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| Orthodox church in Talinn, Estonia, built by the Russians in 1900 to remind the locals, Who's your daddy. Estonians regard it as a symbol of Russian oppression and have discussed in Parliament the possibility of demolishing it. |
We experienced a massive awakening this summer that came from several directions. 1. First, Cindy and I went on a
two-week discovery tour of the three tiny Baltic countries that have been subjected by multiple foreign powers over the centuries, most recently by Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Third Reich--
Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. As a kind of icing on the cake, we spent a couple of days in Helsinki, in
Finland.
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| Our Baltic adventure. |
These three tiny countries, with combined population of around 6 million, celebrated their independence in the early 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and now they try to survive in the shadow of Russia, which is trying to bring back all its former satellites.
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| Near Nida, Lithuania, on the lovely barrier island known as the Curonian Spit, which borders Russian territory. |
