Three museums in Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius—the capitals of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania— stand out amid the rich cultural landscape of the three Baltic republics. They are devoted to the Soviet police state that took them over at the end of World War Two. They are especially relevant today as these countries, all three neighbouring Russia and two, Latvia and Lithuania, Belarus too, with an unblemished track record as a Russian satellite through thick and thin, which is even truer today under the three decade dictatorship of Aleksander Lukashenka.

 

      The centrality of the security apparatus to the foundations and the narrative of the Russian state in its Soviet period is illustrated in the elegy by futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922) to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the Cheka and the quintessential embodiment of the chekist, which at the expense of accuracy, could be roughly translated as ‘secret police’; scholars go to great lengths to explain that, at least in its origins or the way Dzerzhinsky saw it, they were not comparable to the intelligence services of other powers or even of its Tsarist predecessor, the Okhrana, the imperial secret police.

 

            Even though the Cheka (the Russian acronym for All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage under the Council of People's Commissars of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic) would mutate its name and modus operandi over the eventful seven decades of Soviet history, culminating in the KGB, the name for its agents—chekist—stuck and even traveled to other languages.

 

For good reason. The secret police is a fundamental institution in any autocratic state, as Russia is conditioned to be. Any country that is ruled under the principles of what the country’s leader, Vladimir Putin, called the “Russian idea” of what has come to be known as the Millennium Manifesto. On December 29th, 1999, the Kremlin posted on its website a document entitled “Russia at the Turn of the Millennium,” signed by Vladimir Putin, who had been appointed prime minister only a few months earlier, in which he laid the blame for Russia’s weakness at liberal democracy, personal rights and freedoms. As scholars Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy explained in a 2012 article, the core principles of the Russian idea were ‘patriotism, collectivism, and solidarity” as well, crucially, derzhavnost (the belief that Russia is always destined to be a strong state and great power), and the untranslatable gosudarstvennichestvo, which essentially puts the state at the heart of everything’.

 

            Here is why the museums that document the almost five decades of Soviet repression in the Baltic capitals matter today more than ever. Russia today is ruled by the quintessential chekist. The Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights in Vilnius, situated in the former premises of the KGB in the Lithuanian capital; the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia in Riga, with a section housed at the former KGB headquarters in the city; and the Vabamu Museum of Occupation and Freedom in Tallin, show the entrails of the Soviet (and now under Putin, Russian) police state. A quick glimpse into the cells where prisoners were held, tortured, or murdered will just give a foretaste of what the Bolshevik regime was.

 

While to this day there is little certainty about Putin’s role in the KGB and his service in Dresden, in the now defunct German Democratic Republic just before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union that followed, his conduct at the helm of the state is unequivocal: he has ruled Russia according to the elastic amorality of a KGB operative.

             

            If for the sake of argument we take this at face value, an autocratic state will be an inevitable corollary. By its very definition, any autocracy will need a strong security apparatus with the secret police at its center to constrain society to conform.

 

            During the quarter of a century under his rule, Putin has normalized the assassination or the deaths in mysterious circumstances of rivals and critics as well as former allies who run afoul of him: opposition leader Aleksei Navalny; former ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the mercenary army Wagner Group; opposition leader Boris Nemtsov; journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and former intelligence agent Aleksander Litvinenko are just some of the most prominent names.

 

            Such is the passivity with which political assassinations have been normalized that the Russian government does not even bother about rejecting any involvement beyond some perfunctory denials that confirm suspicions rather than dispel them.

 

            Even though distinctions can be made between Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, and its Soviet (Cheka, NKVD, KGB) and post-Soviet (FSB) successors, in Russia, unlike most other countries in the world, the security agent or the secret police—more specifically the chekist—is not only tolerated as a necessary figure for civilised coexistence; in Russia, even today, the early Soviet era panegyrics about Dzerzhinsky and, by extension, the army of agents he spawned, who went on to spy on, betray, torture, imprison, or kill fellow citizens, enjoy almost hagiographic status as agents of morality. In Russia and the Cult of State Security: The Chekist Tradition, From Lenin to Putin, Julie Fedor says she was ‘struck by the degree to which both Soviet and post-Soviet official representations of chekists were characterised by frequent references to morality, and to the concept of “moral purity” in particular.’

 

            A quick visit to the said museums in the Baltic capitals should be sufficient to understand what is at stake if the Russian aggression against Ukraine is not defeated and metastasises into a wider aggression that would see Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as the second line of defence against the country ruled by Putin—a former KGB officer, a chekist in the strictest sense of the word—and his army of soldiers and spies that are ruled by a parallel set of values, where torture, forced confession and liquidation of opponents are normal earmarks of civic duty and morality.