At the final stages of their wars of independence, the republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania benefited from the Entente's intention to create a cordon sanitaire around Soviet Russia. But independence brought the need for economic reorientation towards the West, for the region's economy previously had depended on the Russian market. As hopes of remaining a mediator in Russia's trade with Western Europe did not materialise, all three countries moved to create export economies specialising in dairy and meat products. This task was made easier by the redistribution of large landed estates with little or no compensation. (Most landlords in any case belonged to another nationality, Baltic German in Estonia and Latvia, and Polish in Lithuania.) The new Baltic governments realised that, in order to prevent social discontent, they needed to turn the landless peasantry into small farmers. Indeed, the independent farming class eventually came to constitute the backbone of the Baltic states' social structures. A modest industrial sector survived in Estonia and Latvia, but failed to develop in Lithuania.
Politically, the 1920s were turbulent. All three states were established as parliamentary republics, but political parties were numerous and fragmented. The left and right wings were strong, while the centre weak. Frequent changes of government indicated the inherent instability of a political system, which contemporaries perceived as being in permanent danger of a coup from either the radical Left orthe radical Right. Liberal democracy, indeed, did not survive long in the Baltics, but the authoritarian regimes that emerged in the region were not established by the extremists -ideological cousins of either Bolsheviks or Nazis - but by the traditional Right. Lithuania was the first to take flight in 1926, when the army overthrew a coalition government of populists, socialists and minorities and installed a prominent conservative nationalist, Antanas Smetona, as an authoritarian president.
In Estonia, a coup followed the Great Depression. As disappointment with parliamentary democracy grew, so did the popularity ofthe fascist-like League of Freedom Fighters, a paramilitary organisation of veterans of the war of independence. Before the veterans' candidate could win the presidential elections of 1934, however, Prime Minister Konstantin Pats organised a pre-emptive coup on 12 March 1934. He declared a state of emergency, dissolved the parliament and all political parties and ruled by decree until the decade's end. Latvia followed the path to authoritarianism later the same month. Faced with the challenge from the extreme right Thunder Cross movement, Prime Minister Karlis Ulmanis organised a similar coup on 16 March 1934.
Authoritarian regimes in the Baltic region had many features in common. The dictators forbade all political parties (in some cases, except for their own) and censored the press, but did not completely suppress civic rights. Influenced by Italian Fascist corporatism, they actively involved the state in the regulation of the economic and social spheres. In 1938-9, the worsening international situation forced all three leaders to relax their rule somewhat. Although in the 1920s the promotion of the region's national cultures had not infringed the rights of minorities, this changed with the transition to authoritarianism. The regimes of Pats, Ulmanis and Smetona were not racist or xenophobic, but their aggressive support of national languages undermined the system of Polish and German schooling and the cultural autonomy of minorities in the Baltic countries.[303]
In foreign policy, all three states pursued a policy of neutrality. Lithuania was in a more difficult situation as it had long-running territorial conflicts with Poland because of the Polish incorporation of Vilnius in 1920 and with Germany because of the Lithuanian annexation of Memel (Klaipeda) in 1923. (Memel, with a predominantly German population, was then under the control of the League of Nations.) In 1938, Poland forced Lithuania to recognise Vilnius asbelongingto Poland, while in March 1939 Germany wrested Klaipeda back by force. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Baltic states concluded non-aggression or neutrality agreements with the Soviet Union, followed in 1939 by similar pacts with Nazi Germany. These documents, however, offered little protection when the Great Powers again took it upon themselves to rearrange the map of Europe.
Western Belorussia and the largest part of Western Ukraine found themselves within the new Polish state. In Belorussian lands, where a modern national consciousness was slow in developing, the population's grievances found their expression in the popularity of socialism. Following a brief interlude in the early 1920s, when minority rights had been well protected, Poland, which became an authoritarian dictatorship after 1926, adopted a policy of assimilating Belorussians by closing their schools and encouraging the spread of Roman Catholicism. In addition, Poland handled the redistribution of large landed estates in such a way that the primary beneficiaries were not the local Belorussian peasants, but Polish colonists. The Polish government repeatedly manipulated census results to play down the domination of Polish colonists in the area that was ethnically Belorussian. As a result of such policies and continued land hunger, the Communist Party of western Belorussia and its legal arm, the Belorussian Peasant and Workers' Union, grew in popularity until they were suppressed in i927.The 1930s saw further government repressions against Belorussian cultural institutions and the forcible closure of Orthodox churches.
In Galicia, the Polish government attempted similar policies against the local Ukrainian population, but the response was different, namely, the birth of Ukrainian radical nationalism. With civic discipline and a highly developed national consciousness, Ukrainians were frustrated by the defeat of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic and the ensuing Polish domination. Assimila- tory pressures only added to their sense of injustice. By the mid-i930s, it became clear that a decade of political participation, including several attempts at compromise between the leading Ukrainian party, the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance, and the authorities, had failed to stop the national oppression. A new generation of disaffected young men and women grew disappointed with the fruitless 'collaborationism' of their elders. The moral failure of moderate nationalists cleared the way for the radical Right. At a conference in Vienna in 1929, veterans of the Ukrainian-Polish war, students and nationalist intellectuals created the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). The ideology ofthe new group emphasised the nation as an absolute value and the willpower of a strong minority as the way to restore a nation to its greatness. The radical Right soon grew into a mass movement.
Ukrainians in inter-war Romania also experienced a policy of assimilation, if only formulated more clearly and enforced more strictly. Although the Ukrainian and Romanian languages had little in common, the ideologues ofthe ruling Romanian National Liberal Party classified the Ukrainian population in Bukovina as Romanians who had forgotten their ancestral tongue.[304] In contrast, the position of Ukrainians in Transcarpathia improved greatly. The
Czechoslovak Republic, which was the only new state in Eastern Europe that remained a liberal democracy during the entire inter-war period, provided government support for minority education and culture and allowed the use of minority languages in local administration.
304
Paul Robert Magocsi,