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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
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
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publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover image: © Martins Gurtais / EyeEm / Getty Image
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
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.
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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://
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from-facebooks-sputnik-crackdown/
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ee/1019231/sputnik-ends-operations-in-estonia
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uk/rp_insight/
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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/
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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.
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Aunt Martha bit her lips, and two bright pink spots showed on her
cheeks. “This is scandalous!” she exclaimed.
“It’s downright wicked!” said old Mrs. Lancaster.
The minister went on with the service, raising his voice to make
himself heard; but Don, and doubtless many others, had little thought
for what was being said inside the church.
At the end of the service many of the people hurried past the soldiers
on their way home; but others stood and watched with indignant
glances.
That event was only one of many other irritations that followed and
inflamed the hearts of the townsfolk.
“Aunt Martha, war has got to come,” said Don.
“Don’t speak of it, Donald,” she replied, and Don glanced once at his
aunt’s face and wished that he had held his tongue in the first place;
his aunt’s eyes were red and moist.
“All that cloth and powder is still in the cellar, isn’t it?” he asked a
while later.
“Yes, Donald; and your uncle intends to keep it there until he can find
a satisfactory way of getting it out, though what with all the trouble
that surrounds us, I do believe that he doesn’t often give it a thought
any more.”
“Seems too bad not to sell it,” said Don.
“Yes, I’ve said so myself, but he always nods and says, ‘Yes, that’s
right,’ and then his mind goes wandering off on—on other matters.”
David Hollis, and indeed all the members of the Committees of
Correspondence, had many matters to keep them busy. A close
watch was being kept on the troops in town. It was known that Gage
had sent two officers in disguise to make maps of the roads that led
to Boston; and rumor had it that he intended to send a strong force
to Concord to capture supplies that the patriots had stored there.
The month of March dragged past with war-like preparations on both
sides. Many of the townsfolk, realizing that open hostilities must
begin soon, had moved into the country. Samuel Adams and John
Hancock had gone to Lexington, where they were staying with the
Rev. Jonas Clark. David Hollis and Glen Drake had both made
several trips to the town with messages for them.
One day early in April, David Hollis took his wife aside out of hearing
of his nephew. “Martha,” he said in a low voice, “I want you to leave
the house for a while. There’s going to be trouble, and Boston will be
no safe place for you.”
Aunt Martha’s chin lifted a trifle. “And, pray, where should I go?” she
asked.
“To Cousin Deborah’s in Concord.”
“I shall not go!” Aunt Martha replied.
“But she has already prepared for you; I told her you’d come.”
“You had no right to say that.”
“But, Martha, listen to reason. I say there will be trouble—I know it!
And it’s coming soon. Need I speak plainer than that?”
“No, David, you need not. I understand. Yet I intend to remain right
here in our home.”
David Hollis threw out his hands and turned away. Then with another
gesture he said, “Martha Hollis, you are a foolish woman. I—I
command you to go; it is for your own good.”
Aunt Martha’s blue eyes flashed behind her spectacles. “And I refuse
to obey. My place is here, and here is where I stay.” Then with a
sudden flash of anger she exclaimed, “I’d like to see any Redcoats
drive me from my own home!”
David Hollis turned toward the fire and snapped his fingers several
times. “It’s too bad,” he said. “Stubbornness is not a virtue.”
“You have it!”
Uncle David made no reply.
“You tell Cousin Deborah that I’m sorry she has gone to any trouble
about me.”
“I don’t expect to go that way very soon.”
“Then Glen can see her.”
“Glen has gone—elsewhere.”
Aunt Martha was thoughtful. “Well,” she said at last, “as you say, it is
too bad, but, David, my mind is made up.”
“How would it be to send Donald? Seems to me it might be a good
vacation for him. He’s an able lad, and I know that he’d be glad to
make the trip. He could ride almost as far as Lexington with Harry
Henderson. Cousin Deborah would be glad to have him for
overnight.”
“Dear me!” said Aunt Martha. “I can’t allow it.”
But in the end she yielded, and that evening Don heard the news
with glee. “Your cousin is a nervous, exact kind of person,” his aunt
told him, “and I want you to tell her everything that I say.”
“But what is it?” asked Don.
“Tell her that I am very sorry she has gone to any trouble on my
account, but that I cannot with a clear conscience visit with her at
this time. Say also that when your uncle promised for me he had not
consulted me and therefore did not know all the facts.”
“She’ll want to know the facts,” said Don, grinning. “I’m kind of
curious myself, Aunt Martha.”
“Donald!”
But Don’s grin was irresistible, and his aunt smiled. “Never mind,”
she said. “And you’ll hurry home, won’t you?”
“I surely will, Aunt Martha.”
The next morning, the sixteenth of April, Don set out with Harry
Henderson, a raw-boned young fellow with red hair and a short
growth of red stubble on his face. The soldiers had just finished
standing parade on the Common when Don and Harry rattled by in
the cart; Harry’s light blue eyes narrowed as he watched them
moving in little groups to their barracks.
“Good morning to you, young sir,” said a cheerful voice.
Don, looking up, saw Harry Hawkins. “Good morning to you, sir,” he
replied.
Harry Henderson looked at his companion narrowly. “Friend of
yours?” he asked.
“Well, no, not exactly,” replied the boy.
“Friend of your uncle’s maybe?” Harry was grinning impudently now,
and Don’s cheeks were red.
“No; here’s how it is——” And Don gave a brief account of how he
had happened to meet the Redcoat.
“Well,” said Harry dryly, “I should think he might say good morning to
you.”
They passed the Common and finally turned into Orange Street and,
after some delay, drove past the fortifications on the Neck. “Clear of
’em b’gosh!” said Harry, cracking his whip. “We’ll reach Lexin’ton by
mid-afternoon if old Dan here doesn’t bust a leg.”
But Harry had not reckoned on horseshoes. Shortly before they
reached Medford, old Dan lost a shoe, and the circumstance caused
a delay of two hours. Then later Dan shied at a barking dog and
snapped one of the shafts. As a result Harry and Don did not reach
Lexington until almost ten o’clock.
“You’ve got to stay right here with me,” said Harry, “It’s too late for
you to reach Concord. I know your cousin, and she wouldn’t be at all
pleased to have you wake her at midnight—not she!” He laughed.
So Don remained at Lexington overnight and the next morning set
out on foot for Concord. He reached his cousin’s house just before
noon.
Cousin Deborah was a tall strong-looking woman with black hair,
black eyes and a nose that was overly large. She had once been a
school teacher and, as David Hollis used to say, had never lost the
look. “Where’s your Aunt Martha?” were her first words to Don.
“She decided she couldn’t come.”
“But Uncle David told me——”
Then followed the inevitable questions that a person like Cousin
Deborah would be sure to ask, and Don wriggled under each of
them. But after all, Cousin Deborah was good-hearted, and deep
within her she knew that she would have done the same as Don’s
aunt was doing, if she had been in similar circumstances—though
she would not acknowledge it now. “Your aunt always did have a
broad streak of will,” she said severely. “Now I want you to spend
several days with me, Donald.”
“Aunt Martha told me to hurry back.”
“That means you can stay to-night and to-morrow night,” Cousin
Deborah decided. “I’ll have dinner in a few moments, and then I want
you to tell me all the things that have happened in Boston.”
In spite of his cousin’s questions, which were many and varied, Don
managed to enjoy himself while he was at Concord. On the second
day he met a boy of his own age, and the two fished all morning from
the North Bridge. In the afternoon they went on a long tramp into the
woods along the stream.
At night Don was tired out and was glad when his cousin finally
snuffed the candles and led the way up-stairs. He was asleep shortly
after his head struck the pillow.
That night proved to be one of the most eventful in the history of the
Colonies.
CHAPTER V
THE REGULARS COME OUT
While Don was asleep, breathing the damp, fragrant air that blew
over the rolling hills and fields round Concord, his friend, Paul
Revere, was being rowed cautiously from the vicinity of Hudson’s
Point toward Charlestown. It was then near half-past ten o’clock.
Revere, muffled in a long cloak, sat in the stern of the small boat and
glanced now at his two companions—Thomas Richardson and
Joshua Bentley—and now at the British man-of-war, Somerset, only
a few rods off. The tide was at young flood, and the moon was rising.
The night seemed all black and silver—black shadows ahead where
the town of Charlestown lay, black shadows behind that shrouded
the wharfs and shipyards of the North End, and silver shimmering
splashes on the uneasy water and on the sleek spars of the
Somerset.
The sound of talking came from the direction of the man-of-war and
was followed by a burst of laughter that reverberated musically in the
cool night air. Revere blew on his hands to warm them. The little
boat drew nearer, nearer to Charlestown; now he could see the
vague outlines of wharfs and houses. Several times he glanced over
his shoulder in the direction of a solitary yellow light that gleamed in
the black-and-silver night high among the shadows on the Boston
side,—a light that burned steadily in the belfry of the Old North
Meeting-House behind Corps Hill as a signal that the British were on
their way by land to attack the Colonists.
“Here we are,” said one of the rowers, shipping his muffled oar and
partly turning in his seat.
A few minutes later the boat swung against a wharf, and the two
men at the oars held it steady while Revere stepped out. A brief
word or two and he was on his way up the dock. In the town he soon
met a group of patriots, one of whom, Richard Devens, got a horse
for him. Revere lost no time in mounting and setting off to warn the
countryside of the coming of the Redcoats.
He had not gone far beyond Charlestown Neck, however, when he
almost rode into two British officers who were waiting in the shadows
beneath a tree. One of them rode out into the middle of the path; the
other charged full at the American. Like a flash Revere turned his
horse and galloped back toward the Neck and then pushed for the
Medford road. The Redcoat, unfamiliar with the ground, had ridden
into a clay pit, and before he could get his horse free Revere was
safely out of his reach.
At Medford he roused the captain of the Minute-Men; and from there
to Lexington he stopped at almost every house along the road and
summoned the inmates from their beds. It was close to midnight
when he reached Lexington. Riding to the house of the Rev. Jonas
Clark, where Hancock and Adams were staying, he found eight men
on guard in command of a sergeant.
“Don’t make so much noise!” cried the fellow as Revere clattered up
to the gate.
“Noise!” repeated Revere in a hoarse voice. “You’ll have noise
enough here before long—the regulars are coming out!”
At that moment a window opened, and Hancock thrust his head out.
“Come in, Revere!” he said. “We’re not afraid of you!”
Revere dismounted and hurried inside. In a few words he told his
story, that the British were on their way either to capture Hancock
and Adams or to destroy the military stores at Concord. While he
was talking, William Dawes, who also had set out to warn the
people, clattered up to the door.
After he and Revere had had something to eat and to drink they
started for Concord and were joined by a Dr. Prescott, whom Don
had seen once or twice in company with his uncle. With Revere in
the lead the party rode on at a rapid pace.
About half-way to Concord, while Prescott and Dawes were rousing
the people in a house near the road, Revere spied two horsemen
ahead. Turning in his saddle, he shouted to his companions, and at
that moment two more horsemen appeared.
Prescott came riding forward in answer to the shout, and he and
Revere tried to get past the men, all of whom were British officers.
But the four of them were armed, and they forced the Americans into
a pasture. Prescott at once urged his horse into a gallop, jumped a
stone wall and, riding in headlong flight, was soon safe on his way to
Concord. Revere urged his horse toward a near-by wood, but just
before he reached it six British officers rode out, and he was a
prisoner.
“Are you an express?” demanded one of them.
“Yes,” replied Revere and with a smile added: “Gentlemen, you have
missed your aim. I left Boston after your troops had landed at
Lechemere Point, and if I had not been certain that the people, to the
distance of fifty miles into the country, had been notified of your
movements I would have risked one shot before you should have
taken me.”
For a moment no one spoke; it was clear that the Redcoats were
taken aback. Then followed more questions, all of which Revere
answered truthfully and without hesitating. Finally they ordered their
prisoner to mount, and all rode slowly toward Lexington. They were
not far from the meeting-house when the crash of musketry shook
the night air.
For an instant the major who was in command of the party thought
they had been fired on. Then he remarked to the officer beside him,
“It’s the militia.”
The officer laughed shortly and glanced at their prisoner. Then the
party halted, and the British took Revere’s horse. The major asked
him how far it was to Cambridge and, on being told, left the prisoner
standing in the field and with the rest of the party rode toward the
meeting-house.
A few minutes later Revere crossed the old burying-ground and
entered the town. He soon found Hancock and Adams again and
told them what had happened, and they concluded to take refuge in
the town of Woburn. Revere went with them. He had done his duty.
Perhaps it was a vague feeling of impending danger, perhaps it was
the mere twitter of a bird outside his window—at any rate Don awoke
with a start. All was darkness in the room. A light, cool wind stirred
the branches of the great elm at the side of the house; he could hear
the twigs rubbing gently against the rough shingles. He had no idea
what time it was; it must be after midnight, he thought; but somehow
he was not sleepy. He raised his head a trifle. Down-stairs a door
slammed; that seemed strange. Now someone was talking. “I
wonder——” he said to himself and then sat bolt upright in bed.
The church bell had begun to ring at a furious rate. Clang, clang!
Clang—clang! Don thought he had never before heard a bell ring so
harshly or so unevenly. He jumped out of bed and began to dress.
Clang! Clang! What in the world could be the matter? He could hear
shouts now and the sound of hastening footsteps. In his excitement
he got the wrong arm into his shirt. Clang! Clang—clang! He found
his shoes at last and with trembling fingers got them on his feet. He
unlatched the door and started carefully down the winding stairs. It
seemed as if there were a hundred steps to those creaking old
stairs. Twice he almost missed his footing—and all the while the bell
continued to clash and ring and tremble.
In the sitting-room a single candle was burning. Don got a glimpse of
his cousin Deborah, hastily dressed and still wearing her nightcap;
she was standing at the door, and his Cousin Eben, with a musket in
his hand and a powder horn over his shoulder, was saying good-bye.
Don saw him kiss his wife. Then the door opened, the candle
flickered, and he was gone.
“Cousin Deborah, what’s wrong?” cried Don.
“The regulars are coming!” And then Cousin Deborah burst into
tears.
Don bit his lips; he had never thought of his cousin as being capable
of tears.
They did not last long. A few movements of her handkerchief and
Cousin Deborah seemed like herself again. “Donald,” she said, “they
have begun it, and the good Lord is always on the side of the right.
Now I want you to go back to bed and get your rest.”
“Are you going back to bed, Cousin Deborah?”
“No; there will be no sleep for me this night.”
“Then I shall remain up also,” replied Don.
Cousin Deborah made no protest but went to the stove and poked
the fire.
The bell had ceased ringing now. The town of Concord was wide
awake.
While Don and his cousin were eating a hastily prepared breakfast
the Minute-Men and the militia assembled on the parade ground
near the meeting-house. Meanwhile other patriots were hard at work
transporting the military stores to a place of safety.
Dawn was breaking, and the mist was rising from the river when Don
and his cousin finally got up from the table. “Now, Donald,” said
Cousin Deborah, “I’ve been thinking all along of your Aunt Martha
and blaming myself for my selfishness in having you stay here with
me for so long. I’d give most anything if you were back there with
her. And yet——” She paused frowning.
“Oh, I can get back all right,” said Don confidently.
“How?”
“Why, by keeping off the roads as much as possible. I know the
country pretty well.”
“You’re a bright lad, Donald,” said Cousin Deborah. “You’re a bright
lad; and I don’t know but what you’d better start. Your aunt needs
you more than I do. But oh, Donald, you’ll be cautious!”
“I don’t think I ought to leave you here alone.”
“Drat the boy!” exclaimed his cousin and then smiled. “Bless you,
Donald,” she added, “I’ll be safe enough. I shall go to Mrs. Barton’s
until things are quiet again. Now go and get yourself ready.”
Don needed only a few moments in which to get his things together.
Then he walked with his cousin as far as Mrs. Barton’s house, which
was situated some distance beyond the North Bridge, bade her
good-bye and started back. It was growing lighter every minute now,
and the birds were singing in all the trees. On the road he met a
Minute-Man who was hurrying in the opposite direction, and asked
him the news.
“Regulars fired on our boys at Lexin’ton,” replied the fellow as he
hurried past. Over his shoulder he shouted, “Killed six of ’em—war’s
begun!”
Don said not a word in reply, but stood stock still in the road. For
some reason a great lump had come into his throat, and he thought
of his Aunt Martha. He must get to her as quickly as possible.
As he came near the North Bridge he saw the Provincial troops—the
Minute-Men and the militia of the town and detachments of Minute-
Men from some of the outlying towns; and all the while fresh soldiers
were hurrying to swell the numbers. The British, he soon learned,
were on their way to Concord, and several companies of Provincials
had gone out to meet them.
Don left the town and struck off into the open country several
hundred yards from the Lexington road. After a few minutes of rapid
walking he saw the detachment of Americans coming back. He
quickened his pace and finally broke into a run.
He had gone something more than a mile and a half when he
suddenly stopped and threw himself on the ground. There on the
road, marching steadily in the direction of Concord, was a large force
of regulars. He could see the flash of metal and the bright red of their
coats. For a while he lay there, panting. Then at last, spying a great
rock with a hollow just behind it, he crept toward it and waited.
The long column advanced slowly. Now Don could hear the crunch
of their feet on the hard road. He lifted his head cautiously and
began to count; there must easily be a thousand Redcoats. The
crunching grew louder as the head of the column came almost
opposite to him. Now he could hear the rattle of equipment and the
occasional jangling of a sword.
He Lifted His Head Cautiously and Began to Count.
It was some time before the rear of the column had passed. He
waited until it was perhaps a quarter of a mile up the road and then
got to his feet. He ought not to have much trouble in reaching Boston
if he started at once. He was about to resume his journey when a
fresh thought came to him. Ought he to go without knowing what
was to happen to the town of Concord—and to his Cousin Deborah?
For at least five minutes he struggled with the question. “No, I
oughtn’t!” he declared at last and, turning suddenly, began to retrace
his steps.
It was close to seven o’clock when the regulars, in two columns,
marched into Concord and sent a party over the North Bridge into
the country. Don found a clump of spruces growing on a hillside and
climbed into the lower branches of one of them. From that position
he could see the scattered houses and the two bridges, though the
distance was too great for him to be able to distinguish features or
even the outlines of anybody in the town.
Part of the King’s force seemed to have disbanded, and later when
Don heard the ring of axes he suspected that they were destroying
the stores that had not been carried away. “Well,” he thought, “they
won’t be able to destroy much.”
But when he distinguished blue smoke curling upward from several
places near the centre of the town he almost lost his grip on the
branch to which he was clinging. One of them was the court-house!
Where was the militia? Where were the Minute-Men? He made out
the peaked roof of his cousin’s house and the great elm standing
beside it, and observed with some satisfaction that no Redcoats
were close to it. Then a while later he saw the thread of smoke
above the court-house grow thinner, and at last it disappeared
altogether.
Don held his position in the tree for more than an hour. He ground
his teeth as he saw a detachment of soldiers leave the town and cut
down the liberty pole on the side of the hill. Where were the Minute-
Men and the militia?
The main body of the regulars was well inside the town. At the South
Bridge there was a small party on guard, and at the North Bridge
was another party of about one hundred. Don was so much occupied
with watching the Redcoats that he had failed to observe a long
double column of Provincials coming down the hill beyond the North
Bridge; they were moving at a fast walk and carried their guns at the
trail.
At first glance he thought there were no more than a hundred of
them, but as he watched he was forced to conclude that there were
at least three hundred. He pulled himself farther out on the limb and
waited.
The detachment of regulars, who were on the far side of the bridge,
hastily retired across it and prepared for an attack. When the
Provincials were a few rods distant the Redcoats opened fire, then
waited and fired again, and Don saw two men fall. Then he saw a
succession of bright flashes and heard the crash of arms as the
Provincials returned the fire. Several of the enemy fell. Then there
was more firing, and in a few minutes the British left the bridge and
ran in great haste toward the main body, a detachment from which
was on the way to meet them. The Provincials pursued the regulars
over the bridge and then divided; one party climbed the hill to the
east, and the other returned to the high grounds.
Don found himself trembling all over; he felt sick and dizzy. With
much difficulty he reached the ground, where he lay for a few
minutes. On getting to his feet, he saw the Redcoats who had first
crossed the North Bridge returning. In the town there seemed to be
much confusion; the sun glanced on red coats and polished
trimmings as men hurried here and there.
Don would not trust himself to climb the tree again, but threw himself
on the ground at the foot of it. He would rest for a while and then set
out on his long journey back to Boston, fairly confident that his
cousin had not been harmed. He had not slept a wink since some
time between one and two o’clock in the morning; now it was after
ten o’clock. So when his head began to nod he did not try very hard
to fight off sleep.
CHAPTER VI
ACROSS THE FLATS
Don was wakened by the sound of firing. He sat up and rubbed his
eyes; then, looking at the sun, he guessed that twelve o’clock had
passed. He could see nothing of the Redcoats; nor could he see
smoke anywhere inside the town. From the east came the sound of
firing that had wakened him, and men with muskets were hurrying
across fields in that direction. For a moment he thought of returning
to his Cousin Deborah’s; then he decided to push for Boston as fast
as he could.
Half running, half walking, he made his way in a southeasterly
direction in order to avoid the main road. Once he wondered whether
the Redcoat Harry Hawkins was with this expedition of British troops,
but somehow the thought was painful, and he turned his mind to
other things.
For some time he had been climbing a rocky hillside; now, on
reaching the crest, he got his last glimpse of the skirmish. The British
were in the road just outside of Lexington, and, far off as Don was,
he could see plainly that they were having a hard time of it. He could
see the flash of sabres as if the officers were urging their men to
advance. One officer was prancing here and there on a spirited black
horse, as if he had lost control of the animal. Then Don saw part of
the King’s troops open fire and saw a dozen or more muskets flash
in reply along an old stone wall on the opposite side of the road.
Before he heard the reports of them he saw the black horse fall.
Another glance and he saw a company of Minute-Men crossing a
distant field at a rapid pace. The sight of a battle going on almost
under his nose, the sound of guns, the smell of powder, all seemed
to hold him spell-bound, and only the thought of his Aunt Martha
alone in the little house in Pudding Lane caused him to turn and
hurry on his way.
Soon he was out of hearing of the firing, but from time to time he saw
detachments of Minute-Men and militia marching to the east. Once
he stopped at a solitary farmhouse and asked for something to eat.
A woman who was alone except for a little girl of nine or ten years
gave him bread and cheese and then prepared a small bundle of the
food for him to take along.
Don told her what he had seen at Concord and at Lexington, and her
lips quivered; but she smiled at him. “Such a day!” she exclaimed.
“My husband and my three brothers have gone. It seems that all the
men from the village have gone. I have heard that the town of
Dedham is almost empty; even the company of gray-haired old
veterans of the French Wars has gone. Such a day! Be careful, my
boy, and return to your aunt as soon as possible.”
Don thanked her for her kindness as he was leaving the house, and
soon he was hurrying on his way toward Boston. From Glen Drake
he had learned many of the secrets of woodcraft and had little
trouble in making his way through the thickets in the vicinity of Fresh
Pond. But mishaps will sometimes overtake the best of woodsmen.
As Don was descending a slope on the western side of the pond he
stepped on a loose stone, which turned under his weight and sent
him crashing headlong to the bottom. He lay there with teeth set and
both hands clenched; a sharp pain was throbbing and pounding in
his right ankle. Little drops of perspiration stood out like beads on his
forehead.
For several minutes he lay there; then as the pain decreased in
violence he sat up. But later when he rose he found that he dared
not put any weight at all on his right foot. Here was a predicament!
There was not a house in sight; he was a long way from the nearest
road; and night was coming on.
He tried to climb the slope down which he had slid, but the effort only
sent sharp pains shooting up his leg. Even when he crawled for only
a dozen yards or so on his hands and knees the pain would force
him to stop; it seemed that he could not move without giving the
ankle a painful wrench. Several times he shouted for help, but he
had little hope that anybody would be in that vicinity to hear him. So
at last he dragged himself to a little cove that was overgrown with
birches and willows; there he loosened his shoe and rubbed his
swollen ankle.
“Well,” he said to himself, “I’ve got to stay here all night, and I
haven’t a thing except my knife and——” He interrupted himself with
an exclamation; his knife was not in his pocket. Then he
remembered that he had left it at his Cousin Deborah’s.
The missing knife made his situation even more desperate than he
had supposed it was. With a knife he might have fashioned a bow
such as he had once seen Glen Drake use for lighting a fire; as it
was, he should have to keep warm as best he could.
The first thing he did was to choose a convenient hollow that was
protected at the back by the hill and on the sides by birches and the
willows. Then, breaking off a quantity of branches, he fashioned a
rude but effective windbreak for the front. By the time he had finished
doing that work it was twilight, and a cool wind was blowing across
the pond.
Don opened the package of food that the good lady at the farmhouse
had given him. There were bread and cheese and three small ginger
cakes; and when he had eaten half the food and put the rest by till
morning he felt a good deal better. Pulling his coat up round his
neck, he snuggled down on the light branches with which he had
carpeted the floor of his bower and prepared to wait for morning.
All light had faded from the sky, and the wind was rising steadily.
Loose twigs all round him tapped incessantly against one another in
tune with the wind. Don shivered and forgot the dull pain in his ankle.
Out in the pond and down close to the shore on both sides of the
cove he could hear strange little splashes, and in the thickets behind
him a pair of owls were calling every now and then. If it had not been
for thoughts of Aunt Martha, Don might really have enjoyed his
experience. He did not doubt that he should be able to walk in the
morning, and he rather liked being out alone as Glen Drake had
been many, many times.
Once he dozed off and awoke some time later, feeling cold and
hungry. The twigs were tapping all about him; somewhere far to the
south a hound was baying mournfully; and in front of him the moon
had covered the pond with a silvery sheen.
Again Don dozed off, and then awoke with a violent start. Somebody
—or something—was moving about in the underbrush on the slope
above him. Then a stone rattled down and bounded into the water.
Startled at the loud splash it made, Don gave an involuntary
exclamation. An instant later he heard someone call his name.
“O Don!” the call was repeated.
Don sat up. “Who is it?” he shouted in reply.
“Yer safe and sound? Praise be for that!”
“Glen!” cried Don, pulling himself upward.
In a moment the old trapper was at the foot of the slope, and Don
was explaining the accident that had befallen him.
“Well, yer a plucky lad,” said Glen. “I tracked ye all the way from
Concord, and when I found you was headin’ fer Fresh Pond I began
to have my fears. Here, now, let me take ye on my back, and we’ll
talk as we go along.”
Don was a sturdy boy and unusually solid for his age, but Glen
Drake lifted him to his back as if he had been no more than a child;
Don could feel the muscles in the old trapper’s shoulders play up
and down as Glen climbed the slope easily and walked quite as well
as if it had been daylight.
“What happened to the Redcoats, Glen?” asked Don.
“They got licked,” Glen replied promptly. “They ran most all the way
from Lexin’ton, and some of ’em fell and lay still with their tongues a-
hanging out; they were that tired. They lost a lot of men, Don, and
serves ’em right. Our boys kept a-coming from all directions—and
most of ’em know how to shoot too! I tell you, if a second force of the
King’s men hadn’t come out, not one of the Redcoats that tried to
burn Concord would have got back alive. Now they’re sewed up tight
in Boston; we’ve got an army watchin’ the town, and it’s growing
every minute.”
“How’s Aunt Martha, and how am I ever going to get back to her?”
“Your Aunt Martha is all right—at least, she was the last I saw her. As
to how you’re a-goin’ to get back, I can’t say for certain. But I’ll get
you back somehow; you trust me for that.”
“Where’s Uncle David?”
“He’s at Cambridge with the army. I’m sort of with the army myself,
though I don’t guess I’ll ever do much drillin’.” Glen Drake chuckled.
“Morning’s a-coming, Don; morning’s a-coming, and we’re at war!”
Don thought of his Aunt Martha, alone in Pudding Lane.
All the while Glen had been tramping with long strides in the
direction of the main part of Cambridge. Only once did he pause,
and then it was to fill his pipe. At last he turned into a lane at the right
of the road and approached a small house that overlooked the river.
By that time dawn was well on the way.
Don observed two or three soldiers at the side of the house; they
were cooking bacon over a small fire. “Hi, there!” shouted one. “I see
you found your boy.”
“Yes, I found him,” replied Glen. “Where’s Dave Hollis?”
“He hasn’t come in yet.”
Glen carried Don into the house, spoke a few words to a woman who
was preparing the morning meal and then, at her bidding, climbed
the stairs.
By the time the rays of the sun were slanting down on the river Don
was asleep deep within the feathery softness of a huge four-posted
bed. The woman down-stairs had given him a delicious breakfast,
and after he had eaten it the old trapper had rubbed his injured ankle
with some potent, vile-smelling ointment that he said would cure
anything from rheumatism to nose-bleed.
Near the middle of the afternoon Don awoke and a little to his
astonishment saw his Uncle David sitting beside Glen at one side of

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In the Shadow of the Member States: Policy-Making

The United States and Contemporary China-Russia

The Girl in His Shadow Audrey Blake

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.

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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