Soviet commandos were killing citizens in the Baltic republics last January, in part because the old military thinking and the groups whose interests are served by it are alive and well in Gorbachev's newly packaged Soviet state.  The Soviet military has always been hypersensitive about its vulnerability on the northern flank.  Recent radical changes in the European security structure play to such fear and heighten anxiety about the Baltic states' demands for independence, as well as about the implications of those demands for the military's future.  If we wish to understand what is happening now on the borders of the Soviet Union, and where it might eventually lead (or be led), we have to answer an unwelcome question: If the Cold War is over, why do we still feel a chill wind?

The old geostrategic views that drove foreign policy before Gorbachev are still influencing policy now.  Had there been a war in Europe in pre-perestroika days, the Soviets would have fought a fierce holding action on the northern flank (what the Soviets called the Northwestern Theater of Operations, or TVD) in order to ensure a decisive defeat of NATO forces on the Central Front in West Germany (the Western TVD).  Victory would have had to have come quickly, before the conflict went nuclear or the Warsaw Pact's economy broke under the strain of protracted war.

The creation of forces necessary for such ambitious war plans provoked a counter build-up in the West and led to an arms race in the 1980s which, as we know, the Soviet economy could not sustain and from which Mikhail Gorbachev sought to escape.  It also produced a counter maritime strategy for the region that drove Soviet military planners to distraction.  U.S. naval and naval air forces, by deploying to northern waters, would threaten the USSR itself and so prevent the Soviets from concentrating on the Central Front.  Superior U.S. anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capabilities, meanwhile, would imperil the Soviets' most survivable nuclear retaliatory strike force--their valued fleet of ballistic submarines (SSBNs).

In Gorbachev's new world, such military calculations were supposed to become obsolete.  NATO's defensive might would dissipate because the West would believe that the USSR was becoming a democracy.  Many Western observers, however, have been more impressed by the centrifugal forces unleashed by perestroika, the dilapidated state of the Soviet economy, and the effective dissolution of the Warsaw Pact military alliance, than by professions of incipient liberalism.

Real changes in Soviet concepts of security, needless to say, emerged in stages.  Even after Gorbachev promised the United Nations, on December 7, 1988, that he would unilaterally withdraw six tank divisions from Central Europe, the Soviet General Staff continued to think it could conduct a successful preemptive attack on Western Europe.  It assumed, however, that it could march the Red Army through friendly Eastern European nations--an assumption that promptly crumbled along with the six puppet regimes in Central Europe.

Now, as the possible area for conflict in Europe shifts from West Germany's eastern border toward the Polish-Soviet frontier, thereby demolishing the Central Front strategy, the Soviet military appears to be hatching fresh plans and advocating concomitant diplomatic tactics.  The geostrategic importance to the Soviet Union of the Scandinavian and Baltic countries will increase as the protective layers of Central Europe--the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact nations--fall away.  The northern region will come to be viewed as essential to stopping Canadian and American forces from crossing the Atlantic.  From the perspective of the Soviet General Staff, these forces, once in Europe, would no longer simply reinforce the Central Front, but would be able to march through the now-friendly countries of Western and perhaps even Central Europe to the Soviet frontier.

Such a view of the new strategic imperatives would explain recent Soviet initiatives for mutual naval disarmament.  These will probably seek to remove U.S. carrier forces from Northern Europe, establish the northern waters as an ASW-free zone, terminate U.S. access to early-warning facilities at Thule in Greenland, and close the NATO base at Keflavik, Iceland.  The goal may be less to enhance global stability than to limit NATO's future capacity to reinforce its rapidly thinning Western forces.  It is worth noting that the Soviets are still modernizing their forces in the Baltic and in the Leningrad Military District.

The issue is whether the Soviets are genuinely willing to construct a new, inclusive European security structure that will lock a democratized East into Europe, or are simply in the process of transferring the "Iron Curtain" from what was the inter-German border to the Polish-Soviet frontier.  If the possible area for conflict in Europe merely moves east and north, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania may replace the German Democratic Republic as the probable center of crisis in the 1990s.  This could result in a Europe less stable than the one we knew during the Cold War.

The Soviet General Staff understands that the geostrategic importance of the Baltic states has increased.  This has occurred at the very moment when the demand for freedom, stimulated by the spectacle of political pluralism in the Warsaw Pact nations, is making Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania far more volatile than the GDR ever was.  Since massive troop reductions will decrease NATO's ability to affect a crisis, we can expect the Soviets to be less inhibited about resorting to coercive diplomacy, or even some sort of preemptive action.  They might try to seal off access to the area in a crisis, confident that the risks of a Western military response have decreased to an acceptable level.  That such an action might eventually lead to combat between Soviet and, say, Swedish forces has been discussed in the Swedish press.  Depending on how such a crisis developed and on the status of the Baltic states at the time, such "defensive" actions could include incursions into the territories of neighboring states like Poland or Finland.

This new reality would bring with it, for the first time, the possibility of regional rather than theater conflict in Europe, as events in the Baltic region in January clearly demonstrated.  The Soviet security specialist Sergei Karaganov may well have been worried about this when, last spring, he warned the West against repeating the mistakes made at the end of the World War I.  Just as the West failed to create "a just Europe" then, he said, so the present period of change could lead "to realignments, prolonged instability, or even to a complete reversal--not to the relatively stable `two-camp' system, but rather to something again transitional, such as the Versailles system."

The Baltic states are pursuing a strategy of forcing Gorbachev to grant them the autonomy they desire or lose the international benefits of perestroika.  The Soviets now have a choice, but security concerns and the effect real perestroika will have on some interest groups within the Soviet military will make Moscow's leaders reluctant to give the republics their way.

The Soviets could resolve the security problem.  It hinges on the future status of the Kaliningrad base and the nature of the security relationship between the Baltic states and the central Soviet government.  The Kaliningrad region, although located on the Baltic coast and surrounded by Lithuania, Byelorussia, and Poland, is politically part of the Russian Republic, not the Baltic states.  The militarization of the Kaliningrad region after World War II allowed the defense of Leningrad to move from the Gulf of Finland into the Baltic Sea, thus transforming Finland from a front-line state to a flank.  Just as this change induced the USSR to give Finland domestic autonomy in the 1950s, so now the maintenance or expansion of the formidable military and naval facilities at Kaliningrad could allow for the finlandization of the Baltic in the 1990s.  This is the solution to the Soviet security problem.

The military forces around Kaliningrad would keep all independent Baltic states between two heavily militarized regions: Kaliningrad and Leningrad.  Lithuania has already promised to grant the Soviet government a corridor to Kaliningrad through its territory as the price for independence.  The Estonian minister of state, Raivo Vare, also acknowledges that "without taking into consideration the legitimate security interests of the Soviet Union there will be no independence for Estonia."  The head legal adviser to the Estonian Supreme Council has agreed that Estonia will accept an independence treaty that provides the Soviets with military bases for some length of time.  The idea of finlandizing these countries goes back to Yuri Andropov, who appreciated the superiority of Soviet-Finnish relations to those between the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies.  He saw this approach as the most reliable way of meeting the legitimate security requirements of the Soviet Union in the Baltic while promoting stability in the Nordic region.

Without such a solution NATO and Soviet planners will have to prepare for the kind of periodic upheaval in the Baltic states that we have seen during the past forty-five years in the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact countries.  Now, however, NATO would have more difficulty managing the reaction to these upheavals in contiguous Western states, and the Baltic people will prove more intransigent than their Warsaw Pact counterparts.  Soviet analyst Andrei Piontkowsky warned last January that his country would probably have to endure at least one more "vale of tears" on its road to democratization.