Latvian Orthodoxy

Vladimir Putin has had me doing the impossible. . . defending George W. Bush! Seems the Russian president criticized Georgie for visiting Latvia in advance of his visit to Moscow for today's celebrations of the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II. In Latvia, Bush - who met with the leaders of all three Baltic countries - praised their efforts at democracy and applauded how far they've come since regaining their independence from the old Soviet Union (which was ostensibly a federation of fifteen sovereign states but was really a Russian-dominated central state) in September 1991. And this made Putin mad.

Last time I checked , Bush is free to travel to wherever he wants and doesn't need the permission of the leader of one country to visit another. And Putin, to the best of knowledge, still hasn't formally apologized to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania for the forced Soviet annexation of the three countries in 1940.

Incidentally, democracy wasn't the issue when the U.S.S.R. incorporated the Baltic States sixty-five years ago. Of the three countries, which initially gained their independence from pre-Soviet Russia in 1918, only Estonia was still a democracy then. Latvia was taken over by a strongman in 1934, and Lithuania was a dictatorship for most of the period between 1918 and 1940. Nationhood - the right of these three ethnic groups to exist as separate countries rather than be dominated by a larger one - was the issue, and it remains a key one today.