After the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had been forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in the summer of 1940, Moscow tried to press the American as well as the British governments to recognize these annexations. In Britain, anti-appeasers toward Germany, including Winston Churchill, became appeasers in the matter of the Baltic states, urging to accept Soviet sphere of influence in the Baltic already in the summer of 1939. This paper will discuss how the so-called anti-appeasers steered British Baltic policy towards a realpolitik understanding with the Soviet Union, and how this policy interacted with the U.S. policy of non-recognition.
