The Baltic States – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – ought to be considered parts of Scandinavia, but rarely are, because of the way history has impacted on them. By ‘history’, of course, I mean Russia, especially in recent years when the three republics were all colonies (effectively) of the USSR, and separated politically and socially both from the Nordics, and from the rest of Europe, by the ‘Iron Curtain’.

The Russian influence is still there, its language and script featuring by the side of the three countries’ own distinctive tongues on public notices; as well as in the gorgeous – or garish; take your pick – the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Talinn, built at the turn of the last century, with its onion domes, icons, capped and heavily bearded priests, and all the rest of that Orthodox nonsense. Of more recent provenance is a prominent copper plaque on a Tallinn city wall celebrating Boris Yeltsin, of all people, for the part he is alleged to have played in supporting Estonian liberation in 1991. Otherwise the Soviet period does not appear to be remembered fondly. Russian influence on the built environment of the Baltics is reflected in their dull concrete apartment buildings, which locals usually denigrate as ‘Soviet style’, although I’ve seen similar, or worse, in Britain. (They’re a global 1960s period phenomenon, rather than a communist one.) Otherwise it’s worth visiting there for the medieval, Hansa ‘Old Towns’ of Riga and Tallinn; and for the beer. (Not so much the food, unless I chose badly.)

Otherwise life there appears (and I’m only judging by appearances – we’re just back from a fortnight’s trip there) very Scandinavian; pretty Social Democratic, and even more ‘modern’ if anything than Sweden: with highly advanced technologies, and driverless wheeled robots trundling around the Tallinn streets delivering things. Can we credit all this to their new (2004) membership of the EU? Or to American investment? Or propaganda? Or are there skeletons buried there, cleverly hidden from mere tourists?

Anyway, these seemed to us to be the new post-Soviet Baltics; which Times journalist Oliver Moody, in his recently published Baltic: The Future of Europe (2025), suggests might serve as a model for the rest of us. So long, that is, as Putin’s ambitions to resurrect the old Tsarist or Communist empires there can be resisted. Moody thinks that with Putin in power the Baltic may become the fulcrum of global geopolitics – and perhaps warfare – in the future; as it was for substantial periods in the past two centuries. (Halford Mackinder obviously comes to a historian’s mind.)