The Baltic states (also Baltics, Baltic nations or Baltic countries) usually are referred to the territories east of Baltic Sea which gained independence from the Russian Empire in the wake of World War I: primarily the contiguous trio of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; Finland also fell within the scope of the term from the 1920s to 1939. The term should not be confused with that of Baltic peoples. The latter term describes the indigenous populations of Latvia and Lithuania, while the indigenous populations of Estonia and Finland are Finnic peoples. Since the Middle Ages the region developed another national identity the Baltic Germans that was established after the Livonian Crusade.
The term in the indigenous languages of the Baltic states is:
- Latvian: Baltijas valstis,
- Lithuanian: Baltijos valstybės,
- Estonian: Balti riigid, Baltimaad,
- Finnish: Baltian maat.
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“I cannot say what poetry is; I know that our sufferings and our concentrated joy, our states of plunging far and dark and turning to come back to the world—so that the moment of intense turning seems still and universal—all are here, in a music like the music of our time, like the hero and like the anonymous forgotten; and there is an exchange here in which our lives are met, and created.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)