Skilful Leaders or Dictators? The Image of the Hegemons of State of the Baltic Countries Conveyed by The Finnish Media in the Interwar Period

Abstract

Abstract

There were three persons above the others when evaluating their importance and fame in the political life of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania during the interwar period. Antanas Smetona became the authoritarian leader of Lithuania in 1926. Konstantin Päts rose to the same position in Estonia in the spring of 1934, and Kārlis Ulmanis did the same in Latvia a couple of months after Päts. All three held supreme power until the summer of 1940, when they were ousted by the Soviet occupation regime. The Finnish media followed the development of events in the Baltic countries with interest. The greatest interest was in Estonia, which was geographically and especially culturally closest to Finland, but Latvia and Lithuania also received a fair amount of attention. The attitude towards the politics of these three hegemons was largely, but not entirely determined by the Finnish newspapers’ own ideological backgrounds. Although the administrations of Smetona, Päts, and Ulmanis may have seemed almost identical during their “authoritarian regimes,” contemporaries saw significantly more differences in the hegemons’ content and tone in retrospect.