The History of The Baltic States

Simultaneously admitted into the League of Nations on January 21, 1922, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania enjoyed a sense of security that, while always precarious, was never directly challenged until September 1939, when the Polish state was obliterated by its more powerful neighbors. As the summer turned to autumn the clouds darkened over the three small states located along eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, for their inhabitants too would soon become the victims of unprovoked aggression. First it was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), whose unquenchable thirst for security left no room for the independence of the Baltic states. Then came the Germans, whose rulers planned to seize “living space” in the east for future “Aryan” habitation. Three years passed before the Red Army was able to drive back the Wehrmacht and retake the bases it originally acquired in 1939–1941. The Soviet and Nazi occupations fundamentally altered the Baltic societies’ political systems, economies, social order, and demographic profiles. Few survived unscathed by, and many were complicit in, the totalitarian experience that lasted without interruption until Stalin’s death in 1953.

Despite the installation of Soviet military bases within their borders in late 1939, the Baltic protectorates were allowed to conduct their domestic affairs without Soviet interference while Moscow scrupulously observed the terms of the mutual assistance treaties.1 Then in the spring of 1940, while the world’s attention was riveted on the victorious Nazi campaigns in Holland, Belgium, and France, Moscow began to ratchet up the pressure on the three Baltic republics. In late May and early June the Soviet minister of foreign affairs Vyacheslav Molotov repeatedly accused the Baltic governments of unfriendliness and of conspiring together against the USSR. Alleging their inability to carry out the terms of the mutual assistance pacts, Moscow issued ultimatums to each of the Baltic countries, demanding that they form friendly governments capable of fulfilling their treaty obligations. The accusations were merely a pretext to mask the Moscow’s real intentions of taking over the Baltic states in order to secure the USSR’s direct and permanent access to the Baltic Sea.

Accused of abducting several Red Army soldiers who had strayed from one of the Soviet-occupied military bases, Lithuania was the first to be presented with an ultimatum, just before midnight on June 14. In what was surely a coordinated effort, a few hours later Soviet security forces (NKVD) staged a series of provocations at Latvia’s Masļenki border station. That these incidents occurred just as German troops marched into Paris was hardly accidental; it is possible that the ease of the Nazis’ victories in the West caused Stalin to move more decisively to consolidate the USSR’s position in the Baltic. However, it is unclear exactly when the Soviet leadership decided on the actual incorporation of the Baltic states into the USSR.

With invasion imminent, President Antanas Smetona tried to convince his cabinet and army that Lithuania, with its 26,000 active and 120,000 reserve soldiers, should at least organize a symbolic resistance to the Soviets, but he was overruled. On June 15, the Red Army overran the country as the president escaped to Germany, where the authorities offered him little more than temporary refuge. Continuing to insist that he symbolized independent Lithuania, Smetona died in a house fire in Cleveland in 1944.

The Soviet justification of the occupation, written in history books published in the postwar period, ignored Soviet belligerency in these events, instead emphasizing the “class struggle” then allegedly taking place in each of the Baltic countries. As one Soviet historian later wrote of the situation in Latvia:

“Spontaneous demonstrations” broke out in each of the Baltic capitals as the old order gave way to a new one. One such demonstration took place on June 21 in Tallinn, where observers were under the impression that the vast majority of the demonstrators were Russians and that at least some of these were Soviet troops clad in civilian clothing.⁴ Similar conditions were reported in Riga. Such public demonstrations of support for Soviet power were important for Moscow to defend what would later become its official claim that the “fascist” regimes in the Baltic were swept away by indigenous socialist revolutions. That the legal transfer of power took almost identical form in all three Baltic states is indicative of the thinness of Soviet assertions.

With new “elections” scheduled for July 14–15, the occupying authorities immediately carried out purges of noncommunist political organizations and other institutions. Just days before the elections were to take place, the People’s Government of Lithuania waged a “class struggle” that resulted in the arrests of as many as 2,000 activists with suspect loyalties. Many of the arrested had entertained hopes of reestablishing the constitutional order that had existed in their country prior to the establishment of the Smetona dictatorship, but were dismayed at having been duped by a Soviet regime that was now bent on annexation masked by only the thinnest veneer of Soviet legality.

The new governments immediately began to align their policies with current Soviet practices, the basis of which was Marxist-Leninist ideology. The old “bourgeois” societies had to be destroyed so that new “socialist” societies, run by loyal Soviet citizens, could be constructed in their place. The reconstituted parliaments quickly proclaimed the nationalization of large enterprises, transportation, banks, private housing, and commerce in general. Although land was now considered the property of the people, for the time being the Soviet regime limited itself to expropriating only those holdings comprising 30 or more hectares (about 75 acres). The rest was placed in republic land banks, which then distributed some of the property to landless peasants and farmers with the smallest holdings.

Meanwhile, with the arrival of the Red Army, which quickly absorbed and attempted to indoctrinate the military forces of the Baltic states, accompanied by an influx Soviet security forces (NKVD), came strict censorship and press control along with the confiscation of items such as radios and bicycles. If the working class, the regime’s primary constituency, was rewarded with increased wages, then the price increases, shortages, and the introduction in November of the ruble as legal tender in the Baltic republics soon canceled out such gains. In Riga and the other capitals housing became scarce as large apartment buildings were appropriated and reallocated to officials from the USSR. Everywhere the streets were renamed after Soviet heroes—a practice repeated by the Germans in 1941 and once again by the Soviets after the war. Organized religion, anathema to the atheistic Soviet state, also came under attack, for in each of the new Soviet republics churches and ecclesiastical property were nationalized, religious education and religious publications were forbidden, seminaries and monasteries were seized (often to quarter the Red Army), and many clergymen were arrested.

The greatest blow to the Baltic clergy, whether Lutheran, Catholic, or Orthodox, was dealt in mid-June 1941, when large numbers of priests and pastors were deported to the Soviet hinterland. This was part of a sweeping deportation that simultaneously affected all three Baltic republics and which targeted entire categories of people on the basis of lists prepared by the NKVD. These included former employees of the pre-Soviet Baltic governments, individuals who had been expelled from the communist parties, members of noncommunist parties active during the independence era, former police and prison officials, former large landowners and business owners, heads and active members of labor unions, and former officers in the armed forces.9 Beginning on the night of June 13–14 and lasting for only a few days, the operation involved the shooting of hundreds of army officers and the deportation of about 15,000 people from Latvia, 10,000 from Estonia, and 18,000 from Lithuania, among them many Russians, Jews, and others.¹⁰ Packed into boxcars for a journey of several weeks to northern Russia, Central Asia, or Siberia, many of these alleged class enemies, which included women and children, died along the way.

While these events have sometimes been described as the beginning of an attempted genocide—and some have noted the prominent role of Jewish NKVD officials—the fact that thousands of Jews, Russians, and others were on the NKVD deportation lists calls such assertions into question. Whatever the nationality of the repressed, any properties they held—farms, vehicles, precious metals, libraries, musical instruments—were “requisitioned for the working masses for the good of the state.” Many who faced imminent arrest fled to the woods. Similar operations were planned for later that month, but the approach of the German army prevented them from being carried out.

If the republics’ Soviet-censored newspapers ignored these events at the time, they were known to the local populations and even today remain deeply embedded in the historical consciousness of the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian people, whose leaders continue to view Moscow as guilty of criminal acts for which it has yet to take full responsibility. The “Year of Terror,” echoing and amplifying the Red Terror that took place in the Soviet republics of Latvia and Estonia in 1918–1919, defined the Baltic peoples’ understanding of what it meant to be a citizen under a communist government and helps to explain why so many greeted the arriving German army as liberators in 1941—and why some locals resisted Sovietization when the Red Army returned in 1944. Indeed, the events of 1940–1941, as well as the deportations of 1948–1949 (see pp. 178–179) created a legacy of mistrust between the Baltic states and Russia that is still felt in present times.

Ostland

Launching the largest land invasion in history with the assistance of a half million troops from allied Hungary, Romania, and Finland (as well as volunteers from Italy, France, and other countries), approximately three million soldiers of the Wehrmacht, backed by 3,000 tanks and 2,500 airplanes, pummeled the USSR’s western borderlands, capturing thousands of tanks and hundreds of thousands of stunned and misled Red Army soldiers. Much of the lauded Soviet air force was destroyed on the ground in the first hours of the war.

Many citizens of the Baltic republics, much like many western Ukrainians and other inhabitants of the USSR’s recently acquired border territories, were at first overjoyed by the invasion, believing that the Germans had arrived as “liberators” from Soviet oppression. As one witness in Latvia recalled of the first days of Operation Barbarossa, “Few cities had ever welcomed their own bombing as Riga.”¹² While German propaganda later portrayed the destruction of part of Riga’s medieval Old Town as the work of the retreating Red Army, this wasn’t a Soviet act; it was the German air raids that began on June 23 that destroyed the wooden spire of St. Peter’s Church and other important architectural monuments. Meanwhile, as the Red Army retreated, tens of thousands of civilians, many frightened Jews among them, headed east for the Russian border.

According to the GeneralPlan Ost (1942), which was essentially a master plan for ethnic cleansing that gave priority to the racial objectives of the SS, the region was to be exploited and completely Germanized within the next 25 years in preparation for its ultimate absorption by the Reich. Rosenberg’s loopy racial theories placed Estonians, whom he regarded as largely Germanized, at the apex of the Baltic racial hierarchy. Some Latvians and fewer Lithuanians could be assimilated, but like the Slavs most would have to enslaved, transferred to the Russian hinterland, or simply eliminated. The resulting vacuum would be filled by colonizing Germans, thousands of whom were in fact brought from the Reich to settle on some of the expropriated farms. (Rosenberg and Hitler did not allow Baltic Germans to participate in the political administration of Ostland.) Rosenberg’s plans, often ignored by Hitler for being too sympathetic to certain non-German populations, called for these colonists to be joined by the Baltic Germans who had departed from Estonia and Latvia at the end of 1939. For the time being, however, they were more useful in the territories annexed from Poland (the Warthegau), to which the Baltic Germans were expected to bring “civilization.”

Yet with Hitler focusing on military matters and leaving the implementation of his vision to competing subordinates—a hallmark of his leadership style—occupation policies tended to be improvised and then altered as the Führer ’s henchmen attempted to divine his will. For example, in February 1942 Rosenberg, working from his desk in Berlin, agreed to the establishment of a Latvian Self-Administration (Landselbstverwaltung) under General Oskars Dankers (1883–1965), a pro-German veteran of Latvia’s War of Independence who left Latvia when the Soviets took over and then returned to the country after its “liberation” by the Wehrmacht.¹⁴ Such administrative autonomy, symbolic as it was, was also granted to the Estonians and Lithuanians but was denied the other peoples of the Soviet Union. Its primary purpose was not actual governance but to provide the Nazis with willing and subordinate collaborators whose desire to restore local independence could be easily manipulated and otherwise ignored.

The potential for such a partnership between occupiers and the occupied was scarcely entertained by the Nazis in the summer and fall of 1941 as the Red Terror gave way to the New Order and Sovietization was replaced by Germanization. Rigans who had greeted the Germans as liberators in July were appalled at the renaming of the city’s streets, parks, and squares (Liberty Avenue became Adolf Hitler Street, and so on), intended to underline the Nazis’ goal of restoring “the ancient German character of the Baltic lands.”15 The hope that had accompanied liberation gradually turned to hostility as it became clear that a new evil had replaced the previous one. Even if the Germans made occasional concessions to the Latvian Self-Administration and repeatedly dangled the prospect of expanding self-rule in the Baltic lands, most likely for the purpose of increasing requisitions, Hitler could never conceive of true political autonomy for Latvia or the other occupied territories. Nevertheless, as the war went on circumstances compelled the Nazi leadership to reconsider what had previously been a purely ideological approach to the Nazi occupation of Ostland.

The Holocaust

One thing remained absolutely consistent after the summer of 1941, and that was the Nazis’ commitment to eliminating the Jewish populations of the conquered territories. While the number of Jews living in the Baltic states paled in comparison to Poland, home to 3,474,000 Jews in 1939, there were significant Jewish populations in both Latvia and Lithuania, although not in Estonia, whose 4,300 Jews comprised less than one-half of 1 percent of the population.

Jews have lived in the Latvian lands since the 16th century and in Lithuania still longer (see chapter 2). The 1935 census in Latvia reported 93,479 Jews in Latvia (about 4 percent of the total population), down from 185,000 on the eve of World War I. Nearly half (43,672) lived in Riga, with most of the rest residing in the Latgale region (27,974). Of the approximately 210,000 Jews living in Lithuania in 1939, the recently acquired Vilnius area alone contained up to 80,000 Jews (and almost no Lithuanians). Most lived in cities and were engaged in trade, commerce, and industry; only a very few Jewish farmers exemplified the agrarian ideals extolled by the interwar Baltic governments. Jewish minorities, like all Baltic national groups, enjoyed had constitutional protections in the 1920s (see chapter 4), but Jewish cultural autonomy and economic influence were curtailed under the nationalizing dictatorships of the 1930s. In both interwar Latvia and Lithuania Jews had been excluded from the civil service and had limited options in the military.

The task of annihilating Soviet and Baltic Jewry fell to the SS Einsatzgruppen —the mobile killing forces founded in May 1941 by Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich (1900–1942), who along with Hitler were the main architects of the Holocaust. Organized into four units that followed the advancing German army into Soviet territory, the Einsatzgruppen were charged with restoring order, maintaining security, killing communist functionaries, and fighting partisans. Owing to the myth of Jewish collaboration with the Soviet regime, such targets became synonymous with the Nazis’ foremost enemy, the Jews, whom the SS had full license to annihilate.

If the Nazis disdained to consider any kind of political collaboration with the peoples of the occupied territories beyond the creation of powerless “Self-Administrations,” they did not hesitate to recruit local collaborators to help them complete the gruesome task of annihilation, which local participants likely viewed as revenge rather than genocide. Following the trail blazed by Army Group North into the Baltic lands, Stahlecker’s Einsatzgruppe A next moved into Latvia, reaching Riga on July 1. Accompanying these forces were hundreds of uniformed Latvians returning from Germany who became the core of the Latvian SD (Security Service). Immediately Stahlecker began to recruit locals into auxiliary police units made up of former soldiers and policemen as well as former members of the Aizsargi (Home Guards) and Pērkonkrusts (Thunder Cross), which was Latvia’s largest fascist-type organization until its suppression by the Ulmanis regime in 1934. The most notorious of the Latvian auxiliary police units was the Arājs Kommando, which historian Andrew Ezergailis described as “a unique unit with no exact counterpart in occupied Europe.” Led by a vicious opportunist named Viktors Arājs (1910–1988), its 300 or more volunteers went as far as Minsk in search of victims and were responsible for the murder of at least 26,000 Jews in Latvia and still more in Lithuania and Belarus.¹⁸

By July 17 Stahlecker was able to report that all the synagogues of Riga had been destroyed. Within another three months nearly half of Latvia’s Jews had been murdered.²¹ Now only 29,000 frightened and destitute Jews—the Germans and their Latvian collaborators robbed them of anything of value—remained alive in the isolated Riga ghetto, which became a crowded, unhygienic dumping ground in one of the poorest sections of the city. Easily identified by the yellow Star of David they were forced to wear on their chests and backs, ghetto Jews were compelled to work. A total of 7,000 Jews remained in the Daugavpils ghetto, and fewer than 4,000 in Liepāja, Latvia’s second largest city. The latter became the site of a filmed massacre of Jewish women in which a Latvian police battalion participated. Its viewers will confront a deeply unsettling window into the horror show that was the Nazis’ “New Order.”²² Having overseen the murder of many thousands of Jews in Latvia and Lithuania (although not quickly enough for Himmler), Dr. Stahlecker was reassigned to the Russian front where he was killed in an action against Soviet partisans.

The execution of the final solution was no less horrific in Lithuania, but the scale was greater owing to the larger size of the Jewish communities in Lithuanian cities. As mentioned above, on June 25–26 Kaunas was the scene of the first large-scale massacres; these coincided with the arrival of the Germans, who further goaded the Lithuanians violence against the Jews. While the attacks that took place on these two days are well documented in photographs and memoirs, there is also evidence that from the moment of the insurgency on June 23, before the Germans arrived in Kaunas and other Lithuanian towns, local nationalists were already killing their neighbors. As Solly Ganor, a Jewish resident of Kaunas at the time, recalled:

Vilnius was one of the few larger cities where such pogroms did not occur, owing to the large number of Jews and small number of Lithuanians living in the city. By the end of June the Germans had disarmed most of the anti-Soviet bands and incorporated them into their own auxiliary units for the purpose of continuing the struggle against the Jews in a more orderly, controlled, and thorough manner.

On the whole, the Holocaust unfolded in Lithuania much the same way it did in Latvia, yet Lithuania was the first place in Nazi-occupied Europe where Jews were executed by the thousands. Indeed, the way the Nazis carried out the business of genocide in Soviet territory, largely through shootings, differed markedly from their methods in western Europe and occupied Poland. If the latter became the site of the infamous death camps established beginning at the end of 1941 at Chelmno, Bełžec, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka, where Polish Jews were gassed using modern industrial methods to kill as many Jews as quickly and as efficiently as possible (Jews living in western countries were usually sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, which became the largest of the death factories), Soviet Jews, including the Jews of Lithuania and Latvia, were destroyed in mass shootings in a “Holocaust by bullets” that claimed the lives of 1.5 million Jews overall.²⁵ There was not one Holocaust, but two, and perhaps many.

The evidence that a small number of Lithuanian “freedom fighters” staged pogroms and killed Jews at random in the interval between the Red Army’s evacuation and the Germans’ establishment of mastery over the country is nearly incontrovertible. The gruesome displays of frenzied hatred in Kaunas on June 25–26 even disturbed some of the arriving Nazis, who encouraged the attacks even if their haphazard nature violated the Germans’ sense of order. Establishing his Kaunas office on July 25, Reichskomissar Lohse dashed any hopes the Lithuanians had of regaining their independence and instead treated Lithuanian nationals as inferiors; yet, as in Latvia, the Nazi administration in Lithuania needed local volunteers to help the accomplish the task of making the country Judenfrei (cleansed of Jews). This largely accomplished by the spring of 1942, the first group of 20,000 farmers from Germany arrived in May. It was they, the Germans and not the Lithuanians, who were to benefit from the seizure of Jewish properties and the looting of their possessions.

Such was also the fate of the 38,000 Jews herded into the two Vilnius ghettos, established on September 21, 1941, just weeks after some 25,000 Jews were murdered in the nearby forests of Ponary (Lith. Paneriai).²⁷ While the Germans coordinated the massacres at Ponary, Lithuanian volunteers did much of the killing. Afterward the pace of the killings slowed due to the need for slave labor in Latvia and Estonia, until in March 1943 the Nazis decided to liquidate the Jewish communities in the small towns and transfer their remnants to the crowded Vilnius ghettos and labor camps further north. Three months later Himmler ordered the liquidation of all the ghettos in Ostland.

These actions were being undertaken at roughly the same time as the Nazis attempted to suppress an uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. News of this event, the greatest act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, soon reached the Jews of Vilnius. “A few rumors still come from Warsaw: Warsaw is still fighting, the Warsaw Ghetto has already given up the struggle, and the final cord—the Warsaw Ghetto has finally been silenced,” reads the May 25th entry of a diary by Herman Kruk, written in Yiddish. “Now the radio says they are searching for Jews in Warsaw, outside the ghetto. For pointing out a Jew you receive . . . 10 kilos of sugar. A Jewish head is worth 10 kilos of sugar.”²⁸ Clashes between German units and members of an underground group occurred in Vilnius on September 1, but this only bought the Jews of Vilnius a few weeks’ time as the ghetto was liquidated on the 21st, its remnants sent either to the death camp at Majdanek or to the labor camps in Estonia.

Also like its southern neighbors, Estonians suffered from a similar collective amnesia about the events of that time. Concerned above all with restoring an independent Estonian state, they accepted Hitler as the lesser of two evils and sought to prove the superiority of their culture over that of the Soviets. It was not until 2002, more than a decade after Estonia was freed from Soviet rule, that the Estonian government officially commemorated the Holocaust.

Used to playing the part of victim, the courageous David to the Russian and German Goliaths, segments of the populations in all three Baltic countries, not least their governments, have found it difficult to engage in an honest assessment of those times when their co-nationals, too, had been victimizers. But this is changing as the commemoration of the tragedy becomes increasingly institutionalized. Since the restoration of independence Latvia has observed July 4 as the official commemoration day for Jewish Victims of Genocide in Latvia. The seriousness with which this is taken by the Latvian government is indicated by the annual appearance of Latvian presidents and other dignitaries at the ceremony, which takes place at the site where a synagogue was burnt down in Riga on July 4, 1941. Likewise, Lithuania has been commemorating the National Memorial Day for the Genocide of Lithuanian Jews since September 23, 1994, four years after its government first officially admitted Lithuanian involvement in the Holocaust.

Exploitation and Collaboration

Problems with the food supply were connected to Ostland ’s endemic labor shortage, which in turn was caused mostly by flight and by the absence of the seasonal agricultural laborers upon which Latvia in particular relied. While the deficit was partly made up for by the use of Soviet prisoners of war to work on the farms (as well as the exploitation of Jewish labor in the ghettos), the Nazis exacerbated local labor shortages by deporting tens of thousands of workers to the Reich to labor in German industries as so-called Ostarbeiter, a practice felt more acutely in occupied Ukraine. At first recruitment was semi-voluntary—the material incentives the Nazis offered the locals to sign up to work in Germany were always backed by the credible use of force—but by 1943 labor was regularly being conscripted in the Baltic territories. Thousands avoided mandatory service by taking refuge in the woods.

The first such experiment occurred in Estonia, where at first the locals were recruited on a voluntary basis. An Estonian Waffen-SS unit, called the Estonian Legion, was created in August 1942, but by mid-October it could claim only 500 recruits.31 Turning to forced mobilization when the war began to go badly, the Germans conscripted several thousand Estonian men and sent them to the eastern front in 1943, but thousands more were able to avoid being drafted by fleeing to Finland. Nevertheless, when the Red Army threatened once again to cross the Estonian border in February 1944, Hjalmar Mäe (1901–1978), the head of the Estonian civilian administration (and a former propagandist for the fascistic League of Independence War Veterans), was able to enlist or conscript up to 38,000 men to fight a “new war of independence.” When one considers the tiny size of the Estonian population and the existing demands on the young men of Estonia, this is an impressive number indeed.³² German mobilization efforts met with similar success Lithuania: tens of thousands of Lithuanians volunteered to fight the Soviets, but unlike Latvians and Estonians, Lithuanians did not join the Nazi SS-Legions.

The Nazis’ greatest recruitment success was in Latvia, for perhaps 100,000 men or more were mobilized into the Latvian Legion and other auxiliary forces; as in Estonia, those who did not wish to fight could choose labor service instead.³³ The legacy of the Latvian Legion remains one of contemporary Latvia’s most divisive historical subjects, for the Legion was the enemy of the victorious Soviet Red Army to which memorials all over Latvia were dedicated during the Soviet era. If Russian Latvians tend to remember the Legion’s soldiers as fascist lackeys of the Führer (their commanders were almost always German members of the Waffen-SS, but subordinate officers were Latvian), many ethnic Latvians defend them as patriots who died heroically fighting for the Fatherland, no matter what uniform they were forced to wear. But “[p]articipation in the German armed struggle was more a matter of choice than many postwar Latvian apologists care to admit,” writes historian Valdis Lumans, noting Lithuanians’ resistance to the formation of SS units. “The Latvians too could have said no if they had chosen that course.”34 But even if those who said “yes” had a variety of motivations, and some surely committed war crimes, who else but the Germans could have prevented the return of the Soviets? Being on the same side, the Legion’s defenders have argued, is not the same as being allies. Moreover, had Britain and the United States not partnered with the Soviet Union, which had illegally absorbed the Baltic states and had committed countless outrages, to fight what the West at the moment regarded as the greater evil?

By the time the Hitler reluctantly agreed to the Legion’s formation in February 1943, it was too late, for the Wehrmacht was reeling from its defeat at Stalingrad and would never regain the initiative. Yet even as Hitler’s exhausted and hungry forces retreated in 1943 and 1944, the Nazis spared no efforts to mobilize the local populations for total war while simultaneously murdering the remnants of the Jewish population that had reliably supplied them with labor.

Devastation

When the Soviets returned to the Baltic states in 1944 the people they encountered were divided. If hundreds of thousands of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians had volunteered (or been conscripted) to fight with the Germans against the advancing Soviets—which likely helped delay the latter’s occupation of their countries—a comparable number of local inhabitants fought wearing the uniform of the Red Army. It has been estimated that 30,000 Estonians, 75,000 Latvians, and 82,000 Lithuanians belonged to the Red Army during the latter stages of the war; these included men who had formerly served in the forces created by the Germans.³⁵ To the German- and Soviet-led forces one must add another category of combatants: the anti-Soviet partisan units, some of which had been organized and trained by the Germans. Hiding in the forests of the lands being retaken by the Red Army, the partisans were a drain on Soviet resources but were too insignificant and disunited to secure control over their respective countries or even to significantly impact the course of the war.

Nor was the Baltic region spared the physical destruction and population losses experienced by the other parts of the USSR, for what the Nazis didn’t loot they simply destroyed. As the Nazi SS hurried to finish off its emaciated prisoners and destroy the forced labor camps before they could be liberated by the Soviets, the Wehrmacht did the job of reducing countless towns and villages in Latvia and Lithuania, like those in Ukraine and Belarus, to smoldering ruins. Meanwhile, Soviet bombing during the final stages of the war nearly obliterated the Estonian border city of Narva and the Lithuanian town of Šiauliai while also causing heavy damage to Tallinn and Tartu.

But the physical destruction and the movement of peoples did not end on May 8, 1945, the date that officially commemorates the end of World War II in Europe (in Russia the announcement of “Victory Day” was delayed for one day and to this day it is celebrated on May 9). When the Red Army liberated Klaipėda on January 28, it is said to have found a nearly deserted city, for the Germans who inhabited the city had fled. Within a few years these were replaced by Lithuanians and Russians as the Soviets obliterated the city’s architecturally German character and destroyed the city’s churches. Indeed, the fate of Klaipėda mirrored that of the entire region, where physical destruction and demographic transformation went hand in hand. Entire ethnic communities were uprooted or destroyed, including the Baltic German and Jewish communities, depriving the region of much of its ethnic and cultural diversity as well as many of its most educated and socially active individuals.

Survivors had to adjust to a new reality, whether in the displaced persons camps in western Germany—for 200,000 Baltic refugees these were arguably the safest places to be in Europe in the spring of 1945— or in the reconstituted Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian SSSRs. Neither Britain nor the United States were willing to risk alienating their Soviet partner when it came to the fate of the Baltic states. This much was clear at the Yalta Conference of February 1945, when Stalin’s partners Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill chose stability over principle and allowed the Soviet dictator to strengthen his conquests in eastern Europe. The Western countries even complied with Soviet demands for the return of refugees, many of whom were deported to various parts of the USSR. As the historian Modris Eksteins wrote with remarkable elegance 1945 was Stunde Null, the zero hour, a low point in the history of Western civilization. “Collaborators, resistance fighters, SS soldiers, Jews, peasants, professors, children, paupers, bankers, criminals, clergymen. Every nationality, age, social class, type. They were all present amidst the devastation.”38

Sovietization and Resistance

The returning Soviets did not treat the Baltic states as liberated republics of the USSR but as occupied territories populated by enemies of Soviet power. Not only were they denied independence of any kind, the reincorporated SSRs were forced to accede to minor but unfavorable border changes. Yet the transfers of territory that took place between the USSR and the Baltic republics must be seen in the context of the new borders being drawn throughout eastern Europe that were favorable to the Soviet Union, whose leaders sought to maximize their security and influence in postwar Europe. Germany was forced to cede a large portion of East Prussia, renamed the Kaliningrad oblast ’ in 1946, to Soviet Russia. Poland was shifted westward: while absorbing a large amount of eastern German territory, Poland lost its own eastern regions to the Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Lithuanian SSRs. In nearly all the countries bordering the USSR there were population exchanges involving millions of people to ensure that the countries of eastern Europe were more ethnically homogenous. No ethnic group was affected by this more than the Germans, who were the objects of revenge all over the continent.

In comparison to the overhaul which Germany and Poland received, the outlines of the Estonian and Latvian republics were not drastically altered by Stalin’s blue pencil. Estonia ceded to the Russian republic (RSFSR) eastern territories located both north and south of Lake Peipsi, including most of the Petserimaa district and all the territory east of the Narva River. These areas constituted about 5 percent of the prewar territory of the Republic of Estonia and were home to about 70,000 residents, mostly ethnic Russians. Latvia was forced to cede to the RSFSR the Abrene region, a thin sliver of territory in the northeast that contained relatively few Latvians.

Since Stalin was unconvinced of the reliability of cadres in the Baltic SSRs, the threat of a purge, like those that were carried out in the satellite states of eastern Europe in the 1940s and early 1950s, was ever present. The most drastic case among the Baltic parties was the ECP, from which “bourgeois nationalists”—communists who were believed to favor Estonian interests over those of Moscow—were purged in 1950–1951. They were replaced by Estonians whose families had emigrated from Estonia to Russia in the decades before 1920. Most notably, during the purge Nikolai Karotamm (1901–1969), who had survived the Great Terror in Moscow and was appointed ECP first secretary in 1944, was removed for his supposed lack of vigilance in the face of class hostility; his real crime, however, was pleading for a slower pace of collectivization. Karotamm’s replacement was Jonannes Käbin (1905–1999), an Estonian who had been born in his homeland but had risen through the party bureaucracy in Soviet Russia, only to return during the first Soviet occupation. As long as Stalin lived, political life in the Estonian republic was dominated by a “Russian Estonian mafia”—Russified Estonians who had risen to the top of the ECP—that served Moscow’s interests alone.⁴⁰

Despite being vastly outnumbered, undersupplied, and isolated, some partisan bands rejected repeated Soviet offers of amnesty and a few held out in the forests until as late as 1955, by which time they certainly could not have expected to drive the Soviets out. Holdouts were motivated by the hope, encouraged by foreign radio broadcasts (Radio Free Europe and Voice of America were established in 1949 and 1951) suggesting that Soviet communism would soon collapse and that the Western Allies would help them restore Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian statehood.⁴² Nevertheless, the main partisan formations, strongest in Lithuania, were broken by 1948, after which the guerillas were deprived of recruits and food supplies due to the mass deportations that accompanied the collectivization of the Baltic countryside.

Agricultural Collectivization

While there is little doubt that the impetus for rural reform came from Moscow, recent scholarship has shown that de-kulakization proceedings were often carried out locally. In her study of collectivization and de-kulakization in Soviet Estonia, historian Anu Mai Kõll shows that the struggle against the kulaks was a public process that invited popular participation. The late 1940s was a time of conflicting loyalties and uncertain outcomes; as yet the local community “was not united against Soviet officials; it was still negotiating the boundaries of the permissible.”⁴⁵ Whatever the role of local participants in the dekulakization process, the reality for most of the region’s farmers was a second enserfment, for kolkhoz members were now tied to the collective, forbidden from changing residence without a special permit.

However, Soviet officialdom often looked the other way when young men fled the kolkhoz to seek employment in industry or construction where labor shortages were chronic. Other common responses to collectivization were shirking one’s duties, pilfering materials from the kolkhoz, and producing moonshine to generate some income. While collective farms workers tended to shun mandatory labor on the kolkhoz, they put considerably more effort into their private garden plots, which generated the largest part of their incomes.⁴⁶

The experience of Lithuania, where immigration, like industrialization, occurred on a somewhat smaller scale, suggests otherwise. In 1939, Russians accounted for 2.3 percent of the Lithuanian population, rising to 9.4 percent over the next 50 years, while the ethnic Lithuanian population stabilized at around 80 percent. However, while immigration did not seriously alter Lithuania’s ethnic balance, in other respects the experience was the same, for many of these immigrants were government and party officials, industrial managers, engineers, and professionals. As such they were accorded priority in the awarding of scarce urban housing, thus contributing to the natives’ resentment of the Russian-speaking arrivals and the belief that the Russians were colonizing their homelands.

The waves of migration were a principal feature of a more general influx into the cities that transformed Latvia and Estonia into two of the USSR’s most urbanized republics: by the early 1950s more than half the residents of Latvia and Estonia could be classified as urban residents. Riga’s population doubled from 228,000 at the end of World War II to 482,000 in 1950; likewise, the population of Estonia’s largest city, Tallinn, more than doubled to 283,000 between 1944 and 1959, as did Vilnius, whose population during the same period rose from 110,000 to 236,000. Russians as well as Latvians flooded into Riga, with many of the Soviet migrants moving into buildings in the Moscow district once inhabited by Jews. Still others settled in Daugavpils and Liepāja. While Russians had always been a large component of Narva’s ethnic makeup, Slavic migrants from the Soviet interior soon became the second most populous community in Tallinn.

By 1953 the Baltic republics had each become nearly fully integrated into the political and economic structures of the Soviet Union. Even if the era of totalitarian terror had come to an end with Stalin’s death that March, Soviet rule appeared to be a permanent condition of life in the Baltic republics. With no hope for the restoration of independence, for the next several decades their inhabitants had little choice but to accommodate themselves to the realities of Soviet colonization while attempting to maintain their ethnic identities and cultural traditions.

Notes

1. By March 1940 there had been a number of incidents between Soviet troops and locals in Estonia. See Andrejs Plakans, ed., Experiencing Totalitarianism: The Invasion and Occupation of Latvia by the USSR and Nazi Germany 1939–1991: A Documentary History (Bloomington, IN: Author-House, 2007), 16–19.

2. Plakans (2007), 35.

3. D. Y. Stradins, ed., Istoriia Lativskoi SSR [History of the Latvian SSR] (Riga: Academy of Science of the Latvian SSR, 1955), 481, as appears in I. Joseph Vizulis, Nations under Duress: The Baltic States (Port Washington, NY: Associated Faculty Press, 1985), 46.

4. Toivo U. Raun, Estonia and the Estonians, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2001), 144.

5. In the wake of Latvia’s annexation by the USSR in 1940 Lācis became chairman of the Council of Ministers of his republic—equivalent to a prime minister, except the office lacked real power. Resuming this post after World War II, he retained it until 1959.

6. Romuald Misiunas and Rein Taagepera, The Baltic States: Years of Dependence 1940–1990, expanded and updated edition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 359.

7. Raun, 150.

8. See Geoffrey Swain, Between Stalin and Hitler: Class War and Race War on the Dvina, 1940–46 (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 32–39.

9. The original plans for the deportation of “anti-Soviet” elements were written in October 1939. The document is reproduced in Vizulis, 99–101.

10. The exact figures for these deportations will never be known. All together around 34,250 people from Latvia, 39,000 from Lithuania, and 61,000 from Estonia are thought to have faced arrest and deportation during the “Year of Terror.” Valdis O. Lumans, Latvia in World War II (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 138.

11. The publication in 1990 of Icebreaker by former Soviet intelligence agent Viktor Suvorov stimulated a debate about Soviet intentions vis-à-vis Germany in 1939–1941. While Suvorov believes that Stalin was planning to strike first, most historians have resisted this view.

12. Quoted in Lumans, 158.

13. Rosenberg studied architecture at the Riga Polytechnical Institute, emigrating to Germany in 1918 in the wake of the Bolshevik seizure of power. Arriving in Munich he became one of the earliest members of the Nazi Party and influenced the young Hitler. While his appointment as minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories revived a flagging career, Hitler frequently disregarded his views. See Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

14. Riga was treated separately from the Self-Administration. Denied self-government, it was the hub both of German administration and of the Nazis’ Germanization efforts in Latvia.

15. Andrejs Plakans, A Concise History of the Baltic States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 100.

16. Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939—March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).

17. Karen Sutton, The Massacre of the Jews of Lithuania: Lithuanian Collaboration in the Final Solution 1941–1944 (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2008), 121.

18. Andrew Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia 1941–44: The Missing Center (Washington DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1996), 22, 173–202.

19. Andrej Angrick, Peter Klein, and Ray Brandon, The “Final Solution” in Riga: Exploitation and Annihilation, 1941–1944 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 68.

20. Lumans, 243.

21. Bernhard Press, The Murder of the Jews of Latvia 1941–1945 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 46, 53. An eyewitness to the Holocaust in Riga, Press emphasizes the Latvians’ betrayal and bloodlust, going so far as to assert that “the majority of the Latvian people” supported the mob actions and “also actively participated themselves” (p. 52). Press argues that Latvians began killing Jews even before the arrival of the Germans. This contention is refuted by Andrew Ezergailis, cited earlier, who agrees that Latvians were active participants but maintains that it was the Germans who gave the orders.

22. Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Introduction to the Holocaust—Historical Film Footage.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_fi.php?ModuleId=10005143&MediaId=183 (accessed June 25, 2014).

23. Lumans, 259.

24. Solly Ganor, Light One Candle: A Survivor’s Tale from Lithuania to Jerusalem (New York: Kodansha International, 1995), 53, 57.

25. Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

26. Masha Greenbaum, The Jews of Lithuania: A History of a Remarkable Community 1316–1945 (Jerusalem: Gefen Books, 1995), 321–22.

27. Of the two Vilnius ghettos, one was established for elderly and sick people incapable of performing labor, but it existed for only 45 days before its inhabitants were taken to Ponary to be shot. The other was for those able to work.

28. Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, ed. Bejamin Harshav (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 551.

29. Anton Weiss-Wendt, Murder without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 77.

30. Olaf Mertelsmann, Everyday Life in Stalinist Estonia (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang, 2012), 46–47.

31. The Waffen-SS were combat units composed of Reich Germans, Volksdeutsche, and other nationalities. These units were subordinate to the leadership of the SS but fought under the army military command.

32. Raun, 159.

33. Misiunas and Taagepera, 59; Plakans (2007), 139; Plakans (2011), 357; Lumans, 295–96.

34. Lumans, 298.

35. Plakans (2007), 92; Plakans (2011), 357.

36. Ronald Gregor Suny, The Soviet Experiment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 333.

37. These figures are based on estimates provided by Misiunas and Taagepera, 353.

38. Modris Eksteins, Walking since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of Our Century (New York: Mariner Books, 1999), 220.

39. Misiunas and Taagepera, 359–60.

40. Rein Taagepera, Estonia: Return to Independence (Boulder, CO: West-view Press, 1993), 86.

41. Arvydas Anušaukas, ed., The Anti-Soviet Resistance in the Baltic States, 3rd ed. (Vilnius: Akreta, 2001).

42. In an early Cold War operation between 1949 and 1955 the CIA worked with the British MI-6 to insert Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian agents into Poland and the Baltic states to link up with the anti-Soviet partisans, but the KGB was able to capture or kill nearly all the 42 agents who had landed in the Baltic.

43. Approximations of the number of people deported from the Baltic states during this period vary. Lithuania, which alone experienced 35 waves of deportations between 1941 and 1953, lost approximately 41,000 people to exile in the deportations of May 22–27, 1948. All together at least 200,000 people were deported from the Baltic states in 1940–1953.

44. Dovile Budryte, Taming Nationalism? Political Community Building in the Post-Soviet Baltic States (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 189.

45. Anu Mai Kõll, The Village and the Class War: Anti-Kulak Campaign in Estonia (New York: Central European Press, 2014), 86, 184.

46. Mertelsmann, 89–97.

47. Misiunas and T aagepera, 1 12.

48. Violeta Davoliūtė, The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 50–51.

6

World War II and the Totalitarian Experience, 1939–1953

The Year of Terror