THE BALTICS: The Steel Curtain

Who is crying? What lamenting sounds

so sadly through the night?

They are orphan children crying, bowed

beneath their master's might.

Crying sadly, see them making little

fires against the cold.

By the river, see them bending, dipping

bread crusts hard and old. . . .

Sun so golden, will you tell me where

you wandered yesterday?

"I was warming shiv'ring orphans in

the mountains far away."

—Latvian Folk Song

This poetry of despair sprang from the depths of serfdom, in lands where the soil is hard, the sun is cold, and foreign masters have always been harder and colder than either. For centuries, Baltic peasants have labored for their feudal lords—Swedes, Russians, Poles, Germans. Today, the Baltic peasant serves an old master under a new form of serfdom. He serves Communist Russia.

Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were forced, at the point of Red Army guns, to join the Soviet Union in 1940. Ever since then, Russia's westward window on the Baltic Sea has been tightly shuttered.* Said one Lithuanian recently: "We don't speak of the Iron Curtain, as that is not a strong enough expression. Our country lies behind the Steel Curtain." From refugees' reports, letters, rumors and official Soviet decrees, a picture of life behind the Steel Curtain can be pieced together.

"Vorkuta Is the Name." Before the Steel Curtain descended, the Baltic people were known to the world as a highly literate, vigorous peasant people, used to fighting for the reluctant fruit of their poor land. They have a stolid dignity, yet are cheerfully devoted to simple, inexpensive pleasures. In the summer they used to go swimming along the endless, pine-studded beaches of the Gulf of Riga, often in the nude (the early part of the morning was reserved for men, the latter part for women, and police saw to it that none of the early bathers overstayed their allotted time). During Midsummer Night, they would swarm through their vast woods by the thousands, singing wild songs that echoed over the countryside's countless lakes. Now the silent Lithuanian woods harbor the bitter "brethren of the forest," i.e., anti-Russian guerrillas.

The Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians were proud of their small, separate cultures. They flocked to opera and the ballet, and liked to reminisce about the time Robert Casadesus gave a concert in Riga, or Boris Chaliapin sang at the National Opera. Now, there are only a handful of theaters left, most of them Russian, and the people are in no mood to attend them. Related a refugee: "On June 13, 1946, I was in Vilna† and saw, with my own eyes, 3,000 men being transported from the central prison camp to the central station. They were to be shipped to Siberia. After seeing faces like theirs, you don't feel like going to an operetta in the evening." In Tallinn, every five years, the people used to gather for Laulupidu (singing festivals), with 15,000 singers and 3.000 orchestra members (see cut). Now, there are no more Laulupidu; Estonians explain that it is hard to find enough male voices.