COLUMN ONE : Reclaiming the Past in the Baltics : Property owners are getting back what the Soviets took away decades ago. That makes tenants and farmers nervous and fearful.

The residents of a grand old prewar apartment building ideally located in the center of this capital were less than thrilled when Gundar J. King arrived last week for a quiet look around

“I don’t know how, but somebody got wind of it,” King said after the visit, “and now they’re all scared stiff.”

After five decades of state ownership in which they had been paying rock-bottom rents, the tenants realized that the landlord had returned.

What is unnerving these residents of Riga is happening all over the three newly independent Baltic countries. After 51 years of Soviet rule during which private property was nationalized, the former owners of farms, factories, houses and apartment buildings--or their children and grandchildren--are reclaiming what was taken away.

Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia have all enacted laws providing for the return of nationalized property. Although their programs vary, the principle is the same: Property should be returned to private ownership.

The result is likely to be one of the most sweeping transfers of real estate ever, a vast historical paper search in which heirs come face to face with the period when Soviet authorities took from their parents or grandparents virtually everything they owned and deported them by the hundreds of thousands to Siberia.

“To re-establish ownership after 50 years is a unique action,” says Ain Kabal, an Estonian lawyer working on several reclamation cases including his own.

The process will create serious economic and possibly political dislocations. All three Baltic countries suffer from severe housing shortages, and finding new homes for displaced tenants could take years. The conversion of farmland from collective to private cultivation, in some cases under absentee owners, will hamper agricultural productivity in the short term.

In a region where the average worker lives a mere step above the poverty line despite paying state-regulated rent as low as 5 to 10 rubles ($3 to $6) a month for a two-room urban apartment, huge rent increases loom large on the horizon. The outcome may be a redistribution not only of property but of poverty.

“There’s no way I’ll evict my tenants, but they’re paying 25 rubles a month, and I can’t afford to fix up the house for that,” says Siiri Oder, a young Canadian-Estonian who has applied to reclaim a house in the provincial center of Tartu, Estonia, owned by her grandparents until the Soviets deported them to Siberia in 1944.

The reclamation programs represent just one of the ways in which the Baltic states, whose independence was finally recognized by Moscow on Sept. 6, will shoulder the costs of 51 years of Soviet occupation. Where nationalized property cannot be returned--because it has been destroyed, lost or converted to lasting state use--claimants will receive government pledges they can use to buy property elsewhere.

The expense borne by the new governments is sure to be substantial. In Lithuania, for instance, authorities estimate that fully 51% of the country’s working population, or more than 800,000 people, will be eligible for compensation.

Jiri Luik, chief of the political department of the Foreign Affairs Ministry of Estonia, says, “The problem is that the Estonian taxpayers have to pay compensation for what was taken from them in the first place.”

Nevertheless, people here take these rights seriously. “My landed family had been here for hundreds of years, so it’s not a casual thing,” says King, a professor of business administration at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., who as 17-year-old Gundar Kenins left Riga with his mother and family in 1944.

That was a banner year for flight from the Baltics as dictator Josef Stalin, after recapturing the region from the Germans, stepped up deportations and conscriptions into the Soviet army.

“To me, it’s a matter of principle,” says Tiia Raudma, an Australian-born Estonian working at the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Tallinn, who arrived armed with powers of attorney from her parents and other relatives to reclaim a family homestead. “It wasn’t just property but people’s homes and legacies.”

These countries’ determination to return seized property also stems from their preoccupation with what they term “historical continuity”--the notion that present-day Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania should simply pick up where they left off before the original Soviet takeover of 1940.

The idea of starting anew, for example by ignoring pre-Soviet landholdings, is anathema not only because of nationalistic pride but also because legal continuity gives the new Baltic governments better claims on national assets spirited out of the region by the Soviets or frozen in foreign banks during the occupation.

The long Soviet occupation has created a maze of mutually antagonistic rights and obligations. The most difficult to deal with are the rights of tenants who moved into nationalized houses in good faith and may even have spent their own money on upkeep and repair.

A farmer may have cultivated cropland most of his life, only to face losing it now to the grandchild of someone who fled abroad at the beginning of World War II. Half a century after the Soviet regime in the Baltics began, most people in the region have no way of knowing the name or even the existence of rightful owners of property.

Tension between claimants and occupants is inevitable.

“Does this mean that we who have had the misfortune to be born under the socialist system have now to pay for the Communist system?” asks Kai Maran, a librarian living with her daughter in a small nationalized apartment in Tallinn.

The Lithuanian Parliament needed nearly four months of debate before adopting its property reclamation law, even though no one disputed the principle of returning nationalized land to its owners.

“There’s no legal solution, so the solution had to be political,” says Eduardas Vilkas, a Lithuanian economist and leading member of Parliament. The new law allows reclaiming owners to raise tenants’ rents but not to evict them before alternative living space is found.

“In a big apartment building with 10 families, you must find 10 new apartments,” he says. But housing construction around Vilnius, the capital and largest city, dropped by half over the last two years as the country became preoccupied with its struggle for independence.

“At the current pace of construction,” Vilkas says, “we will solve the problem in 10 years.”

The law also limits the amount of farmland that can be reclaimed by any one applicant and requires that he be prepared to farm it or finance its cultivation himself. Otherwise, the land goes into a land bank to be redistributed to other claimants.

In Lithuania, the law has even opened another old wound: It applies only to property seized by the Soviets from Lithuanian owners and makes no provision for property seized earlier from Jewish owners and subsequently distributed to non-Jewish Lithuanians.

“In other words, a Lithuanian might get a house returned even though it really belonged to a Jew,” says a prominent Jewish lawyer in Vilnius. Also, the lawyer says, the law permits claims only from current Lithuanian citizens, not from Jewish emigrants to Israel or elsewhere.

Of the three programs, Estonia’s is probably the broadest. It applies not only to housing and farmland but also to securities, machinery and valuables confiscated by the Soviets. These categories are generally ignored in the Latvian and Lithuanian statutes on grounds that tracing such property and determining ownership is nearly impossible.

Estonia requires applicants to file their claims by Dec. 27, although they can add supporting documentation afterward. The deadline has inspired an enormous paper chase. Armies of legal agents pore daily through the stacks of the Estonian National Archive in Tartu, looking for old wills, deeds, mortgages and tax records--anything to establish property ownership.

Often the search is fruitless.

“We had two world wars here,” says Kabal, the Estonian lawyer. “Quite a lot of documents have simply disappeared.”

The law allows applicants to back up their claims with witnesses’ testimony, but that may be no easier to find.