Interstate narratives for local aspirations: The Soviet Baltic Republics’ Samizdat on the War in Afghanistan

Abstract

Dissident publications of Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian Samizdat were among the first to comment on the Soviet military involvement in the Afghan Civil War. Reflecting on the war situation in these unofficial texts, the publishers of the Baltic Republics used a particular Afghan conflict narrative to accomplish their own pro-independence national goals. Two open letters, analyzed in this paper, illustrate how the Samizdat authors equate the Soviet military operations on Afghan soil with the Stalinist invasion and annexation of the Baltic States in 1940. The Samizdat oriented the core of the message to the Helsinki Declaration’s provision on the peoples’ right for self-determination, which was more suitably applicable to the Baltic republics, as they were trying to garner support for independence.