Baltic Defence College hosts its Fourth Annual Baltic Military History Conference

On 3-4 September the Baltic Defence College in Tartu Estonia successfully hosted its fourth annual Baltic Military History conference. Every year the Baltic Defence College invites academics and military history scholars from the region and from international institutions to come to Tartu to present papers on some aspect of Baltic area military history.

This year the conference featured formal papers by 16 international scholars that included military historians from all three Baltic States, from Denmark, Sweden and Finland and from Italy. Academics from Tartu University and the University of Latvia presented papers, as well as academics from the universities of Turku and Helsinki in Finland. The conference was open to the public and faculty members from the University of Helsinki, Tartu University and the Estonian National Defence Academy attended to take part in the panel discussions.

The academic papers ranged widely across the history of the Baltic region and included presentations on every era of Baltic military history from the middle ages to the Cold War. Dr. Andris Sne of the University of Latvia presented a paper on “Warfare and Politics in the Eastern Baltics in the Age of the Crusades.” For the Cold War there were presentations by researcher Anna Zotova of the Latvian Defence Ministry on the history of missile defense and from major Gintautas Jakstys of the Lithuanian Military Academy on “psychological ooperations against the Soviet Army in Lithuania in 1991.”

The Baltic Defence College’s annual conference is part of a larger ongoing effort by the Baltic Defence College in partnership with Baltic universities to build a strong academic community of military historians in the region. The Baltic Defence College is looking forward to publioshing some of the conference papers. The Baltic Defence College publishes a newsletter for regional military historians and anyone interested in further military history activities can contact Dr. James Corum ([email protected]) and Dr. Eric Sibul ([email protected]) at the Baltic Defence College.