Bush in Latvia: Soviet control of Baltics "One of the greatest wrongs of history"

Marathon Pundit's wife was born in Latvia--I've been there twice. So I'm quite pleased that President Bush chose Riga, the Latvian capital, to address the Soviet Union's domination of the Baltic States: Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. The March 1945 Yalta Conference between the World War II "Big Three" of Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Josef Stalin closed the door on the independence of the Baltic States for over forty years.

From CNN:

The conference, he said, resulted in the captivity of millions -- "one of the greatest wrongs of history." Bush also called Soviet oppression "evil."

"When powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable," he said.

"We have a great opportunity to move beyond the past and learn the lessons of that painful history," he told reporters. The countries were annexed by Moscow after the fall of Nazism and chafed for decades under the Kremlin's iron-fisted rule.

"The Baltic peoples kept a long vigil of suffering and hope," Bush said. "Though you lived in isolation, you were not alone. The United States refused to recognize your occupation."

I hope Russian leader Vladimir Putin was listening. He probably wasn't.

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