The Baltic countries are sovereign nations. They have the right to decide which military and political bloc they want to be a part of.
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Atlantic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind the line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. . . All these famous cities. . . lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.
While thinking when sober, our success at reaching our goals by using the First Baltic Front troops, the Memel operation, it can't be disregarded, that they [the troops] not only honorably accomplished their powerful strategic operation, but also an infusion of victory for the Soviet armed forces and an entrance into the final stages of the war.
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.
At the end of all this, Russia held in her hands a vast belt of land running from the Baltic sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, comprising eleven nations with a population of 100 million people.
Here I was in Estonia, doing a concert for 5,000 people, and not many people know the song My Way - Gorbachev in the 80s, My Way had just become a famous song, and [Mikhail] Gorbachev in a satirical, kind of cynical manner coined the term the Sinatra Doctrine and My Way was the song because the Baltic states in the Warsaw Pact wanted to go their own way and secede from the Soviet Union, so joking he says," Yeah, we've got the Sinatra Doctrine now. "
