Soviet Probe of Baltic States’ Takeover OKd
The new Soviet Parliament moved today to probe whether the Baltic republics willingly joined the Soviet Union after historian Roy Medvedev and other deputies charged Moscow had forcibly annexed Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia and then doctored the truth.
President Mikhail S. Gorbachev supported setting up a commission to probe whether secret clauses in a 1939 pact with Nazi Germany assigned the three Baltic nations to Moscow, paving the way for annexation a year later.
Gorbachev also revealed that West Germany had failed to come up with the original of the secret portions of the 1939 nonaggression treaty, also called the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, after he requested it from Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
“The Baltic republics are stirred up by this issue. It is not an easy question, but we should not evade it,” Gorbachev told the Congress of People’s Deputies on the seventh day of its inaugural session.
But the Kremlin chief said he doubted that the peoples of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia had opposed joining the Soviet Union five decades ago.
Start your day right
Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
