The Soviet reoccupation of the Baltic states: the Forest Brothers and the deportations of 1949

The Red Army returns, and Courland (1944–1945)

In the summer of 1944, after Operation Bagration had thrown Germany’s Army Group Centre back out of Belorussia, the Red Army re-entered the Baltic region. Vilnius fell on the evening of 13 July after an offensive that began on the 5th, and the spearhead of the follow-up Šiauliai offensive reached the Gulf of Riga on 31 July. The Baltic strategic offensive of 14 September to 24 November committed Ivan Bagramyan’s 1st Baltic Front, Andrei Yeryomenko’s 2nd Baltic Front, Ivan Maslennikov’s 3rd Baltic Front and part of Leonid Govorov’s Leningrad Front. In Estonia the constitutional government seized the government buildings in Tallinn on 18 September as the Germans withdrew, but on the 22nd the Leningrad Front took the capital, and the acting president, Jüri Uluots, fled to Sweden. Riga fell to the 3rd Baltic Front on 13 October. 1 2 3 4)

On 9 October the Red Army reached the Baltic Sea near Memel (Klaipėda), trapping Germany’s Army Group North on the Courland Peninsula in western Latvia. Heinz Guderian, the chief of the German General Staff, and others urged an evacuation so that the troops could stabilise the front in Central Europe, but Adolf Hitler refused; renamed Army Group Courland on 25 January 1945, the force held off six Red Army offensives. Cut off from communications, Army Group Courland received its orders only on 10 May, two days after the German Instrument of Surrender was signed, and then surrendered. By 12 May some 135,000 German troops had surrendered in Courland, and about 180,000 were taken prisoner in the Baltic area as a whole. In Lithuania the last battle, at Klaipėda, ended in January 1945. 5 6

Many fled west ahead of the new occupation. In 1944 some 80,000 people fled Estonia by sea to Finland and Sweden; in Latvia, while the Courland front held, some 130,000 escaped to Sweden and Germany; and about 70,000 Lithuanians, largely political and cultural figures, retreated into Germany. The returning Red Army looted and committed violence, and even Antanas Sniečkus complained to Lavrentiy Beria on 23 July that “if such robbery and violence continues in Kaunas, this will burst our last sympathy for the Red Army”; Beria passed the complaint on to Stalin. Borders changed too: in 1944 part of Abrene District, about 2% of Latvia’s territory, was ceded to the Russian SFSR, and in 1945 Estonia’s Petseri County and Ivangorod, east of the Narva River, went the same way. Latvia lost some 20% of its population during the war. 7 8 6 9

Restoring the Soviet republics under Moscow’s bureaus

The republican leaders who had retreated east in 1941 came back with the Red Army. Antanas Sniečkus, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Lithuania, returned from Russia in 1944; his mother and five of his siblings had fled to the West, and his mother disowned him. In Estonia Nikolai Karotamm, who had led the party de facto during the war, was elected First Secretary at a plenum on 28 September, after the capture of Tallinn, and in Latvia Jānis Kalnbērziņš remained First Secretary from 1940 to 1959. On the government side Vilis Lācis in Latvia, Arnold Veimer in Estonia and their Lithuanian counterpart chaired the Councils of Ministers (Councils of People’s Commissars until 1946), but real power lay with the party first secretaries. Justas Paleckis, who headed the Supreme Council of the Lithuanian SSR, was only the formal supreme authority, and Vilis Lācis too was regarded mostly as a figurehead. 10 11 12 13 14 9

Moscow set up a bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) for each new republic to supervise the local party. The Estonian Bureau, created on 11 November 1944 and dissolved in June 1947, was chaired by Georgy Malenkov’s associate Nikolai Shatalin and from March 1946 by Georgi Perov, and important questions went to it before they reached the Bureau of the Estonian party’s Central Committee. On 5 June 1945 it ruled mistaken a letter in which Karotamm had proposed diplomatic relations between the Estonian SSR and Sweden. The Lithuanian Bureau was chaired in 1944–1946 by Mikhail Suslov, whom anti-Soviet samizdat of the 1970s accused of personal responsibility for the deportation and killing of Lithuanian nationalists. The second secretary of each republican party was almost always a Russian or another Slav. Latvia received many Russian Latvian communists who had survived the “Latvian Operation” of the Great Purge, but most of them did not speak Latvian. 15P_KK_Eesti_b%C3%BCroo) 16 17 18 8

The local parties were small and largely imported. In the last quarter of 1944 the Estonian Communist Party had only 56 members, and in 1946 Estonians made up 42% of it; the Latvian party was 52% Latvian in 1949, and the Lithuanian party was still only 38% Lithuanian in 1953. For the first postwar decade Estonia was governed by ethnic Estonian functionaries born and raised in Russia, few of whom had mastered Estonian; mocking their Russian accent, people called them “Yestonians”. Soviet institutions were rebuilt through elections: in Latvia to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in February 1946, to the republic’s Supreme Soviet in February 1947 and to local soviets only in January 1948, while Lithuania’s 1946 result of over 90% attendance was likely falsified. The Lithuanian partisans protested and disrupted the elections of 1946 and 1947. 17 7 8 9 19

Into the forests (1944–1946)

Many who refused another occupation went into the forests. In Estonia and Latvia they were called the “Forest Brothers”, a term first used in the 1905 revolution; in Lithuania they were the žaliukai (“green ones”) or simply partisans. In Lithuania about half of the Lithuanian Territorial Defense Force, disbanded by the Germans in 1944, formed guerrilla units and dissolved into the countryside, and on 1 July the Lithuanian Liberty Army (LLA) declared a state of war against the Soviet Union and ordered its members to stay in the forests. In Estonia and Latvia soldiers who had fought on the German side evaded capture and took to the woods; in Latvia some 4,000 legionaries went into the forests after Germany’s surrender in May 1945. Above all, postwar Red Army conscription swelled the ranks: in some districts fewer than half the registered conscripts reported, and harassment of the families of those who disappeared drove still more people into the forests. 20 19 21

The first year of the Lithuanian partisans’ fight was the fiercest: about 10,000 Lithuanians were killed in it, roughly half of all the war’s dead. Large units of 100 men or more fought open battles with the NKVD at Kalniškė, Seda, the village of Panara and elsewhere, and where the Soviets had not established control the partisans held whole villages and towns. In the south the teacher Adolfas Ramanauskas joined in early 1945 under the nom de guerre Vanagas (“Hawk”) and organised the 140-man Merkinė company; in the fighting in the Varčia forest in June 1945, 30–47 partisans were killed. In July 1945 the Soviet authorities announced an “amnesty” and “legalisation” for those hiding in the forests, and according to a Soviet report of 1957, 38,838 people came forward (8,350 classed as “armed nationalist bandits” and 30,488 as draft evaders). Even so, some 30,000 armed people lived in the Lithuanian forests at the end of 1945. 19 22

Estimates of how many took part vary. One puts the figure at no fewer than 50,000 (10,000 in Estonia, 10,000 in Latvia and 30,000 in Lithuania); Misiunas and Taagepera estimate 30,000 in Lithuania, 10,000–15,000 in Latvia and 10,000 in Estonia. For Estonia there is both an estimate of 14,000–15,000 fighters in 1944–1953 and an account of some 30,000 partisans hiding in the forests after the German retreat. In Latvia active combatants peaked at 10,000–15,000 and all resisters may have numbered 40,000, while one author gives up to 12,000 in 700 bands over 1945–1955. The losses show the relative weight of the three countries: on the basis of NKVD reports the historian Heinrihs Strods counted 8,916 partisans killed in Lithuania in 1945, 715 in Latvia and 270 in Estonia. 20 7 21

The Union of Lithuanian Freedom Fighters (1946–1952)

From the summer of 1946 the Lithuanian partisans regrouped into smaller but better-organised units. They divided the country into three regions — southern (Nemunas), north-eastern (Mountains) and western (Sea) — and nine military districts, and instead of open battle they hid in bunkers and carried on political and propaganda work, publishing almost 80 periodicals. The MGB changed its tactics too, recruiting agents and organising destruction battalions, and the partisans answered with reprisals against collaborators. Adolfas Ramanauskas became commander of the Dainava military district in September 1947 and of the Southern Lithuania Region in 1948, and wrote, edited and published a number of underground newspapers, among them the Russian-language Svobodnoye slovo (The Free Word) for Soviet soldiers. 19 22

The partisans pinned their hopes on Western support. Juozas Lukša, a former architecture student who had joined the armed resistance in 1946 and commanded the Birutė brigade of the Tauras military district, crossed the Iron Curtain with two comrades at the end of 1947, carrying the partisans’ documentation of Soviet repressions, killings and deportations and a letter asking Pope Pius XII for support. Travelling via Sweden to France and West Germany, he was trained by French intelligence and the CIA and, while in the West, wrote Fighters for Freedom, a first-hand account of partisan activity in 1944–1947. Parachuted back into Lithuania by the CIA in 1949–1950, he was killed by the MGB in the autumn of 1951. According to several witnesses he had taken part in the Lietūkis garage massacre in Kaunas in 1941; the Lithuanian government denies this. 23 19

In February 1949 all the partisan commanders met in a bunker in the village of Minaičiai, founded a central command, the Union of Lithuanian Freedom Fighters (LLKS), and elected the career officer Jonas Žemaitis as its chairman. On 16 February, the 31st anniversary of the 1918 Act of Independence, the Union adopted a declaration proclaiming itself the supreme political and military authority in Lithuania. It stated that the restored Lithuania should be a democratic state granting equal rights to every citizen and declared the Communist Party a criminal organisation; among its signatories was Adolfas Ramanauskas, who became the chairman’s first deputy. The document survived because the KGB preserved it, and after independence was restored the Lithuanian parliament recognised it as an official act. In 2009 Žemaitis was officially named the fourth President of Lithuania. 24 25 19 22 26

Suppression: the MGB, the destruction battalions and infiltration

After the German retreat the destruction battalions were restored. Created under the NKVD right after the German invasion of 1941, these paramilitary units were now formed from local volunteers, and because of the notoriety of their old name they were renamed “people’s defence” in 1945–1946; Lithuanians called them stribai, from the Russian istrebiteli (“destroyers”). They terrorised actual or potential supporters of the Forest Brothers, joined ambushes and search patrols, and were the armed force that carried out Soviet policy in the countryside, for instance forcing farmers to fulfil forestry, peat-cutting and road-building obligations. They never became the efficient fighting force expected to eradicate the resistance, but as locals who knew the language, the people and the landscape they gave invaluable help to the security organs and internal troops. The organisation was dissolved in 1954, and in 2002 the Estonian parliament declared it a criminal organisation. 27 19

The MGB pressed the partisans with torture, summary execution and the deportation of their families, and displayed the corpses of executed partisans in village courtyards to frighten the population. Knowing what capture meant for themselves and their relatives, partisans usually kept one grenade to blow themselves up. The decisive weapon was infiltration. From the late 1940s British MI6 and American and Swedish intelligence sent the Forest Brothers supplies and liaison officers, but MI6’s Operation Jungle was badly compromised by British intelligence officers spying for the Soviets, which let the MGB identify, infiltrate and eliminate many units. Most of the roughly 25 agents the Western services sent to Latvia in 1945–1954 were arrested. Intelligence from Soviet spies in the West and from infiltrators inside the resistance, combined with large-scale operations in 1952, had broken most of the resistance by the early 1950s. 19 20 21

The terror of 1944–1953 left no one certain of safety. In those years 183,000 residents of Lithuania were arrested and 142,000 sent to the Gulag; in Latvia 88,000 were sent to prisons and labour camps and at least 2,321 executed; in Estonia no fewer than 34,800 were arrested for political reasons and 900 executed. According to Soviet data, 20,351 partisans in Estonia had been “defeated” by 1953, 1,510 of them killed in battle, while the Forest Brothers killed 1,728 members of the Red Army, the NKVD and the Estonian police. The Latvian authorities reported 1,562 Soviet personnel killed and 560 wounded over the whole period. Lithuania’s losses are estimated at some 30,000 partisans and supporters killed, and another account counts more than 20,000 fighters alone. The forest war as a whole cost at least 50,000 lives. 20 7 19 9

From land to kolkhoz: the waves of deportation (1945–1951)

Reoccupation brought back the nationalisation of 1940. In Estonia more than 900,000 hectares were expropriated within a few years, much of it handed to new settlers from Russia and elsewhere; in Latvia the farms of refugees were confiscated, the holdings of German supporters sharply reduced, and the taxes and compulsory delivery quotas of the remaining farmers raised until individual farming became impossible. On 21 May 1947 the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party authorised the collectivisation of Estonian agriculture, and collectivisation began in Lithuania in 1947 as well. Yet despite heavy taxes and propaganda only about 3% of farms in Lithuania and Estonia had joined kolkhozes by the end of 1948. Borrowing from the collectivisation of the early 1930s, the authorities named the kulaks as the main obstacle and made them targets of repression. 7 8 9 28

The deportations soon resumed. In October 1944 Soviet officials, among them Sergey Kruglov, who had experience of deporting the Chechens and Ingush, began circulating the idea of deporting the families of “bandits” — men who had joined the partisans to avoid conscription. In May 1945 about 1,000 Lithuanian Germans were sent to cotton plantations in the Vakhsh valley in Tajikistan, where some 580 died in the first two years, and in August 407 people, most of them of German descent, were moved from Estonia to Perm Oblast. In Lithuania deportations began in four counties in February 1946 and continued in December 1947 and January–February 1948. On 22–24 May 1948 the MGB’s Operation Vesna (“Spring”) deported Forest Brothers, their families and helpers, “kulaks” included, from Lithuania. The official tally was 49,331, though other figures of 39,766 and 47,534 are given; as special settlers they were sent to Krasnoyarsk Krai, Irkutsk Oblast and elsewhere. 6 29 9 30

On 18 January 1949 Stalin summoned the leaders of the three republics to report, and the same day the Politburo decided on a mass deportation. On 29 January the USSR Council of Ministers adopted the top-secret decision No. 390-138ss approving the deportation of “kulaks, nationalists, bandits”, their supporters and families, with quotas of 25,500 people for Lithuania, 39,000 for Latvia and 22,500 for Estonia. On 28 February the Minister of State Security, Viktor Abakumov, signed MGB Order No. 0068; Deputy Minister Sergei Ogoltsov was in charge of the MGB’s overall role and Lieutenant General Pyotr Burmak commanded the MGB troops from headquarters in Riga. An additional 8,850 soldiers arrived under cover of “military exercises”. From dawn on 25 March teams of three MGB agents, two destruction battalion members and four or five local party activists armed by the MGB took families from their homes; the freight trains took two weeks on average, and up to almost a month. 28

Operation Priboi of 25–28 March deported more than 90,000 people to Siberia and other remote regions. The figures by republic differ between sources: 28,656 or 28,981 for Lithuania (about 32,000 including a follow-up deportation in April), 42,113–43,000 for Latvia and 20,722 for Estonia. Some 72% of the deportees were women and children under 16; Interior Minister Sergey Kruglov reported to Stalin on 18 May that they included 2,850 “decrepit solitary old people” and 1,785 children without parents to support them. The deportation was “for eternity”, attempted escape was punished with twenty years of hard labour, and by the end of 1950, 4,123 deportees (4.5%) had died, 2,080 of them children. Collectivisation in Estonia jumped from 8% on 20 March to 64% on 20 April and in Latvia from 11% to more than 50%, reaching 80% and 93% by the end of the year. Lithuania stood at 62%, and in the autumn of 1951 Operation Osen (“Autumn”) deported more than 20,000 more people. 28 6 9 31 29

The struggle against “bourgeois nationalism” (1949–1952)

In 1949 Stalin launched a new purge to discipline local leaderships suspected of seeking more independence from the centre. The Russian historian Elena Zubkova divides the Kremlin’s postwar Baltic policy into two periods: 1944–1947, when collectivisation was put off and repression aimed mainly at the resistance, and the time from mid-1947 to Stalin’s death, marked by direct unification and mass repression. In the wake of the Leningrad Affair the Estonian party leadership, considered close to Leningrad’s, became a target. Repeated letters of complaint from one individual prompted a Central Committee investigation, and a commission sent in December 1949 reported that Karotamm relied on “old bourgeois cadres who do not merit political trust” and defended kulaks. What impressed the commission most was the testimony of Johannes Käbin, who said he had repeatedly warned that the republic’s leadership was full of people of bourgeois-nationalist outlook. Karotamm wrote to Malenkov and Stalin admitting mistakes in the choice of cadres while pointing out that in three years 1,022 teachers had been dismissed for political reasons, 12,000 people arrested and convicted, and the “kulak-nationalist element” deported in March 1949. 32

In January 1950 the republic’s Minister of State Security, Boris Kumm, was dismissed, and on 7 March the Politburo approved a decision that the Estonian leadership had neglected the struggle against bourgeois nationalism. At the Eighth Plenum of the Estonian Communist Party, held in Tallinn on 21–26 March 1950, Panteleimon Ponomarenko delivered the indictment on behalf of the Central Committee, and Karotamm was removed as First Secretary and replaced by Johannes Käbin. The purge began at once: Nigol Andresen was arrested on 24 March and given 25 years, and Hans Kruus, Hendrik Allik and others were expelled from the party and arrested. More than a hundred people were dismissed from the Academy of Sciences on political grounds within a year, and at Tartu University about 200 teaching staff were accused and nearly 100 students expelled. Arnold Veimer was removed as chairman of the Council of Ministers in March 1951. Karotamm escaped arrest and in May was sent to the Academy of Social Sciences in Moscow, but Käbin’s opposition kept him from ever returning to Estonia. Käbin led the party until 1978. 32 33 11 14

The other two republics fared differently. In 1949–1950 Sniečkus had his first confrontation with Moscow when he defended old communist friends from his underground years against persecution, and Lithuania became the only Soviet republic where there was no mass persecution of old communists and not a single communist of pre-Soviet times was accused or arrested. In Latvia Kalnbērziņš and Vilis Lācis kept their posts, but outside cadres were so numerous that in March 1949 only 8 of the 30 non-staff lecturers in the Riga city agitprop department knew Latvian. Around 1949 home-grown communists made up about a third of the membership in all three countries, and after five years of occupation only 0.3% of Lithuanians and 0.7% of Latvians and Estonians had joined the party. 10 17

Immigration, industry, the church — and 1953

Postwar reconstruction came with mass immigration. Under the label of “brotherly aid under Stalinist nationality policies” hundreds of thousands of Russian speakers were moved in, mainly to the cities: Estonia’s urban population grew from 267,000 to 516,000 in 1945–1950, more than 90% of the increase being new immigrants, and immigrants were given housing before returning war refugees. Soviet planners expanded oil shale mining in north-eastern Estonia, assigning it 40% of the capital investment planned for Estonia under the fourth Five-Year Plan; from 1948 oil shale gas went to Leningrad by a specially built pipeline, while Tallinn received it only in 1953. Latvia took in 535,000 immigrants between 1945 and 1955 alone, and Riga became heavily militarised. The Estonian share of Estonia’s population fell from 88% in 1934 to 75% in 1959, and the Latvian share of Latvia’s from about 79% in 1940 to 52% in 1989. 7 17 8

The churches were repressed too. In Lithuania state atheism and the Catholic Church’s involvement in the partisans’ fight intensified persecution: priests and believers were arrested and deported, churches closed and the training of new clergy especially restricted. Vincentas Borisevičius, bishop of Telšiai, refused to flee to the West; arrested by the NKVD in December 1945 and again in February 1946, he turned down a pardon in exchange for cooperation, was sentenced to death on 28 August on charges that included giving partisans false papers, and is believed to have been executed in November. Teofilius Matulionis, another bishop, was sentenced to another ten years for issuing a pastoral letter in 1946, Archbishop Mečislovas Reinys of Vilnius was imprisoned as well, and in 1950 the state seized Vilnius Cathedral from the Church. In 1951 members of prohibited religious groups such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses were deported from the Baltic states, Moldavia, western Ukraine and Belarus, and in Latvia Kalnbērziņš secured the removal of the Orthodox Metropolitan Veniamin (Fedchenkov) from Riga. 34 35 36 29 12

The West never recognised the annexation in law. The United States and Britain implicitly acknowledged the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states de facto at the Yalta Conference in 1945, but in line with the Welles Declaration of 23 July 1940 they and most other Western democracies withheld de jure recognition and continued to recognise Baltic diplomats and consuls acting in the name of the former governments. In 1947 the exiled diplomats of the three countries together sent a communication on the occupation to the United Nations; on 26 March 1949 the US State Department issued a circular stating that the Baltic states were still independent nations with their own diplomatic representatives; and on 27 July 1950 the diplomats-in-exile appealed to the United States to support a UN investigation of the “genocidal mass deportations”. With the Soviet Union on the Security Council, however, the Baltic question never reached the UN’s official agenda, and the Forest Brothers’ hope that a war between the West and the Soviet Union would liberate the Baltic states never materialised. 7 37 29 20

When Stalin died in March 1953, Lavrentiy Beria, now Minister of Internal Affairs, advocated better treatment of the non-Russian nationalities. On drafts he had prepared, the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee adopted secret decisions on Lithuania on 26 May and on Latvia on 12 June to speed up the promotion of native cadres, and in the first half of June the Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian parties held plenums endorsing them. Beria ordered the entire leadership of the Latvian and Lithuanian interior ministries replaced with national cadres, and in Latvia a number of Russian officials were dismissed. At about the same time, on 30 May, Jonas Žemaitis, paralysed by a cerebral haemorrhage and in hiding, was arrested and interrogated in Moscow by Beria himself. But Beria was arrested on 26 June, and his “national” decisions were revoked at the Central Committee plenum in July. The partisan leadership was destroyed in 1953; Adolfas Ramanauskas, who had taken over the Union in 1952, had already ordered an end to armed struggle in favour of passive resistance. Žemaitis was executed in Butyrka prison in 1954. 38 39 8 26 19 22