In today’s installment of my “Baltic Journal,” I report from Estonia. Newt Gingrich alarmed this country, and its friends, when he referred to it as “the suburbs of St. Petersburg.” This was at the time of the Republican convention.

I wish to publish a letter from a reader, related to the region:

Dear Jay,
I was on a Baltic cruise in early September. I was struck by the Soviet kitsch for sale, in various places. All the nostalgia.
In St. Petersburg, I saw Lenin T-shirts, Putin-Stalin-Lenin nesting dolls, lots of things with the hammer and sickle.
Depressingly, I saw much the same in Berlin, at Checkpoint Charlie. Berlin, dammit! Memories of what the Soviet Union was could not last a whole quarter-century?
I did not see that stuff in Tallinn (Newt’s suburbs) or Helsinki. The Estonians and the Finns (who fought like furies in the Winter War and have played a difficult game ever since to maintain their independence) still get it.
Good for them.

One question: Those Putin-Stalin-Lenin nesting dolls? They’re supposed to be complimentary? Of Putin? And the other two?

P.S. I wonder whether Stalin or Lenin would approve of the Kremlin’s participation in our presidential election this year.