At the recently held biannual conference of the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) in Bristol, Cold War Coasts was represented through a major poster presentation in the main conference area. It reported on research results from our Estonian sub-project, carried out in a collective effort by Kati Lindström, Kadri Tüür, Kaarel Vanamölder and Denis Jatsenko. The title was “Borders and Practices: Shaping the Estonian National Environment in the Embrace of the Soviet Military“.

These research finds will be further incorporated into several scientific articles that the Cold War Coasts team is now working on, all of which integrate research results from our three country case studies: Sweden, Estonia and Latvia.

On 26 April the Cold War Coasts team organized a workshop for school teachers. It took place at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in conjunction with the Swedish National Agency for Education’s “Lärarlyftet” (“Boost for Teachers”) initiative, a professional development programme aimed at strengthening licensed teachers’ knowledge and capabilities. 15 teachers from different parts of Sweden, all of whom are active in grades 7-9, participated in the workshop. The workshop covered one day of intense activities, included lectures, discussions, and exercises.

The purpose of the workshop was to stimulate new ways of teaching Cold War history, including its technological aspects and the environmental impact of (hot and cold) warfare, in schools. The relevance of integrating such material aspects of the Cold War in teaching has become even more obvious following the recent and ongoing radical military and geopolitical developments in Europe; what happens in our part of the world these days cannot be grasped in political or economic terms only, and in trying to incorporate the technological and material dimension into the analysis there is much to be gained from a deeper historical understanding of East-West conflicts.

Russia’s military assault on Ukraine has shocked the world, and it has had a profound impact on the security situation in the Baltic Sea region. The Swedish, Estonian and Latvian sites that we examine in the Cold War Coasts project are entering a new, unexpected development phase.

In Sweden, the awareness of Gotland as a strategically important island in the Baltic Sea has been heightened, and the prospects for Russian forces to occupy Gotland as part of a potentially escalating military conflict has been discussed openly in Russian media. However, accounts of Gotland’s shifting pasts often fail to take into account the complexity of its military history and how current developments tie into centuries of local experiences. In a longer essay, published in Svenska Dagbladet, Cold War Coasts project leader Per Högselius seeks a more nuanced discussion, attempting to strengthen the historical awareness about Gotland among the general public. Read the essay here.

The most recent example of how the Cold War seemingly is reinvigorated in the Baltic Sea takes the form of US economic sanctions against companies that are involved in the construction of the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline.

Nord Stream 2, like its predecessor Nord Stream 1, enables Western Europe to import more natural gas directly from Russia without the disturbances that for many years have characterized Russian-European gas flows via Ukraine and Belarus. This has made the Baltic gas pipelines, the first of which was taken into operation already in 2011, highly controversial in large parts of Central Europe, not least in Poland and the three Baltic countries. Poland’s foreign minister back then, Radosław Sikorski, famously dubbed Nord Stream 1 the “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pipeline”. The Nordic countries, for their part, worried about the potential environmental consequences of laying a steel pipeline carrying huge volumes of methane under high pressure at the bottom of the Baltic Sea – especially so in view of its already critical ecological state. There were also fears, on both western and eastern shores, that Nord Stream was a kind of Trojan horse, a dangerous military object on par with the multitude of military infrastructure that, ever since the world wars and the Cold War, covers much of the Baltic Sea countries’ territorial waters. This imagination grew further when the pipeline company stated that it wished to erect a “service platform” in the waters off the Swedish island of Gotland. That platform gave rise to public outcry and in the end did not materialize. But the pipeline did.

US sanctions against East-West infrastructure projects have a long history. The current sanctions are strikingly reminiscent of controversies that played out around other East-West natural gas pipelines during the Cold War. Several US governments repeatedly tried to prevent East-West pipelines from being built, first in the years around 1960 and then, during the Reagan administration, in the early 1980s. I have written about this in my book Red Gas: Russia and the Origins of European Energy Dependence (2013). The actual result of the attempts to disrupt the pipeline projects has usually been to cause tensions between different Western countries and, in particular, between Western Europe and the United States. The pipelines themselves have always materialized anyway. It is likely that the result will be much the same this time.

As a matter of fact, the US sanctions appear at a strange point in time, because Nord Stream 2 is already more or less completed. Only 160 km of its total length, 2460 km, remains to be lowered, the rest is already there, resting on the sea bottom. Nevertheless many actors feel so threatened by the geopoliticization of their activities that they instantly disrupted all work on the pipeline. A friend of mine in Norway was perplexed to see the large pipelaying ship “Pioneering Spirit” anchored up during Christmas in the port of Kristiansand, just outside his house. There it would remain while awaiting further decisions on how to proceed.

Today Russia’s energy minister Aleksandr Novak told journalists that the new plan is to bring in another pipelaying vessel to complete the project. The only problem is that this ship is currently in the Russian Far East. And so a variety of non-Baltic regions – from Norway’s Atlantic ports to the distant Pacific – are becoming part of the Baltic political drama.

Cold War Coasts project leader Per Högselius is back from a trip to St. Petersburg, where he, among other things, visited Russia’s magnificent Central Naval Museum. Russia, of course, has a naval history on several different seas, but the Baltic Sea has always played a central role and it’s no coincidence that this museum is located in St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg, Imperial Russia’s capital for over 200 years, was founded in 1703, in the midst of the Great Northern War against Sweden, on what was at that time still officially Swedish territory.

Over the centuries – especially from 1554 to 1809 – Sweden and Russia fought numerous wars against each other. In 1609-10 Sweden’s army even entered distant Moscow, while a century later, in 1719, Russia military attacks caused havoc in the Swedish archipelago, burning numerous coastal towns. The battles fought at sea, especially in the late 18th century, have become subject to famous marine paintings, now at display in regular art museums but also the Central Naval Museum and its counterpart in Stockholm, the Swedish Maritime Museum.

However, Sweden and Russia have also cooperated in the naval field. Especially in the late 19th century, Swedish inventors and engineers – such as Ludvig Nobel, later on more famous for his key role in Russian oil production – played important roles in the Russian military-industrial complex, developing new types of weapons and setting up new military factories in St. Petersburg and elsewhere. Moreover, Russia became a major importer of Swedish weapons. Some of these – like the anti-torpedo cannons pictured below (made at Stavsjö bruk, not far from Norrköping) – are now at display in the Central Naval Museum in St. Petersburg.

The museum’s real show-piece, however, is an original Russian submarine from 1881, built by the Polish-Russian inventor Stefan Drzewiecki (1844-1938). Drzewiecki impressed the to-be-emperor Alexander III with his ingenious and bold ideas and designs, which to most people at the time must have looked like science fiction. These vessels were the first serial-produced submarines in the world. Fifty copies were produced, some of which were shipped by rail to Sevastopol on the Black Sea, while the rest remained in the Baltic, where they were put to protect the Kronstadt naval base. In 1884 Drzewiecki managed to introduce battery-driven engines, and the vessel displayed at the museum (pictured here below) was one of the submarines that were retrofitted for battery-electric propulsion.

It is thus in the 1880s that we find the historical origins of the Russian submarines that, a century later, caused havoc in Swedish territorial waters, either in real life, like in Karlskrona in 1981, or in the Swedish imagination. It remains to be explored how Drzewiecki’s submarine designs were further developed over the decades, and how technology transfer from elsewhere contributed to shaping the more modern vessels that, still today, remain the most iconic artifacts of all in the militarized waters of the Baltic Sea.

On 27 October 1981 a Soviet submarine, often referred to under the designation U-137, ran aground in the Swedish archipelago near Karlskrona, the main Swedish naval base. The event shocked many Swedes, and it became one of few occasions during the Cold War when Swedish and Soviet naval forces actually met. The fear of an enemy attack from the opposite shores of the Baltic had been strong in Sweden since the late 1940s. U-137 turned these fears into a material encounter with the enemy.

Ever since, the spectre of Soviet and Russian submarines has continued to haunt the Swedish naval forces and the people who live in or visit the archipelago. The Swedish military has, on numerous occasions, stated that it has spotted one or the other submarine in the country’s territorial waters. But the borderline between reality and imagination has always been thin, being shaped by the lingering memories of U-137.

Today’s Svenska Dagbladet tells the story of how the Swedish navy on 21 October 2014 intercepted a coded radio signal in the outer Stockholm archipelago of Stockholm, in the sea just east of Huvudskär. At that time the navy was already active in the area, following earlier indications of enemy activity in Swedish waters. The navy had received calls from locals who had spotted unusual movements in nearby waters. Inevitably, anyone old enough to have experienced the U-137 events back in 1981 associated any strange appearances in the archipelago with a possible Russian submarine. In the 2010s the return of such vessels to Swedish coastal waters did not seem that far-fetched, because diplomatic relations between Sweden and Russia had been notoriously frosty for some time, and Russian military activity in the Baltic Sea was clearly increasing.

The signal from Huvudskär was taken as unambiguous evidence of a foreign submarine operating in the archipelago. Head of Sweden’s armed forces Sverker Göransson called a press conference, telling stunned journalists that he was 100% certain that “a smaller submarine has violated the integrity of Swedish territorial waters”. Swedish Defence Minister Peter Hultqvist commented: “The violation that has occurred is brutal and serious”. Both Göransson and Hultqvist, both born in the 1950s, had been young men back in 1981, and they still remembered the shocking images of U-137 on ground off Karlskrona.

However, it subsequently turned out that the coded signal came from an advanced meteorological buoy located in the waters off Huvudskär. As it happened, the Swedish weather service SMHI was in the midst of a mission to repair it. In this connection its repair ship, M/S Fyrbyggaren, communicated with the buoy through radio signals of a kind that were very similar to the ones that the Swedish navy was just listening out for. Two Swedish submarines were at the time hidden in the southern reaches of Stockholm’s outer archipelago, actively listening and looking day and night for any signs of the enemy, which they thought was hiding in Swedish coastal waters.

Events of this kind are likely to recur in the years to come. They are immensely popular in the Swedish media, mysteriously capturing the Swedish imagination in a way that few other things do.

Cold War Coasts: The Transnational Co-Production of Military Landscapes is a research project based at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and carried out in close cooperation with Tallinn University. The project merges environmental, military and cultural history, focusing especially on the transnational dimension of militarized coasts. The project’s geographical setting is the Baltic Sea, whose evolving militarized coastscapes we study from both Western and Eastern angles. Here on the website and the blog the project participants will report continuously about the project’s progress, while also commenting on developments in our own time with regard to military and environmental activities in the Baltic Sea region and beyond. We hope that you will enjoy it!