Wednesday, 28 January 2026, 5:30 CET

At this PoSoCoMeS seminar, Una Bergmane discusses her book Politics of Uncertainty: The United States, the Baltic Question, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Oxford University Press, 2023) with Andris Banka.

Moderator: Dr. Viktorija Jonkutė, The Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore

Seminar link: https://teams.live.com/meet/9361814345634?p=F2RnOYriXF2vpWL2rf

About the book

Politics of Uncertainty: The United States, the Baltic Question, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union explores how Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania leveraged global instability during the late Cold War to assert their independence, highlighting the influence of marginalized actors amid geopolitical upheaval. Based on extensive multilingual archival research and interviews, this book recovers the voices of local actors in Riga, Tallinn, and Vilnius in its examination of the triangular relations between Washington, Moscow, and Baltic independence movements. Occupied and annexed by the USSR in 1940, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were the first Soviet republics to push the limits of Perestroika. The Baltic problem, at first seemingly minor, increasingly gained international visibility and by 1990 risked derailing issues that mattered in the eyes of both Soviet and American leaders. By focusing on the relations between those at the top of global power hierarchies and those situated at their margins, the author underscores how the Soviet collapse was driven much more by uncertainty, domestic pressures, and last-minute decisions than by long-term strategy – while warning about the tenuous geopolitical positions of these three states that joined NATO and the European Union after breaking out of the Soviet empire.

Author

Dr. Una Bergmane is a Latvian historian and a Research Council of Finland Fellow at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cold War and Baltic history. She received her PhD in History from Sciences Po Paris in 2016 and has held postdoctoral, research and teaching fellowships at Cornell University, Yale University, and the London School of Economics. In 2024, Dr. Bergmane was awarded the Latvian Historian of the Year Award (2024) for her book Politics of Uncertainty. The book has also received significant international recognition, including the University of Cambridge Baltic Geopolitics Network Publication Prize (2024) and the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies Book Prize (2024), Honourable Mention for the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies’ W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize (2024) and was a finalist for the SMU Centre for Presidential History Book Prize.

Discussant

Dr. Andris Banka is a senior researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Baltic Sea Region Research (IFZO) at the University of Greifswald in Germany. He specializes in Baltic security and transatlantic relations. His scholarly work has been featured in peer-reviewed journals such as Security Studies, The Washington Quarterly, European Journal of International Security, International Politics, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, and The RUSI Journal. He holds a PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Birmingham, UK. Dr. Banka has taught international relations and politics classes in Germany, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. He is the author of the book America, the Baltic States and the Making of an Unlikely Security Alliance.