“We sang ourselves free” is a cliché in Estonian accounts of events leading to Estonia’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. In his new book, Guntis Šmidchens takes in earnest this phrase, as well as Latvians’ and Lithuanians’ similar claims about their concurrent struggles for freedom in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during what has come to be called the Singing Revolution. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, as well as on archival research and textual analysis, The Power of Song: Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution seeks to demonstrate how for decades, if not centuries, songs and singing have served the Balts as means of nonviolent political action.
The Power of Song is an exceptional study, outstanding and gently unconventional. It is all about ethnicity and nationalism, but without the usual constructivist criticism or cautionary tales from the history of folklore studies. Rather, Šmidchens appears to claim that nationalism need not be violent and bad and that it can be looked at as a precondition for self-preservation. Reading the book, I was reminded of Elli Köngas-Maranda’s distinction between nationalism and chauvinism in her review of William Wilson’s Folklore and Nationalism in Modern Finland (1976): “Nationalism is defensive, chauvinism is offensive (pun intended).”
The Power of Song begins (chapter 1, “Balts Speak to America, July 4, 1998”) and ends (chapter 9, “Nonviolent National Singing Traditions”) with recollections of the 1998 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, where Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians gave a joint concert to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Singing Revolution. Šmidchens acted as an interpreter for Baltic performers. He takes on a similar role in the book, representing the Baltic peoples and their singing traditions to the English-speaking world. Šmidchens treats his readers to meticulous translations and illuminating analyses of handpicked choral, folk, and rock songs from the Baltic states. “At some point in national history, each of the one hundred and twelve songs in this book was identified by an Estonian, Latvian, or Lithuanian, or in some cases by an outside observer, as a key text, worthy of inclusion in the discourse on national identity” (4). The goal of the monograph is to revive feelings that once accompanied these songs and to “interpret meanings as Balts themselves may have imagined them when they sang” (4). In doing so Šmidchens is hoping to reproduce the ethnographic method of the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803): “Deeply moved by living, singing voices, Herder collected, translated and printed songs that, he hoped, would transmit a similar effect to his book’s empathetic readers” (47).
Herder’s folk song project and its effects on the Baltic states are discussed at length in chapters 2-4. Herder believed that each nation had songs that expressed its “natural way of thinking” (35), and he contrasted warlike nations that sing of feats with gentle nations that sing of love, placing Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians in the latter category. In chapter 2 (“Herder’s Discovery of Baltic Songs”), Šmidchens writes insightfully about how this distinction was worked into Balts’ perceptions and representations of themselves and how folksong texts published by Herder took on new meanings in live performances during the years of the Singing Revolution. Chapter 3 (“Three Singing Nations and their Songs”) explains the instrumental role of singing in national group formation in the Baltics in the nineteenth century. Šmidchens looks at cultural and social factors that led to the standardization of Baltic singing traditions and gave rise to mass singing movements, including song festivals that Estonia and Latvia in particular are famous for.
Chapter 4 (“Songs of Warrior Nations”) takes up anew Herder’s distinction between warlike and gentle nations, analyzing treatments of war and violence in Baltic folksongs and epics. Though some bellicose pieces were incorporated into Singing Revolution repertoires, Šmidchens argues that “(t)he songs and their singers reaffirmed a gentle identity based on love, even in war” (134). I found this conclusion somewhat romanticizing. For one thing, it turns a blind eye to mundane hostility between natives and Russian-speaking newcomers from other parts of the Soviet Union. Though this opposition rarely escalated into violence, it fueled the Singing Revolution, alongside beautiful emotions derived from singing. The jokes and personal narratives from that era paint a less pretty picture of Baltic nonviolent movements. However, the chapters on Herder are of crucial importance to the book’s argument and, furthermore, are useful for elucidating Herder’s legacy in the Baltic states, as well as the relationship between nationalism and folklore studies in that part of the world.
The remaining chapters of the book focus on the Soviet era and explore developments in choral, folk, and rock music scenes that made the Singing Revolution possible. Drawing on the Czech writer, dissident, and politician Václav Havel, Šmidchens characterizes life under the Soviet regime as “living within a lie.” He argues that singing non-Soviet songs, i.e., songs that did not conform to the rules of Soviet socialist realism, provided individual Balts with a means for “living within truth” and maintaining a “non-Soviet identity” (156). Chapter 5 is therefore entitled “Soviet Power versus Power of the Powerless” and chapters 6-8, “Living within the Truth in Choral Songs,” “Living within the Truth in Rock Songs,” and “Living within the Truth in Folk Songs.”
Despite such strong statements, Šmidchens admits at several points that it is not always easy or even possible to distinguish between Soviet and non-Soviet songs or between dissent and collaboration. Song festivals, too, were quickly incorporated into the official Soviet culture: “The song festival’s image of an entire nation singing in unity was as appealing to Stalin as it had been to the organizers of the prewar festivals” (146). The tradition of youth song- and dance-festivals was established in Latvia and Estonia in the 1960s. For some odd reason, The Power of Song passes over this Soviet-era initiative, even though youth festivals played, and continue to play, a crucial role in sustaining all-national festivals.
Overall, the decades under Soviet rule are discussed in rather simplistic and static terms: Stalinist terror was followed by a “post-totalitarian” system that crumbled when Gorbachev began to reform it. Once red flags and other official communist paraphernalia disappeared from public view, “masses of people were no longer participating in the Soviet Union” (159). The book describes the establishment of Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian popular fronts in 1988, but sidesteps competing national nongovernmental organizations and their agendas. For example, the Estonian Popular Front supported Gorbachev’s reforms and radicalized its claims only in the course of the Singing Revolution, whereas the Estonian Citizens’ Committees, launched in 1989-1990, called from the start for the restoration of Estonian independence. Only in hindsight is it possible to claim that the Singing Revolution was from the very beginning about political independence.
Looked at from this perspective, The Power of Song reiterates official historical narratives of the newly independent Baltic states: public narratives that Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians like to tell about themselves, to themselves, and to others. These narratives tend to present the Soviet era as a period of abnormal rupture and individual Balts as resistance fighters who cherished the memory of lost independence and were immune to things Soviet. In actuality, few people living in the Soviet Baltic area could afford to refuse to conform to the official rule, and most became Soviets to a degree. Yet this is a topic for another book. Similarly, further studies are needed to explore how singing and song festivals serve as means of integration and exclusion in post-Soviet Estonia and Latvia, which are both still grappling with large Russian-speaking minorities.
Empathic, informative, and thoroughly researched, The Power of Song is a true achievement. Surpassing this book will be a difficult task, not least because very few scholars are able to conduct research in Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian, none of which, by the way, are mutually intelligible. Language functions as an important marker of national identity in the Baltic states and mastery of local languages has undoubtedly helped Šmidchens “to enter the [Singing Revolution’s] participants’ ‘inner world’”(4). Moreover, unlike most other scholarly treatments of the Baltic states that I have come across, The Power of Song does not have a bias towards one of the three states but transitions between them smoothly and creatively. Reading this book was an enjoyable experience and I would recommend it to anybody interested in the culture and history of the Baltic states, nationalism, Herder, nonviolent political movements, singing, and the folklore movement.
Work Cited
Köngas-Maranda, Elli. 1978. “Folklore and Nationalism in Modern Finland by William Wilson. A Review.” Western Folklore 37: 63-67.
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[Review length: 1425 words • Review posted on December 3, 2014]