ABSTRACT
The Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania remain relatively unknown not only to the general public, but even to scholars in rural studies. Their struggle for independence in the late 1980s and early 1990s did bring them into the focus of world attention for a moment, and their accession to NATO and the European Union in 2004 has certainly brought them back into the Western sphere of influence, but even in post-socialism research there is still a tendency to slot them somewhere in the ‘grey zone,’ in-between Central Europe and NIC countries, and indeed to lump them together under one heading. It is often overlooked that despite the features that they share in common, these three countries are in fact very different from one another. These differences have their roots in the countryside and in agriculture.
