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Valentin Falin, head of the Central Committee's international department, conceded last month what Moscow has long denied: that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact included a secret protocol that called for the Soviet takeover of the Baltics. But Baltic deputies serving on a commission to study the pact complain that Moscow representatives want to stop short of drawing the necessary conclusions about the legal standing of their republics in the union. Says Estonian Popular Front leader Rein Veidemann: "We must solve the Baltic question and recognize the fact that we were first occupied and then annexed." But what would belated recognition of that historical reality actually accomplish? "Nothing," says Latvian Ideology Secretary Kezbers flatly. "The marriage between the Soviet Union and the Baltic states is de facto if not de jure. It is part of the existing order of postwar Europe."
Still, the Baltic states hope at least to cut a better deal with Moscow, perhaps in a new treaty that guarantees their sovereign rights. During five decades of Soviet rule, the three republics have watched helplessly as all- powerful ministries in Moscow imposed new industries, regardless of whether they were appropriate to the region. As a result, stretches of white sand beaches along the Baltic coast became too polluted for swimming. An influx of outside manpower threatened to make Latvians a minority in their own homeland. The hardworking Estonians learned to their amazement that by Gorbachev's reckoning, they were supposed to be running a yearly deficit of 500 million rubles in the Soviet Union's federal budget.
The Baltic states also demand more say in military affairs. The Estonian government has petitioned Moscow to put more Estonians in the republic's interior-ministry forces and border guards. There have been calls to restore the tradition of local military units like the Sixteenth Lithuanian Rifle Division, and more radical proposals to create a zone of peace in the Baltics. Says Latvian Popular Front leader Dainis Ivans: "We should decide ourselves how many military bases we need on our territory and move step by step toward making Latvia a military-free zone."
The anger accumulated over decades has blossomed into a rainbow of national colors, a sign that whatever their unity of aims, each state still proudly clings to its own national traditions. In Estonia the once banned blue-black- and-white flag from the period of independence between the two World Wars waves again above Tallinn's Toompea Castle. Latvia has hoisted its traditional crimson-and-white banner above Riga Castle. In Lithuania the historic yellow- green-and-red tricolor flutters once more from Gediminas Tower in Vilnius. A report from each of the Baltic republics:
ESTONIA