On August 23, 1988, during a Latvian nationalist rally in Riga, an open letter to the Baltic people signed by 28 U.S. senators was read to the crowd of more than 60,000 people. It included the following passage:
Sadly, your struggle for universal human rights and self-
determination, won with such singular courage seven decades
ago, has not ended. As members of the United States
Senate, we want you to know that our support for these
noble goals continues as well.
The public reading of the letter, like the rally itself, was part of a continuing series of remarkable events in the Soviet-occupied Baltic states. Over the last two years, Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of glasnost, restructuring, and democratization have unleashed a massive display of long-suppressed national feeling in once independent Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Longing to regain control over homelands that were forcibly occupied and annexed by Stalin's Soviet Union in 1940, the Baltic peoples are testing the limits of Gorbachev's reform-minded Soviet Union of 1988. Former national flags, banned under Stalin, now fly proudly over the three Baltic capitals. Popular fronts, boasting hundreds of thousands of followers, have proposed radical programs calling for a wide-ranging autonomy that falls just short of total independence. Some Balts, emboldened by the euphoria of recent events, even talk of outright secession from the Soviet Union.
The words of support from the U.S. Senate, while clearly welcome, did not come as a surprise. The United States has never recognized the legitimacy of Soviet rule in the occupied Baltic states, and every president from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan has supported the right of Baltic independence. Yet for 48 years those words were largely symbolic, reaffirming a principle that most experts believed had little chance of being realized. Now that the Balts have seized the initiative and are directly challenging Moscow's control over their homelands, many are wondering if the United States is finally ready to back its symbolic support with constructive actions.
Nonrecognition Policy
Since 1940, the U.S. policy on the Baltic states, commonly known as the nonrecognition policy, has consisted largely of negative actions. This policy does not recognize the Baltic states as legal Soviet republics, does not permit the president or the ambassador to the USSR to visit the Baltic states, and does not allow high-ranking U.S. officials to meet with representatives of the Soviet-appointed Baltic governments.
Mari-Ann Rikken, vice president of the Estonian American Council, views this policy as a cornerstone for the eventual reestablishment of independent Baltic states. According to Rikken,
the importance of the nonrecognition of forcible seizure of
territory, based on international law, as applied to the
Baltic states, cannot be over-emphasized. The fact that
the Western world
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