Amara shows that the Soviet authorities did not immediately destroy every Baltic institution and replace it with something new. They first captured the existing institutions, redirected their work and used their accumulated knowledge to dismantle the states and societies they had previously served.
The national audit institutions are at the center of the story.
These were constitutional bodies with detailed knowledge of ministries, banks, budgets, businesses, public property and government personnel. After the occupation, they continued to operate, but under a new political authority.
Their expertise could now be used to identify strategic assets, locate state funds, catalogue property, assess officials and assist with the nationalization of the economy.
Within days of the military occupation, Moscow’s representatives had assumed political control and installed compliant governments. The independent heads of the Baltic audit institutions were removed. Some were later imprisoned, deported or killed.
The institutions themselves remained useful for a time. They helped inventory property, transfer assets and absorb the administrative structures of the independent states. Once that work was complete, they were replaced by Soviet People’s Commissariats of State Control.
This was not simply the destruction of a state. It was the use of a state’s own knowledge against it.
The records described in the article answered the questions any occupying power would need answered. How does the government function? Where is the money? Who owns the property? Which officials possess useful expertise? Who can be trusted? What material can be used to discredit the previous government?
Audits and investigations could be used to portray the former governments as corrupt, inefficient or illegitimate. Administrative documents therefore served two purposes. They helped the occupying authorities take control of the state, and they helped manufacture an explanation for why the takeover had supposedly been necessary.
The article also examines the theatrical side of the occupation.
Soviet forces arrived in overwhelming numbers. Demonstrations were staged. Selected crowds were presented as evidence of popular support. Governments installed under military pressure were described as expressions of the people’s will.
Soviet propaganda presented the events not as military occupations, but as socialist revolutions supported by the local population. That version of history was then repeated for decades through Soviet institutions, publications and supposedly scholarly work.
It is a dense and carefully researched article, and it deserves to be read slowly.
While reading it, however, I kept returning to my own issue that's been bothering me for a long time now and that is over how many people on today’s left, including those who still identify as communists, understand what Soviet power actually looked like to the societies that experienced it?
I do not mean whether they know that Stalin committed crimes. I do not mean whether they accept that the Soviet Union became authoritarian, made terrible mistakes or failed to live up to its ideals.
Those acknowledgements are relatively easy.
The more difficult question is whether they understand the relationship between Soviet ideology and Soviet imperial power.
The Soviet Union presented itself as the enemy of empire. It claimed to represent international solidarity, national liberation and the end of exploitation.
Yet it occupied neighbouring states, dismantled their sovereignty, subordinated their institutions to Moscow and suppressed resistance in the name of historical progress.
A state that defined itself as anti-imperialist could not openly describe its own expansion as imperial conquest. It needed another vocabulary.
Occupation became liberation.
Governments installed under military pressure became people’s governments.
The destruction of sovereignty became voluntary socialist integration.
Confiscation became nationalization.
Resistance to Moscow became fascism, reaction or bourgeois nationalism.
Communist language did not merely exist alongside Soviet imperialism. It was used to conceal it, explain it and give it moral legitimacy.
This required more than occasional propaganda. It required a fundamentally false description of what the entire political system was doing.
An empire had to describe itself as the destroyer of empires. Conquered nations had to be portrayed as willing participants in their own subordination. Political obedience had to be presented as international solidarity.
The revolutionary language was especially useful to them because it transformed domination into a moral duty.
Moscow was not supposedly pursuing its own interests. It was carrying out the inevitable movement of history. Those who resisted were therefore not simply defending their countries, institutions or property. They could be portrayed as enemies of equality, peace and human progress.
This is one of the deepest and long-lasting injuries the Soviet system inflicted on communist thought itself.
Ideas of equality, collective welfare and human emancipation became attached to a state that censored information, deported populations, destroyed independent institutions and demanded political obedience from the nations it controlled.
The Soviet Union claimed that it would create a “new man.” This person would supposedly be rational, selfless, socially conscious and free from the corruption of the old world.
But the reality described in Amara’s article points towards a completely different kind of transformation.
Officials were tested not only for competence, but for their willingness to participate in the new system. Auditors were assigned politically sensitive tasks involving confiscated property, bank assets and nationalized businesses. Those who carried out these assignments demonstrated both professional usefulness and political compliance. Those who resisted risked identifying themselves as unreliable.
This did not necessarily produce a convinced communist. It produced a person who understood that professional and sometimes physical survival depended on participating in the machinery of power.
Over time, the system rewarded public conformity, caution and the ability to conceal private doubts. People learned to recognize which truths had become dangerous. They developed one language for official life and another for their homes, friends and private thoughts.
This does not mean that everyone who lived under Soviet rule became dishonest or morally compromised. Many people preserved their dignity, helped others and resisted in ways both large and small.
The point is that the institutions themselves rewarded obedience and political performance.
The official “new Soviet man” existed in speeches, textbooks and propaganda posters. The real Soviet person often had to survive inside a system where almost everyone could see the distance between the official story and everyday reality.
This produced a society in which lying was not limited to the leadership.
The state lied about history, production, politics and the nature of its own power. Officials repeated the lies because their positions depended on it. Citizens learned to perform agreement because honesty could carry serious consequences.
Public language became ritualized. Private knowledge became dangerous. Cynicism became a reasonable response to a system that demanded belief in claims many people knew were false.
The Soviet Union eventually collapsed, but neither this political culture nor its imperial assumptions disappeared completely.
Russia abandoned much of the language of communist equality, but it preserved the belief that Moscow possessed special rights over the nations and populations that had once been ruled from the Soviet centre.
It also preserved many of the narratives developed to conceal that relationship.
Neighbouring countries were not treated as fully independent political communities. Their choices were often interpreted as the result of foreign manipulation. Their desire to escape Moscow’s control was described as hostility towards Russia. Their national histories were dismissed as extremism, ingratitude or fascism.
We can see the consequences in Ukraine.
Russia claimed that it entered Ukraine to protect Russian speakers. It then bombed and destroyed some of the largest Russian-speaking cities in the country. The people it claimed to defend became the people whose homes, hospitals, schools and neighbourhoods were devastated.
This appears contradictory only when we take the language of protection literally.
Within an imperial framework, Russian speakers are not treated primarily as individual human beings with citizenship, political beliefs and the right to choose their own future. They are treated as evidence of Moscow’s historical claim over a territory.
Their language is used to assign them a political identity whether they accept it or not.
A Russian-speaking Ukrainian who considers Ukraine their country presents a serious problem for that worldview. Such a person demonstrates that speaking Russian does not produce loyalty to the Russian state.
Cities such as Mariupol and Kharkiv were not Russian communities waiting to be reunited with Moscow. They were Russian-speaking Ukrainian cities. Their existence showed that language, culture, citizenship and political identity do not belong automatically to the Kremlin.
The destruction of these communities reveals the emptiness of the claim that the war was conducted for their protection.
The population was useful as an imperial justification. Its actual wishes were not.
The connection to Soviet history does not mean that present-day Russia is communist. It clearly is not.
The connection lies in the political method.
Once again, conquest is presented as liberation. Aggression is described as defense. The sovereignty of a neighbouring country is treated as artificial. Resistance is labelled fascism. The people supposedly being protected are denied the right to define their own identity and political future.
The ideology has changed, but the imperial logic remains recognizable.
This history is still poorly understood by many people in Western left-wing movements.
Some have developed a detailed and justified understanding of Western colonialism, American power and the failures of NATO. Yet they often lack an equivalent framework for recognizing Russian imperialism.
Russia is then treated mainly as a state reacting to Western pressure. Eastern European countries are discussed as pieces on a geopolitical board rather than societies with their own histories, fears and political choices.
Their desire to escape Moscow’s control is reduced to NATO expansion.
Their resistance to Russian domination is dismissed as nationalism.
Their historical memory is treated as simplistic anti-communism.
Even Soviet accusations of fascism and foreign manipulation are sometimes repeated without examining how those accusations were historically used to delegitimize opposition to Moscow.
This creates a strange form of anti-imperialism in which only certain countries are allowed to behave as empires.
Western actions are examined through the language of power, conquest and domination. Russian actions are explained through insecurity, provocation and historical grievance.
Moscow retains the status of a rational political actor whose motivations must be understood. The nations around it are reduced to territory, strategic depth, NATO assets or instruments of American policy.
Their agency disappears almost completely.
This is one reason the history documented by Amara is so important.
The Baltic states did not voluntarily dissolve themselves in a wave of socialist enthusiasm. Military control came first. Political capture followed. Existing institutions were redirected. Personnel were tested and filtered. Property was transferred. The former governments were discredited. Once the machinery of the independent states had served the occupying power, it was absorbed into the Soviet system.
Communist language gave this process a moral disguise and that may be the deeper Soviet tragedy.
The Soviet Union did not merely fail to achieve the ideals it proclaimed. It used those ideals to justify an imperial reality. It turned the language of equality into a defense of political domination and the language of liberation into an explanation for conquest.
In doing so, it damaged more than the societies it occupied.
It corrupted the very political ideas it claimed to represent.
It also left behind generations of people who learned Soviet history mainly through the system’s own vocabulary. Some continue to distinguish between noble communist ideals and regrettable Soviet mistakes without fully confronting the possibility that the ideology was not merely betrayed by imperial power. It was repeatedly used in the service of that power.
This does not settle every argument about communism as a philosophy. Nor does it excuse the crimes, failures or imperial behaviour of Western states but it does establish a more basic principle.
Anti-imperialism cannot depend on the identity of the empire.
Anyone who claims that tradition must be willing to recognize conquest when it is carried out by Moscow, domination when it is justified through socialist language, and the denial of national agency when it is directed at people whose history falls outside the usual Western account.
Amara’s article gives us a painstakingly detailed view of how this process worked in the Baltic states.
It shows how a military occupation became an administrative transformation, how institutions were turned against the societies they served, and how the destruction of sovereignty was rewritten as a popular revolution.
Anyone who wants to understand Russia’s present war against Ukraine should learn to recognize that machinery.
Anyone who still speaks in the name of liberation should understand how easily its language can be used to conceal conquest.
And now, you know.
