day Estonia has been the home of the Estonian people for over 8,000 years. Situated precariously in the middle of stronger and often more belligerent nations, it has seen centuries of war and conquest. To the east of Estonia are Sweden and Denmark, to the north Finland, to the south the other two Baltic countries of Latvia and Lithuania, and then Poland and Germany. To the east is Russia which has since the Tsarist times coveted the fertile land and ice-free seaports of Estonia.
Estonia and its neighbors.
The first conquest of Estonia was in 1219 by the Danes and the German Knights of the Sword, leading to over 700 years of servitude to the various colonial masters. The urban areas of Estonia were colonized by traders while the rural estates were governed by the descendants of the Crusaders from Germany. As the country came under the control of successive foreign powers such as Sweden and Russia, the ruling nations always guaranteed the continuation of the Baltic Germans’ class privileges and administration rights. This class of Estonian “nobility,” making up approximately five percent of the population, spoke German, while the language of their Estonian serfs continued to be Estonian. Estonian traditions, language, and culture were kept alive by the peasants with the hope of eventually achieving self-governance. Folk music played a major part in the peasants’ traditions and provided a focus for establishing cultural identity.
The middle of the nineteenth century, when Estonia was still part of the Tsarist Russian empire, witnessed a period of Estonian national awakening. The serfs were allowed to go to school and literacy rates soared. Books and newspapers in the Estonian language started to appear. A nation-wide singing festival, the first of many, was organized in 1869. Nationalist feelings were emboldened when the Russians, in response to what they correctly identified as an independence movement, initiated a period of russification in the 1880’s. When the Russian Bolshevik revolution brought a change to the rule and social structure of Russia in 1917, the Estonians seized the opportunity to wage a successful war of independence. In the aftermath of World War I, Estonia became an independent nation for the first time in 700 years. The government was democratic and they had a free market economy. Estonia joined the League of Nations and fully expected to have its borders and national integrity respected by others. The blue-black-white flag of Estonia flew from the top of Pikk Hermann (Tall Hermann), symbolizing independence. But sadly, Estonians enjoyed this independence for only a very short 20 years.
Pikk Herman after re-independence, 1993.
The rest of the world also changed in the twenty years after World War I. Russia endured a revolution that brought to power leaders whose moral values differed greatly from those of other civilized people. Following Lenin’s death, Josef Stalin ruthlessly took control of the Russian government, initiating purges and mass killings, and established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). He had most of the generals and other officers in the armed forces killed in case they might show some spark of leadership that would challenge his own rule.
Communism is in many aspects like a religion. One has to believe in the system, even if it means great personal sacrifice. School children, for example, were taught to listen to what their parents talked about at home and to report this to the secret police. During the dark early years of the USSR, many people went to prison after having been denounced by their own children, who then were venerated as heroes of the state.
Belief in the value and goodness of the Communist system naturally caused the true believers in Russia to impose their own religion on the uninitiated and uneducated masses in other countries. Communism was to be an international movement, and Russia went to great lengths to foment what they hoped would be Communist revolutions in other countries. Russian Communists therefore were naturally looking out to Europe, believing that someday soon the entire world would embrace this social and economic system.
Russia had another reason for looking to the west. After World War I, the countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had been formed out of what had been Tsarist Russia. To the south, some parts of the old empire became the eastern half of modern Poland. The Russian military planners saw the Baltic countries especially as crucial to future military operations because these countries had ice-free harbors to the west. Leningrad (formerly and now again St. Petersburg), the only major Soviet port on the Baltic Sea, freezes over in the winter, making shipping impossible.
These three forces – the need for ice-free harbors, the return of lands they thought were rightfully theirs, and the desire to expand the Communist religion – caused Russia to covet the Baltic countries.
While Russia was creating the USSR, much of the rest of Europe was adopting or at least flirting with fascism. In a fascist system there is private ownership, but the purpose of one’s work is for the greater glory of the state. The most successful fascist government was in Germany, where Adolf Hitler managed to wrest total control of the country from what had been a fledgling democracy. He used his energy and charisma to transform Germany from a country defeated in World War I and suffering with a chaotic economy into the strongest military machine in Europe.
But just as Stalin was worried about the fascists, Hitler was troubled by what he saw to his east, where Stalin ruled vast lands and people with an iron hand and could mobilize millions of troops to fight for the USSR. In turn, Stalin feared Hitler, and for good cause. Hitler had clearly indicated in his memoir, Mein Kampf, that Russia was an enemy, and he made no secret of his intent to someday invade Russia.
The European democracies could not decide how to handle this situation. There seemed to be little difference between the two despots who had enslaved their own people and who made no secret of their expansionist intent. The West finally decided that Hitler was the greater danger, and France and England pushed for more military and economic treaties with the USSR with the intent of encircling Germany and intimidating Hitler into keeping the peace. European nations agreed to sign agreements that stated that an attack by Germany on one nation was to be viewed as an attack on all of them, but to make this policy really effective they needed to include Stalin’s USSR in the treaty.
Hitler did not want such alliances to be consummated because he did not want to fight a two-front war. He had already planned to invade France and then attack England, and he did not want to be fighting the USSR in the east at the same time. So his diplomatic genius (or luck) came to the fore. He dispatched his foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to Moscow to meet with the Russian foreign minister, Viacheslav Molotov, and the two concocted a scheme in which the USSR and Germany would proclaim the signing of a treaty of friendship. What the West did not know was that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact included a secret protocol having to do with “sphere of influence,” in effect dividing up the land between Germany and the USSR, with the latter taking the Baltics, half of Poland, and some of Romania, and with Germany occupying half of Poland and the rest of Romania. This was brilliant strategy for Hitler because he now had stabilized his eastern border and as part of the treaty began to receive badly needed raw materials from the USSR.
The invasion of Poland by Germany on 1 September 1939 was the official start of the Second World War, since Poland had treaties with England and France that required each to come to the aid of the other should it be invaded by another power. When German troops overran Poland, England and France declared war on Germany. Hitler, however, was secure in the knowledge that the Russian armies, massed on the eastern frontier of Poland, would not attack the Germans and would instead occupy the predetermined areas of eastern Poland, which they did on 17 September. The German “blitzkrieg” (lightning war) defeated the Polish forces in a matter of three weeks, and then stopped at the new border, with the Russian troops moving in from the east. Both Germany and the USSR annexed these regions, and Poland ceased to exist.
The Soviet Union was now free to occupy land that was in their “sphere of influence” under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty, including the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In September 1939 the Soviet government forced Estonia to accept an agreement to station Red Army troops in Estonia, and on 18 October 1939, over 25,000 troops and 10,000 members of a labor battalion entered Estonia, thus effectively ending Estonia’s independence. The western governments, not wanting to antagonize Stalin and having their own political problems, looked