At the dawn of the 20th century the Estonian and Latvian territories were among the most industrialized and urbanized regions of the Russian Empire. As the beneficiaries of rising living standards and a promising demographic situation, Latvian and Estonian families— town-dwellers as well as the vast majority who continued to derive their living from the land—had never before enjoyed greater prosperity than they did during the decades that preceded World War I. Literate, politically awakened, and yet increasingly integrated into the institutions of the German and Russian elites, the peoples of Russia’s Baltic provinces had every reason to look forward to enjoying still future prosperity as subjects of the tsar in a modernizing, multinational empire.
At the same time, a widespread mistrust of the imperial authorities, coupled with the resentment felt by many Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians toward their German, Polish, and Russian landlords, divided the peoples of the Baltic region. The early decades of the 20th century, shaped by war, revolution, and massive dislocation, would prove to be among the most turbulent in the region’s history. Old loyalties based on privilege and service were tested, and new bonds based on language, nationhood, and class were forged during a cataclysmic war that in four horrific years tore asunder the mighty empires that for centuries had dominated central and eastern Europe. The opening years of the century turned out to be the twilight of German power in the eastern Baltic, for what followed was the dawn of self-government for the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian peoples amidst the rubble of empire.
The census carried out by imperial authorities in 1897 revealed that approximately 125 million people lived in a Russian Empire that sprawled across two continents from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. As important as the cities, ports, and farms of the Baltic littoral were for the empire’s economic development, the populations of the provinces inhabited by the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian peoples constituted only a tiny fraction of the empire’s human resources. Russia’s Latvian territories, including southern Livland, Courland, and part of the Vitebsk province, were home to about 1.9 million people, of whom about two-thirds were of Latvian nationality.1 Russians, Germans, Jews, Poles, and Lithuanians constituted the bulk of the remaining population of ethnographic Latvia. While most Latvians remained simple but overwhelmingly literate peasants—a reality that shaped the way that Latvia’s awakeners conceptualized the nation—this was changing rapidly as the new century dawned: whereas in 1897 only about 28 percent of Latvia’s population lived in urban centers, by 1913 this number exceeded 40 percent.
The most important by far of Latvia’s urban center was Riga. Swelling from 102,000 inhabitants to 282,000 in the space of only 30 years (1867–1897), Riga’s population would nearly double again before reaching its prewar peak of 517,000, making it one of the largest cities in the Russian Empire. With the demolition of its medieval walls in the 1860s and the urban renewal that followed, not only did Riga become a more open, more beautiful, and more modern city, it also became more heavily Latvianized as the proportion of Latvians residing in the city rose from 23.5 percent in 1867 to 41.6 percent in 1897.
The city’s industrial workforce quadrupled during the same period. A port whose industry was based largely on the processing of import and export commodities—by 1913 Riga had become the most significant timber exporting harbor on the continent—the city on the Daugava needed this largely Latvian working class for its growing textile, wood-processing, and machine-building industries. Despite having only 1.5 percent of the empire’s total population, during the early years of the 20th century the Latvian lands alone provided 5.5 percent of Russia’s industrial production, with the majority of this activity taking place in Riga, followed by Liepāja, Jelgava, and Daugavpils. 2
The Germans’ share of the city’s population declined as steeply as the proportion of Latvians and Jews rose. Even if there were twice as many Germans (14 percent) as Jews (8 percent) living in Riga in 1913, this was still a far cry from the situation in 1867, when 43 percent of Riga’s population was German and Riga could still be regarded as a “German” city. In part the relative decline in the German population can be attributed to the growing tendency of Germanized Latvians to identify as Latvians, but the main factor was the influx of non-Germans, especially peasants who following the introduction of the passport system in 1864 became free to seek employment in Russia’s cities.
Russians (20 percent), Poles (9.5 percent), and Lithuanians (6.9 percent) were the other leading ethnic groups who populated Riga on the eve of the Great War. Given Riga’s geographical proximity to Estonia, it is easy to imagine the city being a natural magnet for Estonian peasants as well. At no time, however, did the number of Estonians in Riga exceed 10,000. Indeed, the number of other foreigners living in Riga at any time vastly exceeded the number of Estonians. In 1881, as much as 6.7 percent of the city’s population consisted of foreign Germans—citizens of the German Empire who were ethnic Germans but not, strictly speaking, Baltic Germans. However, the stricter Russification policies imposed after 1881 made Riga and other urban centers of the littoral less attractive to foreign Germans—as well as to many Baltendeutsche, who now began to perceive, although not actively resist, the new challenges to their traditional power and influence.
The Estonian regions experienced demographic trends similar to those of ethnographic Latvia. Between 1881 and 1897 the population of Estland and northern Livland increased from 881,455 to 986,000, of whom more than 90 percent were ethnic Estonians. The relatively unimpressive growth rate of the Estonian regions is partially explained by rising Estonian emigration to other parts of the empire, including St. Petersburg, the Volga River region, and the Caucasus. However, this was offset by the migration of Russians from the interior to the growing Estonian cities. By 1897 the urban share of the Estonian population rose to nearly 20 percent, with the two largest Estonian cities being Tallinn (64,572), now an important center for the machine and metals industries and a major base for the imperial navy, and Tartu (42,308), which housed the region’s only university and was the center of Estonian cultural life. These cities were followed in size by Narva, whose largest industrial establishment, the Krenholm cotton factory, underlined the importance of textiles, and Pärnu, from which grain, flax, and timber from Estonia were shipped to west European markets.
As in Riga, the proportion of Germans in Estonian cities began to decline during this period: in 1897, only 16 percent of the urban population in the Estonian territories was German, while Estonians made up 68 percent of Estonia’s city-dwellers and Russians 11 percent.3 Given the rising number of Estonians and Latvians in the littoral’s urban areas, their growing economic power, and the long history of the region’s colonial status, it is not difficult to understand why many Estonians and Latvians came to regard Germans and Russians (and Jews) as alien presences in their cities.
In the Lithuanian territories, still divided between Russia and Germany, the situation was quite different. Although the total population of ethnographic Lithuania had reached 2.7 million by the turn of the century, most of this growth was in the countryside. Moreover, the few cities that there were in the region did not even enjoy a Lithuanian character: in 1897, Lithuanians comprised only 2 percent of the population in Vilnius (154,000) and 6 percent of the population of Kaunas (86,500). Lithuanians, even more than the Latvians and Estonians, remained an overwhelmingly rural and agricultural people, while Poles, Russians, and Jews comprised the bulk of the urban inhabitants of the three Lithuanian gubernii of Vilnius, Kaunas, and Suvalki. The city of Vilnius, whose population in 1897 was 40 percent Jewish and 31 percent Polish, was the center of Jewish cultural life in northeastern Europe.
Partly because serfdom was not abolished in the Lithuanian provinces until 1861, and consequently few Lithuanian peasants were literate or mobile, industrialization arrived late in the region and remained below Estonian and Latvian levels throughout the period of Russian rule. Thus, although towns of Lithuania enjoyed great ethnic and cultural diversity, unlike the cities in ethnographic Latvia and Estonia they were neglected by St. Petersburg and experienced little development under tsarist rule.
A more intensive economic development in the Estonian and Latvian areas underlined the importance of these relatively highly industrialized provinces to the Russian Empire. Among the most important growth areas were cloth manufacturing and alcohol distillation, along with food processing and the tobacco, leather, metal, and timber industries. The paper mills of Estonia provided more than 70 percent of the empire’s paper products, while the construction of three large shipyards in Tallinn in the years immediately prior to World War I demonstrated the region’s military importance to the empire. While Germans continued to play a leading role in industry and finance in the urban centers of Estonia and Latvia, many factories, and more than half in Estonia, were owned by Russian business magnates. Among the most noteworthy of these enterprises was Riga’s Kuznetsov Porcelain Factory (now Latelektrokeramika), which satisfied the needs of the affluent for intricately decorated tableware.
By the end of the 19th century the cities of the eastern Baltic were linked to the interior of Russia by railroad and together handled 30 percent of Russia’s foreign trade. The region’s first railway, constructed in 1861, connected Riga to Daugavpils (Rus. Dvinsk), a fortress town whose ethnic diversity mirrored that of the Latgale region as a whole: in 1897, nearly half of Daugavpils’s rapidly growing population of 69,700 was Jewish, with Russians and Poles comprising most of the remainder. The opening of the Liepāja (Ger. Libau) to Kaunas line in 1871 ensured that Russian goods would flow through the ports of Courland, as did the opening of a line that connected Moscow directly to Ventspils (Ger. Windau) in the 1890s. Revived as a shipbuilding center with the added attraction of being an ice-free port, Ventspils’s population quadrupled to 29,000 between 1897 and 1913.
But the unchallenged center of industry and trade in the littoral was Riga, which enjoyed rail links not only with the larger towns in the Latvian lands (Daugavpils, Jelvaga, Liepāja), but also with the empire’s greatest cities, including Moscow, Warsaw, and St. Petersburg. After 1870 the imperial capital was also connected to Tallinn, which fostered that city’s growing metal works and allowed the farmers of northern Estonia to ship their goods to the Russian interior. By the end of the century, nearly all the towns of Estonia and Latvia and a growing number of Lithuanian towns had a railway connection.
These developments did not take place in isolation, for the economic development of the Baltic provinces was part of a larger plan to modernize the Russian Empire, with the state playing a leading role in building the railroads that connected the Russian interior to its Baltic ports and in attracting foreign investment. Nevertheless, despite the rapid modernization of the northernmost provinces of Estland and Livland, certain things did not change. Among the continuities was the fundamentally rural and agricultural nature of the region, as the majority of the region’s inhabitants continued to make a living from the land and agricultural exports remained the largest segment of the economy. Yet the traditional German domination of the rural economy was in rapid decline. By 1900 the Latvian and Estonian countryside was socially differentiated, with new classes of landowners consolidating control over small, medium, and even some large landholdings. While this came mostly at the expense of the heavily indebted nobility, Baltic Germans nevertheless continued to own nearly half the arable land.
In the cities, Latvians and Estonians had developed both a bourgeoisie and a working class. What they lacked, however, was political influence that corresponded with their numbers and their growing economic clout. While the reforms to city governance that were introduced in the late 1870s enfranchised more non-Germans in Riga and other cities, the reality was that political power in the Baltic provinces remained in large measure in the hands of the German elite and the Russian government.
The first political party in the territories that presently comprise the contemporary Baltic states, the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party (LSDP), was born in Vilnius in 1896. Given the almost total absence of an urban proletariat in Lithuania, the party’s existence was perhaps anomalous. In principle, the LSDP, consisting largely of Poles rather than Lithuanians, stood for solidarity with the empire’s Polish and Russian working class, but it was not long before one of its principal aims became Lithuanian statehood. Its 1904 program contained the demand for an “autonomous, democratic republic, composed of Lithuanian Poland and other countries on the basis of a loose federation.”4
If creating a truly independent Lithuanian state remained at this stage impractical, and to most people nearly unthinkable, more perplexing still would have been the problem of defining a Lithuanian state in national terms given the large numbers of Jews and Poles whose towns dotted a rural Lithuanian landscape. Other Lithuanian parties, such as the Lithuanian Democratic Party (formed 1902) and the League of Lithuanian Christian Democrats (1905), faced the question as well, but none went any further than demanding autonomy for an ethnographic Lithuania within a democratic Russia. The General Jewish Workers’ Union, better known as the Bund, was one of the region’s most influential political organizations, but its leadership gave little thought to Lithuanian statehood.
As the main vehicles for Marxism, social democratic organizations exerted greater appeal in Riga, where rapid industrialization was producing a sizable working class, than in Lithuania’s cities, where a proletariat developed far more slowly. Since 1891 Marxist ideas had appeared in print in Latvia on the pages of Dienas Lapa (Daily Paper), a newspaper that was closely associated with New Current (jaunā strāva), the collective name for the broadly leftist Latvian intelligentsia of the 1890s and early 1900s. In 1897, two years after a series of strikes in Riga and Liepāja, the newspaper’s staff, along with some left-wing student groups, were arrested and jailed; some were temporarily expelled from the Baltic provinces. Consequently, large numbers of Latvian intellectuals and activists became disillusioned with a government upon which they had earlier relied for protection against the Baltic German landlords.
In none of the Baltic states did Marxism have a greater impact than in Latvia. By 1904, the Latvian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, founded as an expatriate group in Zürich the previous year, were prepared to publish their demands:
We demand that each nationality which is a member of the Russian Empire should have the right to determine its own fate; that each nationality should have the right to maintain its own culture and to develop its spiritual strengths; and that the language of each nationality should have the right to be used in schools, local administrative institutions, and local courts.5
Although not all Social Democrats agreed with this position, the manifesto suggests that by the time the 1905 revolution broke out the nationality question in Latvia had assumed a position of prominence not only as a cultural issue but as a political issue as well.
In Estonia the main issue was the Russified educational system, opposed by nearly all Estonian activists, who instead demanded that Estonian be the language of instruction in all elementary schools and secondary schools. Still, for most Estonians, loyalty to the tsarist regime was not in question. Among the most influential of the Estonian nationalists was Jaan Tõnisson (1868–ca. 1941). Editor since 1896 of the first Estonian daily newspaper, Postimees (The Courier) and later one of the founders of the Estonian Republic, Tõnisson advocated loyalty to the tsarist regime (although he opposed Russification) and collaboration between Estonians and Germans (even if he resented their privileges) in order to advance their common goal of regional development. Nevertheless, calls for more radical economic and social change, emanating from intellectuals who represented the Estonian working classes, began to be heard in the newspapers Uudised (The News), which first appeared in Tartu, and Teataja (The Herald), which was founded and edited by future Estonian president Konstantin Päts (1874–1956) and published in Tallinn between 1901 and 1905.
Some workers and radical intellectuals in Estonia’s bigger towns sympathized with the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP), a Marxist and internationalist party founded by Russian radicals in 1898. Tallinn, for example, became an important Menshevik center, although Bolsheviks, who comprised the party’s more militant elements, also enjoyed a presence there. The fact that the RSDWP operated illegally, organizing secret meetings and distributing illegal pamphlets and books, was perhaps one of the reasons that Estonian workers became attracted to it. Even if Estonians activists and intellectuals lacked a common vision, both nationalist and socialist ideals resonated among the Estonian people more powerfully than ever by the time a revolution broke out in St. Petersburg in 1905.
Often seen as a warm-up act for the more momentous revolutions of 1917, the Revolution of 1905 was partly a consequence of Russia’s humiliating loss to Japan in a war over spheres of influence in the Far East. Disastrous as it was for the Russian military—the war is the setting for Sergei Eisenstein’s propaganda film Battleship Potemkin (1925), which dramatizes a sailors’ mutiny on a doomed warship—Russia’s defeat at the hands of an Asian power highlighted the weaknesses of the absolutist system of Tsar Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917), whose refusal to introduce constitutional reforms confounded the empire’s growing classes of bourgeois professionals and liberal intellectuals. Such people, who sought a solution in liberalism under a constitutional monarchy, became the main base of support for the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) that was formed in October 1905 as the government in St. Petersburg struggled for its very survival.
However, the event that triggered the upheaval that nearly cost the tsar his throne was the confrontation between striking workers and the St. Petersburg police, who on January 22 (January 9 according to the old Russian calendar) fired on a demonstration and killed hundreds of peaceful protesters. Known as Bloody Sunday, the massacre placed a sea of blood between the tsar and his people and galvanized popular support for the revolutionary movement.
By this time the Marxist RSDWP had become the main organization for the empire’s urban proletariat, while the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) believed the answer was peasant socialism based on Russian traditions. Thus when revolution broke out in early 1905, Russia was already in a state of unrest that revealed itself in the form of labor strikes (workers typically labored for 12 or more hours a day six days each week and enjoyed few government protections), student protests, peasant disturbances in the countryside, and an SR terrorist campaign that targeted government officials in the hopes of emboldening the masses and intimidating the government into making concessions.
While the Revolution of 1905 was very much a Russian affair, its spread to the empire’s borderlands revealed the extent of discontent in the Baltic provinces.6 Shortly after the tragedy in St. Petersburg sympathy strikes broke out in Tallinn, Narva, Pärnu, and other cities. In Riga authorities fired on a large crowd of demonstrators on January 26 (January 13, old style) as they marched from a working-class suburb toward the city center, killing dozens and injuring many more. While the conflict never reached the point of an armed uprising, strikes in the cities and towns, largely coordinated by the Latvian Social Democrats, continued through the spring and summer, by which time the focus had shifted to the countryside, where peasants directed their rage at the German landlords. By the time these spasms of uncoordinated violence subsided, hundreds of Baltic manor houses had been burned down and 82 of their owners and defenders (as well as clergymen) killed in the Baltic provinces.
Taking the side of the Baltic Germans, who formed their own militias and often took matters into their own hands, imperial forces vigorously suppressed the rebellions of the countryside and towns. On October 29 (October 16, old style), tsarist forces fired into a peaceful crowd in Tallinn, killing 94 people and wounding 200 more. Soon afterward martial law, in effect until 1908, was declared in Livland, Courland, and Estland as the regime began to regain control and bring the suspects to justice.7 Yet it was the pressure of the revolutionary movement that forced a very reluctant tsar to sign the October Manifesto, which promised civil liberties, including the right to organize political parties, and a representative assembly.
Although these concessions satisfied few, activists in the Baltic provinces took advantage of the new opportunities as representative bodies convened to discuss the fate of the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian peoples. In late November 1905 an All-Estonian Congress met in Tartu. At roughly the same time Latvian leader conducted meetings to discuss the fate of the Latvian nation. Whatever the disposition of Estonian and Latvian activists prior to the events of 1905—some were moderates and others more radical—the subsequent punishment of thousands of their countrymen tested the goodwill of even the tsar’s most loyal subjects.
In the Lithuanian gubernii, where the proletariat was considerably smaller and less radical than in the Baltic provinces to the north, the 1905 revolution was more peaceful—although there too the official reaction was severe: hundreds, if not thousands, of Lithuanians were arrested in its wake, while many others fled. Since the Lithuanians’ concerns were more national than social, unrest in the countryside was directed less at Russo-Polish landlords than at the Russian state. In early December 1905, the Vilnius Diet, chaired by Dr. Jonas Basanavičius and attended by 2,000 representatives, met to debate the future of Lithuania. Its demands were the most radical yet of any nationality within the Russian Empire, for the Lithuanians wanted nothing less than national autonomy within ethnic Lithuanian boundaries along with a democratically elected parliament. The Diet also called for the use of the Lithuanian language in schools and in local government.
Attempting to recover from the shock of revolution, the Russian government found that it had little choice but to make limited concessions to the national minorities inhabiting its western provinces, including the granting of permission to use the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian languages in the schools. However, the regime coupled its compromises with muscular displays of its authority, in particular the proclamation of martial law and the repression of local activists. Among those imprisoned, sent to Siberian exile, or expelled from their homelands were two future presidents: Konstantin Päts was sentenced to death, but continued his journalistic activities in Finland before returning to Estonia in 1909, while the Latvian activist Kārlis Ulmanis (1877–1942) fled to the United States, where he studied agriculture at the University of Nebraska before returning to Latvia in 1913.
Meanwhile, the revolution found the Baltic Germans in a quandary. While administrative Russification in the decades before 1905 had eroded much of their power and strained their relationship with the imperial authorities, an alliance with the Latvians and Estonians against St. Petersburg was unthinkable for all concerned, so great was the mutual suspicion and mistrust. If most Baltic Germans cast their lot with the Russian state in the hope that the tsar would uphold their traditional position in Baltic society, a smaller number rejected the tsarist government and emigrated to Germany. (Their numbers were more than offset by the settlement in Latvia of some 13,000 Germans from the Volga region after 1908.) Caught between the hammer and the anvil, for many Baltic Germans there could be no reconciliation with either the tsar or the local nationalists.
After the Revolution of 1905 subsided the tone of politics in the Baltic provinces became more restrained. The periodical press expanded rapidly, and with the abolition of preliminary censorship in 1906 it enjoyed considerable freedom of expression, including the liberty to discuss Russification issues. However, censorship was not completely abolished and radical newspapers were shut down.
During these twilight years of the Russian Empire it was also possible for Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, as it was for Russians, Germans, and others, to voice their concerns through the State Duma. With the creation of this imperial parliament, an advisory body more than a legislative one, the Baltic provinces enjoyed political representation for the first time in their history. While left-leaning Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians were dispatched to St. Petersburg for the first and second Dumas, following the dissolution of the latter in June 1907 changes were made to the electoral laws whose purpose was to return more conservative candidates. As a result of the modifications, in the third (1907–1912) and fourth (1912–1917) Dumas the Baltic and Lithuanian provinces were represented mostly by wealthy Germans, Russians, and Poles.
Although the peoples of the Baltic and Lithuanian provinces now enjoyed unprecedented opportunities to engage with the tsarist system, challenges to St. Petersburg’s authority continued to be met with repression. Future president of Latvia Jānis Čakste (1859–1927), for example, was elected to the first Duma as a member of the moderate Constitutional Democratic Party; however, his signature on the Vyborg Manifesto (July 1906), which called for passive resistance to the regime following its dissolution of the Duma, earned him three months in a tsarist prison.
Nevertheless, even if the outcome of the Revolution of 1905 was disappointing to the recently awakened peoples of the eastern Baltic, the subsequent decade of parliamentary politics helped to furnish them with the leadership skills and the experience necessary to cope with the challenges that would soon be presented by the Great War.
On June 28, 1914, little more than four weeks after a Serbian terrorist assassinated the Austrian archduke, Europe was plunged into a world war that drew in all the major powers and caused untold suffering. At the conclusion of four years of fighting between the countries of the Entente (led by Britain, France, and Russia) and the Central Powers (principally Germany and Austria-Hungary), the map of Europe was transformed, as were the political arrangements that governed most of its states. Gone were the great multinational empires of eastern, central, and southern Europe, replaced by a number of smaller, weaker, and initially democratic successor states. Following two revolutions and a civil war between 1917 and 1921, tsarist Russia, minus its western borderlands, was reinvented as a one-party socialist state, later to be called the Soviet Union.
When Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II declared war on the Russia of his cousin Nicholas II in the summer of 1914, national self-determination seemed a remote prospect to even the most ambitious activists. Some contemporary observers concluded that a German victory would mean incorporation of Russia’s Baltic provinces into the Reich. A Russian triumph, on the other hand, would likely reinforce the existing relationship between St. Petersburg and the provinces and therefore would bring few benefits to the tsar’s subject nationalities.
Despite staunch opposition to the war among the empire’s socialists, for the most part the populations of the Baltic provinces initially supported Nicholas II and tens of thousands of Latvians and Estonians fought in his army. Lithuanians were also drafted into the Russian army, but their leaders’ demand for the unification of Lithuanian territories went unanswered. For many Baltic Germans, the choice between Kaiser and Tsar was agonizing. For the war’s first six months they tried to convince the suspicious authorities in St. Petersburg of their unswerving loyalty, but Russia’s military failures and the advance of German forces into Lithuania and Courland caused more than a few Baltic Germans to reconsider their allegiance to the tsar.
By autumn 1915 the littoral was cut in half at the Daugava River as the Russian army, along with endless streams of refugees, evacuated the occupied and nearby territories. Among the displaced were about 760,000 people from the Latvian lands, including most of the inhabitants of Courland and the bulk of Riga’s industrial workforce. As part of a larger effort to prevent the region’s industries and peoples from falling into the hands of the advancing Germans, Latvia’s industries were evacuated to neighboring territories. During the war more than 2.6 million refugees from Polish, Lithuanian, and Latvian regions left to find safety in Russia proper. This included the majority of Lithuania’s Jewish population, whom St. Petersburg suspected of disloyalty and compelled to leave their homes and move east in what amounted to a population “cleansing”—even if the overwhelming majority of refugees consisted of frightened women, children, and elderly people who could hardly have posed a threat to anyone.8
The vastness of the material and economic damage caused by the war nearly matched this human catastrophe. While advancing into Lithuania the Kaiser’s army destroyed many farms, while the retreating Russian troops were observed emptying Lithuanian factories and burning their bridges. Although Estonia and northeastern Latvia managed to avoid German occupation until September 1917, when Riga and the larger Estonian islands (Saaremaa, Muhu, Hiiumaa) were seized, the peoples residing in the unoccupied territories suffered from shortages, unemployment, and the runaway inflation that resulted from Russia’s attempt to finance the war effort by printing more money.
Military administration in the occupied territories, called the Land Oberost, was headed by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, chief of the German High Command, and his second-in-command, General Erich Ludendorff.9 Although German military leaders had long been convinced that it was necessary to weaken Russia permanently by setting up a ring of dependent barrier states on her western border, at the outset of the war Germany’s goals in the Baltic were undefined. One possibility was the annexation of Lithuania and Courland. Another alternative, endorsed by some Baltic German émigrés, was German colonization of the entire Baltic region. In any case, in a speech to the Reichstag in April 1916 Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg made it clear that Germany would not be returning the Polish, Lithuanian, or Latvian territories to the Russian Empire.
Whatever the ultimate fate of the Land Oberost, for the moment the territory was an indivisible administrative unit run exclusively by Reich Germans. Not only did the region provide the occupying army with food and raw materials, it also sent agricultural and industrial products to the Reich. Besides having to submit to requisitions, the inhabitants of the Land Oberost faced restrictions on their freedom of movement and in communications. Moreover, a German policy of divide and conquer, aiming to pit the national groups against one another (such as Lithuanians against Poles, Poles and Lithuanians against Jews), was coupled with the goal of bringing German Kultur to Lithuania and Courland—a particular concern of Ludendorff’s. Perhaps the most enduring consequence of the German occupation was the way the encounters between soldiers and civilians in the Land Oberost shaped the policies and atrocities of the later Nazi occupation.10
With the war going badly for Russia and hunger threatening its cities, demonstrations against the government broke out in early 1917. The largest protests occurred in Petrograd, as the German-sounding St. Petersburg was renamed in 1914, where 50,000 workers, led by the employees of the Putilov munitions plant, went on strike on March 7 (February 22, old style). As the protests in Petrograd mounted, Tsar Nicholas II ordered that the disturbances be suppressed. His popularity across Russian society, never impressive to begin with, was now fatally undermined by Russia’s military failures (the tsar took personal command of the armies at the front), his inability to control events in the capital (where his “German” wife Alexandra was left in charge), and the shortages in the shops. Thus on March 8 the tsar accepted the advice of his closest advisors and abdicated the throne. Sixteen months later he and his entire family were murdered by the Bolsheviks, who played no part in the first of the two revolutions of 1917.
As the February Revolution swept away the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty it opened up Russia’s political arena to an array of political activists, with the parties of the left reaping the greatest rewards. Immediately a series of “soviets,” patterned on the spontaneously organized workers’ and soldiers’ councils that first formed during the 1905 revolution, acquired immense authority in the empire’s cities, especially in Petrograd. Meanwhile, a Provisional Government was formed on the basis of the State Duma, the elected assembly that had been created in the wake of the Revolution of 1905. However, this bourgeois–democratic body, which continued to pursue Russia’s losing war against Germany, was countered by the Petrograd Soviet, a socialist-dominated institution that embodied the popular forces that had overthrown the old government. This political arrangement was known as “dual power,” a phrase that appropriately symbolized the country’s political paralysis and ambiguous future. For the empire’s non-Russian nationalities, the fall of the tsarist government represented an opportunity to pursue their dreams of political autonomy, as the new Provisional Government would have little choice but to recognize the growing authority of the Baltic provinces’ national leaders and establish partnerships with them.
While some sort of autonomy became a realistic goal for the peoples of Russia’s western borderlands, the situation was far from ideal. Consider the circumstances in Lithuania, where aside from the debilitating inconvenience of German occupation, a main obstacle was the Polish leadership, who regarded Lithuanian independence of any kind as undesirable and even threatening to their own plans to reconstitute a Polish state. Nevertheless, while Germany consented to the creation of the Kingdom of Poland in November 1916, Lithuanian leaders worked to secure German recognition for a Lithuanian state. Suspicious of German intentions and fed up with the deportations, compulsory work, requisitions, and personal maltreatment to which their co-nationals were subjected, other national-minded Lithuanians placed their hopes in a Russian victory to achieve their goals. Yet the prospect of a Russian triumph all but disappeared with the February Revolution.
Nevertheless, the revolution created the conditions for the spontaneous growth of national movements espousing the principle of self-determination. In May 1917, some 320 elected representatives of Lithuania’s political parties met in Russia’s capital to discuss the future of Lithuania. The congress was split: while Lithuanian parties on the political left called for an autonomous Lithuania within a democratic Russian federation, the majority was able to squeeze through a resolution calling for complete independence. Still, the Russian Provisional Government would not provide specific assurances of national autonomy for the Lithuanians, as had been promised the Poles at the beginning of the war.
While the government in Petrograd was reluctant to address the nationality problem, the Germans understood how the slogan of “self-determination,” a phrase that was associated with President Woodrow Wilson, who brought the United States into war on the side of the Entente in April 1917, could be applied to advance their own goal of attaching the Baltic territories to the Reich—or at least of detaching them from Russia. With German permission, in September 1917, Lithuanians in Vilnius organized a 20-member State Council of Lithuanian (Lietuvos Valstybės Taryba), mainly representing the Lithuanian bourgeoisie, which unanimously voted for the establishment of “an independent state of Lithuania.” In return, the Taryba, chaired by future Lithuanian president Antanas Smetona (1874–1944), vaguely agreed that the future Lithuanian state would enter into close military, economic, and political relations with the Reich. The effect of this arrangement was to bring closer to fruition the German High Command’s goal of turning the entire Baltic region into a German dependency.
While Lithuanian politicians tried to gain advantages from the German occupation, the situation in the Latvian territories was less promising, as they, with the exception of German-occupied Courland, remained under Russian control with seemingly little prospect of independence in the early years of the war. However, circumstances changed after the February Revolution, which presented the Latvians with new opportunities to advance their autonomist goals. As in Petrograd and Moscow, soviets immediately appeared in Riga and other unoccupied Latvian cities, where they appealed to workers and soldiers with their promises of radical social and political change. Meanwhile, Kārlis Ulmanis and Miķelis Valters formed a new political party, the Farmers’ Union, to appeal to the interests of Latvian farmers.
Competing visions of an independent Latvia, one that would include southern Livland, Courland, and Latgale, were debated throughout the Latvian provinces. Some Latvian activists called for the right of national self-determination for the Latvian people within their ethnic borders. Such were the demands of the Latvian representatives who met in Riga on July 30, whose declaration proposed an autonomous Latvia within a democratic Russia. Others went even further and called for Latvia’s complete independence from Russia, but until the Bolshevik seizure of power such maximalist demands seemed unrealistic as the Provisional Government in Petrograd refused to recognize an autonomous or united Latvia. Yet another obstacle to Latvian autonomy was internal disunity among the Latvians, as many peasants and workers—the latter were increasingly drawn toward Bolshevism—were more concerned with the class struggle than the national one.
Like the Latvians, the Estonians had also entered the war as more or less loyal subjects of the tsar, but many eventually began to understand that Russia’s weakness provided an opportunity for them to achieve their own national ambitions. With the fall of the imperial government in March 1917, Estonians saw little reason to continue defending the old order and were the first to take advantage of the new conditions. Immediately Jaan Tõnisson called for Estonian autonomy and began to pressure the Provisional Government to agree to the reorganization of self-government in the north Baltic region. With the establishment of an Estonian representative assembly (Maapäev) at the end of March, the old Baltic German- and Russian-controlled institutions of local government were abolished. Perhaps most importantly, Petrograd agreed to the administrative unification of the ethnographically Estonian territories. The imperial government’s recognition of the existence of “Estonia” was a concession granted to neither the Latvians nor the Lithuanians.
Estonian political parties quickly emerged to fill the seats in the Maapäev, for which elections were held in May and June 1917. Rather than urging outright separation from Russia, most deputies agreed that Estonia should become part of a democratic Russian federation. However, during the summer of 1917 real power lay not with the Maapäev, but with the socialist-dominated soviets in which the empire’s sailors, soldiers, and workers were predominant. Bolsheviks fared well in local elections in August and, as a rising force in Estonian politics, challenged the authority of the Maapäev to speak for all Estonia. But with the Germans advancing and capturing Riga in mid-August, it looked as if nearby Estonia too would become an extension of the Reich.
By the time the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd in the autumn of 1917, the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian peoples had already taken decisive steps in the direction of national autonomy. But just as Russia’s brief experiment with liberalism ended with the Bolshevik coup d’état of November 6–7 (October 24–25, old style), so ended any prospect of a federal arrangement between Russia and the nascent Baltic countries.
Support for the Bolsheviks had been growing in the urban areas of Latvian and Estonia well before their leader Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) declared Soviet power in Petrograd. By the summer of 1917, the Bolshevik faction of the Latvian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, which already controlled the party’s Central Committee, had even achieved majorities in some Latvian soviets. In August the Latvian Bolsheviks, supported by Riga’s radicalized workers, managed to form an indigenous Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers, Soldiers, and the Landless in Latvia (Iskolat) in the unoccupied eastern regions parts of Latvia; in December 1917 it formally declared itself to be Latvia’s Soviet government. Headed by the Latvian Bolshevik Fricis Roziņš (1870–1919) and run by ethnic Latvians, the short-lived Iskolat is thought by historians to have been a significant stage in the development of Latvian statehood, as Latvian was introduced as the language of administration and the Latgale region was annexed from Russia’s Vitebsk province. Yet the Iskolat’s main objective was not nationalist but rather to carry out Lenin’s class-based revolution in Latvia.11 Already divided geographically, as hundreds of thousands of Latvians had been evacuated to the Russian interior in 1915, the Latvian people were divided politically as well.
Assisting the Bolshevik cause in Latvia was the battalion of Latvian Riflemen, the only national fighting force to emerge in the region. Formed in August 1915 as part of the imperial army to fight the Germans and regain Courland, the Riflemen (strēlnieki) earned a reputation for their reliability and determination, holding a German offensive in check while suffering their most serious losses during the Christmas Battles (Ziemassvētku kaujas) of 1916–1917. In the wake of the February Revolution the Riflemen came under the influence of the political left and switched their allegiance to the Bolsheviks, who offered immediate and radical solutions to Russia’s (and Latvia’s) problems— the most pressing of which was the war, which the Bolsheviks proposed to end immediately and without reparations and annexations.12
The Iskolat’s main political competition during its short life, from December 1917 to February 1918, was the Latvian Provisional National Council (LPNC), which brought together representatives of nearly all of Latvia’s most important associations and political parties at its first meeting in late November 1917—just as the Bolsheviks began to create a dictatorship in Russia. Gathering in the unoccupied city of Valka, the LPNC declared “Latvia”—including Livland, Courland, and Latgale—to be an autonomous unit within Russia. Some Latvian writers regard this as nothing less than a declaration of independence.13 When the Bolshevik Iskolat that ruled the unoccupied parts of Latvia declared the LNPC’s activities illegal, the latter relocated to Petrograd, where in January 1918 it adopted an unambiguous declaration of Latvian independence and began to seek international recognition for a Latvian state.
While the Germans and the Bolsheviks began the negotiations that would lead in March 1918 to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, popular assemblies in Lithuania and Estonia also took steps to secure their independence from a weakened Russia. On December 11, 1917, a Lithuanian government was proclaimed by the Taryba, which declared that Vilnius, also claimed by Poland, would be its capital city; but it was not until February 16 that the Taryba, meeting in Vilnius, signed an act of independence that explicitly repudiated Lithuania’s ties with any foreign powers. Having received the necessary assurances from the Taryba, now temporarily chaired by Jonas Basanavičius, of its future close collaboration with Germany, on March 23, 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm decided to recognize a nominally independent Lithuanian state, which was to be bound in perpetuity to the Reich.
The first of the Baltic peoples to demand self-government, the Estonians were the last to declare their outright independence, for the nationalist aims being pursued by the bourgeoisie, who were represented in the Maapäev, carried little weight with Estonia’s councils of workers and soldiers, who were increasingly embracing the Bolshevik view in the summer of 1917. The autumn of 1917 was marked by turbulence and uncertainty in the Estonian lands, for German troops had swiftly occupied the larger islands as the Russian workers and industries were evacuated to the interior and the Bolsheviks planned their coup. But the Bolsheviks failed to consolidate power in Estonia and their defenses fell apart in February 1918 as German troops advanced toward the future Estonian capital. Realizing that a German occupation could threaten the prospect of Estonian independence, Estonian leaders worked to garner national and international support for the Estonian cause. Meanwhile, as the Bolsheviks and the German High Command negotiated the terms of what would become the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, an Estonian Committee of Elders, acting on behalf of the dispersed Maapäev, declared the country’s independence on February 24 and simultaneously created a new Provisional Government headed by Konstantin Päts. But detachment from Russia was still a far cry from full independence, for on the next day German troops, now openly supported by much of the Baltic nobility, moved into Tallinn, where they stayed until November 1918.
As the Germans completed their occupation of the entire Baltic region, members of Latvia’s Iskolat fled to Moscow, thereby bringing to a conclusion the first socialist experiment in Latvia. (As discussed later, Soviet power would return to Estonia and Latvia with the Red Army at the end of the year.) Desperately needing to end the war with Germany, the Bolsheviks had by this time decided to surrender the western borderlands in an effort to strengthen their hold over the Russian heartland. Under the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed by Bolshevik and German representatives on March 3, 1918, the German-Russian war was declared over and the Bolsheviks were compelled to surrender vast stretches of border territory from the Baltic to the Black Sea. While in principle the fate of these territories was to be determined “in agreement with their populations,” the reality was that the Germans didn’t know what to do with them; the main thing now was to redouble their efforts on the western front.
If reformers in the German Reichstag pressed for national self-determination for the Baltic peoples, the German High Command continued to manipulate the situation in the region in the hopes of, at minimum, permanently depriving Russia of her western borderlands, and maximally, attaching them to the Reich. The most effective way to do achieve the latter was to rely on the traditional lords of the region, the Baltic Germans, to express a popular desire for unification with Germany. The prototype for this plan was created in German-occupied Courland, where a representative assembly, the Landesrat, composed of Baltic Germans and seeking the closest ties to Germany, on March 8, 1918, offered the crown of the Duchy of Courland to Kaiser Wilhelm II. The expectation was that similar experiments would be repeated in Livland and Estonia, and thus the entire Baltikum would fall into the hands of the Reich. Indeed, many among the Baltic German elite rejoiced at the prospect of the entire region becoming Germanized; the nobles of Livland and Estland were even prepared to offer land to German colonists from the Reich. However, Germany’s recent good fortune in war was not to last much longer and Latvian and Estonian resistance, combined with objections from the Reichstag, effectively ruined the Kaiser’s plan.
Lithuania’s situation differed from that of Latvia and Estonia in that its lack of a German elite meant that were no Baltic German assemblies for the Reich to use to achieve its foreign policy goals in the region. Nevertheless, in the summer of 1918, the Taryba contr oversially toyed with the idea of placing on the Lithuanian throne Duke Wilhelm von Urach, a German aristocrat who was to be known as Mindaugas II. But Wilhelm, a Roman Catholic whose appointment earned the Vatican’s approval, never got to visit his adopted homeland much less assume the throne, for after the German military collapse in the autumn Lithuania no longer needed this ploy. On November 2 the Taryba declared Lithuania a republic with a three-member presidium that included Augustinas Voldemaras as prime minister. After the adoption of a constitution in April 1919, Antanas Smetona became Lithuania’s first president.
To some extent, the fate of the provinces inhabited by the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian peoples lay in the hands not of the Germans but of the Entente powers—Britain, France, and the United States, an “associate power” that joined the war in 1917. But during this period the Entente’s main concern in the region, apart from reopening the eastern front and winning the war against Germany, was to maintain the territorial integrity of the Russian state, whose Bolshevik leaders many in the West believed would quickly pass from the scene. Reluctant to acknowledge the full independence of the Baltic states, the Entente nonetheless encouraged them to resist the Germans while delaying any discussion of their final status until the peace conference.
But first the war against Germany needed to be brought to a successful conclusion. Reinvigorated by a fresh infusion of U.S. forces on the western front, the Entente powers were able to turn the tide during the summer of 1918 and by October they were threatening to invade Germany, prompting General Ludendorff to seek an armistice. In quick succession a revolution in Berlin on November 9 deposed the Kaiser, a German Provisional Government was installed, an armistice was signed, and Soviet Russia repudiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Once again the Baltic region fell into chaos as the new German government acknowledged the right of Latvians and Estonians to self-determination and the Bolsheviks advanced into the Baltic region. However, the absence of any external legal authority during the transition gave Estonian and Latvian politicians an opportunity to influence the course of events in their countries.
On November 18, 1918, a day that would later be celebrated as Latvian Independence Day, representatives formed a national council in Riga that declared the existence of a Republic of Latvia and a Provisional Government headed by Kārlis Ulmanis. Immediately it was recognized by the new German government, whose leaders believed independent Baltic states to be preferable to Russian rule for the maintenance of Germany’s interests in the region. However, the state of disarray in Russia’s western borderlands provided the Bolsheviks, who were counting on a German evacuation and possibly a socialist uprising in Germany, with an opportunity to spread the revolution westward. In December, the Latvian Bolsheviks returned to those Latvian areas not occupied by the Germans and set up a Soviet government headed by Pēteris Stučka (1865–1932) while the Ulmanisled Latvian Provisional Government (1918–1920) was forced to flee to German-occupied Courland, where for the time being it enjoyed German protection.
Politically close to Lenin, Stučka, like the other Latvian Bolsheviks, envisioned a socialist Latvian republic as having the “closest possible links” with Bolshevik Russia.14 The establishment of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” was immediately followed by a wave of terror, with the Bolsheviks imprisoning and executing more than 1,000 (some sources claim that there were upward of 5,000 victims) of their aristocratic and bourgeois enemies, mostly Baltic Germans. An entry from the diary of 24-year-old Angelika von Korff describes the experience of Bolshevik rule in Riga in the spring of 1919 from the point of view of a Baltic German baroness:
Here things are getting worse and worse. On the street one is constantly being asked for documents and often people are led off. The most anger is directed against the nobility. [Stučka] recently wrote, “We show no compromise with the nobility. They can go hide in the forest, but we will find them and get rid of them.” We are totally without rights, anybody who wants to can just shoot us. Pastors and businessmen are also high on their list and the prisons are overcrowded. . . . In the empty houses, Bolsheviks move in, the maidservants, the butlers. Now they are all gone, the Engelhardts, Oelsens, Panders, Reckes, Brüggens, Roennes, Bistrams, Drude Korff, Jenny Grandidier, ach, almost all of them.15
The Latvian Soviet Republic also antagonized the peasants with agrarian policies that anticipated the collectivization campaign ordered by Joseph Stalin three decades later. The return of German armed forces in May 1919 (discussed below) brought an end to the Red Terror in Riga, but the Latvian Bolsheviks held onto parts of eastern Latvia until the end of the year.
Estonia, which had been occupied by the Germans since February, was also threatened by the Bolsheviks, whose invasion began on November 22, 1918, only three days after a defeated Germany had recognized de facto the Estonian Provisional Government headed by Konstantin Päts. While Estonia’s leaders devoted their efforts to creating a national army, headed by the capable Lieutenant Colonel Johan Laidoner (1884–1953), Baltic German communities simultaneously formed their own volunteer units. At first, the Estonian defense was a failure: within a week, Bolshevik forces conquered Narva and proclaimed the Estonian Workers’ Commune, headed by Jaan Anvelt (1884–1937), as an autonomous part of Soviet Russia. As other Estonian towns fell one after another, the Bolsheviks instituted a Red Terror that claimed more than 500 lives. A “White terror” would follow in both Estonia and Latvia the following year when the tables were turned and the Bolsheviks and their accomplices became the objects of revenge.
What followed in the wake of the Armistice and the Bolshevik advance into the Baltic was a curious postscript to World War I in which German military forces, having been defeated on the western front, were given a green light to continue the struggle in the east. Concerned that the Bolsheviks might succeed in igniting revolutions in the areas “liberated” by the Red Army, leaders of the Entente invoked Article XII of the Armistice Agreement, which required that Germany withdraw its armed forces from the east only when the Entente governments thought it desirable. Although the new democratic government in Berlin, installed after the Kaiser’s flight in November, hoped to build friendly relations with the Baltic countries for the purpose of securing Germany’s long-term influence in the region, it nevertheless concluded that Germany would receive better peace terms from the Allies if it participated in the Baltic counteroffensive against the Bolsheviks.
Little more than two months after the proclamations of Soviet republics in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in late 1918, the Iron Division entered Latvia. A unit of the German Freikorps (Free Corps), the Iron Division was assigned to General Rüdiger von der Goltz (1865–1946), whose recent intervention in Finland had helped its new government to defeat the combined Finnish “Red” and Soviet Russian armies. In Latvia, von der Goltz’s forces combined with Baltic German units, organized as the Baltische Landeswehr (Baltic Territorial Army), as well as Latvian soldiers loyal to the Provisional Government of Kārlis Ulmanis—an embryonic Latvian national army—to continue the fight against the Bolsheviks. Thus while the terms of the peace were being negotiated at Versailles, the armed struggle continued in the east, with Baltic Germans fighting to maintain their privileged position in the region and Reich Germans—ordinary soldiers with limited prospects in Germany—lured to Latvia by false promises of land.
If Latvian soldiers fought for a Latvia free of both Russian and German domination (such a Latvian state, the Ulmanis government promised, would also provide Latvian veterans with farmland), the same could not be said of von der Goltz, whose goal was to build a Baltic bridge that would connect Germany to what he hoped would be a restored “White” (nonsocialist) Russia. “[W]hy could not an economic and political sphere be created next to Russia? Russia’s own intelligentsia was ruined and her land was hungering for German technicians, merchants and leaders. Her devastated and depopulated border provinces required German settlers to cultivate their fertile soil. I had in mind especially the discharged soldiers . . . Russia was no longer in a position to object.”16
That the German forces had no authority to intervene in local political affairs did little to stop the Freikorps from pursuing their own goals in the Baltic. On April 16, the Germans deposed the government in Liepāja as Ulmanis and most of his ministers found sanctuary on the SS Saratov under the protection of the British navy, which had been delivering weapons to the Latvian Provisional Government. Five weeks later, on May 22, 1919, the combined units (Latvian forces, the Landeswehr, and Freikorps) managed to liberate Riga from the exhausted Bolsheviks. With von der Goltz’s cooperation, the Landeswehr took over the administration and set up a rival government that was headed by the pastor Andrievs Niedra (1871–1942), a Latvian reactionary who would be reliant upon his German masters.
Since the Freikorps and Landeswehr were believed to have killed hundreds and possibly thousands of alleged communist collaborators, overwhelmingly Latvians, during their occupation of Riga, Latvian nationalists turned against their former allies. Meanwhile, native Estonian forces, having pushed the Red Army out of southern Estonia into Latgale, now advanced into Latvia, where they combined with Latvian units to capture the town of Cēsis from the Germans in June 1919.
Victory at the Battle of Cēsis (Võnnu in Estonian) was a decisive moment in both the Estonian and Latvian wars of independence. In Estonia it is now celebrated as Victory Day (Võidupüha), a national holiday that is observed every June 23. On July 3, the combatants signed the armistice of Strazdumuiža, which forced the Germans to leave Riga while the Landeswehr was redeployed to fight the Red Army. As the German-backed Niedra government slipped into irrelevance, Kārlis Ulmanis reclaimed the legitimacy of his Provisional Government as Latvian units took control of the capital.17 Concluding that it would be better to replace the German anti-Bolshevik forces with native troops, the Entente ordered the Germans to leave the region as quickly as possible. His plans in tatters, a defiant von der Goltz returned to Germany in October (five months after his recall) as volunteers flooded into the Estonian and Latvian armies and Allied aid flowed into the Latvian and Estonian governments.
Nevertheless, remnants of the Freikorps continued the crusade in the Baltic for months afterward. Thousands were transferred to the West Russian Volunteer Army of Pavel Bermondt-Avalov (1877–1974), an aristocrat of Cossack lineage who declared that he would continue the anti-Bolshevik struggle. Taking command of the German forces in Courland, Bermondt’s purported aim was to join up with the White army of General Nikolai Yudenich (see below), capture Petrograd, and reintegrate the Baltic territories into a monarchist Russia. However, Berlin’s involvement in the scheme was so obvious that on November 25 the Ulmanis government declared that a state of war existed between Latvia and Germany. By this time, Bermondt’s forces were spent, having failed to take Riga in October 1919 and then burning and looting the countryside during their retreat through Courland. By mid-December Bermondt’s demoralized army was driven from the Baltic by the Latvian and Lithuanian armies with the aid of Estonian troops and Allied material aid. Soon afterward the Polish army drove the Bolsheviks from Latgale, leaving Latvia completely free of German and Russian armies.
If the Estonians had managed to liberate themselves from the Bolsheviks without help from the Freikorps, they did benefit from the assistance of Finnish, Latvian, and Baltic German forces, while also receiving aid from the Entente powers. Estonia also uncomfortably hosted a White Russian army headed by General Yudenich. The Whites, however, had no intention of recognizing the right to self-determination of any nationality of the old Russian Empire; they fought for a “Russia one and indivisible.” While Yudenich’s attempt to take Petrograd ultimately ended in defeat, by the spring of 1919 Estonia was cleared of Soviet troops and the Provisional Government was secure enough to elect a Constituent Assembly, which in turn voted unanimously to affirm Estonia’s independence. Relations with Russia, however, remained questionable as the fractured giant’s devastating civil war dragged on. Nevertheless, by early 1920 the Bolshevik government in Moscow (the new capital of Soviet Russia), concerned that the Estonians and others would join a united anti-Bolshevik front that would permit the victory of the White Russian forces, was ready to make peace with Estonia.
According to the terms of the Treaty of Tartu signed on February 2, 1920, Soviet Russia recognized Estonian independence de jure and forever renounced any rights to Estonian territory. Likewise, Latvia’s Ulmanis government signed an armistice with the Bolshevik government after the liberation of Latgale in early 1920. A peace treaty followed on August 11, 1920, in which Moscow recognized Latvia’s independence. Although many Latvian refugees returned from Russia between 1919 and 1927, at least 150,000 Latvians, many of whom were convinced socialists, decided to remain in the Soviet Union.18
Lithuania also endured a Soviet regime—the Lithuanian-Belorussian (Litbel) Republic, proclaimed in December 1918 following the withdrawal of German forces—but the Bolsheviks managed to occupy only about two-thirds of the country. Since Bolshevism had not produced a native organization in Lithuania as it had in Latvia and Estonia, the Lithuanians’ war against the Red Army was truly a national rather than a civil war. Volunteer regiments were formed to fight for the country’s independence, and by late August 1919 the Lithuanians were able to drive the tired and poorly supplied Red Army from their territory.
Like Riga, Vilnius changed hands numerous times during a profoundly turbulent era that witnessed the comings and goings of peoples (Russians being evacuated, Jewish refugees arriving), persistent food shortages, and waves of epidemics. The city was occupied by the Germans from 1915 until late 1918, then by the Bolshevik Lithuanian government (Litbel), and from April 1919 by Polish forces who claimed it and the surrounding region for Poland as they drove toward the Russian interior. A little more than a year later the situation was reversed: with Poland now losing its war against Soviet Russia, in July 1920, Bolshevik forces marched into Vilnius, following which they turned the city over to Lithuania in exchange for allowing the Red Army free passage through Lithuanian territory. Even after Polish forces returned to Vilnius in late October, the Lithuanian government refused to surrender its claim to the city.
Thus at various points in 1919–1920 the Lithuanians faced the Bolsheviks in the east, the Poles in the south, and White Russian (and German) forces on the northern front. As a result, the resolution of the situation in Lithuania took longer than was the case in Latvia and Estonia. It was not until July 12, 1920, that the Lithuanian and Soviet governments at last concluded a peace treaty, with the latter recognizing Lithuania’s claim to Vilnius (Poland’s subsequent seizure of the city notwithstanding).19
No longer part of Russia, and freed from the dominance of the Baltic German elite, who now had nowhere to turn, the peoples of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania embarked upon the creation of independent states during a period of great uncertainty but with high hopes. But for the Baltic countries, it has never been possible to pursue the interests of nation and state completely independently of the will of their larger neighbors and other great powers. Indeed, while historian Georg von Rauch, writing 40 years ago, lauded the aspiring states for their “military prowess and political courage” at this critical moment in their collective history, it was, in the final analysis, the collapse of two great powers, Germany and Russia, which made possible the establishment of three sovereign states along the Baltic Sea.20
Although the Allied (Entente) powers were willing to provide some material help in their struggle against the Bolsheviks, the Baltic countries were able to secure Allied recognition only in 1921 and 1922—after the outcome of the Russian civil war had been decided. Having abandoned the cause of the various White armies who fought the united Bolshevik Red Army, the Allies now endorsed the idea of a cordon sanitaire—a belt of states that would confine Bolshevism to the east and keep Russia and Germany apart. In the postwar period, the requirements of the great powers would again play decisive roles in determining the fate of the Baltic peoples.
Few episodes in the history of the Baltic states are fraught with greater significance than the wars of independence that were fought between 1918 and 1920. From these wars emerged not only three new democratic states and three new national armies, but also a new pantheon of heroes and an institutionalized commemoration of the generation whose sacrifices brought liberty to the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian peoples. Few could have been unaware that the political freedoms for which so many had sacrificed their lives could be quickly lost.
1. The statistics used in this section were drawn from several sources. These include Andrejs Plakans, The Latvians: A Short History (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1995), 88, 108; Andrejs Plakans, A Concise History of the Baltic States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 244–54; Toivo U. Raun, Estonia and the Estonians, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2001), 71–73; Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2001), 397–407; Stephen D. Corrsin, “The Changing Composition of the City of Riga, 1867–1913,” Journal of Baltic Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 19–39.
2. Daina Bleiere, et al., History of Latvia: The 20th Century, 2nd ed. (Riga: Jumava, 2006), 39–51.
3. Overall, the demographic situation was bleak for the Baltic Germans. From 1881 to 1897 the total number of Baltic Germans in Estland, Livland, and Courland dropped from 180,423 to 152,936, partly due to Russification and also owing to some German emigration.
4. Alfonsas Eidintas, Vytautas Žalys, and Alfred Erich Senn, Lithuania in European Politics: The Years of the First Republic, 1918–1940 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 17.
5. Edward C. Thaden, ed., Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 1855–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 260.
6. See Toivu U. Raun, “The Revolution of 1905 in the Baltic Provinces and Finland,” Slavic Review 53, no. 3 (Winter 1984): 453–67.
7. Latgale, an ethnically diverse and underdeveloped region of Latvia that was part of the province of Vitebsk, was less affected by the disturbances of 1905–1907.
8. Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
9. At first Oberost, or Ober Ost, included only Courland, Lithuania, Bialystock-Grodno. With the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 it was expanded to include Estonia, Belarus, and the rest of Latvia.
10. See Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
11. Andrew Ezergailis, The Latvian Impact on the Bolshevik Revolution (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1983).
12. After Russia lost Riga to the Germans in September 1917, the Riflemen were summoned by Lenin to Petrograd where they became his praetorian guard and arguably saved the revolution. But it wasn’t long after returning to Latvia in the summer of 1918 that the Riflemen, whose ranks consisted mostly of landless peasants and small tenant farmers, became disillusioned with the Soviet experiment, having witnessed the betrayal of its promises of justice and fairness. The feats of the Latvian Riflemen would later be celebrated in Soviet Latvia, where monuments were erected in their honor. So great is their historical reputation that even many anticommunist Latvians accept the Rifleman as authentic Latvian heroes, even if they do not share many of the soldiers’ commitment to Lenin’s vision. See Geoffrey Swain, “The Disillusioning of the Revolution’s Praetorian Guard: The Latvian Riflemen, Summer-Autumn 1918,” Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 51, no. 4 (June 1999): 667–86.
13. Bleiere, 120–21.
14. Georg von Rauch, The Baltic States: The Years of Independence: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania 1917–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 58.
15. Mark R. Hatlie, “Riga’s First Totalitarian Regime: January 3 – May 22, 1919.” http://hatlie.de/pdf/korff.pdf (accessed July 9, 2014). Excerpts translated by Mark R. Hatlie.
16. Rüdiger von der Goltz, Meine Sendung in Finland und im Baltikum (Leipzig, Germany: K.F. Koehler, 1920), as appears in Puisāns, 193.
17. Amnestied in 1924, Niedra was expelled from the country only to return to Latvia during the later Nazi occupation.
18. Plakans (1995), 120. Among those who remained in Russia was the former Bolshevik Pēteris Stučka. From 1958 to 1990 the University of Latvia was officially named the Pēteris Stučka Latvian State University.
19. Although secretly authorized by Józef Piłsudski, the head of the new Polish state, the seizure of Vilnius by General Lucjan Żeligowski in October 1920 became known as Żeligowski’s Mutiny. In 1922, the Lithuanian Seimas voted to incorporate V ilnius and the surrounding region into Poland, and afterward Piłsudski admitted that the “mutiny” had in fact been a planned operation carried out with his support.
20. Quote from Rauch, p. 75.