Bridging the Baltic Sea

This is an important and well-researched contribution to the growing body of Cold War literature which focuses on transnational cross-border contacts, interactions, and cooperation between East and West in Europe, rather than only on confrontation and division. Lars Fredrik Stöcker demonstrates convincingly how activist networks of Baltic and Polish emigrés benefited from the comparatively low-tension atmosphere of Nordic neutrality in the Baltic Sea region in their intricate and creative work on both sides of the East–West Bloc divide to perforate the Iron Curtain and promote political change. -- Poul Villaume, University of Copenhagen
Lars Fredrik Stöcker has produced a novel and engaging study of the Polish and Estonian émigré communities in Sweden and their struggle to reestablish Poland and Estonia as nation-states during the Cold War. Using an impressive body of sources, Stöcker reconstructs a complex political landscape of the Baltic Sea region, official and clandestine channels of communication across the Iron Curtain, and the challenges that nationalist activists created for socialist regimes. Scholars of post-World War II Europe will greatly benefit from his focus on these ‘rank-and-file’ warriors of the Cold War, as it shows how much East–West tensions were fueled from below. Bridging the Baltic Sea is an academically rigorous volume, but it is also a fascinating read, telling us in a historically accurate manner about double agents, secret operations, intelligence and counter-intelligence activities, and public opinion formation both in the Eastern bloc and in neutral Sweden. -- Alexey Golubev, University of Houston
Transnational networking in the Baltic Sea region contributed to the demise of communism in Poland and the Soviet Union and to the end of the Cold War. In this brilliant study, Lars Fredrik Stöcker demonstrates how, in the Baltic Sea region, the concerted actions of numerous individuals on both sides of the Iron Curtain became the driving force between the major changes that took place in Poland and Estonia in the 1980s. The transnational opposition networks in the Baltic Sea region helped to undermine the repressive Soviet system. Once the Soviet leaders chose to rule by means of perestroika and glasnost instead of repression, an assertive civil society in these two countries managed to blow up the ossified Soviet system from within. In his pathbreaking study, Stöcker shows how the Baltic Sea became a Sea of Peace that melted down the Cold War. -- Kristian Gerner, Lund University
Surveying the Baltic region from World War II to the fall of ‘real socialism’ in 1989, Lars Fredrik Stöcker writes about the wise and the unwise ideas of political émigrés, about realists and dreamers, about the ways of illegal border crossing and secret police, and eventually about the equally illegal transfer of forbidden thoughts, which contributed so much to the ‘annus mirabilis’ of 1989. Stöcker writes accessibly, in a way that will also appeal to general readers, and provides professional historians an eye-opening account of an almost unknown front line of the Cold War. -- Włodzimierz Borodziej, Warsaw University