Baltic wars of independence and border settlements

Before 1918: what kind of land these were

Before 1918 there was no state called Estonia or Latvia. Ever since German traders and crusaders arrived on this coast in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the land and the towns had belonged to a German-speaking minority, the Baltic German nobility and merchants, while the Estonian- and Latvian-speaking majority were peasants on their manors. Rulers changed, from Sweden to Poland–Lithuania, but the hierarchy stayed. Russia conquered the region in 1710 and restored the German landowners’ rights by the Treaty of Nystad in 1721, and in 1795, with the partition of Poland, it annexed the Duchy of Courland as well. The land became the three “Baltic governorates” of Estland, Livland and Courland, administered by the German nobility’s diets. Estonians lived in Estland and northern Livland; Latvians were divided between southern Livland, Courland and Latgale, which belonged to the Vitebsk governorate. Today’s borders follow the language line, not these provincial boundaries, and were drawn for the first time in 1918–1920.

Serfdom was abolished in 1816–1820, half a century earlier than in Russia proper, but the land stayed with the manors: at the start of independence Baltic Germans still owned 58% of the land in Estonia and 48% in Latvia. In the later nineteenth century the Estonian and Latvian “national awakenings” produced their own middle classes, who moved into towns dominated by Germans and Jews, and the Russification of the 1880s ended German autonomy and switched administration and schooling to Russian. Riga became one of the most industrialised cities of the empire, and by 1905 the Latvian Social Democratic Workers’ Party was already leaning towards the Bolsheviks. In the Revolution of 1905 peasants and workers burned more than 400 manor houses and German-owned buildings and killed 82 Germans. Cossack punitive expeditions, aided by German nobles and officers, burned hundreds of farms, arrested and deported thousands and summarily executed at least 2,000 people. Here the national question and the class question were the same question: the landlords were German, the peasants Latvian and Estonian.

The First World War turned the land into a front. When the German army occupied Courland and Lithuania in 1915 and placed them under the military administration of Ober Ost, Latvian deputies in the Duma won the formation of Latvian Riflemen battalions, which held the front before Riga. In the Christmas Battles of December 1916 and January 1917 the riflemen lost 9,000 men, about a third of their strength, and their anger at the tsarist generals turned into support for the Bolsheviks, who promised to end the war. After the October Revolution the Red Latvian Riflemen Division became the Red Army’s first regular division and put down the Left SR uprising in Moscow in 1918, and Ioakim Vatsetis, a former Riflemen colonel, became the Red Army’s first commander-in-chief that September. Much of the Red Army that entered Latvia in December 1918 consisted of these Latvian riflemen. Latvia’s war of independence was a foreign invasion and, at the same time, a civil war among Latvians.

Lithuania was different. The medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania had been a great power of eastern Europe; after the Union of Lublin made it one state with Poland in 1569, its nobility and towns assimilated into Polish-speaking Catholic culture. The last partition of 1795 brought it into the Russian Empire, and after the failed January Uprising of 1863 the Russian authorities banned Lithuanian publications in the Latin alphabet from the mid-1860s until 1904. Book smugglers, carrying volumes printed in East Prussia and the United States across the border, kept the national movement alive. The historic capital, Vilnius, was a city of Polish and Yiddish: a German count in 1916 found half its residents to be Poles, and as the “Jerusalem of Lithuania” it was a centre of Jewish learning. For Lithuanians it was the nation’s capital, for Poles their own city; that contradiction became the Vilnius dispute.

The declarations of independence came out of these conditions. After the February Revolution of 1917 the Russian Provisional Government joined the Estonian-speaking districts into one autonomous governorate in April, and its elected assembly, the Maapäev, refused to recognise the Bolshevik seizure of power in November and declared itself the only lawful authority. In German-occupied Lithuania the Vilnius Conference of September 1917 elected a twenty-member Council, the Taryba, which on 16 February 1918 proclaimed independence with Vilnius as its capital. Estonia declared independence in Tallinn on 24 February, between the retreating Bolshevik troops and the advancing German army. Germany was preparing another path. In April 1918 a provincial assembly of 35 Baltic Germans, 13 Estonians and 11 Latvians asked the German Emperor for a protectorate, and on 5 November a “United Baltic Duchy” led by Baltic Germans was proclaimed in Riga. Germany’s surrender brought the scheme down, but its armed force, the Landeswehr, remained.

November 1918: three governments and one vacuum

Germany's defeat in November 1918 did not hand power in the Baltic to the independence governments. Estonia and Lithuania had declared independence in February and Latvia proclaimed it in Riga on 18 November, but all three governments had to create armies, treasuries and territory they actually governed. In Estonia Konstantin Päts's provisional government took over from the German occupation authorities on 11 November; in Latvia Kārlis Ulmanis led the government of the People's Council; in Lithuania Augustinas Voldemaras formed the first cabinet on 11 November. None commanded more than a few thousand armed men. In the conditions created by Brest-Litovsk and the German occupation, three different forces moved in behind the retreating Germans.

The first was the Red Army. On 13 November, the day the Brest treaty was annulled, the Soviet government decided on a westward advance, in the name of Soviet governments for the Baltic lands and with the aim of linking up with the German revolution. An attack on Narva failed on 22 November, but the town fell on 28 November and the next day a Commune of the Working People of Estonia was proclaimed there under Jaan Anvelt. Pēteris Stučka's Soviet government of Latvia followed on 17 December and Vincas Kapsukas's Soviet government of Lithuania on 16 December. Riga fell to the Red Army on 3 January 1919 and Vilnius on 5 January. At the end of December Estonian troops were fighting 34 kilometres from Tallinn.

The second force was the Russian Whites. The Northern Corps, formed at Pskov under German protection, retreated into Estonia after Pskov fell on 25 November and placed itself under Estonian command on 6 December. The third was the remaining German troops together with the Baltic Landeswehr, the armed organization of the Baltic German landowners. Article 12 of the armistice kept German troops in the region until the Allies judged otherwise, and the Allies used them as a barrier against the Bolsheviks. It is not enough to see the three countries as one front, nor as three isolated national epics. Estonian troops fought in northern Latvia, Polish troops cooperated with Latvia while clashing with Lithuania, and German Freikorps appeared in all three countries.

Estonia: the counteroffensive of January 1919 and the making of a state

Three things turned the tide. The first was the British navy. On 12 December 1918 Admiral Alexander-Sinclair's light cruiser squadron arrived at Tallinn with 6,500 rifles, machine guns and field guns, and on 26 and 27 December it captured the Soviet destroyers Spartak and Avtroil off Tallinn and handed them to the Estonian navy. Fyodor Raskolnikov, aboard the Spartak, was taken prisoner and exchanged for British prisoners the following year. The second was Johan Laidoner, appointed commander-in-chief on 23 December, who built mobile forces around armoured trains and volunteer battalions and enforced conscription. The third was foreign volunteers: about 3,700 Finns arrived in early January, followed by Swedish and Danish contingents.

The counteroffensive launched on 7 January moved fast. On 14 January Kuperjanov's partisans retook Tartu; just before leaving the city the Soviet side executed nineteen hostages held in the cellar of the Credit Bank, among them the Orthodox bishop Platon. Narva was recovered on 19 January, and on 31 January Kuperjanov was killed at the battle of Paju, fighting alongside the Finnish volunteers. By early February the Red Army had been driven from all Estonian territory. A peasant rising on the island of Saaremaa in February was put down by government troops. The Commune withdrew into Russian territory and dissolved itself on 5 June.

Battles alone did not make the state. Elections to a Constituent Assembly were held from 5 to 7 April within earshot of the front, and the Social Democrats and the Labour Party won a majority. The land reform law the Assembly passed on 10 October expropriated without compensation more than a thousand manors owned by Baltic German landlords, over half the country's farmland, and distributed it to smallholders and war veterans. While Yudenich's Whites spoke of "reuniting Russia" and the Soviets of a "workers' commune", it was the independent republic that gave the peasants land. Without that reform it would have been hard to explain to the soldiers what they were fighting for. The communist underground led by Viktor Kingissepp remained active, and he was arrested and executed in 1922, but its activity cannot be equated with the will of the country as a whole.

Estonia: Yudenich's North-Western Army, ally or burden?

Russian Whites remained on Estonian soil. The Northern Corps went over to the offensive under Rodzianko on 13 May 1919, taking Yamburg, and on 25 May Stanisław Bułak-Bałachowicz's troops took Pskov. On 13 June the garrison of the Krasnaya Gorka fort mutinied and was suppressed. In June Nikolai Yudenich, whom Kolchak had appointed commander of the north-western front, arrived and the force was reorganized as the Northwestern Army, at its peak some 18,000 men.

Relations between Estonia and the Whites combined conditional cooperation with fundamental distrust. The White programme of "Russia one and indivisible" did not recognize Estonian independence. On 10 August General Marsh of the British military mission told White politicians in Tallinn to form a government within hours, and the next day a Northwestern Government under Lianozov was set up and recognized Estonian independence. Yudenich, however, treated the recognition as "a matter for local politicians", and Kolchak in Omsk refused to accept it. Still, the claim that the Whites never granted any recognition is inaccurate. Recognition was given; what was missing was the power to guarantee it. Meanwhile the Estonian government opened its first preliminary peace talks with the Soviets at Pskov on 17 September.

On 10 October the Northwestern Army began its last offensive towards Petrograd. Yamburg fell on 12 October, Gatchina on the 16th and Tsarskoye Selo on the 20th, and from the Pulkovo heights the city's roofs were in sight. The Estonian 1st Division covered the southern flank but took no part in the attack on Petrograd, and Finland did not move. The defence Trotsky organized in person and the counterattack of the Red 7th Army drove the Whites back from 21 October. After losing Yamburg on 14 November the Northwestern Army retreated to the Narva river. Estonia disarmed and interned it on its own territory. Typhus spread through the camps and among the refugees and killed thousands. On 22 January 1920 Yudenich ordered the army dissolved, and after Bułak-Bałachowicz briefly detained him on 28 January he left the country. Bułak-Bałachowicz took his men to the Polish front. For Estonia the Whites had been less an ally than a burden that hastened peace with the Soviets.

Estonia: the terms of the Tartu treaty

Peace talks opened at Tartu on 5 December 1919. The Soviet delegate was Leonid Krasin, replaced in mid-December by Adolph Joffe; the Estonian delegation was led by the foreign minister Jaan Poska, backed by the government of Jaan Tõnisson that had taken office on 18 November. An armistice signed on 31 December took effect on 3 January 1920, and the treaty was signed on 2 February.

In Article 2 Soviet Russia recognized Estonia's independence "voluntarily and forever" and renounced all sovereign rights over its territory and people. The frontier included the Ivangorod district east of the Narva river and the Petseri region in the south-east. Russia paid 15 million gold roubles and granted Estonia a timber concession of a million desyatins, and Estonia was freed from the debts of the Russian Empire. Each side undertook not to allow armies or organizations directed against the other to operate on its territory, a clause that closed the Northwestern Army question for good. It was the first treaty in which Soviet Russia fixed a frontier and recognized a state's independence, and at the same time the first in which any state recognized Soviet Russia as a treaty partner. Lenin is widely quoted as calling the treaty "a window into Europe"; in 1920 and 1921 Tallinn did become the channel through which Soviet gold reached Western markets. This was how a state born in war had its military survival confirmed by treaty.

Latvia: four camps, the Liepāja coup and Cēsis

Latvia's war was the most complex because four camps fought over the same land and the alignments changed from season to season. The first was the provisional government of Kārlis Ulmanis, which had proclaimed independence on 18 November 1918. Ulmanis, an agronomist, had founded the Latvian Farmers' Union, and his government was backed by Britain and the other Allies. The second was Pēteris Stučka's Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic. Stučka was a Latvian Bolshevik jurist who had been People's Commissar for Justice in Lenin's first government; his government was formed by the leadership of Latvian Social Democracy in Moscow, proclaimed on 17 December, and backed politically, economically and militarily by Soviet Russia. Its army was built around the Red Latvian Riflemen of the previous section. The third was the German camp: the German troops left behind after the defeat, the Iron Division of Freikorps volunteers newly recruited in Germany, and the Landeswehr of the Baltic German landowners, all under Rüdiger von der Goltz. The Allies kept them there as a barrier against the Bolsheviks, but Goltz's aim was to keep the Baltic in Germany's sphere. The fourth, which appeared in autumn 1919, was Bermondt-Avalov's West Russian Volunteer Army, a White Russian army in name and in substance a continuation of the German camp. Ulmanis's government, which had almost no army of its own, first fought Stučka's government alongside the Germans, then, after Riga was retaken, fought the Germans, and in the autumn fought Bermondt.

When the Red Army entered Riga on 3 January 1919 the Ulmanis government withdrew to Liepāja. Its only troops were a few hundred men of the Latvian battalion under Oskars Kalpaks, who was killed on 6 March in an exchange of fire with German troops who mistook them for the enemy. Liepāja was held by the Landeswehr and the Iron Division. On 29 December 1918 the Ulmanis government had promised Latvian citizenship to foreign soldiers who fought for Latvia's freedom; the promise grew into a rumour of land grants and Freikorps men poured in from across Germany. On 1 February Goltz arrived at Liepāja as commander of the German VI Reserve Corps. He saw the Latvian national government as an obstacle to his plans. In Riga, meanwhile, Stučka's government expropriated the bourgeoisie but nationalised all farmland instead of giving it to the peasants. When the peasants would not supply the towns with food on the government's terms, Riga went hungry, and a Red Terror followed in which revolutionary tribunals executed alleged counter-revolutionaries.

Jelgava was retaken on 18 March. On 16 April a Landeswehr strike detachment under Baron von Manteuffel staged a coup in Liepāja and tried to arrest the Ulmanis cabinet; Ulmanis took refuge on the ship Saratov in the harbour under British protection. On 10 May the Latvian pastor and writer Andrievs Niedra, a long-standing opponent of socialism, became head of a puppet government set up by the German military. On 22 May the Landeswehr and the Iron Division drove the Red Army from Riga. Executions of suspected Bolshevik supporters followed the recapture; estimates range from 174, the figure of Riga's chief of gendarmerie, to 4,000–5,000 according to the Social Democrats and Communists. The German formations pressed north from Riga and in early June met the Estonian army, which had entered northern Latvia. In the battle of Cēsis from 19 to 23 June the Estonian 3rd Division and Zemitāns's Northern Latvian brigade defeated the Landeswehr and the Iron Division. With this battle the German camp turned from the Latvian national government's ally into its enemy. An armistice brokered by the Allied mission was signed at Strazdumuiža on 3 July and the Germans left Riga; Ulmanis returned on 8 July. The Landeswehr was placed under the British officer Harold Alexander, absorbed into the Latvian army and sent to the Latgale front in the east.

Latvia: Bermondt's attack on Riga and the treaty of Riga

The armistice did not end the war. After the Treaty of Versailles in June the Allies ordered the German troops out, but only part of the Freikorps in the Baltic went home; the rest stayed under Goltz. For men who had come for citizenship and land, the only place to return to was defeated Germany. To keep the German government clear of Allied blame, Goltz stepped into the background and in August merged his forces with Pavel Bermondt-Avalov's "Special Russian Corps". Bermondt was a former Cossack officer and adventurer who had been captured at Kiev and sent to Germany. The roughly 50,000 men thus gathered were mostly Freikorps members and Baltic Germans, with some Russian prisoners of war released on condition that they fight the Bolsheviks. This West Russian Volunteer Army used money printed in Germany and received funds and weapons from German industrialists such as Krupp. It declared its support for Kolchak in Siberia, but Bermondt and Goltz were more interested in eliminating the Latvian national government and preserving German power in the Baltic than in fighting the Bolsheviks.

Under Allied pressure the Weimar government banned the transfer of German soldiers to the Russians and closed the East Prussian border, and Goltz was recalled on 4 October. Bermondt then attacked Riga on 8 October 1919 to force Latvia to negotiate, and took the suburbs on the west bank of the Daugava. The Ulmanis government asked its neighbours for help, and, supported by the guns of British and French warships and by Estonian armoured trains, the Latvian army counterattacked from 3 November and cleared the west bank on 11 November, now Latvia's Lāčplēsis Day. Bermondt's forces were also beaten by the Lithuanians at Radviliškis in northern Lithuania on 21 and 22 November and withdrew to Germany in December. Zigfrīds Meierovics's diplomacy worked to convert this military survival into international recognition. What remained was eastern Latgale, where Stučka's government held out to the end. On 3 January 1920 Latvian and Polish troops jointly attacked and took Daugavpils, and by the end of January they had pushed the Red Army out of Latgale. An armistice took effect on 1 February, and on 11 August in Riga Soviet Russia signed a treaty recognizing Latvia's independence "for all time". This treaty is distinct from the Treaty of Riga of 1921 between Poland and the Soviets. On 16 September the Constituent Assembly passed a land reform law expropriating the manors. Seven centuries of Baltic German landholding came to an end.

Lithuania: the failure of Litbel

Lithuanian state-building went on between the German withdrawal and the Red advance. When German troops left Vilnius on 31 December 1918 a Polish self-defence force briefly held the city, and the Red Army entered on 5 January. Kapsukas's Soviet government moved to Vilnius, and on 27 February the Soviet republics of Lithuania and Belorussia merged into "Litbel". The State Council chaired by Antanas Smetona, the Voldemaras cabinet and the Sleževičius cabinet that followed it settled in Kaunas. From 8 to 10 February 1919 the Lithuanian army, helped by German Saxon volunteers, held off the Red Army for the first time at Kėdainiai. Litbel never won the support of the Lithuanian peasants. On the land question the Soviet government nationalized the large estates and turned them into state farms, and the peasants who wanted land did not regard them as their own. Soviet state-building failed to absorb the Lithuanian independence movement.

Lithuania: the Vilnius dispute

Vilnius passed into other hands. From 19 to 21 April 1919 Polish troops took the city from the Red Army, and on 22 April Piłsudski issued a proclamation "to the inhabitants of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania". To the Lithuanian government Vilnius was the capital named in its constitution; to Poland it was a city whose majority spoke Polish. In August a plot by the Polish Military Organization to overthrow the Lithuanian government in Kaunas was uncovered. Lithuania and Poland became enemies, while in the north the Lithuanian army was repelling Bermondt's troops.

By the Moscow treaty of 12 July 1920 Soviet Russia recognized Lithuania's independence and its right to Vilnius. The Red Army was then advancing in the Soviet-Polish War; it took Vilnius on 14 July and handed the city to Lithuania on 26 August. But the treaty did not bind Poland. As the Polish army, victorious at Warsaw, came back east, the Vilnius question reopened. The Suwałki Agreement of 7 October, mediated by the League of Nations, fixed a ceasefire and a demarcation line in a limited sector, leaving Vilnius on the Lithuanian side. On 9 October, before the agreement took effect, the 1st Lithuanian-Belorussian Division of about 14,000 men under Lucjan Żeligowski declared a "mutiny" and seized Vilnius. The action had been agreed with Piłsudski in advance and dressed up as insubordination. Żeligowski set up a "Central Lithuania"; after Lithuanian troops stopped him at Giedraičiai and Širvintos in November, a League-brokered truce followed on 29 November. After elections in January 1922 Central Lithuania was incorporated into Poland in March. Lithuania never recognized this, and the two countries had no diplomatic relations until Poland's ultimatum of 1938. States that had secured their independence could go on fighting each other over frontiers and the political will of their inhabitants. This is why the northern wing cannot be separated from the Soviet-Polish War.

Beyond the three: the British fleet and Finland's choices

From January 1919 the British Baltic squadron under Admiral Walter Cowan, based at Koivisto in the Gulf of Finland, blockaded the Soviet Baltic Fleet in Kronstadt. On 17 June Augustus Agar's coastal motor boat sank the cruiser Oleg, which was supporting the suppression of the Krasnaya Gorka mutiny, and on the night of 18 August a raid on Kronstadt harbour by seven motor boats and aircraft flying from Koivisto damaged the battleship Andrei Pervozvanny and sank the submarine depot ship Pamiat Azova; three boats were lost and many of their crews captured. In the Baltic campaign Britain lost seventeen vessels, including the cruiser Cassandra, two destroyers and the submarine L55, and over a hundred men. Yet Britain's anti-Bolshevik aim did not align the interests of the Baltic states and the Whites. It armed Estonia while also supporting the Whites, and in Latvia it used the German troops as a barrier before driving them out. Among the forces Britain backed, conflict over recognition and territory went on.

Finland too sent expeditions into East Karelia and Aunus in the same years and made its own Treaty of Tartu with Soviet Russia on 14 October 1920; its course from the civil war of 1918 to that treaty is told in Finland: independence and civil war.

The treaties of one year: what was settled and what remained

In 1920 Soviet Russia made peace in turn with Estonia (2 February), Lithuania (12 July), Latvia (11 August) and Finland (14 October), and in March 1921 with Poland at Riga. The treaties shared a structure: Soviet Russia renounced the sovereignty of the old empire, each side barred armies directed against the other from its territory, and settlements of gold and property followed. The Soviet motive was plain. The Seventh Congress of Soviets in December 1919 had offered peace to all its neighbours, and with Denikin and Kolchak broken but the Polish front still open, closing the north-western fronts came first. The cordon the Allies had tried to build was breached for the first time by these treaties. For the new states they were the way to secure independence and the territory they actually governed.

That does not mean every treaty produced the same terms or the same political order. The Polish-Lithuanian dispute outlasted the peace with Russia. The Baltic German landholding order ended with the land reforms of all three countries, which in Germany became material for a politics that remembered the Baltic as "lost land". The parliamentary democracies of the three republics gave way to the authoritarian regimes of Smetona, Päts and Ulmanis in 1926 in Lithuania and in 1934 in Estonia and Latvia. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 and the annexations of 1940 nullified the treaties of 1920, but the documents themselves survived and became the legal basis of the claim to restored sovereignty in the movement for Baltic independence from 1987 to 1991.

Two lines of historical writing long confronted each other here too. Soviet accounts portrayed Baltic independence as "bourgeois regimes set up on Entente bayonets"; the national accounts of each country portrayed the wars as their founding. Research since 1991 has looked at how war in these borderlands made nations. Tomas Balkelis, taking Lithuania as his case, analysed how war and revolution "made" a nation, and there is a growing body of work that treats the 1919 experienced by Baltic Germans, Latvians and Jews in the same cities together. The wars of independence were peripheral battles of the Russian Civil War and at the same time the founding of states. The military connections as a whole are covered in the parent document, the Russian Civil War.