the balance will be kept up; but the
moment she decidedly throws it into the scale with Virginia the balance is
gone, New England loses her influence in the national Government, and she
establishes a Government of her own.’[1587] This reflects the spirit of the
times when the two parties faced each other for the decisive battle of 1800.
The Alien and Sedition Laws and the Terror were issues; the Kentucky and
Virginia Resolutions played scarcely any part at all.
CHAPTER XVIII
ADAMS PULLS DOWN THE PILLARS
M EANWHILE, the Federalist leaders, having, as they thought, cowed

and crushed the Democrats, were engaged in an internecine strife for
control. There was to be war—at all hazards a war. It was to be a
Federalist war, with Jeffersonians rigidly excluded from all places of
command. But more than that, it had to be a war personally conducted by
Alexander Hamilton—with no unseemly interference from John Adams.
This was the grim determination of the radical Federalists everywhere, even
the Essex Junto, in the President’s own State, sharing it with the three
leading members of the Adams Cabinet. Thus, when Adams one day
casually asked Pickering who should be made Commander-in-Chief of the
army, and the spectacled Puritan unhesitatingly answered, ‘Colonel
Hamilton,’ there was an ominous silence. When, on another occasion, the
same question elicited the identical answer, with a similar silence, even
Pickering must have sensed the situation. But when, after a third question
had brought the same answer, and Adams, a little annoyed, had rejected the
suggestion with the sharp observation, ‘It is not his turn by a great deal,’
Pickering might have dropped his plans without disgrace.[1588] But nothing
was more remote from his intentions. It was at this time that the
conspirators, including the three members of the Cabinet, put their heads
together to devise ways and means of forcing the appointment of their idol.
The chief command would naturally be offered to Washington, who would
accept the position in an honorary sense, but old age and infirmities would
make his activities and authority but perfunctory. The important thing was to
secure the second position for Hamilton—and even there was a rub. Adams
was prejudiced.
Then, one day, Adams ordered McHenry to Mount Vernon to proffer the
chief command to Washington, with a request for advice in the formation of
the officers’ list. The names of several eligibles for the leading posts,
enumerated by Adams, might be mentioned. Hamilton was among them, but
he was fourth on the list. That day McHenry hastened to Pickering, and the
conspiracy against the President in his own household began to unfold. It
was agreed that Pickering should send a personal letter on ahead urging
Hamilton for second place, McHenry should reënforce Pickering’s plea in
person, Hamilton should be instantly notified and a letter from him should
be delivered to Washington along with the commission from Adams. Thus,
when the smug-faced little War Secretary, more familiar with the pen of the
rhymester than with the sword of the soldier, bade his chief adieu and set out
upon his mission, he was the messenger of his chief’s dearest enemy,
prepared to exhaust his ingenuity in thwarting the plans of the man of whom
he was a subordinate and on whose mission he went forth.
As early as June, Washington had planned to make Hamilton Inspector-
General, but without placing him ahead of Pinckney or Knox, both of whom
outranked him in the old army.[1589] Just what treachery McHenry practiced
as he sat on the veranda at Mount Vernon those July days will never be
positively known. That he pleaded the cause of Hamilton against the wishes
of his chief there can be no doubt. That it was he who suggested that
Washington should make his own acceptance conditional on having absolute
power in the selection of his subordinates is more than probable. At any rate,
when he returned to Philadelphia he carried in Washington’s handwriting the
names of the three Major-Generals—Hamilton, Pinckney, and Knox, in the
order given. In this order Adams, who assumed that their relative positions
would be determined by himself, sent them to the Senate and they were
confirmed.
Soon the Federalist camp was in fermentation as to whether Knox,
favored by the President, or Hamilton, preferred by the party bosses, should
be second in command. Pinckney, who accepted slights with the same
contrite spirit with which his brother had stepped aside for Jay in London,
agreed to serve under the Federalist leader, but Knox, not so humble,
refused, and the crisis came. Personally fond of Knox, the quarrel was
embarrassing to Washington, but it had never been the habit of the
Hamiltonians to spare him where their wishes were involved. Soon Hamilton
was bombarding Mount Vernon with letters strikingly lacking in the spirit of
humility. His claims were superior to those of Knox or Pinckney, and the
Federalists preferred him to the former.[1590] ‘If I am to be degraded beneath
my just claims in public opinion, ought I acquiesce?’ he wrote the
sympathetic Pickering.[1591] To McHenry he wrote that he would not
surrender the first place to which he ‘had been called by the voice of the
country’;[1592] to Washington that the Federalists of New England favored
him over Knox.[1593]
All the while the three leading members of the Cabinet were concocting
plans for the humiliation of Adams, taking their orders from Hamilton, who,
from his law office in New York, was directing the fight of the President’s
trusted advisers against their chief. One day the angels looked down and
smiled through tears on the spectacle of McHenry writing a letter to Knox
fixing his status, from a model in the handwriting of Alexander Hamilton.
[1594] As Adams stubbornly held his ground, one by one all the
Hamiltonians of consequence were drawn into the conspiracy against him.
One evening the secretarial conspirators sat about a table phrasing a
persuasive note to Adams which Wolcott, the most consummate deceiver of
the three, should sign and send as his personal view. ‘Public opinion’
favored Hamilton, Washington preferred him, and ‘Knox [has] no popular
character even in Massachusetts.’[1595] Having dispatched this cunning
letter, Wolcott immediately wrote his real chief in New York that ‘measures
have been taken to bring all right,’ and requesting Hamilton neither to do nor
to say anything ‘until you hear from me.’[1596] Another little caucus of
conspirators in Boston: present, Cabot, Ames, and Higginson; purpose, the
framing of a letter to Adams that Cabot should sign, assuring the President
of a ‘remarkable uniformity of sentiment’ in New England for Hamilton
over Knox.[1597] Having sent this letter, Cabot wrote confidentially to
Pickering suggesting that General Wadsworth, who was ‘accustomed to tell
[Knox] his faults,’ should be enlisted in the cause.[1598] Meanwhile
Pickering, more sinister, if less deceptive than the others, was seeking to
intimidate his chief by having Hamiltonian Senators declare that the officers
had been confirmed with the understanding that Hamilton stood at the head.
[1599]
All this time, Iago-like letters were going forth from members of the
Cabinet to Washington conveying the impression that Adams was
contemptuously indifferent to the great man’s wishes. The effect was all that
could have been desired. In a surprisingly offensive note, Washington wrote
peremptorily to the President demanding to know ‘at once and precisely’
what was to be expected.[1600] Such a letter from a less popular idol would
have elicited an answer sharp and decisive; but, taking discretion for the
wiser course, Adams swallowed his pride and wrote a conciliatory note, not
neglecting, however, to remind the man who had presided over the
Constitutional Convention that under the Constitution the President, and no
one else, ‘has the authority to determine the rank of the officers.’[1601] Thus
the issue was closed, with Hamilton triumphant, but with Adams awaiting
only an opportunity for revenge. The tiny cloud that had appeared in the
beginning of the Administration was now dark and large and threatening.
II
Having won with Hamilton, the Federalist leaders now turned to another
part of their programme—the rigid exclusion of Jeffersonians from
commissions in the army. This was to be a Federalist war, nothing less. Even
Washington, who had, by this time, become a partisan Federalist, was in
sympathy with the view that the friends of Jefferson, Madison, Hancock, and
Sam Adams should be proscribed. This appears in his consultations with
John Marshall as to the personnel of the army,[1602] and in a letter to
McHenry referring to the ‘erroneous political opinions’ of an applicant.[1603]
This enlistment of Washington in the proscriptive policies of the Federalists
is directly traceable to the Iagos who were writing him all the while.
Hamilton was solemnly assuring him that the Democrats were ‘determined
to go every length with France’ and to ‘form with her a perpetual offensive
and defensive alliance and to give her a monopoly of our trade.’[1604]
Thus one day Adams sat in conference with Washington on the
organization of the army. Knowing Aaron Burr as a brave and able officer
anxious to fight, he wished to recognize the Democrats by giving him a
commission. Washington, much under the influence of Hamilton, conceded
Burr’s capacity, but opposed his appointment because he was a master of
intrigue. Through the mind of Adams, hampered in his plans at every turn,
flashed the vivid memory of how his predecessor had forced him to
humiliate his own friends in the appointment of Hamilton—‘the most
restless, impatient, artful, indefatigable, and unprincipled intriguer in the
United States.’ But—as he afterward wrote—he was ‘not permitted to
nominate Burr.’[1605] Here again the traitors in the Cabinet had played their
part.[1606]
But the war was not to be national, but Federalist. ‘Every one of them
[Democrats] ought to be rejected, and only men of fair property employed in
the higher and more confidential grades,’ wrote a Federalist Representative
to Wolcott.[1607] When Adams’s son-in-law applied for a commission his
application was held until he sent a certificate that he had not interfered in a
gubernatorial election in New York.[1608] So zealously did the minor
politicians enter into this policy of proscription that some of the wiser
leaders began to take alarm. Even a friend of McHenry at Baltimore was
moved to protest. ‘They seemed to imagine that nothing was left to be done
but to exterminate every one who had been on the Democratic side’ he
complained.[1609] Even Hamilton finally thought fit to call for a moderation
of the programme. ‘It does not seem advisable,’ he wrote McHenry, ‘to
exclude all hope and to give to appointments too absolute a party
feature.’[1610] But there was no relenting in party circles, and no one had
done more to arouse this fanatical spirit than Hamilton himself.
The climax of stupidity was reached in the case of Frederick A.
Muhlenberg, former Speaker of the House, a leader and oracle among the
Germans of Pennsylvania, but no blind follower of Federalism. In a spirit of
pure patriotism he had personally offered the service of his sword to Adams,
whose wish to accept it was again thwarted by Washington, acting under the
inspiration of the Federalist leaders. Whereupon Muhlenberg marched with
the Germans as a body into the Jeffersonian camp and enlisted for another
war.[1611]
Under this proscriptive program the Jeffersonians remained mute but for
a few sarcastic comments in their press. ‘General Washington must have
some very keen reflection,’ said the ‘Independent Chronicle,’ ‘in taking
command of the army of the present day, in seeing so many new friends who
were his old enemies during the Revolution.’[1612] When it was reported that
Robert Goodhue Harper had been made Commissioner-General, it chortled,
‘What lawyer would not plead for such a fee?’[1613] And it had reflected on
Adams’s ‘pretence’ for piety in connection with his appointment of
Hamilton, ‘who published a book to prove that he was an adulterer.’[1614]
Bitter as were the reflections of Adams on reading such observations, it
could have mattered little to Hamilton. Everything he had started out to get
he got. He wanted a war with France—and got it. He wanted the command
directly under Washington as he had wanted nothing else in his life—and got
it, by striding to his sword over the humiliated pride of the President. He
wanted an army of fifty thousand men, and, if he fell short in this, he
nevertheless had an army. He was on the crest of the wave, the most
powerful man in America, and he was happy.
III
Feeling that supreme fortune was within his grasp, Hamilton threw all his
enthusiasm and vitality into the task of perfecting the army and organizing
the Nation for war. ‘The law has abandoned him, or rather he has forsaken
it,’ wrote a friend to King.[1615] Preparing the plan for the fortification of
New York Harbor, he personally superintended its execution. He had worked
out to the minutest detail the organization of the army and all he lacked was
men and a declaration of war. But alas, he was confronted on every hand by
disheartening difficulties. The recruiting fell pathetically short of
anticipations, the War Department under the Secretary of his own choosing
was pitifully inefficient, and, while the army was woefully below the
provisions of Congress, even the fragment was not adequately clothed or
provisioned, and there was a deficiency of tents. In a rage, Hamilton wrote
angrily to McHenry: ‘Why, dear friend, why do you suffer the business of
providing to go on as it does? Every moment proves the insufficiency of the
existing plan and the necessity of auxiliaries. I have no doubt that at
Baltimore, New York, Providence, and Boston additional supplies of
clothing may promptly be procured and prepared by your agents, and it
ought to be done, though it may enhance the expense. ‘Tis terrible ... that
there should be wants everywhere. So of tents. Calls for them are repeated
from Massachusetts where better and cheaper than anywhere else they can
certainly be provided.’[1616]
The truth is that the hysteria for getting at the throat of the French
democracy was over almost as soon as it began, and the masses commenced
to reflect on the cost, as the war measures grew apace. Jefferson, noting the
increasing boldness of opposition in Pennsylvania, where petitions were
signed by four thousand people protesting against the Alien and Sedition
Laws, standing armies, and extraordinary war powers for the President, and
observing similar unrest in New Jersey and New York, and ‘even in New
Hampshire,’ was fearful of insurrection. ‘Nothing could be so fatal,’ he
wrote. ‘Anything like force would check the progress of public
opinion.’[1617]
When Wolcott tried to float a loan, he found the moneyed men cold to the
regular legal rate of interest, for their patriotic passion had suffered a chill
when it came to cash. After all, business was business, and why should the
Federalist men of money fail to get in on the profits? It was not hard to
persuade Wolcott, who had a sentimental weakness for the financiers, and he
could see nothing unreasonable in a demand for eight per cent. The rates for
stocks were good, commercial prospects were alluring, and after all, eight
per cent would be but ‘moderate terms.’ Adams, sore from the unmerciful
pummeling from his party, was outraged at such a rate,[1618] but Wolcott
persisted—it was the only way. War was war as business was business.
Finally, in sheer disgust, Adams capitulated to necessity with the
exclamation: ‘This damned army will be the ruin of this country; if it must
be so, it must; I cannot help it. Issue your proposals as you please.’[1619]
When Hamilton had urged that all the resources of revenue be seized upon,
Adams thought him mad, but it soon became evident that something of the
sort would be necessary.[1620]
Aha, said the ‘Independent Chronicle,’ ‘ “millions for defence but not one
cent for tribute.” This has been the language of those who are in favor of
war. The patriotism of such persons is every day becoming more and more
evident. A loan of five million has been attempted, but instead of the old
legal rate of six per cent these modern patriots have required the moderate
premium of Eight. At this rate we shall soon verify the first part of the
motto, viz., “millions for defence,” but whether the latter is not violated by
the extra interest is left to the decision of those who are to bear the
burdens.’[1621] And they who were to pay the piper gave an acquiescent nod.
The taxes which the war party had levied with such patriotic abandon
aroused bitter resentment. Among the Germans of Pennsylvania, the taxes on
houses, lands, and windows were considered the beginning of a system
which would extend to everything. The immediate outcome was an
insurrection led by John Fries, an ignorant son of a German farmer, and the
marching of the troops and the easy dissipation of the incipient rebellion
against the assessors.[1622]
About that time Hamilton arrived in Philadelphia. ‘For what purpose?’
inquired ‘The Aurora.’ ‘Can it be to foment another insurrection and thereby
to increase the energies of the Government? What distinguished citizen is
there in the counties of Northampton and Bucks that he wishes to glut his
vengeance upon? Does he wish that Easton may be burned to afford him a
pretext for military execution?’[1623] If there were no executions, the people
had a touch of military rule. A troop of horse from Lancaster committed
outrages on citizens at Reading, and Jacob Schneider, a local editor,
commented with severity upon their actions. On their return through
Reading these troops went to the editor’s office, tore his clothing from his
back, dragged him to the Market House, and were preparing to give him
twenty-five lashes when troops from Philadelphia interfered.[1624] The
brutality of the soldiers shocked the country. The prisoners taken on the
expedition were treated with the same unnecessary cruelty which marked the
treatment of the rebels in the Whiskey Insurrection. Ignorant or besotted
with partisan passion, under a lax discipline, and contemptuous of the civil
government, many soldiers strutting about in uniforms, insulting and
attacking citizens, convinced the majority of the people that the
Jeffersonians were right in their observations upon the evils of standing
armies.
No one had denounced these excesses with greater vehemence than
William Duane, editor of ‘The Aurora.’ One day some petty officers in
uniforms, swords and pistols on their persons, said by Duane to have
numbered thirty and by his enemies to have been fifteen, entered his office.
With drawn pistols the compositors and pressmen were driven into a corner
and kept at bay by a part of the assailants. Some grasped and held Duane’s
hands while others beat him over the head with the butt end of a pistol. Then
with ten gallant soldiers participating in the assault on the one man, he was
brutally dragged downstairs into Franklin Court, where the assault was
repeated. He was knocked down and kicked. The editor’s request to be
permitted to fight any one of them was ignored, and had not his sixteen-year-
old son thrown himself across his father’s body, and a number of Democrats
arrived to give battle, he would have been murdered in cold blood. That
night armed Democrats went to the ‘Aurora’ office prepared to give shot for
shot if an attempt should be made to destroy the plant.[1625] ‘Porcupine’
chortled, and young Fenno declared that ‘the punishment of this caitiff is of
no more consequence than that of any other vagabond.’ Besides, did not
every one know that ‘the infernal Aurora and the United Irishman who
conducts it’ were ‘expressly chargeable with the Northampton
Insurrection?’[1626]
With such encouragement from the organs of the Administration, these
outrages by soldiers soon became commonplace wherever they were
assembled, with uniformed ruffians swaggering down the streets pushing
civilians into the gutters, taking liberties with women, picking quarrels while
drunk, and slashing and lunging with dirk and sword.[1627] This bullying
spirit affected the petty officers and reached a climax when civil officials,
armed with a warrant for a thief who had escaped to the soldiers near
Philadelphia, were literally kicked out of the camp, their warrant cursed and
trampled.[1628] With the tide rising rapidly against both the war and the
army, the recruiting lagged. Adams in later years recalled that the army was
as unpopular ‘as if it had been a ferocious wild beast let loose upon the
nation to devour it.’[1629] With the recruiting officers putting forth their
utmost efforts, ‘with all the influence of Hamilton, reënforced by the
magical name of Washington,’ they were unable to ‘raise one half of their ...
little army.’[1630] Duane wrote that before the law creating the army passed
‘there were 15,000 applications for commissions—since the passing of the
law there have been only 3000 soldiers.’[1631] There is more than a touch of
irony in the fact that while the Administration papers were vilifying the
Irish, ‘three fifths of the men enlisted were Irish immigrants.’[1632]
But there was another reason for the failure in recruiting—the people
soon concluded that some one had cried ‘wolf’ when there was no wolf. No
one, including Hamilton, believed that France had the most remote notion of
warring on the United States. The impression grew that the army was
intended for purposes other than the protection of the country from a foreign
foe. Meanwhile, the taxes were bearing hard, the national debt was mounting
and the passion for peace returned. Right gallantly the war party sought to
reawaken the fine frenzy of the hysterical days of the X Y Z papers. The
preachers were as distressed over the possibility of peace as the politicians,
and a convention of ministers in Boston issued a war cry. ‘You will see by
these things that the clergy are not asleep this way,’ wrote a Massachusetts
man to Wolcott. ‘They ought everywhere to be awake.’[1633] From the New
York ‘Commercial Advertiser’ came a pathetic attempt to sweep back the
rising tide for peace: ‘The necessity in times like the present in cherishing
the war spirit ... is evident.’[1634] Apropos of the report that the French were
ready to make every concession to our interest and pride, the ‘Centinel’ in
Boston sent forth the warning, ‘The trying time is now approaching’;[1635]
but the rabble, as the masses were called, could see nothing distressing in
winning a war without the loss of a drop of blood. Fenno’s ‘Gazette,’
commenting on the business stagnation, promised that ‘a war with France
would within two months revivify every department of society, commerce
would be invigorated, the funds would rise, and every employment of life
would receive new vigor.’[1636] This sordid note he was soon to strike again.
[1637] But it was all unavailing. The enlistments dwindled to nothing,
common soldiers were actually cheering the Democratic Governor in the
streets of Philadelphia, no one feared an invasion, and, as Wolcott confided
to Fisher Ames, ‘no one has thought it prudent to say that the army is kept to
suppress or prevent rebellions.’[1638] To make matters all the worse,
desertions multiplied until the harassed McHenry was writing Hamilton
urging executions. The little rhymester was far beyond his depths, scolded
by Washington, kicked like a flunky by Hamilton in one or two letters a day.
But the idea of shooting a deserter was a bit too high-toned for Hamilton.
‘There must be some caution,’ he wrote, ‘not to render our military system
odious by giving it the appearance of being sanguinary.’[1639] Adams was
prepared for extreme measures, but it was decided to leave the decision with
Hamilton and McHenry—which meant with Hamilton. ‘If the virtuous
General Hamilton is determined upon shooting every soldier who deserts,’
said ‘The Aurora,’ ‘Billy Wilcox’s court martial will be kept at pretty
constant duty. In a Daily Advertiser of last week no less than ten of these
strayed gentlemen are advertised for apprehension at $10 a head.’[1640]
But Hamilton was too wise to shoot.
IV
The war cry was sinking to a hoarse whisper when Dr. James Logan, who
had entertained the Washingtons, and who was a follower of Jefferson,
quietly slipped out of Philadelphia one day and sailed for France—and the
war hawks were in a frenzy. When Logan, at his own expense and wholly on
his own volition, went to Paris, it was to determine the state of the public
mind there for himself. He was a leading citizen, his family familiar to
society, his home one of the most cultured in the community, and, aside from
being a friend of the French democracy, he was a Quaker and an enemy of
war. He felt that the country had been deceived by war propaganda, and he
determined to find out for himself.
The war wing of the Federalist Party knew that an investigation in Paris
was the one thing they could not afford. No one knew better that war was
unnecessary and that the French were ready if not eager to recede. Harrison
Gray Otis knew it best of all because his fellow Federalist of Boston and
classmate, Richard Codman, was writing him from Paris of the French
disposition for peace and conciliation. But this was being carefully
concealed from the American people. Thus, when Logan sailed it was
clearly the cue for the war party to hint darkly of weird conspiracies with the
French and a factional embassy from the Democrats. Soon Harper, who had
a supersensitive nose for conspiracies and treason, was hinting mysteriously
on the floor of the House of a traitorous correspondence between the French
Directory and the Jeffersonian Party. The truth is that, when Logan foolishly
made a mystery of his departure and almost surreptitiously stole out of
Philadelphia, he carried letters from Jefferson and Governor McKean. Four
or five days before his departure he had informed Jefferson of his purpose
and asked for letters of introduction and a certification of his citizenship. It
was not a secret that Jefferson was opposed to a preventable war, but no
instructions were given the Doctor, no communication was sent by Jefferson,
and there was no conspiracy at all.[1641] Thus, on his own volition Logan
went to Paris, talked with Otis’s Federalist friend Codman and other
Americans, conversed with leading Frenchmen, dined with Merlin, met
Talleyrand, and ascertained, as he had expected, that peace could be
preserved with honor. A simple, honest man, with none of the crooked
mental twists of the professional politician, he returned with the confident
expectation that the President and his advisers would be glad to get the
benefit of his observations. He reached Philadelphia to find himself the
object of immeasurable abuse.
Not doubting that Pickering would be glad to have his impressions,
Logan went first to him. This was, in truth, a ludicrous performance, and a
Federalist paper was moved to mirth because he had ‘actually unfolded his
budget to Pickering’ and ‘needless to say’ returned ‘with a bug in his
ear.’[1642] Going on to Trenton, the temporary seat of government, he saw
Washington, to be received with more than his customary coldness. He had a
message from Lafayette to Washington. ‘Aye,’ said the General. And one
from Kosciusko. ‘Aye,’ said Washington. Whereupon Logan courteously
proffered him the use of his home, which the Washingtons had often found
agreeable, while in Philadelphia, to have his offer curtly declined. Even
Pinckney haughtily refused the use of Logan’s carriage when the General
was seeking a conveyance to the capital. ‘This fellow Logan had the
unparalleled effrontery to offer the General a seat in his carriage,’ sneered a
war paper.[1643] Some historians insist that Adams treated him
contemptuously, and this seems probable in the light of the latter’s letter to
Pickering,[1644] albeit Gibbs records that Adams was much impressed with
Logan’s story and with his sincerity and candor.[1645] The letter was written
to Pickering, however, before the interview was granted.
When Congress met, Logan found himself the subject of a bitter debate
brought on by the introduction of the so-called ‘Logan Law’ prohibiting
unofficial meddling in international affairs. Harper had followed his cue and
found his conspiracy. Logan had actually presented a paper to the Directory
as from one having authority. The story was all too thin, the facts too badly
twisted, and the Jeffersonians under the leadership of Gallatin showed their
teeth. The climax came when Harper read the paper which Logan was
presumed to have presented. Then, through frank letters in ‘The Aurora,’
Logan brought out the truth to the discomfiture of the war hawks. In view of
the scurvy treatment he has received, his own statement is one of value. He
had been met at Hamburg by Lafayette, who had furnished him with the
means to proceed to Paris. There he found negotiations at an end. Knowing
no law, ‘moral or political,’ that prevented him from serving his country, he
had sought interviews with leading characters and found France anxious for
peace. Whereupon he had suggested the lifting of the embargo on American
shipping detained in French ports and the release of American sailors held
prisoners. He had not gone to Paris ‘at the direction or on the request or on
the advice of any person whatever.’ He went for his own pleasure, on his
own views, and at his own expense.[1646] Not only had the memorial Harper
had read to the house not been presented by him, it had not been written by
him, but by a good Federalist who was an intimate friend and correspondent
of Harrison Gray Otis, and he had refused the request to present it on the
ground of its ‘having too much the appearance of an official act.’[1647] The
absolute veracity of this story was known to Otis, who was intimate with
Harper, for he had a letter from Codman in verification, and to the effect that
Logan had told Talleyrand that in the event of war all parties in America
would rally around the Government ‘and oppose all its enemies.’[1648]
Thus there was a conspiracy, a peculiarly ugly conspiracy, of the war
hawks to ruin an honest, patriotic, if Quixotic man because of his
interference with their plans to manufacture a needless and therefore a
criminal war.
But there was a special reason for the war party’s rage over Logan. About
this time Elbridge Gerry, one of the three envoys, who had stayed over in
Paris on the invitation of Talleyrand, had returned with a similar story. The
Federalists had been outraged by his failure to leave with his colleagues, and
on his return to his home in Cambridge he found himself socially ostracized.
Adams, who was his friend, had severely condemned him for continuing his
conferences in Paris.[1649] So bitter was the feeling against him, that the war
party did not scruple to terrorize his family in his absence. His wife received
anonymous letters charging that a woman was responsible for his lingering
in Paris. With only women and children in his house, their nights were made
hideous with yells and bonfires under their windows; and one morning Mrs.
Gerry looked out of the window on a miniature guillotine smeared with
blood. On his return, Gerry had gone to Philadelphia and left his dispatches,
which Pickering had published with his intemperate comments. The
Federalists were well pleased with Pickering’s excoriation.
And Jefferson? So different was his conception of public opinion that he
was delighted. Seizing upon the Gerry correspondence as a complete answer
to the X Y Z papers, he wrote Edmund Pendleton that it was too voluminous
for the masses, and urging him to prepare ‘a capitulation ... stating
everything ... short, simple, and leveled to every capacity ... so concise, as,
omitting nothing material, may yet be printed in handbills, of which we
could print and disperse ten or twelve thousand copies under letter covers,
through all the United States by the members of Congress when they return
home.’[1650]
Meanwhile, Gerry had hastened to Quincy, and in the rambling frame
house of the President was going over the situation with him.
The restoration of peace with France would mean the end of the army
created with so much expense and trouble. So determined were the
Hamiltonians on war that they were ready to wreck the Federalist Party on
the issue. Many explanations have been offered. Wolcott had hinted in his
letter to Ames that an army was wanted for domestic use.[1651] That was the
common charge of the Democrats. That there was another and more
portentous reason we may be sure, albeit the public, and even John Adams,
was ignorant of it.
At that time a queer little Latin-American soldier of fortune, Francesco de
Miranda, was living in London, playing about Downing Street, and
conferring with Rufus King, the American Minister, who, next to Morris,
was the ablest of Hamilton’s lieutenants. There was a possibility that at any
time England might be forced to war on Spain should that country enter into
the struggle on the side of France. The United States was then engaged in a
quarrel with Spain. It was the idea of Miranda to enlist England and the
United States in a grand revolutionary scheme in South America. He had
discussed it with the British Ministers and with King, who was in
correspondence with Hamilton. It involved an alliance between the English-
speaking countries. This had been hinted at, as we have seen, long before, by
Hamilton in a letter to Pickering, who was in favor of entering into such an
alliance without delay. It was the plan of Miranda for England to furnish the
ships, not exceeding twenty, men and money; the United States to supply no
less than seven thousand soldiers, two thousand of these being cavalry. The
lure of Florida and Cuba was held out to the United States.[1652] Here was a
grand scheme of conquest that appealed irresistibly to Hamilton’s ambition
for military glory.[1653] Entirely unknown to Adams or Washington,
Hamilton had been in correspondence with the soldier of fortune, and in
communication with him through King who was managing the London end
of the affair. He made it plain to King that in the event of a successful issue
he would want the United States to be the principal agency. ‘The command
in this case would very naturally fall upon me, and I hope I should
disappoint no favorable anticipations,’ he wrote. He thought the country not
quite ripe for the enterprise, but ‘we ripen fast, and it may, I think, be rapidly
brought to maturity if an efficient negotiation for the purpose is at once set
on foot.’[1654] To Miranda he was writing that he would not embark in the
affair ‘unless patronized by the Government of this country.’ An army of
twelve thousand men was being raised. ‘General Washington has resumed
his station at the head of our armies, I am second in command.’[1655] In the
autumn of 1798, he was writing Senator Gunn on the importance of heavy
cannon for fortifications and mortars in the case of a siege. ‘If we engage in
war our game will be to attack where we can. France is not to be considered
as separated from her ally. Tempting objects will be within our grasp.’[1656]
In January, 1799, Hamilton was writing Otis in the same strain. ‘If universal
empire is still to be the pursuit of France, what can tend to defeat that
purpose better than to detach South America from Spain.... The Executive
ought to be put in a situation to embrace favorable conjunctures for effecting
that separation.’[1657] With all this Pickering was familiar and in sympathy,
but Adams was in total ignorance. In time the subject was cautiously
broached to him, to be rejected with the curt notation that we were not at war
with Spain. But the record is too clear to leave the South American project
out of consideration in seeking the reason for the intense desire for war—and
a large army. Through all this period, Hamilton had visions of himself on
horseback, at the head of troops in South America, with England as an ally.
[1658]
Never had Hamilton felt himself so near the top of the world. When
Congress met in the fall of 1798, he had a plan ready for a complete change
in the formation of the Nation. This provided for eighty United States
District Courts;[1659] the division of old States into new ones for any
territory having as many as 100,000 people on the request of any
considerable number—which would or could have made seven States out of
Virginia; and for the extension and more rigid enforcement of the Sedition
Law.
It was on this state of affairs that Adams, perplexed, harassed, worried by
the serious illness of Abigail, aching under the humiliations visited upon him
by the bosses of his party, meditated during the summer and early fall of
1798. And he thought seriously, too, on what Gerry had told him of the
temper of France.
VI
This had almost persuaded him that a new mission to France was feasible,
when a letter from Murray at The Hague, indicating uneasiness in Paris lest
the United States be forced into an alliance with England, convinced him.
Thus, about the middle of October, in a letter to Pickering, he submitted two
questions for the consideration of the Cabinet. ‘Should there be a declaration
of war?’ ‘Could proposals for further negotiations be made with safety, and
should a new envoy be named, prepared to sail on assurances that he would
be received?’
That letter fell like a bomb in the camp of the war conspirators. How
Pickering must have scowled, and McHenry grumbled, and Wolcott
shrugged his shoulders with a cynical grin when they sat down to meditate
on its meaning. That more important personages were informed we may be
sure. To that note, however, the Cabinet did not deign to reply. Had not
Adams declared that he would never send another envoy unless solemnly
assured that he would be received? No such assurance had come. Then why
discuss it—even on the request of the President? However, a Message would
have to be sent to Congress, and with Adams in a conciliatory frame of mind
it was imperative that something definite await him on his arrival. Thus the
conspirators sat down to the framing of a Message that would defeat the very
purpose the letter had indicated. Hamilton and Pinckney were summoned to
the conference. The result was a paragraph putting it squarely up to France
to take the initiative in the matter of a renewal of negotiations. Wolcott, who,
better than any of the others, could hide his treachery behind an ingratiating
urbanity, was put forward as the author. Reaching the capital, Adams
summoned his Cabinet to go over the Message. All went well until the
fateful paragraph was reached, and instantly the keen eye of the suspicious
old man caught its full significance. That, he would not accept, and an open
struggle began. With earnestness and even heat the obnoxious paragraph was
urged upon him, but Adams planted his feet and stood. He would rewrite
that paragraph to conform to his personal view of the proprieties.[1660]
The Cabinet conspirators retired with the realization that there were dark
days ahead. Adams in his substitute held forth the olive branch to the extent
of declaring that no new envoy would be sent unless assurances were
forthcoming that he would be properly received. Washington, Hamilton, and
Pinckney, in uniforms, sat in the chamber when the Message was read. Two
of these, at least, had grave forebodings. Then it was that the conspirators
determined to override Adams by meeting his plan for negotiations with an
immediate declaration of war. A caucus of the Federalists was called. The
most brilliant and fiery orators were primed for the occasion. The proposal
was made and supported with eloquence. The vote was taken, and by a small
majority Adams triumphed over his foes. This was the most significant
incident yet—it meant that Hamilton had lost control of the party councils.
[1661] With that knowledge, Pickering made no further attempt to conceal his
bitter hostility to his chief. Ordered to prepare a treaty that would be
acceptable, he ignored the request. Asked to moderate his report on the

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Information Wars in the Baltic States:

Russia’s Long Shadow Janis Chakars

ISSN 2945-6118 ISSN 2945-6126 (electronic)

Cover image: © Martins Gurtais / EyeEm / Getty Image

“This book is an exceptionally timely collection of analyses from journalists, aca-

Part I The Weight of History 9

Part II The Weight of Ethnicity 53

Part III The Digital Challenges 121

Part IV The Responses 167

Part V The Complications 225

Janis Chakars is Associate Professor of Communication and Digital

Indra Ekmanis is a Baltic Sea fellow at the Foreign Policy Research

in esse: art + opinions; Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving

Latvia and Estonia during times of geo-political uncertainty. He is the

Table 5.4 Change in percentage points of the evaluation given to the

Janis Chakars and Indra Ekmanis

At the start of 2019, about 60,000 followers in Latvia and Estonia—a

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

An important part of the work is to produce situational analyses and reports

States cannot count on Meta, or other platforms, to solve their problems.

the volume—disinformation is a many-headed monster that demands a

In section four, attention is focused on responses to information disor-

However, recently, several significant Russian organizations have set up

ERR. (2020, January 1). Sputnik ends operations in Estonia. https://news.err.

The Weight of History

Echoes of the Past: Media and History

Janis Chakars and Indra Ekmanis

In 1930, Eugen Jannsen, youngest son of the progenitor of Estonian

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 11

Livland nobility, or the Estonian republic of [Prime Minister] Herr [Jaan]

expectations of international conduct that Western powers could insist

A Pattern of Political Instrumentalization

understand each other as connected as a people. Through its ritual con-

Press control as an existential matter for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania

until—with troops on the ground—sham elections led to total conquest,

But in that pursuit of thought, Lenin’s desires ultimately failed in the

instance, nationalist activist endeavors of the early perestroika era were at

Three decades on from reestablished independence, the Baltic countries

Political, personal, and linguistic integration is certainly gaining root in

rehabilitate a “hypodermic needle” theory of media influence, the reality

Continuity and Change in the Baltic

importance. Today, Russian policy-making and posturing have again pro-

controversial. In a commentary shortly before it shuttered, Latvian media

European Union and, especially important from a security perspective,

member. Concerns loomed large, especially following the election of

We request that you, Comrade Gorbachev, help realize Article 69 of the

At its core, effective communication is the production of shared meaning.

ADAMS PULLS DOWN THE PILLARS

M EANWHILE, the Federalist leaders, having, as they thought, cowed

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Part I The Weight of History 9

Part II The Weight of Ethnicity 53

Part III The Digital Challenges 121

Part IV The Responses 167

Part V The Complications 225