THE BALTICS: The Steel Curtain

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The Soviet Barons. Nowhere is the new servitude as sharply apparent as on the farms. The huge private estates (which had been broken up into medium-sized individual holdings after World War I) are now reincarnated in huge sovkhozy (state farms). There, the Baltic peasants work as near-serfs for their new Soviet barons. The remaining private farms are assigned rigid production quotas which are usually far above what man, beast and soil can produce (nearly half of the Baltics' livestock was slaughtered or carried off during the war). Farmers who fail to meet the production quotas are either deported to Siberia or forced to go to work in factories; the result is that a great deal of soil actually goes untilled.

The Russians carry off everything—from horses, of which the Baltic people are so fond that they compose songs to them ("Little horse of mine, what means this neighing?"), to timber cut in Riga's Kaiserwald; Rigans wistfully remember how they went skiing there, amid the tall northern pines, in the opalescent light of short winter days.

Most of the people (except the guerrillas and those who manage to escape) gloomily accept their fate. They know that even though the Western allies have not formally recognized the presence of Russia in the Baltics, the Russians are there to stay. Wrote one Latvian: "My hatred is such as I have never known before, but the Soviets are the masters."

The Russian radio recently gave the official Soviet version of the story: "The Baltic Republics ... of their own free will . . . joined the great and united Soviet family, a family which will never let any of its members remain in misery."