Baltic Letter: Britain's Queen Elizabeth can dispense with her translator as she tours the Baltic states this week, as the guest of three multilingual presidents whose families chose exile in North America over Soviet occupation, writes Dan McLaughlin.
When Toomas Hendrik Ilves was sworn in recently as Estonia's head of state, he joined Lithuania's Valdas Adamkus and Latvia's Vaira Vike-Freiberga in reaching a peak of Baltic political power after living for decades in the West.
Mr Ilves was born in exile, to two of the hundreds of thousands of people who fled the Baltic states in the 1940s, when they were occupied by the Red Army and then the Nazis, before being reclaimed by the Kremlin in 1944.
While Moscow tightened its grip on the Baltic states with purges, deportations to Siberia and a programme of Russification, the young Ilves moved with his parents from Sweden to the US, where he went on to graduate from universities in Pennsylvania and New York.
In the 1980s, he worked for Radio Free Europe as the Soviet empire creaked and finally crumbled in 1991, when he gave up US citizenship to serve as newly independent Estonia's ambassador to Washington, Ottawa and Mexico City.
By that time, Mr Adamkus was on the brink of retiring from a distinguished career in the US Environmental Protection Agency, after crossing the Atlantic in 1949 and working his way up from humble beginnings at an Illinois factory making parts for cars.
He returned to Lithuania in the 1990s and was elected president in 1998; he is now serving his second term in office, following a brief interlude during which his country joined the European Union in 2004, while under a shadow cast by the impeachment of the incumbent president for alleged links to the Russian Mafia.
Like Mr Adamkus, Latvia's President Vike-Freiberga fled the Baltic with her family as the Red Army reoccupied the region at the end of the second World War.
They spent four years surviving on United Nations rations in a German refugee camp, where her little sister died of pneumonia, before moving to Morocco where her father, an architect, took work as a farm labourer.
After five years in North Africa they left for Canada, where Ms Vike-Freiberga worked as a bank clerk to fund an education that eventually yielded a PhD in experimental psychology and a professorship at Montreal University.
Only after three decades in Canadian academia did she move back to Latvia, where she soon found herself tipped as a potential compromise candidate in a stymied presidential race.
In 1999, a year after returning home, the "Iron Lady of the Baltic" began the first of two terms as head of state. She is due to step down next year.
Since they regained independence, the Baltic states have angered the Kremlin with their persistent criticism of the war in Chechnya, the erosion of human rights and free media in Russia, and its bullying attitude to its former Soviet subject states.
For the Baltic states and their leaders of the last 15 years, membership of Nato and the EU were the key goals that would ensure protection from Russian belligerence and help them rebuild rickety economies that were moulded for decades by Moscow.
Now, the Baltic economies are the most dynamic in the EU, thanks to radical liberal reform of the kind advocated by Britain and the US and often frowned upon in Paris and Berlin.
In foreign policy too, the Baltic states are far closer to Washington than many of their EU partners, as leaders in Riga, Tallinn and Vilnius remember well how the US led Cold War opposition to communism, while some European nations equivocated.
That "Atlanticist" outlook, which is shared by Britain and most East European countries, is likely to intensify under the simultaneous rule of three presidents who watched from North America as the Iron Curtain obscured their homelands.
"All three countries now have presidents with similar backgrounds . . . and all three present a clear break from the Soviet past," said Andres Kasekamp, professor of Baltic politics at Tartu University in Estonia. "Having grown up in democratic societies, they can better appreciate democratic values than many home-grown local politicians."
But as well as favouring close ties with the US, Mr Kasekamp insisted the Baltic leaders also backed deeper European integration, and would not be afraid of Washington.
"They have been strong supporters of US initiatives in Iraq and Afghanistan," he said. "But the American backgrounds of the three presidents also makes it easier for the three Baltic leaders to view US policies critically."