Past, Present and Future: Youth Protest in the Soviet Union's Baltic Republics after Stalin

Drawing on declassified reports from the KGB and Komsomol, this paper offers a new picture of dissenting activity among young people in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia between Stalin's death in 1953 and the end of the 1960s. In contrast to existing depictions of this period as a time of relative quiescence across the region, the article highlights key themes and forms of protest behaviour, ranging from political graffiti and vandalism through to mass public disorders and participation in clandestine underground groups. Further, while such actions remained well outside of the norm, we also see evidence of a wider social milieu in which ordinary citizens time and again declined to confront or report on those instances of dissenting activity that they encountered.