National Security in the Baltic States

It is one of the ironies of history that the full independence of the three Baltic states came only on the backs of Soviet conservatives trying to preserve the centralized power structures of the crumbling union. By the end of President and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s tenure, every region in the country had issued either declarations of sovereignty or independence. In large part because of this, they suffered brutal repressions in January 1991 as Gorbachev struggled to convince his conservative opponents that he was capable of acting resolutely in the face of anarchy.