The secret protocol and the bases treaties (September–October 1939)

The secret protocol of the Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939 placed Estonia and Latvia in the Soviet sphere of influence, and Lithuania, first assigned to Germany, passed for the most part to the Soviet side under the German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty of 28 September. Having invaded Poland on 17 September, the Soviet Union questioned Estonia’s neutrality after the Polish submarine Orzeł escaped from internment in Tallinn the next day. While the Moscow press and radio attacked Estonia as “hostile” and Red Navy warships and bombers appeared off Tallinn and over it, Foreign Minister Karl Selter, in Moscow on 24 September, was presented with a demand for a mutual assistance treaty that would admit Soviet military bases. The Estonian government yielded, and on 28 September Selter and Vyacheslav Molotov signed the treaty. It declared that the sovereignty and the political and economic systems of both parties would not be affected, but it gave the Soviet Union naval, air and army bases on two Estonian islands and at the port of Paldiski and the right to station 25,000 troops for the duration of the European war. 1 2) 3

Latvia signed a similar treaty on 5 October through its foreign minister Vilhelms Munters, and Lithuania on 10 October. When the Lithuanian foreign minister Juozas Urbšys came to Moscow on 3 October, Joseph Stalin personally told him about the secret protocols and showed him maps of the spheres of influence. When Urbšys objected that Soviet bases would mean a virtual occupation, Stalin replied: “No matter if you take Vilnius or not, Soviet troops will enter Lithuania anyway.” In the end Lithuania received about a fifth of the Vilnius Region, which the Soviets had taken in the invasion of Poland, including the historic capital Vilnius, in exchange for accepting 20,000 Soviet troops; Latvia was allotted 30,000. Soviet propaganda presented the treaty as proof of Stalin’s benevolence towards small nations, and Lithuanian politicians publicly praised the “traditional Soviet–Lithuanian friendship”, but in the street people said: “Vilnius is ours, but Lithuania is Russia’s.” 4 5 2) 6

On 28 October the Lithuanian Army entered Vilnius for the first time since 1920. Before handing over the city the Soviets carried off factory equipment, hospital equipment, vehicles and cultural objects from museums and libraries, and when the price of bread suddenly rose on 30 October – 1 November, clashes between local communists and Poles turned into a riot against the Jewish population. The Soviet bases in Lithuania were fixed at four sites — Alytus, Prienai, Gaižiūnai and Naujoji Vilnia — with 18,786 men. From Estonia some 12,000–18,000 Baltic Germans left for Germany. When Finland, which had rejected the same demands, was attacked on 30 November in the Winter War, the Baltic states were officially neutral, but Soviet bombers used bases in Estonia to bomb Finland. For some months afterwards the Soviets did not interfere in the Baltic states’ domestic affairs and the soldiers in the bases were well-behaved; as late as 29 March 1940 Molotov told the Supreme Soviet that he was satisfied with the execution of the mutual assistance treaties. 5 3 2) 6

The ultimatums (May–June 1940)

As Germany won victory after victory in western Europe, the Soviet attitude changed. On 16 May Izvestia warned that it was naive for a small country to attempt neutrality while giants were fighting for survival, and on 25 May Molotov accused Lithuania of abducting three Soviet soldiers from the bases. The soldier Butayev, whom the Soviets claimed had been murdered, had in fact deserted his unit and killed himself when the Lithuanian police found him, and the Soviets left the Lithuanian commission’s requests for information unanswered. On 7 June Prime Minister Antanas Merkys, the only negotiator Molotov would accept, came to Moscow and heard the kidnapping charges repeated; on the 9th Lithuania was also accused of conspiring with Latvia and Estonia through the Baltic Entente to form a secret military union in violation of the treaty. President Antanas Smetona wrote to Mikhail Kalinin that Lithuania had always honoured the pact, but the last meeting on the 11th brought no resolution. 6

The Red Army was already preparing to attack. On 5 June all Soviet forces in the Baltic region were placed under the People’s Commissar for Defence, Semyon Timoshenko, and on the 11th General Dmitry Pavlov finalised the plan of attack on Lithuania. The forces gathered on Lithuania’s eastern border numbered 221,260 men with 1,140 aircraft and 1,513 tanks, against a Lithuanian army of 28,005. On the 9th Timoshenko ordered preparations to seize the Estonian and Latvian vessels, blockade their coasts and prevent the evacuation of the two governments, and on the 14th the naval blockade of Estonia went into effect. The same day two Soviet bombers shot down the Finnish airliner Kaleva on its way from Tallinn to Helsinki, killing the American diplomatic employee Henry W. Antheil Jr., who was carrying diplomatic pouches from the American legations. Just before midnight on 14 June, while the world watched the fall of Paris, Molotov handed Urbšys the ultimatum in Moscow: the interior minister and the director of state security were to be put on trial, a government more capable of adhering to the mutual assistance pact was to be formed, a “sufficiently large” number of Soviet troops was to be allowed in, and an answer was due by 10 a.m. the next morning. 6 2) 3

The Lithuanian government debated through the night. Smetona argued for military resistance, even if only symbolic, but Merkys and the commanders held that resistance was impossible with Soviet troops already in the country and the army unmobilised, and at 7 a.m. the government decided to accept all the demands without protest. At noon Moscow rejected the proposed new prime minister and announced that Molotov’s deputy Vladimir Dekanozov would supervise the formation of a new government. Smetona handed his duties to Merkys, saying “I do not want to make Lithuania a bolshevik country with my own hands”, and on the evening of the 15th waded across the border stream at Kybartai into Germany. At dawn that day Soviet NKVD troops attacked Latvian border posts in the east of the country, at Masļenki and elsewhere, killing three border guards and two civilians and carrying off 37 people. On the 16th almost identical ultimatums went to Latvia and Estonia, with only eight hours to reply (six for Latvia, by another account); with Lithuania already in Soviet hands, both accepted. 6 7 8 4

Occupation and Moscow’s emissaries (June 1940)

Soviet troops entered Lithuania on 15 June and Latvia and Estonia on the 16th–17th. According to a Time magazine article of the day, some 500,000 Red Army troops occupied the three countries within days, and about 90,000 more entered Estonia in addition to the garrisons. The Lithuanian Army was ordered not to resist and to extend friendly greetings, and Kārlis Ulmanis, in a nationwide radio address ordering no resistance, said: “I will remain in my place and you remain in yours.” The Estonian Defence Forces and Defence League were likewise disarmed on their government’s orders. Only the Independent Signal Battalion in Raua Street in Tallinn fought the Red Army and the communist “People’s Self-Defence” militia for several hours on 21 June before surrendering after negotiations; the same day the Estonian flag on the Pikk Hermann tower was replaced with a red flag. In each country the occupation coincided with a communist coup d’état supported by the Soviet troops. 2) 3 6 9

Moscow sent an emissary to each country to build the new regime. In Lithuania Dekanozov arrived in Kaunas on 15 June and installed himself in the Soviet embassy; the Communist Party of Lithuania, headed by Antanas Sniečkus, was at his disposal, and he was aided by specialists in Soviet administration and by security officers sent from Moscow. In Latvia Andrey Vyshinsky stayed from June to August to supervise the establishment of a pro-Soviet government and the country’s incorporation, and purged the Latvian Communist Party of “Trotskyists and Bukharinites”. Andrei Zhdanov, the Leningrad party chief who had an interest in enlarging the Soviet presence in the Baltic Sea, went to Estonia. On 18 June Molotov “warmly” congratulated the German ambassador Schulenburg on Germany’s success in France and explained that it had become necessary to put an end to the intrigues by which England and France had tried to sow discord between Germany and the Soviet Union in the Baltic states. 10 11 12 13 2)

Three “people’s governments” (June–July 1940)

In Lithuania Merkys took over the presidential duties when Smetona left and announced on the radio the next day that he had removed Smetona and was now president in his own right. On 17 June, as the Soviets demanded, he appointed the left-wing journalist Justas Paleckis prime minister and resigned, leaving Paleckis acting president as well. The so-called People’s Government included well-known public figures so that it would look not like a tool of Soviet occupation but like a replacement for Smetona’s authoritarian regime; the writer Vincas Krėvė-Mickevičius became foreign minister and acting prime minister. Because opposition to Smetona had been strong, some Lithuanians took the change as the end of presidential rule rather than the loss of independence. Since 1990 Lithuania has maintained that Merkys’s takeover of the presidency was unconstitutional because Smetona never resigned, and that every subsequent step towards annexation was therefore void. 14 6 15 16

In Latvia Ulmanis resigned as prime minister three days after the coup and appointed a left-wing government under Augusts Kirhenšteins, which had in truth been chosen by the Soviet embassy. Kirhenšteins, a microbiologist, had been invited to the embassy and offered the leadership of the new government, and the writer Vilis Lācis became interior minister. For the next month Ulmanis cooperated with the Soviets. Until the election of 14–15 July there was no public statement in Latvia about any government plan to introduce a Soviet political order or to join the Soviet Union. 9 17 18 19

In Estonia Zhdanov forced President Konstantin Päts on 21 June to appoint a puppet government under the doctor and poet Johannes Vares. Päts stayed in office but became effectively a puppet himself, signing nearly 200 decrees of the new regime over the following month, among them a change to the electoral law that allowed snap elections. Because the upper house, the National Council, had been dissolved and never reconvened, the change was unconstitutional. The government of Jüri Uluots, the last constitutional prime minister, went underground, and in April 1944 the Electoral Committee of the Republic of Estonia, meeting in secret, declared Vares’s appointment illegal. 20 21 22

Single-list elections and the “requests” to join (July–August 1940)

The three governments dissolved the existing parliaments and called elections to “People’s Parliaments” for 14–15 July. All non-communist parties and organisations had already been outlawed, and the communist parties that came out of hiding had only 1,500 members in Lithuania, 500 in Latvia and 133 in Estonia. Only the communist-made Working People’s Leagues put up candidates, exactly one for each seat, many of them not party members. In Lithuania some 2,000 political activists were arrested before the vote. Those who voted had their passports stamped, while anyone who did not was branded an “enemy of the people” and could expect persecution later. The Soviet envoy in London released the results before the polls closed, and the Latvian results appeared in a London newspaper 24 hours before voting ended. 23 15 18

In Estonia the opposition, with only three days to organise, put up 78 candidates in 66 of the 80 constituencies, but Zhdanov ordered Vares to remove them from the ballot, and almost all were eliminated by threats, violence and invalidations; the one who remained, Jüri Rajur-Liivak, was later arrested. Officially the Working People’s Union won all 80 seats, but a re-examination during the German occupation found a turnout of 80.1% and a vote share of 91.6%, with evidence that the election committee had forged 35,119 votes. In Latvia the “Democratic Bloc” of the banned parties tried to get on the ballot, but its office was closed and its leaders arrested. Lithuania’s official result was a turnout of 95.51% with 99.19% for the official list. Across the three states the Soviet-sponsored slates were reported at between 92.2% and 99.2%. 24 25 18 6 26

The three People’s Parliaments met together on 21 July and, without discussion and unanimously, proclaimed their countries Soviet socialist republics and petitioned to join the Soviet Union; their early sessions also resolved to nationalise larger enterprises, real estate and land. Krėvė-Mickevičius had already been told by Molotov in Moscow on the night of 1 July that all the Baltic states had to join the Soviet Union, and on his return he wrote his resignation. On 21 July Ulmanis was forced out of the presidency and Kirhenšteins took over its duties. The same day Päts sent his son to the US legation in Tallinn to ask for asylum, but — with the date of his resignation recorded variously as the 21st to the 23rd — Vares took over the president’s powers. The leaders of the old order disappeared at once: the family of the foreign minister Munters was deported on 16 July in the presence of the interior minister Vilis Lācis; Merkys was arrested in Riga trying to escape to Sweden; the commander-in-chief Johan Laidoner and his wife were sent to Penza on 19 July, the Päts family to Ufa on the 30th and Ulmanis to Stavropol. 23 16 9 20 19 14 27

On 1 August the three delegations presented their petitions to the Supreme Soviet in Moscow, which admitted Lithuania on the 3rd, Latvia on the 5th and Estonia on the 6th; the Estonian delegation was headed by Vares. The People’s Parliaments renamed themselves the Supreme Soviets of their republics, and on 25 August the Lithuanian one adopted a new constitution closely copied from the Soviet Constitution of 1936. Vares and Kirhenšteins became chairmen of the presidiums of the Estonian and Latvian Supreme Soviets. The official Soviet narrative held that the three states had simultaneously carried out socialist revolutions and voluntarily requested to join. But the Latvian constitution required a plebiscite approved by two-thirds of the electorate for any change to the basic order of the state, and in Estonia only the lower house had been elected, without an upper house; on such grounds the three states, restoring their independence in 1990–1991, held the whole annexation to be void. 23 15 21 17 2) 25 24

The Welles Declaration and non-recognition

On 15 July the United States amended an executive order to freeze the Baltic states’ assets, grouping them with the German-occupied countries, and on 23 July the acting Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, issued a statement condemning the Soviet occupation of the three Baltic countries and refusing to recognise their annexation. Finding the first draft by State Department officials too weak, Welles read it to President Franklin D. Roosevelt over the telephone, and the two strengthened it. The Welles Declaration applied the Stimson Doctrine of 1932, which refused to recognise territorial changes made by force, and Welles announced that the United States would continue to recognise the Baltic envoys as representatives of sovereign governments; The New York Times called it “one of the most exceptional diplomatic documents issued by the Department of State in many years.” The day before, Welles had authorised diplomatic visas for the Päts family, but Päts never got away. 26 28 20

The declaration later became a point of contention within the alliance of the Americans, the British and the Soviets, but Welles persistently defended it, saying the Soviets had manoeuvred to give “an odor of legality to acts of aggression for purposes of the record.” In 1942 he wrote that he would have preferred to call the plebiscites supporting the annexations “faked”, and that the annexation was “not only indefensible from every moral standpoint, but likewise extraordinarily stupid.” The United States did not confront the Soviet Union militarily, but the declaration enabled the Baltic states to maintain independent diplomatic missions, and Executive Order 8484 protected their financial assets. The crews of 42 Estonian ships in foreign waters refused to return home; the ships were requisitioned by the British and used in Atlantic convoys. The non-recognition, supported by every later US president and by congressional resolutions, lasted five decades. 26 3

Sovietisation and arrests (1940–1941)

The new regimes immediately remade the economy on the Soviet model. In Estonia all land, banks and major industrial enterprises were nationalised on 23 July; most larger businesses and half of the housing became state property, and savings were destroyed by an artificially low exchange rate from the kroon to the rouble. In Lithuania all banks, deposits over 1,000 litas, real estate over 170 square metres and enterprises with more than 20 workers were nationalised; all land was nationalised, the largest farms were cut to 30 hectares and some 575,000 hectares were distributed to small farmers. The litas, depreciated to a third or a quarter of its actual value, was withdrawn by March 1941. Collectivisation was not introduced at once, but farm taxes were raised by 50–200%. In Latvia, too, rumours of collectivisation were officially denied in 1940 and 52,000 landless peasants received small plots of up to 10 hectares, but preparations for collectivisation began in early 1941. 29 3 6 18

Social and political organisations were dismantled. In Lithuania all cultural and religious organisations were closed on 1 July, leaving the Communist Party and its youth branch as the only legitimate political bodies. In Latvia all print media and printing houses were nationalised on 7 August, and from November a total of 4,000 titles were banned and removed from circulation. The Soviet constitution and a criminal code copied from Russia were introduced, and elections to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union followed in January 1941. The three communist parties became branches of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in October 1940. The remaining Baltic Germans in Latvia, and anyone who could claim to be one, left for Germany in these months. 6 18 30 21

Arrests began even before the annexation. In Estonia over 8,000 people, including most of the country’s leading politicians and military officers, were arrested in the first year of the occupation, and about 800 officers were arrested, roughly half of whom were executed or starved to death in prison camps. In Lithuania an estimated 12,000 people were imprisoned as “enemies of the people” during the year after the annexation. In Latvia Ulmanis, the war minister Jānis Balodis and the army chief Krišjānis Berķis were arrested in July 1940, and the NKVD arrested most of the White Russian exiles who had found refuge there; the purge reached even the puppet government, whose welfare minister Jūlijs Lācis was arrested. From late summer 1940 the NKVD registered “anti-Soviet elements”; in Lithuania alone it reckoned it needed to register 320,000 people, about 15% of the population, or with their families about half of it. 3 6 18 31

14 June 1941

On 14 May 1941 a joint decree, No. 1299-526ss, of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party and the Council of People’s Commissars ordered the removal of “socially alien elements” from the Baltic republics, western Ukraine, western Belarus and Moldavia. The procedure was set by the so-called Serov Instructions, signed by Ivan Serov, deputy People’s Commissar for State Security; the undated document must have been written between February 1941, when the NKGB was created, and 7 June, when a copy was stamped as received. The instructions required the deportations to be carried out as secretly, quietly and quickly as possible, allowed each family up to 100 kilograms of belongings, and sent heads of families to Gulag camps and the other members to forced settlements in remote regions. In Lithuania each four-member executive group was assigned two families. The lists kept changing: a report of 13 May named 19,610 people to be arrested and sent to prison camps and 2,954 family members, but a month later the figures were 8,598 arrested and 13,654 family members, showing a policy of eliminating entire “anti-Soviet” families. 32 33 34 35 31

The operation began simultaneously in all three countries on the night of 13–14 June, with NKVD and NKGB troops from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus surrounding houses together with local police and Communist Party members. The numbers taken differ by source. For Estonia they range from an official 9,156 (Russian Wikipedia) and 9,254–10,861 (English Wikipedia) to 10,016 according to the train records (Russian Wikipedia), and the European Court of Human Rights wrote of about 10,000. For Latvia the figure is 15,424, including 1,771 Jews and 742 Russians (Latvian Wikipedia: “more than 15,400”). For Lithuania an NKVD report of 19 June counted 17,485 deportees, though the official statistics were incomplete and confused, and the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania has traced and published the fate of 16,246. In Lithuania, still some 1,400 short of their lists on the 16th, Soviet officials hurriedly arrested another 2,000 people on 16–18 June. In Estonia 439 Jews were among the deportees, and in Latvia 600 officers were arrested at the Litene army camp. 31 36 37 32 3 18 33

The families left in cattle cars. The Lithuanian trains gathered at Naujoji Vilnia, where the men, on the pretext of further inspection or paperwork, were separated from their families and loaded onto trains bound for prison camps; the seventeen trains left on 19 June and reached their destinations between 30 June and 9 July. Most of the men died in Gulag camps in Siberia; Estonian Wikipedia states that of the roughly 3,000 men taken from Estonia nearly all were executed or died in the camps. Women and children were put down in forced settlements in Omsk and Novosibirsk oblasts, Krasnoyarsk, the Altai and Kazakhstan, where poor living conditions made mortality very high. The mortality rate among the Estonian deportees has been estimated at 60%, and the historian Arvydas Anušauskas counted some 8,000 deaths among the Lithuanian deportees of 1941. 31 36 38

Eight days later, on 22 June, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and the war cut short plans to deport several hundred thousand more. In Lithuania the Lithuanian Activist Front launched the anti-Soviet uprising it had been preparing and set up a provisional government; the retreating NKVD massacred political prisoners in the Rainiai forest and elsewhere; and in Estonia the Forest Brothers fought the Soviet troops — a story, together with the German occupation that followed, told in the next event. Päts and Munters were re-arrested in their places of exile on the 26th and Laidoner on the 28th. At first many people in the Baltic states greeted the Germans as liberators. Today the Baltic states keep 14 June as a day of remembrance. 18 39 40 41 20 19 27 2) 36