The unmodified remainder is not a good sentence because it is very unbalanced. There are 22 words in the subject part of the sentence, and only 7 in the verb and complement. This makes the reader feel that the sentence has been broken off prematurely.

There are two solutions:

Here the parenthetic clause describing the subject has become an adverbial explaining why they stoically remained. This is balanced because there is a semantic parallel between the verb and complement phrase and the elements of the adverbial.

The other solution is to shift this adverbial to the start of the sentence:

Personally, I prefer this as the pronoun ('their') preceding the noun it denotes ('the Baltic States') creates great momentum, as the reader needs to get to the noun to comprehend the first part of the sentence. Furthermore, the full stop after 'throughout the cold war' seems to dramatise the end of that period of history. One can easily imagine the beginning of the next sentence, 'However, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, politicians in Vilnius, Riga and Tallin began... '

Now we have seen how a sentence can be built up from its elemental clauses, we can examine three basic techniques to reduce redundancy.

1. The elimination of 'there is/are'
2. The conversion of passive verb forms into noun phrases
3. The replacement of pronouns

Techniques 1 and 2 are directly linked to the previous exercise because they produce the type of elemental clauses that we have been using to build sentences.

1. The elimination of 'there is/are'

This is as easy as it sounds. In a first draft, a sentence such as,

'There are three Baltic States, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia'

can be simply made into a subject in the second draft -

The Baltic States, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, recognized the futility of asserting their independence against the overwhelming strength of the Red Army.

2. The conversion of passive verb forms into noun phrases