2017 History Institute "What Is Eurasia? And Why Does It Matter?"
Kevin Platt, Professor in the Humanities and of Russian and East European Studies, University of Pennsylvania
presenting
The Baltic States: Forging Nations Amid Empires
When and why did the nations of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia emerge? How did these small peoples achieve self-government in a region long dominated by more numerous and more powerful groups? When the Soviet Union annexed their territory and tried to extinguish their cultural identity, how were they able to retain their sense of nationhood? In what way did this facilitate their emergence from the USSR in the late 1980s?