This book develops a comprehensive and critical political economy account of ‘post-communist’ transformations in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Mobilising a conceptual arsenal that employs the categories of capital, class and the state, the contribution advances a novel research agenda that sheds light on the empirical material, which so far remains hidden beneath the veneer of treating the Baltics as the ‘success stories’ of transformation. This framing tends to discount the changes and continuities in the class structures during and after the Soviet rule, the horizons of geographical and social unevenness generated by the processes of neoliberal restructuring and the landscapes of intra- and inter-class contestation that shaped the lineages, actualities and postscripts of transformation.

The extended timeframe (from 1940s to the present) adopted throughout this manuscript engenders the exploration of themes that range from the social nature of the Soviet Union, the political character of 1991 revolutions, which gave birth to restored post-Soviet territorial sovereignties to the transnational origins of Baltic neoliberal regimes and the intricacies of class re-composition in moments of property restructuring. Apart from challenging the myths about Baltic labour’s acquiescence to neoliberalism during the periods of ‘transition’, European integration and the 2008 crisis, this intervention also situates the contemporaneous rise of the radical right in the environment of authoritarian neoliberal statecraft. It promises to be an indispensable resource to the students exploring the past, present and future of the Baltic region and East-Central Europe as a whole.