Baltic wars of independence and border settlements

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 4 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 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.

Yudenich and Estonia: 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.

Tartu: the terms of the first 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: three governments and two battles for Riga

Latvia's war, with three camps entangled, was the most complex. 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, organized by Baltic German landowners, and by the Iron Division newly recruited in Germany. On 29 December the Ulmanis government had promised Latvian citizenship to German volunteers who served four weeks or more; the promise grew into a rumour of land grants and Freikorps men poured in from across Germany. On 1 February Rüdiger von der Goltz arrived at Liepāja as commander of the German VI Reserve Corps. He meant to keep the Baltic in Germany's sphere and saw the Latvian government as an obstacle.

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 pastor and writer Andrievs Niedra became head of a pro-German government. On 22 May the Landeswehr and the Iron Division drove the Red Army from Riga. Under Stučka's regime there had been executions by revolutionary tribunals and hunger; after the recapture came days of executions and reprisals whose dead are likewise estimated in the thousands. The German formations pressed north from Riga and in early June met the Estonian army. 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. 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.

The war was not over. When the Allies demanded Goltz's recall and the withdrawal of German troops, most of the men who refused to leave joined Pavel Bermondt-Avalov's West Russian Volunteer Army. This force of more than 40,000 flew the flag of an anti-Bolshevik Russian army, but what it actually attacked on 8 October was Riga. Bermondt's troops took the suburbs on the west bank of the Daugava. Supported by the guns of British and French warships, 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. 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 and the Vilnius dispute

Lithuanian state-building went on between the German withdrawal and the Red advance. When German troops left Vilnius on 31 December 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.

Vilnius passed into other hands. From 19 to 21 April 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.

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, after the White victory, still had an unsettled eastern border. In 1918 and 1919 Finnish volunteers mounted expeditions into East Karelia and Petsamo, and the Aunus expedition of April to June 1919 hoped for a Karelian rising that never came. Finnish volunteers helped Estonia in January 1919 and suffered heavy losses at Paju. But Finland did not join Yudenich in attacking Petrograd. The regent Mannerheim considered intervention in return for recognition of independence and East Karelia, but Kolchak rejected the conditions, and Ståhlberg, elected president in July, opposed intervention. Negotiations that opened at Tartu in June 1920 ended in a treaty on 14 October. Finland gained Petsamo, with its outlet to the Arctic, and withdrew from Repola and Porajärvi in East Karelia, which it had occupied in 1919; the Soviet side promised autonomy for East Karelia. This treaty should not be confused with Estonia's Treaty of Tartu of February. The border order it created led through the East Karelian rising of 1921 to the background of the Winter War of 1939.

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.