by Prit Buttar
Estonia was culturally different from its two southern neighbours, with its language having far more in common with Finnish. It was the last part of the region to embrace Christianity, coming under the influence of the Teutonic crusaders from 1208 onwards. Shortly after, Denmark took an interest in the area, occupying the northern parts of the country. Local people rose up against Danish rule in 1343, and not long afterwards the Danes sold their interest in the region to the Livonian Order; an ecclesiastical state called Terra Mariana was then established under Livonian control. It was perhaps typical of the history of the region that various factions – the Livonian Knights, the ecclesiastical authorities and local secular Baltic German interests – fought a series of civil wars for control of Estonia, with little or no regard for the local people, other than as a source of manpower for their forces. When the Livonian Order was finally defeated in 1345, the various factions agreed to put aside their differences and formed the Livonian Confederation. In the 16th century, the Danes took a renewed interest in Estonia, before Sweden gained control of the northern part of the country. A series of wars between Sweden on the one hand, and the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth on the other, followed. Eventually, the Swedes gained complete control of the territory of modern Estonia, and forced the German landowners to grant greater autonomy to the Estonian peasantry, but in 1710, the region came under Russian control as a result of the Great Northern War. For the Estonians, this was more than the replacement of one foreign ruler by another; the Russians revoked the limited reforms that the Swedes had initiated, restoring serfdom and the dominance of the Baltic German nobility.
These different histories, with a common end point, left the three nations with distinct differences as well as similarities. Because of its association with Poland, Lithuania was a largely Catholic country, and its nobility had close family links with the Polish aristocracy. Estonia and Latvia, by contrast, had an ethnically German ruling and landowning class, who formed the bulk of the population of the larger towns and cities, and both countries followed much of Germany and Scandinavia in embracing Lutheran Christianity. In return for the restoration of their rights over the local peasantry, the Baltic German families provided the Russian Empire with many of its finest administrators, diplomats and army officers; inevitably, this resulted in great hostility between the ethnic Estonians and Latvians, and their Baltic German overlords. The roots of the Baltic antipathy to Russia that played such a big part in the region’s history in the 20th century therefore stretched back several hundred years.
The reimposition of serfdom proved to be short-lived, and was reversed in Estonia and parts of Latvia by 1819. Whatever the intention of this step, it proved to be of little value to the local peasants, as land remained in the control of the German landowning families, and the newly liberated former serfs lacked the financial resources to purchase land of their own. It was only in the middle of the 19th century that a limited degree of land reform occurred. At the same time, relaxation of laws relating to compulsory membership of trading guilds resulted in more Latvians and Estonians moving from the countryside into the large coastal cities; the population of Tallinn was over 50 per cent Estonian by 1871, and grew further to over 67 per cent Estonian by 1897. During the same period, the Latvian population of Riga grew from 23 to 42 per cent.
Religion was another field in which cultural differences provided ample opportunities for conflict. Competition between the established churches in the Baltic States – the Lutheran church in Latvia and Estonia and the Roman Catholic church in Lithuania – and the Russian Orthodox church led to an increase in publications in Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian, and to a rapid increase in literacy – by the end of the century, almost the entire population of the Baltic States was literate.1 A common feature in all three countries during the 19th century was an attempt by Russia to impose Russian culture upon the region. In addition to the efforts of the Orthodox Church, all school education was compulsorily in Russian, and in Lithuania the publication of Latin alphabet books in Lithuanian was banned until 1904. Catholics in Lithuania were barred from local government posts in 1894, a move which resulted in a tight association in the region between nationalist sentiment and the Catholic Church. Russian efforts were undermined by the presence of a substantial Lithuanian population in nearby East Prussia, where material continued to be published in Lithuanian and smuggled across the border. Unlike Latvia and Estonia, Lithuania was comparatively untouched by the industrial revolution, and remained a largely agricultural state. Consequently, much of its growing population emigrated to the New World rather than to the industrial cities, as was the case in the two northern countries.
The 20th century started with widespread turmoil across the Russian Empire. In 1905, nationalists convened assemblies in Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius, while in the countryside of Estonia and Latvia, the unrest targeted the unpopular German aristocracy. Some 200 country manors were set ablaze, and about 300 people were killed. Some of the victims were rich landowners, others were Latvians and Estonians who in the opinion of their neighbours were sympathetic to the Baltic Germans. A few were targeted for the flimsiest of associations with the landowning aristocracy, as was the case of an elderly parson in the town of Jelgava, or Mitau:
His chief delight had been the collection of Lettish [Latvian] songs, riddles, proverbs and legends. Over this labour he had gone blind … Suddenly the peasants attacked his parsonage, shot his sexton, threatened his daughter, burned his library, smashed his china, trampled on his harpsichord, and made a bonfire of his furniture in the garden, kindling it with his manuscripts.2
In Lithuania, by contrast, there was much less civil disturbance, with a few attacks on Russian teachers and the Orthodox clergy. The Russian response varied in accord with the intensity of the trouble: in Lithuania, there was limited repression, while in Tallinn and Riga the Russian Army fired on protestors, killing over 150 and wounding hundreds more. About 400 Estonians were killed in the countryside as Russian troops put an end to attacks on landowners’ property; in Latvia, the nationalists gained control of considerable areas of countryside, and several expeditions were mounted before Russian control was restored, leaving over 1,100 dead. Many more were deported to Siberia.3
The First World War brought further conflict to the region. Initially, Russian armies advanced into East Prussia, but were decisively defeated at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes in 1914. In the following months, most of Latvia and Lithuania were occupied by German forces, but Estonia remained under Russian control. The collapse of Imperial Russia and Lenin’s seizure of power in 1917 led to further anarchy as the remnants of the Russian Army withdrew. Faced with a potentially protracted civil war, the Bolsheviks opened peace negotiations with Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey in December 1917, in the city of Brest-Litovsk, in an attempt to secure peace with the Central Powers, so that the Red Army could concentrate its efforts against the White Russians.
It was, according to those present, a most remarkable set of negotiations. Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire were represented by aristocratic diplomats and senior army officers from patrician families, while the Bolshevik delegation was made up of dedicated revolutionaries. Prince Leopold of Bavaria found himself seated at dinner next to Anastasia Bizenko, who was described by the German Foreign Minister, Richard von Kühlmann, as looking like an elderly housekeeper. During the dinner, Bizenko told Leopold how she had shot General Sakharov, a city governor who she earnestly described as ‘an evil man’. At the beginning of the conference, the head of the Bolshevik delegation was Adolf Joffe, a longstanding supporter of Trotsky who had been in exile in Siberia until earlier that year. The leader of the Austro-Hungarian delegation, Graf Ottokar Czemin von und zu Chudenitz, was astonished to hear Joffe’s view that a universal application of self-governance to all nations, along the lines of the Bolshevik Revolution, would be followed by the people of those nations learning to love one another and to live in peace. It was the intention and ambition of t
he Bolsheviks, Joffe told his dinner-table neighbour, to export the revolution first to the rest of Europe, and then to the rest of the world. The war had not gone well for the Austro-Hungarian Empire; its initial invasion of Serbia had been a complete disaster, and a mixture of incompetent High Command, confusion brought about by the multitude of ethnicities and languages in the Empire, and intractable supply problems had prevented the Austro-Hungarian Army from contributing significantly to the German effort. Indeed, by 1916, the German military had frequently likened their alliance with the Habsburg Empire as like being shackled to a corpse. Now, with widespread unrest throughout the Empire and open mutiny in its demoralised armies, Chudenitz reacted with horror to Joffe’s comments:
I pointed out to him that we should not ourselves undertake any imitation of the Russian methods, and did not wish for any interference with our own internal affairs; this we must strictly forbid. If he persisted in endeavouring to carry out this Utopian plan of grafting his ideas on ourselves, he had better go back home by the next train, for there could be no question of making peace. Mr Joffe looked at me in astonishment with his soft eyes, was silent for a while, and then, in a kindly, almost imploring tone that I shall never forget, he said: ‘Still, I hope we may yet be able to raise the revolution in your country too.’4
Negotiations foundered in February 1918, when Leon Trotsky, who was now head of the Bolshevik delegation, decided that further progress was impossible, as the Germans were insisting on territorial concessions, while the Bolshevik position was to concede no territory, nor agree to any financial reparations to the Central Powers. There was a resumption of hostilities, which proved disastrous to the Russian position, with German troops pushing into Estonia, and when negotiations resumed a month later, the Bolsheviks were forced to accept far worse terms than those originally offered. Russia renounced any claim to Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, the Ukraine and Poland. In the words of the treaty, Germany and Austria-Hungary would determine the future fates of these territories in agreement with their populations. The reality of the situation was that the Germans would seek to establish client states, based upon whatever minority support they could gain.
Just as it seemed that German dreams of an empire in Eastern Europe that would allow it to rival the British Empire were about to be realised, the abdication of the Kaiser and the collapse of the German Empire in late 1918 changed the situation entirely. As the German army began to withdraw from the Baltic States, the Soviet leadership saw an opportunity to regain territory that had been conceded in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. From their perspective, the treaty had been imposed upon them when they were at their weakest, and as the successors to the Czar they regarded themselves entitled to the same territories that Czarist Russia had controlled. There also appeared to be some prospect of exporting the Bolshevik Revolution into the heart of Europe, and the establishment of new Soviet Socialist Republics in the Baltic States, Poland, and even Germany would see the dream outlined by Joffe during the Brest-Litovsk talks beginning to come true. Therefore, intent on reclaiming territory that many Russians regarded as rightly theirs, and seeking an opportunity to spread Bolshevism to the west, Soviet forces began to move against the Baltic region. Although this has been described as the Soviet Westward Offensive, and according to one source was given the codename Target Vistula, it seems that there was no central planned offensive.5 Rather, a series of uncoordinated movements occurred in the same region, with little if any overall coordination. In addition to geopolitical considerations, the animosity of the Soviet leadership towards the Baltic States certainly played a part in the development of events. Lenin told his staff, ‘Cross the frontier somewhere, even if only to the depth of a kilometre, and hang 100–1,000 of their civil servants and rich people.’6
If the war that followed had been limited to the invading Bolshevik forces and the fledgling nationalist armies of the three states, it would have been over in early 1919, with an almost complete victory for the Red Army. But there were many parties involved in the struggle, each with its own agenda. At the heart of these conflicting agendas lay the fundamental conundrum posed by the three states: was it feasible for them to exist as independent nations, or would they be forced to sacrifice some degree of independence to secure the support of one of their powerful neighbours?
The Bolshevik vision of the future of these states has already been mentioned. The Germans developed their ideas of the shape of Eastern Europe as the First World War progressed. The concept of Mitteleuropa as a German empire was first proposed in detail by Friedrich Naumann in 1915, in his book of the same name.7 He suggested that a new constellation of states could be created from the western parts of the Russian Empire; these states would gradually become more German as a result of settlement, and by providing an area for German economic exploitation Mitteleuropa would serve as a counterbalance to the British Empire’s colonies. Moreover Austria-Hungary and Turkey, both allies of Germany, would become increasingly dependent economically upon Germany and its vassal states, and would eventually become little more than vassal states themselves.
Several different levels of autonomy were proposed for the new states. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania would be semi-autonomous, with almost complete control of government functions by Germany. They would be early targets for German colonisation, and consequently it was not expected they would remain even semi-autonomous for a prolonged period.8 It is important to bear in mind how the German concept of colonies differed from that of the British or French. Whilst Britain ensured that there was almost no autonomy in the non-white parts of the British Empire, there was no real intention to settle these areas with sufficient numbers of white British citizens to create a British majority. The Germans, in contrast, intended to ‘Germanise’ their colonies in full, and regarded all non-Germans, regardless of their skin colour, as inferior to Germans. In the German protectorate of South West Africa – modern-day Namibia – the forcible seizure of land from local people for German settlers, in an attempt to create an ‘African Germany’, led to an uprising by the Herero people.9 The German response was a genocidal war, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of Herero.10 This attitude to colonies persisted long after the fall of the Kaiser, and strongly influenced the behaviour of Nazi Germany towards occupied parts of Eastern Europe. Indeed, many of the key figures of the Nazi era had links with the Herero War; Hermann Goering’s father was one of the German officers involved in the genocides.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk effectively gave Germany permission to create Mitteleuropa, and even though the treaty was renounced by Lenin shortly afterwards, on the grounds that it had been forced upon the Soviet Union, the Germans did not abandon their dream of an East European empire. The fall of the Kaiser was a huge setback, but, despite this, German policy in the Baltic States appears to have been one of trying to establish dominance of the area through client states, thus creating a pro-German status quo that would survive any final peace settlement with the Western Powers. Large numbers of German troops assembled as volunteer formations, known as the Freikorps, and played an important part in the independence wars in the Baltic States. Whilst their assistance in driving back the Bolshevik forces was invaluable, they had no intention of helping to create truly independent states; rather, they often worked to further the German vision of puppet regimes, either under direct German control, or dominated by the Baltic German aristocracy. It should be stressed that this was particularly the case in Latvia; Baltic Germans in Estonia were largely strong supporters of Estonian nationalism, and helped raise some of the first military units that fought for Estonian independence.
The Polish vision of the future of those parts of Europe caught between Germany and Russia was not entirely dissimilar to the German vision. The Poles wished for a constellation of independent states collectively known as Międzymorze (‘Between the seas’, referring to the belt of land running from the Baltic coast to the Adriatic Sea). These states would – of course – be domi
nated by Poland, which would be the largest member of the confederation. In addition, the Polish vision saw no possibility of an independent Lithuania. Instead, the old commonwealth between the two nations would be recreated, with Lithuania reduced to a semi-autonomous part of Poland. Whilst the Lithuanian nationalists welcomed the involvement of Poland in the war against the Bolshevik forces, they were less enthusiastic about what they perceived as Polish interference in Lithuania itself, including an attempted coup and the seizure of the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius.