Coups in the Baltic states

On 21 June 1940, four days after the Red Army occupied Latvia and Estonia, crowds carrying red flags marched through the streets of Tallinn. Surrounded by Soviet armoured cars, the demonstrators demanded “a government that will honestly carry out the pact with the Soviet Union”, cheered Stalin and Molotov, freed political prisoners, seized police stations and hoisted the red flag on the tower of Toompea Castle. Late that evening President Konstantin Päts appointed as prime minister the poet and physician Johannes Vares, the man designated by Andrei Zhdanov, who had been sent from Moscow. The same day the Latvian press announced the composition of a government under the microbiologist Augusts Kirhenšteins, put together in the Soviet legation in Riga. In Lithuania a similar “people’s government” had been in office since 17 June.

These events are usually described as coups in the Baltic states carried out under Soviet direction. It is also said that in the only armed resistance, in Tallinn, two people were killed on the Estonian side and about ten on the Soviet side. The description is accurate but needs two qualifications. First, the “coups” were not the work of local communists, who numbered only a few hundred in each of Estonia and Latvia, but a script written in Moscow and acted out in the presence of occupying troops. Soviet historiography called them the “socialist revolution of 1940”; in Estonia they are referred to as the “June coup” (juunipööre). Second, the number of Soviet-side casualties is uncertain, as explained below.

The Kremlin’s envoys

The governments of Estonia and Latvia accepted the Soviet ultimatums on 16 June and resigned. Molotov’s notes demanded governments “able and willing” to carry out the mutual assistance pacts honestly, but said nothing about a change of political system. In Tallinn some politicians therefore believed that Moscow merely wanted a cabinet more favourable to it. The illusion was soon dispelled. An emissary with full powers from the Kremlin arrived in each capital: in Kaunas Molotov’s deputy Vladimir Dekanozov; in Riga Andrey Vyshinsky, deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and the prosecutor of the Moscow show trials; and in Tallinn, on 19 June and by special train, Andrei Zhdanov, secretary of the Central Committee and party chief in Leningrad.

That same day Zhdanov called on Päts at Kadriorg Palace. In his report to Moscow he wrote that the president had made every excuse for the old government, assuring him that it had carried out the pact honestly and conscientiously, and that the general impression was that Päts, General Johan Laidoner and the whole old team wanted to keep power and to present Estonia as a victim of great-power politics, “the bitter fate of small states”. Zhdanov had no intention of sparing them. On 19 and 20 June he held talks with the communist activist Maksim Unt, offered him the post of interior minister and instructed him to organise rallies across the country demanding a change of government. Staff of the Soviet legation also took part in the preparations.

In Riga Vyshinsky acted in the same way. According to Latvian historians, on the evening of 19 June he presented President Kārlis Ulmanis with a ready-made list of ministers drawn up in the Soviet legation. Some of those invited refused, and the line-up had to be filled in. On 20 June the Ulmanis government met for the last time, and that evening Ulmanis signed the act appointing the cabinet of Kirhenšteins, a professor of microbiology and an activist of the society for friendship with the USSR. The writer Vilis Lācis became interior minister. None of the ministers in the first line-up was formally a member of the illegal Communist Party, but several had long worked with Soviet intelligence. The choice was deliberate: the government was meant to look like a left-wing democratic coalition, not a communist team imposed from outside.

21 June in Tallinn

On 20 June rallies were held in several Tallinn factories, and posters calling for a demonstration appeared in the streets. On the morning of 21 June agitators went round the factories, forcing workers with threats to down tools. According to Estonian studies, a substantial part of the crowd consisted of workers brought by lorry from Soviet bases and airfield construction sites, and of Red Army men in civilian clothes. The government of Jüri Uluots, by now only a caretaker, met at Toompea Castle at 8.30 a.m. Päts proposed convening parliament, but the ministers considered this pointless. The interior minister reported that during the night Unt and his men had occupied the trade union building and were threatening to lead the workers to Freedom Square without permission. Laidoner pointed out that Soviet troops had entered Tallinn without the slightest incident, so Zhdanov had no grounds for demanding changes. The government decided nothing, and the police did not hinder the demonstrators.

At 10 a.m. the rally began in Freedom Square. By Estonian estimates it drew a little over 2,000 people, many of them onlookers. Soviet armoured cars ringed the square, tanks stood in the neighbouring streets and aircraft circled over the city. Trade union activists spoke from a lorry, as did a Red Army representative, who brought greetings to “the Estonian nation”. The procession then marched over Toompea, past the Soviet legation, to Kadriorg Palace, the president’s residence. Photographs from that day show Soviet armoured vehicles alongside the column. In Soviet-era publications they were retouched out of the pictures.

According to contemporary accounts, six to seven thousand people gathered outside the palace. Päts came out on to the balcony with Laidoner, but shouting drowned his words, and the president withdrew inside to receive a delegation. The demonstrators demanded a new government and the immediate release of political prisoners. Päts replied that the prisoners could be released through the normal legal procedure. The crowd would not wait and moved on to the Central Prison. At about 3 p.m., in the presence of Soviet officers and an armoured car, a delegation demanded that the governor hand over the prisoners. Forty-three people, mostly communists, were freed. In their place a dozen or so newly arrested people, chiefly policemen, were put in the cells. Smaller groups of armed workers, calling themselves the “workers’ self-defence”, seized police stations, government offices, and also barracks and arms depots.

At about 5 p.m. the procession climbed Toompea a second time, now led by the freed prisoners. The guard stood aside. Speeches in honour of the Soviet leaders were made from the balcony of the castle, and at 6.45 p.m. a red flag was raised at the top of the Tall Hermann tower, where the Estonian national flag had flown since 1918. The crowd waited for the “people’s government” to be announced. Its composition was broadcast on the radio at 10.15 p.m., and at 10.20 p.m. Päts dismissed Uluots and swore in Vares. The other ministers took the oath the next morning. The historian Hans Kruus became deputy prime minister, Maksim Unt interior minister and General Tõnis Rotberg war minister. The next day the blue, black and white flag was flying on the tower again, for the pretence of independence was to be kept up for a few more weeks.

The fight in Raua Street

The only armed resistance that day came from the independent signals battalion of the Estonian army. After 17 June the Russians had taken over the Estonian army’s barracks, and the battalion had been moved to a school building in Raua Street in Tallinn. At about 7.30 p.m. armed men with red armbands arrived there and demanded that the soldiers hand over their weapons. The soldiers, who were under orders to avoid clashes with the Red Army, gave way when a Soviet armoured car drove up to the school. They hid some of their weapons, however, and found in the courtyard a stock set aside for mobilisation. Shortly before midnight, when a new shift of the “self-defence” arrived, the soldiers refused to let it into the building. Shots were fired and Private Johannes Mandre was killed. The soldiers barricaded themselves in the school and returned fire from the windows. Most of the officers were at a major’s funeral that evening, so the fighting broke out spontaneously. The shooting went on intermittently for several hours, until the new war minister, Rotberg, arrived with six Soviet armoured cars. The battalion laid down its arms, and the school was looted.

Two soldiers were killed on the Estonian side: Mandre and the non-commissioned officer Aleksei Männikus, mortally wounded while taking the wounded to hospital. The other side’s losses are uncertain. Some accounts give about ten dead militiamen and Red Army soldiers; Estonian monographs speak more cautiously of at least one dead and of reports of more than ten. According to Estonian sources, during the night of 21–22 June three more armed workers were killed and ten wounded during arrests in other parts of Tallinn. The fight in Raua Street was the only organised armed resistance during the occupation of Estonia. Mandre and Männikus are among the few soldiers who died in the Second World War in Estonian uniform and under the Estonian flag, and years later independent Estonia decorated several of the men who took part in the fighting.

Riga, Kaunas and the provinces

Rallies were held on 21 June in all the larger towns of Estonia, in Tartu and Pärnu, with the same resolutions: a new government, the dissolution of the Defence League and a purge of the state apparatus. In Latvia the script was spread over several days. As early as 19 and 20 June in Liepāja Red Army men with fixed bayonets cleared the way for demonstrations, and the crowd seized the post office and the building of the aizsargi paramilitary organisation. On 21 June the Kirhenšteins government held its first meeting and issued a declaration promising to “ensure the independence of the Latvian state” and full observance of the constitution. Rallies of support were organised in Riga and other towns. That day the commander of the Zemgale Division, General Žanis Bahs, reported to the army commander that his units were confined to barracks, without ammunition and unfit for combat, while the commander of the frontier guard brigade, General Ludvigs Bolšteins, shot himself in his office rather than serve the occupier. The British minister in Riga cabled London that the new government had been formed not on the basis of the constitution but under pressure from outside.

In Lithuania all this had happened earlier. After President Smetona fled, Dekanozov had already brought about the appointment on 17 June of a government under the journalist Justas Paleckis, who also took over the duties of president. Kaunas therefore needed no coup on 21 June, only further “democratisation”: communists released from prison, organisations dissolved and officials replaced.

Façade and reality

In all three countries the first “people’s governments” were meant to reassure. They contained no communists, or almost none, and their declarations spoke of friendship with the USSR but also of independence and the constitution. Presidents Päts and Ulmanis remained in office and signed decree after decree, which was meant to show continuity of authority. Real power lay with Zhdanov, Vyshinsky and Dekanozov, with the Soviet legations and with the military command. In the very first days the new authorities dissolved paramilitary organisations, took over the police, closed newspapers and began arrests. The legalised communist parties emerged from the underground, and their people took over one office after another. Moscow meanwhile watched to see whether Germany would react. It did not: Berlin, which under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact had itself handed the Baltic states to the Soviet sphere of influence, was busy with France that day. On 21 June, in the forest near Compiègne, the French delegation sent by Pétain’s government received the German armistice terms.

Place in the war

The coups of 21 June opened the second act of the annexation. On 5 July Päts, under pressure, signed a decree calling early elections to the lower house of parliament, in breach of the constitution, since the upper house had not been convened. On 14 and 15 July elections were held in all three countries in which only the communist list of the “Working People’s Unions” could stand. In Estonia, of 80 candidates from outside that list, 17 withdrew “voluntarily”, one was arrested and 58 were struck off. According to official figures, almost 93 per cent of voters there backed the government list. On 21 July the new parliaments proclaimed Soviet republics and asked to be admitted to the USSR, and between 3 and 6 August the Supreme Soviet admitted Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia as the Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian SSRs. On 25 August the Vares and Kirhenšteins governments gave way to Soviet councils of people’s commissars.

The men who had tried in June to save their states through concessions paid the highest price. Laidoner was deported deep into the USSR in July, Päts on 30 July, and Ulmanis earlier, on 22 July. All three died in Soviet prisons and hospitals. Of the eleven ministers of the Uluots government only one, the education minister, survived the war, while Uluots himself died in exile in Sweden. Nor did the coups spare some of those who carried them out: several ministers of the “people’s governments” later died in the Gulag or were shot. On 14 June 1941 the NKVD carried out a mass deportation in the three republics which, by most estimates, affected more than 40,000 people, including families with children. A week later Germany attacked the USSR and within a few weeks occupied the Baltic states, where part of the population greeted the Germans as liberators. In 1944 the Red Army returned, and the USSR ruled these countries until 1991.

The stage-managed “popular” coup, preserving a façade of continuity, became a model that Moscow later applied in Central Europe. For the legal history of the Baltic states, however, it had the opposite effect to the one intended. Because the governments of 21 June were appointed under duress and the decrees of Päts and Ulmanis had no constitutional basis, the United States and most Western countries never recognised the annexation, and in 1990–1991 Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania restored the continuity of their pre-war states rather than declaring themselves new ones.