Baltic World

My Baltic career, as it were, has been bracketed by two epochal events, each involving the Kremlin: the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.  

One of my vividest memories of my Baltic beat years was meeting Robert Thompson, then the Baltic correspondent for the Financial Times at a dinner by a mutual friend in Helsinki.  “My empire,” the seasoned newsman half-jestingly called the Baltic basin.  

I am not sure I would call it that.  However after thirty years on the Baltic beat, I can be forgiven for feeling a bit proprietary about the region.  Since 1990, when I attended the Bush-Gorbachev summit conference in Helsinki, I have visited and reported from all eight countries of the so-called NB8 group—Finland, Estonia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Latvia, Lithuania and Iceland—for a gamut of American, British, Finnish, Swedish and Estonian newspapers, magazines and news sites, including The New York Times, Financial Times, Washington Post, New York Review of Books and The Christian Science Monitor, where I am Nordic/Baltic correspondent.  Some 50 of the more noteworthy and varied NB8-related articles and essays I have published are archived below.

During that time, I have covered a number of breaking news events for which I happened to be in the neighborhood, including the Bush-Gorbachev summit, and the horrific sinking of the Estonia cruise ship in 1994, which I helped report for “The New York Times.”  However most of the stories I have done have been about trends, events, and figures which were too “small” or “obscure” for the international media to pick up on—the effulgence of Finnish design, the winding down of the Swedish military, the suicide epidemic in the Balts—or too “big” to apprehend: the coalescing of Finland and Estonia into a supra-national unit, the formation of a new regional Hanseatic economic union.

Inevitably there have been a few hairy moments—an encounter with two drunken Russian mafia on the hydrofoil from Helsinki to Tallinn in 1996 stands out—along with too many fun ones to name.  And quite a few sublime ones too.

I also have written a number of books about the region—four in all—The Hundred Day Winter War, about the 1939-40 Fenno-Soviet Winter War; Off the Map: A Personal History of Finland, my memoir of my Finnish and Baltic reporting career; The Finnish Factor: Kekkonen, Kennedy, Khrushchev and The Cold War, my historical biography of long-time Finnish president Urho Kekkonen; and Latvia Rising, my illustrated ode to Latvia, which has been my base since 2017.  And there are two more in the works, In The Shadow of the Peace, about the nebulous period following the 1940 Peace of Moscow, which somehow wound up with “Brave Little Finland” becoming a co-belligerent with Nazi Germany, and Estonia Ascendant, the third of my series of “country books.”

Does all this make me “the pre-eminent English language expert” on the region as I have been called? I don't know.  Personally I don't like the word “expert.”  My philosophy both as a journalist and an historian has always been the more I know the less I know.

I do know that my late father, Kurt, a German-Jewish refugee who lived in Denmark for several years before emigrating to the United States, where he joined the U.S. Army and wound up turning his guns against the Nazis during World War II as an intelligence officer--which may or may not have something to do with my own ken for interrogating people--whose warm memories of his Danish bivouac was one of the seeds of my “Baltic thing” would certainly have gotten a kick out of it.

The key thing, I think, is that I am still here, a third of a century later, finding interesting things to write about, and sharing my knowledge of—and yes, affection for—this still surprisingly misunderstood quadrant of Europe with the rest of the world.  It isn’t quite my empire.  But, for better or worse—I like the think the former—it is my world.