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...In 1920, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania signed separate peace treaties with Russia, and by the middle of the next decade all three states were controlled by authoritarian governments...

...The book is told in a curious and sometimes awkward chronology that culminates in the "zero hour" of the end of the Second World War by working, in alternating passages, forward from 1850 and backward from 1999...

...Greater opportunities awaited ethnic Balts like Janis Vajeiks, the author's grandfather, who was born in 1874...

...The greatest failure imposed on Walking Since Daybreak by Eksteins's non-linear method, however, derives from the author's capacity to look only backward from the present, and not forward...

...Grieta's husband soon became a model of success—a "respected landlord, farmer, and family man...

...In the twelfth century, traders discovered the region's commercial promise...

...Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was little material available in English about the history of the eastern Baltic region, and the best source probably remains Georg Von Rauch's The Baltic States, translated in 1974...

...But Modris Eksteins, a Latvian-born history professor at the University of Toronto, has now added Walking Since Daybreak, an unusual and fascinating contribution to what is a rapidly growing body of literature...

...Churchill, at least, knew the right of it: "The deadly comb ran back and forth, and back again, through Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania," he wrote, and "the Baltic States should be sovereign independent peoples...

...By June 1940, Stalin had rigged elections in the Baltics that brought Communist parties to power, and the new governments quickly declared Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania republics of the Soviet Union—with the result that when German troops invaded in 1941, they were greeted by many as liberators...

...His chronicle of the collapse of Baltic culture is accurate and moving, but the way he tells his story—the non-linear structure he imposes on his story—forces him into a vision of history in which no one is ever on the right side...

...Janis started out as a domestic servant on a large estate in Latvia...

...At the 1945 Yalta conference, for example, in "the great betrayal," Roosevelt and Churchill accorded postwar administration of Eastern Europe to Stalin...

...Eksteins himself was born in 1943, and in 1944 Soviet troops reentered the Baltics, staying for nearly fifty years...

...Their liberal democracy and their market economy seem well established and growing...

...Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have entered their most hopeful period in hundreds of years...

...From that time to the twentieth century, Estonians and Latvians— almost all serfs—knew nothing more than subjugation: to the German Teutonic Order from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, Sweden and Poland in the seventeenth century, and Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth...

...There he met his future bride, Grieta's youngest daughter, and with her dowry, founded a small but flourishing coach business and soon joined the ranks of a growing, indigenous middle class...

...That wouldn't have happened, of course, if no one ever fought on the right side of history—if the Allies had not been the standard bearers for freedom both during World War II and through the Cold War...

...It was "the result not just of a few madmen and their befuddled followers, not just of 'others,' but of humanity as a whole and of our culture as a whole...

...The time has come, however, to pay some attention, for these three independent states are among the few unambiguous successes among the nations broken loose from the old Soviet empire...

...Earlier in the years of national awakening and then independence, Latvians had talked of seven hundred years of slavery under German domination," Eksteins observes...

...At the start of the Second World War, the Soviet Union grabbed the Baltics...

...Herberts Cukurs, a Latvian national, became known as the "butcher of Riga," and of the 250,000 Jews living in the Baltics when Germany invaded, only 50,000 survived...

...For Eksteins, past and present converge in May 1945, at the end of the Second World War...

...But even before Yalta, Soviet troops had already secured the Baltics, and only the Allies' use of force against the Soviet army could have freed them...

...Eksteins is right, of course—and yet he's completely wrong...

...Eksteins's family joined Europe's thousands of displaced persons, wandering until a Baptist organization sponsored their passage to Winnipeg in 1949...

...Eksteins can, of course, point to moments when western tactics proved costly to the Baltics...

...But German terror, especially for the region's Jewish population, was not far behind...

...The baron, in turn, married her off to a young Estonian and gave them a farm...

...FREE AT LAST Past and Future in the Baltics By Amanda Watson Schnetzer Despite their remarkable progress since 1991—the year Moscow recognized their independence—the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are little noticed on this side of the Atlantic...

...A secret provision in the Molo-tov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed in Moscow in August 1939, assigned Estonia and Latvia to the Soviet sphere of influence and Lithuania to the German, but the following month, Stalin agreed to renounce any claims to Poland in exchange for Lithuania...

...Families like Janis Vajeiks's were caught in the crossfire that lasted until 1919 when Germany finally collapsed and Baltic nationalist armies managed to push back the Bolsheviks...

...Amanda Watson Schnetzer is a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute...

...Originally intending to write an academic study of European culture at the end of World War II, Eksteins soon transformed his project into a personalized history of Baltic statehood as witnessed by four generations of his family...

...But it also would not have happened if the Baltic peoples could only spend their time remembering the "deadly comb" that has raked back and forth across their countries— if history only ran backward to grievance and not forward to hope...

...The abolition of serfdom, the end of servile tenure, and the growth of modern industries contributed to a flowering of ethnic cultures and the rise of nationalist political movements...

...Family lore has it that the baron seduced Grieta, who gave birth to his child...

...There was no trace of such talk now...

...Born in 1834, Eksteins's maternal great-grandmother, Grieta Pluta, was a chambermaid for a Baltic-German baron...

...The First World War and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia offered independence for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, but established as well the German and Russian tug-of-war over the Baltics...

...By arguing, for instance, that the Allies "had no moral authority to 'reeducate' " Germany after the war, Walking Since Daybreak turns the conduct of the Western Allies into the moral equivalent of Nazi and Soviet aggression...

...With freer systems than other former Soviet republics, they are expecting to enter NATO, and Estonia, the strongest of the three, is already on the European Union's "fast-track" to membership and one of Europe's fastest-growing economies...

...At the heart of the author's lament is not only the Baltics' failure to regain their sovereignty after the war, but the base inhumanity exhibited during it...

...After a year of Bolshevik terror, German rule appeared like the return of sweetness and light...

...Lithuania had been more successful at maintaining its independence and building an empire, but in the twentieth century, it joined Estonia and Latvia as a battleground for German and Russian expansion...

...Situated on the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have deep roots in European history...