Cultural Professionals as Political Leaders: The Baltic National Movements as Case Study

• In Event: Decolonization in Eurasia: Revisiting the Unfinished Business of Empire

Abstract

This paper discusses national identity formation in Eurasia pointing at the legacies of nation-building and nation-repressing policies pursued by pre-Soviet and Soviet states. I argue that in Eurasia, writers, artists, professors, and other cultural professionals radically re-shaped how Soviet citizens thought about nationality in some Republics, but not others. In this paper, which is a chapter from a larger book manuscript, I test this argument in the paired cases of Soviet Lithuania and Latvia.

Author

• Matthew Reichert, Harvard U