Conclusion and Epilogue

Abstract

THE BALTIC QUESTION HAD BEEN PUT INTO COLD STORAGE BY 1950. THE United States and Britain had been forced to accept as a fact that the Baltic states had been incorporated into the USSR. Soviet system had been reintroduced in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and no one could force the Soviet army out. However, Soviet presence in the eastern Baltic lacked legitimacy, because the majority of states had not formally recognized the transfer of sovereignty. As long as the Cold War was fought with the ideological intensity already apparent in 1950, it was unlikely that the Western Powers would declare the annexation legitimate. As far as international law was concerned, the prewar Baltic republics had not ceased to exist. The most important bearers of the continuity were the Baltic embassies in London and Washington, the only state organs that would function without interruption from 1940 to 1991. Symbolically, Ernst Jaakson, who had worked at the Estonian consulate in New York since 1932, became the first ambassador of the restored Republic of Estonia in 1991.