Traveling in the Baltic states it is hard not to notice how pervasive — and how recent — the German influence was in the region. The Estonian vocabulary borrowed extensively from the German language, and Latvian grammar owes a debt to the German grammar. Teutonic Knights were busy converting the local populations to Christianity from the 13th century. Germans ran the two countries’ administration and were active in the professions, the military and the arts while Estonians and Latvians were mostly farmers living on the countryside lorded over by German nobles in their castles.
Thriving cities along the Baltic coast in all three Baltic states were part of the Hanseatic League.
While the Baltic region was under Swedish rule until Peter I emerged victorious from the Great Northern War in the 18th century, it should be noted that the Swedish royal family at the time also spoke German.
German domination continued under Russian rule, and the Baltic nobles not only served the Russian tsars but also were considered one of the most reactionary and retrograde social groups in the empire. Even after the Latvian and Estonian educated, prosperous and urban class began to emerge in the second half of the 19th century, German presence remained strong.
German farmers (or kolonisty as they were known) were invited by Peter’s successors — most notably by German-born Catherine — to settle on underpopulated southern lands. They became so numerous across Ukraine and in the culturally Ukrainian lands in southern Russia that the Soviets organized them into the (nominally) autonomous German republic along the Volga, with the capital renamed Engels.
Numerous Germans lived in Hungary, constituting (along with the Jews) the core of that country’s business and professional class in the 19th century and in the early 20th. German nobles lived in castles in the remote forests of Transylvania (then also part of the Kingdom of Hungary). Count Dracula was in fact German even though his abode was located in what is probably today Romania; Austrian writer Gregor von Rezzori described his childhood among German landed gentry in a region which is today divided between Moldova and Ukraine.
German was the language of the cultural entity known as Mitteleuropa. Franz Kafka wrote in German, the language spoken by the Jews in Prague, and a Bulgarian, Elias Canetti, won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1981 largely because he was perhaps the last of those writers in Central Europe who still wrote in German.
The German penetration in the region reached its peak probably in the early years of the 20th century — just as the bellicosity of the recently formed German Empire had begun to worry the continent’s more established powers. The two world wars in the first half of the century are sometimes considered by historians as a single conflict to contain upstart Germany.
In the West, German ambitions were severely curtailed but it was in the east that German influence was swiftly and definitively rolled back after World War II. Germans were expelled from most of Central Europe, most notably the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia, the East Prussians from what became Kaliningrad Oblast of the Russian Federation and the Silesians from the region annexed by Poland.
The Volga Germans were deported by Stalin to Central Asia and Siberia during the war and were forced to live there until they too repatriated to Germany in the final decades of the 20th century.
Even though the northeastern third of the remaining Germany was part of the Soviet Empire for some 45 years, including a portion of the capital, Berlin, the German influence never returned anywhere in that region. Instead, the Russian influence, which had always been strong because Russia ruled many of its countries, grew substantially.
The study of Russian became compulsory in most communist countries. In the Soviet Union, while the policies of outright Russification were perhaps less blatant than in the tsarist era, the Russian expansion was accomplished by population replacement.
Thus, the Baltic states suffered major population losses due to Soviet deportations, the war, the Holocaust, and emigration. The Soviets built factories and brought in Russian-speaking workers from other parts of the Soviet Union. Soviet Army officers liked to retire to those highly civilized places and they were encouraged to do so by the Soviet government which constructed housing to accommodate them. As a result, in Latvia, for instance, ethnic Latvians were in a minority at the time of independence.
Ukraine suffered even greater damage to its admittedly larger population. From World War I to World War II, through the bloodbath of the civil war, military action and occupation took a heavy toll on the country. Collectivization and the Holodomor took uncounted millions of lives more. Workers from other parts were brought in there too, especially to the coal mining areas and metallurgical plants in the east of the country.
While Crimea was not part of Ukraine when Crimean Tatars were deported, the population of the peninsula was also replaced with Russian-speaking carpetbaggers.
And yet, in the 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet empire and the Soviet Union, the Russian influence has waned dramatically. In the Baltics, Russian speakers had been considered occupiers throughout the postwar period, and while the older generation still knows Russian, younger kids increasingly don’t — and that even starts to affect ethnic Russian families.
I recently biked from Tallinn to Riga with an American friend, and even older people responded much more readily to his accented Russian than to my native speaker’s.
In Ukraine, Russian has become the language of the enemy and many native Russian speakers have switched to Ukrainian since 2014. Russian television is gone and Russian literature and cinema will likely become foreign to the Ukrainians of this generation.
This process is irreversible and will outlive Vladimir Putin, the annexation of Crimea, and the invasion of the Donbas.
Instead, English is asserting its linguistic and cultural influence everywhere across Eastern Europe. Young people often speak a colloquial, Cockney-accented English that points to a few years of working in London. English is spoken even in countries such as Poland and Hungary whose leaders are taking an anti-Western stance reminiscent of the disastrous policies of the 1930s. This suggests that their posturing will most likely be short-lived.
It also implies that the current rift between the European Union on the one hand and America and Britain on the other, and the withdrawal of Britain into imbecility, is probably temporary and that nothing is fundamentally wrong with the Anglo-Saxon empire.
