The Baltic States

The Russian population growth in Central Asia, despite its large size, failed to change the ethnic balance of that region in favor of the Russians. All it achieved was to slow down the relative decline of the Slavic element there. What appeared at one time like a Russian offen-

The Nations of the USSR in 1970  45

Sivc has proved to have been a defensive, holding-off aaion. In Eastern Europe Russians have done much better.

In Latvia and Estonia, where the local population grew very slowly, Russian immigration was most successful in changing the Russian-to-nativc ratio in favor of the Russians. The number of Russians in Estonia between the censuses increased by 39.6 percent and that of Estonians by

3.6  percent; the Russian growth was about 11 times higher than the Estonian. In absolute numbers, there were 95,000 more Russians in Estonia in 1970 than in 1959 (total in 1970: 335,000), but only 32,000 more Estonians (total in 1970: 925,000).'*

In Latvia the Latvians added another 44,000 to their number of

1,298,000 in 1959; that is, they grew by 3.4 percent, while dropping from 62 percent in their republic’s population to 56.8 percent. (In Estonia the Estonians fell from 74.6 to 68.2 percent.) The Russians, who increased in I. atvia from 556,000 to 705,000 (26.8 percent), now constitute a sizable minority of 29.8 percent (1959: 26.6 percent).

The third Baltic republic, Lithuania, is often mentioned together with Latvia and Estonia, but the population changes in it followed another pattern. First of all, the Lithuanians themselves increased at a quite different pace: There were 2,507,000 Lithuanians in Lithuania in 1970, which was a gain of 16.5 percent over the 1959 figure of 2,151,000. They even managed to improve their majority in the country’s total population from 79.3 to 80.1 percent. Secondly, Russians also increased (16 percent), but at a rate considerably lower than anywhere else in Soviet Eastern Europe and even slightly lower than that of Lithuanians themselves. There were 231,000 Russians in 1959, and 268,000 in 1970 in Lithuania. Their relative position improved only slightly, from 8.5 to

8.6  percent of the total population.

When one discusses the Baltic-Russian relationship it is also necessary to consider the Belorussian and Ukrainian presence in and immigration to these areas. In view of the total lack of cultural or educational facilities for Ukrainians and Belorussians outside Ukraine and Belorussia respectively, and their linguistic closeness to the Russians, members of these nationalities outside their own republic function in practice as a Russifying element. The importance of this in the Baltic states should not be underestimated. Ukrainians increased in the Baltic area by more than two-thirds (from 63,000 in 1959 to 106,000 in 1970) and Belorussians by more than half (from 103,000 to 159,000). Since in Estonia the Estonians gained by only 32,(KX), an increase of the Ukrainian popula-46 Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union tion in that republic from 16,000 to 28,000, and of the Belorussian from

11.000  to 19,000, produced a weighty addition of 20,000 East Slavs to reinforce the Russian gain of 95,000. In Latvia the joint gain of Ukrainians and Belorussians was in fact higher than that of the Latvians. The Belorussians increased from 62,000 to 95,000 and the Ukrainians hx>m

29.000  to 53,000; jointly they gained 57,000 in Latvia, 13,000 more than their host, the Latvian nation. Since there was also a gain of

149.000  Russians, these figures mean that in absolute numbers, for every new Latvian, Latvia was simultaneously getting five new inhabitants who were Russian, Belorussian, or Ukrainian. How is one to interpret the fact that the growth of the Ukrainian population in Latvia exceeded 82 percent, reached 75 percent in Estonia, and came close to 40 percent in Lithuania when, as will be shown below, in Ukraine itself the growth of the Ukrainian population was less than 10 percent (while that of the Russians was nearly three times as large), and the Ukrainian share in the total population there declined considerably?

A review of the Baltic situation should not consist only of information on the weakening of the Baltic nations. One of them, the Lithuanian, has in fact won a major achievement in the period under consideration. Vilnius, the ancient capital of Lithuania, seems to have become more of a Lithuanian city than it has ever been during the past three or four hundred years. In consequence of a series of Polish-Lithuanian agreements that were finalized in the act of Polish-Lithuanian union at Lublin (1569), Vilnius and other cities of Lithuania became gradually Polonized, so that throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries Lithuanians in Vilnius numbered about 2 percent of the population. After the Second World War a majority of the Poles moved west to Poland, but even as late as 1959 the Poles constituted a 20 percent minority in the city. The places of those Poles who went west, and of the Yiddish-speaking Jews (in the past the second largest group in Vilnius) who perished under the Nazis, were taken by Lithuanians moving in from the countryside and by Russians coming in from the east. (The Russian element in Vilnius before the Second World War was insignificant.) The table at the top of the facing page shows the ethnic distribution of population of Vilnius in 1959 and 1970.

Their capital is comparable to the Uzbeks' partial recovery of their own capital of Tashkent and promises to make local resistance to Russification more effective.