The future of the Baltics analytics. On the future of the Baltic economy: everything is bad

The Baltic republics and Belarus developed for centuries as part of the same region, had similar geographical conditions, economic structure and history. However, in the post-Soviet period, the Baltic states and Belarus turned into antagonists - the advanced Baltic states and the last dictatorship of Europe. Let's look impartially - politics, economics, population and so on.

Human rights are violated in Belarus. Elections are rigged in Belarus. One person has been in power in Belarus for 20 years. There are political prisoners in Belarus. There is censorship and pressure on journalists in Belarus. In Belarus, the dominance of special services. In short, this Belarus of yours is some kind of European North Korea. With the most cursory comparison of the facts of the socio-political life of Belarus and Lithuania, it turns out that all the claims of Western fighters for democracy and human rights to Belarusians against the backdrop of Lithuanian realities are simply ridiculous.

Belarusian political prisoners were people who, on the night after the presidential elections in 2010, tried to stage a revolution in the country and seize administrative buildings in Minsk. The last such “prisoner of conscience”, around whose arrest “people of good will” tried to launch a hysterical propaganda campaign, is Vladimir Kondrus, who was arrested for breaking down the doors of the Government House. At the same time, the same “people of goodwill” in 2004 gladly accepted Lithuania into the European Union, in whose prisons the obvious political prisoners Mykolas Burokevichius and Juozas Ermalavichyus were then sitting, whom the Lithuanian special services, in violation of all conceivable decency in international relations in 1994, stole just from Minsk.

Western partners chose not to notice such a “prank” of Vilnius, which is in a state of “democratic transit”, but the arrogance of the foreign intelligence services that run the Belarusian land as if it were their own made a strong impression on Lithuania’s neighbors and became one of the reasons for Alexander Lukashenko’s victory in the presidential elections in the same year. Speaking of special services. There is a dominance of special services in Belarus, you say? Has it happened in recent Belarusian history that special services broke into schools of national minorities, carried out searches there and interrogated teachers in the case of children's trips to foreign summer camps? In Lithuanian history, this happened: the Lithuanian authorities seriously believe that after visiting Russian recreation centers, children will return recruited by Russian intelligence and will be prone to anti-state activities. “Elections are being rigged in Belarus.” In Lithuania, after the incident of Rolandas Paksas, there is no need to falsify anything: the “wrong” candidate will simply not be allowed there before the elections. Paksas was admitted once, and exactly a year later they made the first impeachment in Europe - they say, the “wrong” president was chosen by the people. A couple more years later, the Constitutional Court found the ex-president innocent of all charges, but Paksas was still forbidden to be elected anywhere in Lithuania. As for the falsifications, after the impeachment of Paksas, a marvelous incident occurred in Lithuania: when the “wrong” candidate Kazimir Prunskienė began to come forward during the counting of votes cast in the second round of the presidential elections, the electronic vote counting system suddenly “frozen” for two hours, and when it “drooped”, it turned out that the “correct” candidate Valdas Adamkus was already becoming president. Who would talk after that about falsifications? The same contrasts are found when comparing Belarus with Latvia and Estonia: if you do not turn a blind eye to what is happening in the Baltic republics, then the Republic of Belarus against their background appears as a standard of democratic development. Who in recent years has heard that Belarus has banned someone entry, deported from the country, declared someone persona non grata? Those who call it “the last dictatorship of Europe” and dream of seeing a revolution in Minsk also travel there freely. In the Baltics, the number of names on the “black lists” has exceeded a hundred: in recent years, objectionable scientists, experts, artists, writers, and journalists have been expelled from there. Including EU citizens, in violation of their own obligations on freedom of movement in Europe.

Is there censorship and persecution of journalists in the Belarusian media? But, wait a minute, the Belsat channel, a Polish state-owned TV channel created by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs with a frank formulation “to support the democratic opposition of Belarus”, is broadcasting freely in Belarus, financed from the state budget and part of the state broadcasting of Poland. It has not yet been turned off or banned, just as the “Radio Raciya” broadcasting to Belarus from Bialystok, another Polish mouthpiece of the Belarusian opposition, has not yet been drowned out. Compare this with Latvia and Lithuania, where in the past three years they have done nothing but ban and turn off Russian TV channels, convincing the whole of Europe to use their methods of combating “Russian propaganda”. Belarus is the only former Soviet republic that has two official languages. In 2010-2012, not Belarusian, but Lithuanian authorities closed Polish schools with the wording “if you want to be a Pole, go to Poland.” This is about the situation of minorities in Belarus. For Minsk, such a statement of the question is, in principle, incorrect; As the President of Belarus has repeatedly said, “We do not have any minorities, neither sexual nor national. These are all our citizens. These are our Poles, these are my Poles.” Finally, the crown argument: in Minsk, the “last dictator of Europe” is in power - the same person has been holding the highest state post for more than twenty years. The truth is that Alexander Lukashenko in politics is a man from the street compared to the Baltic elites: after all, in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, the same tightly connected groups of people have been in power for many decades.

As a result of the collapse of the USSR and the emergence of independent post-Soviet republics, the real change of power took place in Belarus, and not in the Baltics. Who was Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko elected in 1994 as President of the Republic of Belarus? Director of the state farm "Gorodets" in the Mogilev region, an opposition deputy of the Supreme Council of the Belarusian SSR, who made a name for himself on anti-corruption revelations of the nomenklatura that repainted from the communist to the "Litvinian" nationalist nomenklatura. And who in the Baltic States gained a foothold in power following the fateful events of the early 1990s? In Lithuania - the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Lithuanian SSR Brazauskas, in Latvia - the secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Latvian SSR on the Marxist-Leninist ideology Gorbunov, in Estonia - the chairman of the Supreme Council of the Estonian SSR since 1983 Ruutel. Together with them, numerous instructors of party departments, chairmen of city executive committees, heads of departments of republican Komsomol and scientific secretaries of higher party schools have firmly entrenched themselves in power and to this day feed on access to it. Tellingly, they unanimously demand to equate communism with Nazism and pay them compensation for the "Soviet occupation". On closer examination, it turns out that the Baltic States and Belarus, in whatever area you begin to compare them, each time turn out to be antagonists and antipodes of each other, and the comparison with Belarus invariably turns out to be not in favor of the Baltic States. This circumstance is especially striking, given that today's Belarus and The Baltic states (more precisely, Lithuania and part of Latvia - Latgale) have developed for centuries as one region with the same geographical conditions, great similarity of culture and life, a common history (being part of the Commonwealth and the Russian Empire, Polish cultural influence). Common features were preserved even in the Soviet period: the Byelorussian SSR and the “Baltic sisters” had the same economic structure with a predominance of high-tech heavy industry in it. Striking contrasts between different countries of the same region began to appear only after the collapse of the USSR. In a couple of years, the Belarusian society rejected the nationalist pro-Western model of the development of the Baltic countries, abandoning privatization, globalization, liberalization, xenophobia, Russophobia - in a word, from everything that is commonly called the “European choice” in the post-Soviet space. Belarus established a succession with the Byelorussian SSR, rejected nationalist symbols, set the task of preserving industry, introduced two state languages, did not declare anyone non-citizens and did not squeeze out of the country, refused membership in the EU and NATO as a reward for breaking off relations with Russia, made the first attempts to revive integration ties destroyed after the collapse of the USSR. For two decades, by default, it was believed that the Belarusian development model is a rudiment, a rollback and regression, especially when compared with the most progressive Baltic countries in the post-Soviet space, open to the global world. However, now objectively it turns out that the countries of the future in Eastern Europe are Poland and Belarus, while the Baltic states are the outgoing nature. The most important criterion is whether people want to live in these countries. Belarus is one of the few former Soviet republics that has maintained a positive migration balance for many years. Belarusians do not emigrate anywhere, unlike Latvians and Lithuanians, of which a third have already left for the West and another third are going to. And the point is not that the Belarusians are not included in the Schengen zone and the European Union and do not have the opportunity to freely go to work in Europe. Ukrainians are also deprived of all this, nevertheless, more than a million guest workers have left for Poland alone from Ukraine, which made the “European choice”, in recent years. Belarusians, by percentage of the population, do not emigrate anywhere: neither to the EU, the borders with which are closed, nor to Russia, the borders with which are open. The population of Belarus has been growing in recent years, both due to immigration and due to a good birth rate. The population of Belarus has decreased by 7% since 1991 - can this be compared with the depopulation in Latvia or Lithuania, where a quarter of a century after 1991 there was a demographic catastrophe that has no analogues in modern history? And is it any wonder that this demographic catastrophe happened, if in Latvia, for example, during the five years of the “anti-crisis policy” of the cabinet of Valdis Dombrovskis, every second hospital was closed, which was called by the government “optimization of the medical network”. In Belarus, over the same years, 1.9% of medical institutions were closed under the same justification of “optimization”. So in which case did optimization take place, and in which case did the destruction of social infrastructure take place? The Republic of Belarus is among the ten European countries with the highest survival rate of children with cancer - 75%. In a ranking prepared by Bloomberg in 2014 based on data from the World Health Organization and the World Bank, the efficiency of the Belarusian healthcare system surpasses that of the United States. What can the "lawyers" of the Baltic republics present in response to these arguments? Is GDP per capita higher than Belarusian? So subtract from this per capita GDP the money that the average Lithuanian or Latvian pays for housing and communal services in accordance with the principle prescribed by the European Commission and the IMF of one hundred percent payment of utility tariffs by the end consumer at market value, and compare with state".

Is the human development index in the Baltic countries the highest among the former Soviet republics? How is this index calculated? The Human Development Index (HDI) is life expectancy, education of the population and per capita GDP. The life expectancy indicator in the Baltic states only speaks of the aging of the population and the increase in the proportion of older people in the age structure. Young people are fleeing en masse from the Baltic republics, and the birth rate in them is negligible. The level of educated people in society is really high, but what are these educated people to do with their education if the real economy is destroyed, and the service market is shrinking due to population decline? Specialists with higher education today fly away from the Baltic States immediately after receiving a diploma. About GDP has already been mentioned above; it is worth adding to the above that per capita GDP is distributed extremely unevenly, and Latvia, for example, is the leader of the European Union in terms of the "Gini coefficient" - the level of stratification between the rich and the poor. In Belarus, the “Gini coefficient” is one of the lowest in Europe. It turns out that for the most part Belarusians live better than the Balts. As a result of two and a half decades of post-Soviet development, it was Belarus that retained and increased its human potential, while the Baltics finally and irrevocably lost it. Therefore, Belarus has a future, while the Baltics no longer have it. The share of innovative goods in the total shipped Belarusian products in 2014 reached 18%, and high-tech exports amounted to about $10 billion - about a third of the total Belarusian exports. Belarus will soon have its own nuclear power plant, a Chinese-Belarusian industrial park and other innovative strategic projects, with the help of which it will break through into the 21st century. The Baltic States will have nothing - only a further exodus of the population, a demographic crisis and the transformation into a nursing home. This polar opposite in development is the result of a choice made 20 years ago. The Baltics made their choice - and lost. The Belarusians remained true to their choice, no matter how they were called “collective farmers” and “scoops” for 20 years ... and now it turns out that they are the winners. But, of course, the correctness of the Belarusian choice cannot be recognized either in the Baltic states or in the West. Therefore, in the Belarusian eye they will continue to look for every straw, not noticing a huge log in the Baltic eyes.

The European Union has begun consultations on a new financial budget for 2021-2027. In connection with the exit from the donor union - Great Britain - and the redistribution of the budget for defense needs and migration, assistance to the Baltic countries from EU funds will be greatly reduced. Will the welfare-ridden Baltic economies be able to survive without resorting to Russian help?

Latvia is in favor of leaving the EU

Where to get money "for a bridge from Crimea to South Africa"?

Note that, according to Eurostat, approximately seven percent of the world's population lives in the EU, but Europeans receive 50 percent of social benefits in the world. At the same time, the amount is constantly growing due to the rising costs of maintaining an aging population. At the same time, the eurozone economy has not recovered from the crisis and has modest economic growth (2.2 percent in 2017), many countries have huge debts that hinder the implementation of social obligations.

The outlook is not very bright. The revenue part of the budget will decrease after Brexit and the trade wars with Trump, while the expenditure part will grow. Such development cannot be sustainable in the long term. It is clear that it is time to reduce subsidies, allowances, grants allocated by various funds to weak members of the European Union, that is, those whose GDP per capita does not reach 75 percent of the average. For the Baltics, this would mean a six to forty percent cut in financial aid, according to their own estimates.

As Nikolai Mezhevich, professor at the Department of European Studies at the Faculty of International Relations of St. Petersburg State University (SPbU), head of the Baltic and Nordic Studies program, Nikolai Mezhevich, told Pravda.Ru, subsidizing the Baltic countries from EU funds "will decrease by 25-30 percent." But for the Baltic States, this is "substantial money." "If you are implementing a project of disconnection from the Russian power grids worth one or two billion euros, then it cannot be completed by half, it is impossible to build half of the Royal-Baltic road and provide a European gauge connecting Tallinn with Kaunas and Kaunas with Poland, - the expert of "Pravda.Ru" noted. - And on the scale of Estonia, a billion euros is not that the Crimean bridge, it is a bridge from the Crimea to South Africa."

When politicians control the economy

According to the previous financial plan for 2014-2020, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia will receive 4.4, seven and 4.4 billion euros from European structural funds, respectively, in seven years, which is 7-11 percent of budget revenues and ensures an increase GDP by three percent. The habit of living on subsidies is so ingrained that entrepreneurs do not want to fully finance their projects, hoping for help from EU funds.

Like the then President of the Bank of Latvia, Ilmar Rimsevicius, back in 2012, the situation after 2020 in the region will resemble the situation that arose after the collapse of the USSR, when over several years the economy of Estonia shrank by 35 percent, Lithuania by 49 percent and Latvia by 52 percent. The banker predicted that Brussels' efforts to lay the foundations for the independent functioning of the Baltic economies would fail, as wages in the Baltic countries grew faster than labor productivity, and emigration and a shortage of qualified personnel exacerbated the situation. Rimsevicius in this situation called for the search for cooperation with neighbors, that is, with Russia. But this was not done, on the contrary, the Baltic countries, for political reasons, curtailed all cooperation with Moscow.

As Nikolai Mezhevich noted in an interview with Pravda.Ru, after the reduction in funding from the EU, the implementation of infrastructure projects will suffer the most, the share of external subsidies in them is very high - from 50 percent over the past ten years in Estonia, to 70 percent - in Latvia. Moreover, these expenses cannot be replenished from the state budget. A hard fate awaits farmers who are financed by 70 percent of EU funds, as well as small and medium-sized businesses with 85-90 percent EU funding.

How to reconcile the devil with Michael the Archangel?

In such a situation, the belligerence of the Baltic states in relation to Russia would have to decrease sharply, as well as economic ties would improve. Indeed, only Russians can consume Baltic farmers and use the logistics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Only through Russia can the Baltic States gain access to the Eastern markets. But will they manage to reorganize in two years, apologize and ask for mutually beneficial cooperation with Russia? Bulgaria is already doing this.

“Imagine a repentant devil who turns to Michael the Archangel with a request to organize a meeting with the Lord God for an apology, restoration of friendly relations? This is practically impossible. If you tell your neighbor for 25 years that he is a fool, an enemy, then a sharp change in tone will he will understand and not believe,” Nikolai Mezhevich commented on this possibility to Pravda.Ru. According to the Pravda.Ru expert, the countries of the region are waiting for the final withdrawal of Russian transit from the region.

“Relations with Russia are 18 percent of the GDP of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania,” Nikolai Mezhevich noted in an interview with Pravda.Ru. “If Russia, then the railways going in the direction of Russia, the Baltic ports will become economically unprofitable.”

If not with Russia, then with whom?

So what to do if Russia is not on the way? As Nikolai Mezhevich told Pravda.Ru, questions are now being discussed as to how many new maternity hospitals are needed in Estonia. They reduced the plans to one, "but with such savings you can't get as much as you need to build the Estonian navy, but you want to." According to an expert from Pravda.Ru, the Americans are offering to sell Estonia a good, used aircraft carrier for five to six billion dollars. "I'm not even asking how to drag him into the Baltic Sea and what he will do there, I ask - and with what money will he be bought?" - said the expert of Pravda.Ru. Naturally, Nikolai Mezhevich continued in an interview with Pravda.Ru, Brussels is not very pleased that, translated into Russian, German money is used to ensure that Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania buy American weapons. As we say "friendship is friendship, but money apart." "Moreover, here the question of friendship with the United States is also already on the table," the Pravda.Ru expert concluded.

Photo: Peter Hermes Furian / shutterstock.com

It seems that in the foreseeable future the Baltic countries themselves will die, without any mythical "Russian aggression" there, and this is due to purely economic factors. Today, a message appeared on the net that Brussels will completely stop allocating financial assistance to the Baltic countries through EU structural funds by 2021.

It is known that Lithuania and Latvia will be the most affected, while Estonia will suffer less. The situation is greatly aggravated by the fact that, adhering to, so to speak, the general course of a united Europe, the Baltic countries willingly agreed to get involved in a sanctions war against Russia. And Russia, as you know, was a huge sales market for producers from the Baltic countries, and in this regard, local economists, as one might expect, were very concerned about the illusory future of the national economies of the Baltic countries.

It should be recalled that Russia not only closed its internal market to the Baltic countries, but also deprived them of income from the transit of goods through their territory. And in general, in general, local experts in the field of macroeconomics in unison repeat that the sanctions war with Russia turned out to be a crushing blow for the economies of the Baltic countries.

One of the chief economists of the DNB bank in Lithuania, Ekaterina Rojaka, talking about the reduction of financial receipts from the EU for the Baltic countries, said that this step could very seriously shake the national economies of these states. Moreover, Rojaka added that, for example, about 20% of the Lithuanian budget consists of financial receipts from EU structural funds, noting that if you just take and remove this rather impressive part from the Lithuanian treasury, the country's economy may even collapse. The same, according to the DNB economist, applies to Lithuania.

It should be noted that the collapse of the economies of the countries of the Baltic region is a completely realistic scenario for the development of the situation around the EU structural funds. However, it is necessary to understand that the diplomats and politicians of the Baltic countries will not sit back and wait for the feeder to close...

Most likely, during this time there will be a huge number of personal meetings between diplomats and officials at different levels, and, hiding behind their “front-line” position, the Balts will still be able to beg for something in Brussels. Although you will agree, it would be funny if the poor Russophobe Balts arrived in Moscow to pay their respects, so that Russia would open its domestic market for them. And it is likely that it will!

The population of the Baltic States is rapidly declining. The reason is not only in the decline in the birth rate, but above all in the increase in the scale of emigration. An increasing number of people of working age are leaving en masse abroad - someone to Europe, someone to Russia. Post-Soviet nation-states are unlikely to escape demographic and subsequent economic collapse.

Lithuania was the first of the "new European" countries to sum up the demographic results of its seven-year stay in the European Union by completing the population census. The result did not so much shock the Lithuanians (it was quite predictable) as plunged into despondency: the largest of the Baltic republics irrevocably lost almost a quarter of its people - and some of them were the youngest and able-bodied. In neighboring Latvia, the authorities hastily announced that they were extending the census, during which those who had left the country long ago would be added to the people actually living in the republic now.

Small Duchy of Lithuania

The result of the population census in Lithuania looks especially egregious in comparison with the two previous ones - 1989 and 2001. In 1989, the population of the Lithuanian SSR was almost 3.7 million inhabitants. Lithuania differed from the other two Baltic republics in that at one time it did not host a wide industrialization and large-scale import of "Russian" personnel from other, larger union republics. Thus, only 0.6 million people were employed in the industrial production of Lithuania, and there were no relatively large enterprises in the republic. As a result, Lithuania at the time of the collapse of the USSR turned out to be the most mono-ethnic of the Baltic republics - Lithuanians made up 80% of the population in it, and the Russian minority, perceived as a “dangerous”, hardly exceeded 8% (compare with Latvia, where Russians made up at least half of the country's population). Therefore, unlike Latvia and Estonia, Lithuania did not survive the truly large-scale departure of "ethnically alien" elements to Russia in the 1990s. The first post-Soviet census showed a decrease in the population by less than 200 thousand people, while neighboring Latvia, which is much less populated, lost 300 thousand.

However, between 2001 and 2011, Lithuania joined the European Union, and the consequences of the 2000s turned out to be much more catastrophic for it than the consequences of the 1990s. Labor emigration from Lithuania, which began even before the official entry into the EU, has taken on an avalanche-like character since 2004 - Lithuanians were among the first, along with the Poles, to master the labor market in Great Britain, Ireland, Spain and Portugal. In 2011, the population of Lithuania is 3.05 million people. At the same time, as experts admit, the real size of the population is probably less than 3 million, since during the census emigrants were given the opportunity to fill out questionnaires on the Internet and present themselves as still living in Lithuania.

The ex-president of the republic, Rolandas Paksas, having learned about the results of the census, stated that such data "put the state on the brink of extinction." Lithuanian historian Liudas Truska noted that "the Lithuanian people have never been reduced on such a large scale and so quickly," and compared what happened with a "mass evacuation." No state measures were discussed in connection with the result of the census in Lithuania: the President of the Republic, Dalia Grybauskaite, only expressed the hope that the emigrants "someday will return."

Meanwhile in Latvia

Simultaneously with the announcement of the Lithuanian results, the Latvian authorities hurriedly and without clear explanations announced the extension of their own census. As in Lithuania, in Latvia the census took place in two stages: first, from March 1 to March 12, an online census, during which labor emigrants could declare themselves residents of the republic; then, on March 14, census takers began to walk around the republic. The second stage was supposed to end on May 31. However, two weeks before the expiration of the term, the authorities decided to add “another 10 days to it so that everyone who did not have time to register online during the first stage could do it.”

...In order to understand the level of desolation in Latvia, it is enough to walk around the Latvian capital in the evening. Once claiming the status of a millionaire, Riga today is a sparsely populated place: no more than a dozen cars move in both directions on the central Brivibas Street, almost no people are visible in half-empty trolleybuses and on the streets. At night, the city plunges into darkness - many houses in the center turn out to be completely uninhabited. Convenience stores died out as a class in the mid-2000s. According to local entrepreneurs, the biggest headache in any project is to see it through to completion: “For example, you need to build or fix something. You recruit a team, you get to work, and then they begin to disappear one by one. How? And this means that they just turned away from you, and during this time they found a real job in Europe ... ”Against this background, the Latvian political class faces a non-banal task: to prove to the voters who have remained in the country (most of whom are already at pre-retirement and retirement age) that there is still a future for them. What is curious: for the Latvian political class, the acceptable results of the census are much more important than for the Lithuanian one. For, due to the large number of "foreigners" in the country, the ideology of the Latvian political majority is more focused on the "survival of the nation" in the internal confrontation with the Russians. Until now, all measures to Latvianize the public information space, destroy education in Russian and civil segregation have been explained by the need to preserve the Latvian nation and the Latvian language.

Therefore, measures to prevent surprises were taken in advance: for example, the census was entrusted to a sociological company that ensured the fulfillment of orders from the ruling party before the last elections; during the second stage, according to the stories of local residents, the census takers offer residents to fill out questionnaires on their relatives who have left the country as if they continue to live at home. Even a paradoxical form of filling out a questionnaire for an absent relative was invented: “a resident of Latvia, living abroad for more than a year.” This category includes those who do not visit their historical homeland even on a visit. Such "residents", according to preliminary data of the Latvian Central Statistical Office, there are about 56 thousand people.

Respondents themselves actively help census takers to distort information: according to the newspaper Latvijas Avize, relatives of people living and working abroad usually pass them off as “just left home” or “already enumerated on the Internet”, fearing that guest workers who arrived on a visit may be forced pay taxes on money earned abroad. However, even as a result of these joint efforts of the authorities and the population, the census takers managed to collect data for only 1.14 million inhabitants in two months of work, by May 12. For reference: in 1989, the population of Latvia was 2.67 million people. In 2000 - 2.37 million. In 2010, according to official data from the Central Statistical Bureau, it should have been 2.25 million. Meanwhile, the representative of the Latvian CSO Aldis Brokans, reporting on the interim results, let slip that 1.14 million - "this is 73.8% of the total number of persons subject to the census." This means that even in the case of a mechanical addition of the results of the electronic and face-to-face stages of the census, with all the additions, the authorities hope to get a maximum of two million results. The real figures range from 1.5 to 1.8 million (Latvian demographers, based solely on official statistics, assumed that such a population decline would occur only by 2050).

It should be noted that the data received by the Lithuanians and expected by the Latvians will obviously be exaggerated: on May 1, the largest Western European labor market, the German one, opened for Eastern Europeans. The event has sparked a surge in demand for bus and air tickets in Baltic cities, where census takers say the working population is already a tiny minority.

According to the head of the Council of Foreign Investors in Latvia, Ahmed Sharh, these processes "cause concern." Sharkh advised the republic to “work on improving the situation in healthcare, education and the social system in order to motivate people who left Latvia in search of work to return to their homeland” - otherwise “negative consequences” await it. After all, a country that can provide a foreign investor with only a small and constantly dwindling number of unskilled workers will interest him the least. Especially if there is Poland or Belarus nearby, where both quantitative and qualitative indicators of the labor force are incomparably better.

No future

In fact, neither for Lithuania, nor for Latvia, nor for Estonia (where, according to official statistics, the population has not changed at all for the past five years, and the census will take place only next year), there are no real chances to escape desolation. In these post-Soviet republics, four factors are at work at once, nullifying the possibility of correcting the situation.

First: the narrowed reproduction of the population, from 1.28 to 1.39 children per woman - and for a long time, since 1992. Those who leave and the dead are not made up for by those born. Tajikistan, which exports Tajiks all over Russia, has quietly increased its population by 1.2 million inhabitants over the past decade through social regression and a return to a feudal way of life. For European micronations, this option is, of course, impossible.

Second: xenophobia, which has been inculcated since the dismantling of the USSR, deliberately turns any decision of the Baltic elites to open borders for immigrants into political suicide. Anyone who allows “crowds of foreigners” will almost immediately be recognized as a traitor to the indigenous nation and, as a result, will lose the votes of voters who are accustomed to perceive the ethnic and cultural homogeneity of the environment as the highest and absolute good. Meanwhile, the process of flight of the able-bodied population has gone so far that it is impossible to correct its consequences by importing some symbolic hundreds of workers.

Third: the absolute dependence of the Baltic ethnocracies on the European Union, which is today the main creditor of the Baltic states, their main trading partner and the main sponsor of their elites. With a large difference between the average wages in Germany and Latvia, Western Europe in the coming years will continue to suck out all the more or less suitable personnel from the Eastern European republics. The ethnocratic elites are, of course, aware of this, but the discussion of "Eurogenic depopulation" among them has actually been vetoed. For they are still not in a position to change the position of their republics as donors of labor. Any attempt to forcibly limit the travel of young people abroad or to develop their own industries is, in these monstrously indebted and poor countries, the realm of unscience fiction.

Finally, the fourth and main factor: having received their own states 20 years ago, the Baltic ethnic groups could not understand why these states are needed. In the absence of statist ideas, they made do with ethnic ideologies, by definition clan ideologies, focused not on creating an environment, but on using it for self-preservation. Therefore, in the early 2000s, ethnic elites did not hesitate to sacrifice their sovereignties in exchange for work for their youth.

The fact that such a search for "extra-state good" actually destroys the very structure of the state is obvious today. Now the Baltics have fallen into a vicious circle: no population, because there is no work, because there are no enterprises, because there is no investment, because there is no population.

Perhaps, there is justice in the fact that those who made this choice, that is, the current elderly Balts, who at one time voted for the “creation of nation states” and the “European choice”, will be responsible for the consequences of the choice 22 years ago. In Latvia, at the level of ministries, the possibility of reducing pensions in the coming years to a symbolic “Chinese” size is being discussed, because there will be no one to ensure the old age of the fighters for Europe.

I wonder what is happening now in the Baltic States? Judging by the latest news - nothing good. Kazakhstan has already joined the ban on the supply of fish products from Latvia and Estonia. Let me remind you that it closed its borders for Baltic fish back in 2014 - some harmful and dangerous substances were found there.

With dairy products from the Baltic States, things are also quite sour. Dr. Pilyulkin, known to you, writes that he found Lithuanian butter on the shelves of a Spanish supermarket.

The inscriptions in oil are still in Russian - they probably wanted to send this batch to Russia, but they could not. Obviously, no one will buy expensive Baltic oil in Spain either: Spain is in a severe crisis, and many experts believe that Spain will be the next after Greece.

What the Baltic States will do next is completely incomprehensible. The Balts are a very hardworking people, under other circumstances they could live no worse than the Germans or Danes. Under current circumstances… let's look at the economy of our Baltic neighbors with sober eyes.

1. The industry of the Baltic countries is not competitive. The Germans have better equipment and more political power to shove their goods, the Germans also have a lot more money and, in general, a higher level of technological development. The Baltic countries cannot compete with the Germans.

In Russia, on the other hand, there are now very favorable conditions for production - a study by the Boston Consulting Group indicates that we have already outperformed even China in terms of competitiveness, and are only behind India, Thailand and Indonesia.

The Baltics, with its high costs and expensive labor force, are caught between two huge regions with which it cannot compete.

2. There are no hydrocarbons in the Baltics. The Ignalina nuclear power plant, which could solve the energy problems of the Baltic states, was closed by order of the European Union, but no one will build a new nuclear power plant in its place. A nuclear power plant is already under construction in the Kaliningrad region, and two nuclear power plants in the region will be cramped.

Thus, energy in the Baltics is, was and will be expensive - and nothing can be done about it.

3. The agriculture of the Baltic countries turns out to be unnecessary. The European Union is full of its own farmers, and Russia, towards which the Baltic elites continue to actively spit, has no particular desire to plow up its markets towards its neighbors in the Baltic Sea.

Again, agriculture in Russia is now developing at a very good pace, and we do not have a special need to import products that are excellently produced in Russia.

4. Until recently, ice-free ports in the Baltic Sea were the main trump card of the Baltic states. These ports served Russian import-export, since there were no sufficiently powerful ports in the nearby territory of Russia.

In the zero years, however, Russia began to actively develop the port in Ust-Luga near St. Petersburg, the water in which freezes only in the coldest winters (during which icebreakers can break the ice). Already now, this port has taken over a significant share of the turnover of the Baltic ports.

It can be expected that in a year or two the need for Baltic ports will simply disappear.

Look at the map of Europe. To the west of the Baltics is Poland, which has its own excellent ports. In the east - Russia, which will soon no longer need the services of the Baltic states. It remains to focus only on a small Belarus, which, again, can now choose between Poland, Russia, the Baltic states and Ukraine.

Of course, there are also internal needs. However, the population of the Baltics is very small, and it is not clear what specific goods will be transported by the ports. I repeat, agriculture and industry in the Baltics are not very competitive.

5. The finances of the "Baltic tigers" are in an extremely deplorable state. After joining the European Union, debts were fairly accumulated, and their maintenance is now eating up a significant share of the budget. Also, a lot of money is spent on social programs - by no means the most generous in the EU, but still very burdensome for the Baltic countries.

6. It remains, perhaps, to mention the demographic problem. The Baltics are experiencing a terrible depopulation: people are leaving the country en masse - first of all, to the European Union, where it is easiest for them to leave.

Two significant numbers. 2 million 900 thousand people now live in Lithuania. In 1991, 3 million 700 thousand lived.

If people were leaving Russia at such a pace, we would now have not 146, but 116 million inhabitants. It is difficult to call what happened to the Baltic States otherwise than a demographic catastrophe: after all, the most active and most able-bodied citizens left the country.

Are there ways out of the crisis?

As you can see, the Baltics are now a classic depressive region, which needs to be injected with significant funds so that it can at least provide for itself. However, the European Union has the wrong traditions and the wrong financial position to provide material assistance to countries that are far from being the most important from the point of view of “old Europe”.

Russia, even more so, does not intend to pour resources into the Baltic states, since the Baltic authorities are openly hostile towards Russia.

In the medium term, the Baltics will probably be able to falter for some more time, increasing their external debt year after year, losing population and gradually sinking to the very bottom.

Many are afraid that the EU will start using the Baltics as a cesspool for refugees from countries devastated by the West, but these fears seem exaggerated to me: refugees prefer to settle either in richer countries or in countries where there is work.

In the long term, the Baltics have exactly two options for overcoming the crisis. Or still make peace with Russia and try to integrate into the economy of the Customs Union, within which the Baltic States can find a comfortable economic niche.

Or abandon the euro, return their native currencies and devalue them five times: so that the labor of the Balts would cost farmers and industrialists cheaper than the labor of the poor inhabitants of the countries of Southeast Asia.

Let me summarize

In this article, I by no means want to pass an unjustifiably harsh sentence on our Western neighbors. No matter how hard the Baltic authorities tried, they failed to inflate hostility between our peoples: in Russia they treat Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians well, and in the Baltics, in turn, they treat Russians quite well. There are, of course, unpleasant exceptions, but they do not make the weather.

If you think that I have exaggerated and that the Baltic economy has a chance of recovery, well, open my eyes and tell me in the comments your plan to bring this region out of the systemic crisis. I would love to hear what the Baltic farmers and industrialists have to offer the world economy.

Update 1. Of the important: in Estonia there is oil shale, which provides a very powerful support to the local economy. Unfortunately, I did not immediately find detailed data on this shale - production volumes, profitability, applicability.

Update 2. I take from the comments:

“I myself am from Estonia, my whole family went to live in Cyprus, even my mother lives with us, that is, 5 people (husband, me, two children and mother) went abroad 7 years ago, but we are still statistically considered residents of Estonia , we are constantly sent papers to fill out in order to count us.

When I write in response that we do not live there, they answer me that this is not so important, we are citizens of Estonia. This year I changed my passport, so before issuing it, they again forced me to fill in the statistics.

Questions usually bypass the place of residence, and more ask if there is a job, children, whether they study, wages. It turns out that I supposedly live in Estonia and receive 3,000 euros. Not bad, right?

If we take into account the difference in prices in Cyprus and Estonia, that in Cyprus I have to pay 1000 euros for rent, more than 500 euros for each child for a school, and food prices sometimes differ three times.

But the picture then turns out to be not bad for Estonians, especially when you consider that in almost every family someone always works and lives abroad (otherwise you simply cannot survive and there is no work at home). Here is a beautiful GDP for you.”