HOME, BITTER HOME

Anatol Lieven returns to

the expropriated and vandalised estates of his Baltic German ancestors

Mezotne UNTIL I was in my late twenties, the house where the head of my family used to live, at Mezotne in southern Latvia, might as well have been on the moon, so remote did it seem. Indeed the moon seemed if anything rather more accessible than a closed area of the Soviet Union. The pic- tures of this and other family estates in the Baltic lurked in the background of my infancy like the woolly mammoths which my father assured me were still living in the depths of Siberia: enormous, vague, Impossibly romantic, but unreal.

The unreality came not just from the fact that these places were now in the Sovi- et Union, but that they were no longer even inhabited by my father's people, the Baltic Germans, who included the so- called 'Baltic Barons'. Of the Latvians who had reclaimed the lands they lost to the Germans in the 13th century, I then knew very little.

A Baltic German exile community of sorts lingers on in Germany, but we were kept at a safe distance from it. When he was growing up in the 1920s and 30s, my father saw quite enough of its narrowness, snobbery, chauvinism and ultimate fatuity. Having been tortured by an evangelical Protestant upbringing of a peculiarly awful kind, his distaste for much of the Baltic German tradition may have been all the stronger because he himself was in many ways a quintessential Balt. Wimmelhoch jauchzend, zur Tode betdibt' was the Ger- man way of describing the Germans of the Baltic: 'Rejoicing to Heaven, depressed to death', which is only a fancy German way of saying manic-depressive. The 'Reich Germans' in fact always regarded the Baltic Germans, and especially the nobili- ty, as rather slavicised, impulsive and unre- liable, even as the Russians regarded them as unbearably stolid and Teutonic.

My father's view of those who would have been his fellow noblemen was summed up in an anecdote he delighted to tell of the Baltic gentleman, more used to horses than people, who put his wife out of her misery with his revolver when she broke her ankle. It was with this strange mixture of images (half grand, half comic and very remote) in my head that I went to the Baltic States as a journalist in February 1990, and soon after headed for Mezotne and the other places of my family.

The reality was a shock, but in a way this continued to be muffled by psychological distance. The Latvians who live around our former estates were initially at least tremendously kind and welcoming, but it was clear to both sides that we were grop- ing across a vast gulf: very different, for example, from the experience of a Polish émigré, even a third-generation one, returning to Poland. The house and the scenery at Mezotne, called in German Mesothen, were a shock because they were so familiar from a 19th-century print in the possession of my uncle in London. The house stands at right-angles to the shallow, reed-filled Lielupe river. Across it, water-meadows are fringed with low, wood- ed hills. It is one of those placid, slightly boring Baltic landscapes which belie the cruelties of their history. The park stretch- es along the bank of the river, and its great trees feel like the most enduring link to the past, more so than the restored decorations of the house.

Following the course of the Lielupe, it is possible to trace some of the main events of Latvian history. Across the river from the house, beside our family cemetery, unexcavated mounds are thought to hide the remains of pre-Christian chieftains of the Semgale people. The thick woods around are of oak and linden, which the Batts have always planted in cemeteries, oaks for men and lindens for women. The thickness and richness of these forests are almost inconceivable to someone from England, and in the right light they seem to glow like tropical rain forests — which they should do, as the Baltic States are certainly rainy enough. Many pagan spirits and leg- ends are associated with the oak and lin- den, and standing beneath them is still thought to bring cures for various diseases.

After the second world war, the Baltic forests hid partisan groups, the so-called Forest Brothers, which fought on in the hope that a third world war would lead the West to liberate the Baltic. I have visited the remains of their bunkers in the depths of the woods, and marvelled at the courage and determination of these men, who went on fighting into the mid-50s, long after all hope was gone. In the 13th century as in our own, Mezotne was repeatedly in the front line of Baltic wars. In the park stands a granite Orthodox cross, inscribed in the German language, 'Here Lie Seven Brave Russian Soldiers: August 1915.' It was erected by a chivalrous enemy to honour the men of the Russian rearguard who cov- ered their army's retreat into Riga. The nearby cemetery is full of German soldiers who fell in that battle and those against the Communists and Latvian national forces during the civil war.

In that war, my great-uncle, Colonel Prince Anatol Lieven, formed the first White Russian force in the Baltic States, and the house, by then already wrecked and looted, was for a time his headquar- ters. Unlike the bulk of his fellow Baltic German noblemen, he never sided with the Germans against the Latvian national government. For his part in the liberation of Riga from the Bolsheviks, during which he was badly wounded, he was given a Lat- vian state funeral in 1937. He is buried in the cemetery at Mezotne.

From a family originally native Balt but Germanised in the course of the centuries, of Lutheran religion with a heavy English evangelical input, partly Russian by cul- ture but loyal not to Russia but to the Russian imperial family, he symbolises the ambiguities of the ethnically mixed Baltic frontier, and the dilemmas of a man with an essentially feudal concept of political allegiance faced with the brutal ethnic and class-defined choices of the 20th century. In the moral shambles which fell upon the region, he is perhaps not the worst of fig- ures to identify with, even though his efforts and allegiances were in the end futile. My uncle was lucky to die when he did.

Three years later, Soviet Communism under Stalin finally got its claws on Latvia. The surviving officers of his regiment were to a man executed or deported, as were all the other leading figures of the Russian emigration in Latvia. This is something too often forgotten by the Balts when they automatically associate 'Russian' and `Soviet': just as when they say that the Soviet terror in 1940-41 was largely carried out by Jews, they forget that there were also a disproportionate number of Jews among its victims. The savagery of that terror is also now commemorated at Mezotne.

Near the house, a new monument, always with a bunch of flowers lying beside it, commemorates 11 pupils of the local high school, deported to Siberia in 1940 after a portrait of Stalin was thrown into the river. Only two returned. A few yards away, on the river-bank, another block of local granite commemorates the Soviet sol- diers of the 37th Pontoon Battalion, 9th Brigade, 43rd Army, 'who on this spot, on 14 September 1944, under enemy fire, con- structed a bridge and forced the crossing of the river'.

With the Latvians in their present mood of hostility to a memorial of the hated Soviet period, this monument may not last very much longer. As I stood beside my great-uncle's grave in the wreckage which is all that Soviet rule left of our family cemetery, I could understand how they feel. Whether from sheer love of vandal- ism, or under the mistaken impression that the Baltic German nobility were buried along with their possessions, the tombs were smashed open and bones scattered through the uncut grass.

The cemetery can stand as a symbol of all the damage that Soviet rule did to the cultural heritage of the Baltic States. How- ever, for all my bitterness about this, I should be sorry if the local Soviet military monuments were destroyed in revenge for past Russian sins; and I certainly have no intention of making any claim for the restoration of those lands at Mezotne which were left to us by the independent Latvian state after the land reform of 1920.

Today, they are occupied by Russian mil- itary veterans, and I thought I detected a hope in some local Latvians that we might be used as a lever to evict these hated intruders. For my own part, I am only too glad that the chances of history have saved me from having to participate in such con- flicts and have allowed me the luxury of some detachment from ethnic allegiances. A Balt of course would regard such an atti- tude as decadent — and might indeed be right.

Anatol Lieven's book, The Baltic Revolu- tion: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence, was published by Yale University Press earlier this month.

`One day, son, all this will be box office.'