Probe of Baltic Annexations Planned
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MOSCOW — The Congress of People’s Deputies moved Thursday to investigate whether the Baltic republics willingly joined the Soviet Union, after historian Roy A. Medvedev and other deputies charged that the Kremlin forcibly annexed them and then doctored the truth.
President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, responding to a request from an Estonian deputy, supported setting up a commission to look into whether secret clauses in a 1939 pact with Nazi Germany assigned Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to the Soviet Union, paving the way for annexation a year later.
“The Baltic republics are stirred up by this issue. It is not an easy question, but we should not evade it,” Gorbachev told the congress on the seventh day of its inaugural session. “There should be both a political and legal analysis.”
But the Kremlin chief said he doubted that the peoples of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia had opposed joining the Soviet Union five decades ago. “This is hardly the case,” he said.
The United States has never formally recognized the move.
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