The declaration of the National Committee of the Estonian Republic

23 June 1944 is the date borne by the manifesto “To the Estonian people” (Estonian: “Eesti rahvale!”) issued by the clandestine National Committee of the Estonian Republic (Eesti Vabariigi Rahvuskomitee). In it the committee declared that the independent Republic of Estonia continued to exist despite the Soviet and German occupations, and that the committee itself exercised state authority until the constitutional organs of the republic could resume their work. The text expressed solidarity with “the free nations of the world” led by Britain and the United States, and placed the violence of both dictatorships that had ravaged the country on the same footing.

The date was telling. On 23 June Estonians celebrate Võidupüha, Victory Day, the anniversary of the Battle of Cēsis (Võnnu) in 1919, in which Estonian and Latvian troops defeated the German Baltische Landeswehr and the Iron Division. In June 1944 exactly a quarter of a century had passed since then. Choosing that day in a country occupied by the Germans was a signal directed against them.

The manifesto itself, however, has a more complicated history than its date suggests. According to the Estonian historians Peeter Kaasik (Estonian Institute of Historical Memory) and Kristo Nurmis, no one proclaimed it in Estonia on 23 June. The text was prepared by the committee’s foreign delegation in Stockholm, while at home its content was still being debated. It was presented to the world press in Sweden at the end of July (Nurmis gives 27 July, Kaasik 30 July). In Estonia it was posted up on the night of 6/7 August, in a version dated 1 August and markedly toned down. It is often written that it was proclaimed in Tallinn on 1 August: that is the date of the document, not the day it was distributed, and it was no longer the same text.

Estonia in the summer of 1944

Estonia was then a country occupied for the second time in four years. In 1940 the USSR incorporated it into the Soviet state, President Konstantin Päts was deported deep into Russia, and in June 1941 the June deportation swept up some 10,000 of the country’s inhabitants. The Germans, who arrived in the summer of 1941, did not restore independence. They incorporated Estonia into the Reichskommissariat Ostland and left it only Hjalmar Mäe’s Self-Administration, subordinate to the German Generalkommissar.

At the beginning of 1944 the war returned to the country. The Red Army reached Narva, and after the failed offensive at Narva the front came to a halt on the isthmus between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Peipus. The Battle of Narva went on intermittently throughout the spring. Soviet aircraft bombed the towns, most painfully in March, when the raid on Tallinn killed 757 people. The occupiers announced a mobilisation, and on 7 February Jüri Uluots, the last constitutional prime minister and, in his own view, acting president, endorsed it on the radio. Tens of thousands of Estonians went into the army and auxiliary formations, including the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS.

In June 1944 the situation was changing fast. On 9 June the Red Army attacked Finland on the Karelian Isthmus, and on 22 June, the day before the date of the manifesto, Operation Bagration began against the German Army Group Centre in Belarus. For Estonians this meant that the return of Soviet troops was a matter of months, if not weeks. The leaders of the underground still hoped, however, that the Western Allies would not allow the Baltic states to be annexed again.

Authors and content

The committee operated on two levels. At home its members, thinned out by arrests carried out by the German Security Police in April, were only just rebuilding the leadership. Abroad there was a delegation made up of diplomats and politicians living in Sweden and Finland. It was led by the Social Democrat August Rei, a pre-war head of state and Estonia’s last envoy in Moscow, and among its most active members was the envoy in Helsinki, Aleksander Warma. It was this delegation, thinking above all of readers in the West, that drafted the text of the manifesto and the accompanying “Order No. 1”.

In the version dated 23 June the committee stated that the Republic of Estonia had not ceased to exist, and that the committee was the sole holder of state authority until the constitutional organs were restored. According to Nurmis’s summary, the manifesto equated the violence of the “dictatorial states of the East and the West” that had ravaged the country and the nation, condemned their collaborationist institutions – that is, the authorities of Soviet Estonia and the Self-Administration operating under the Germans – and publicly expressed solidarity with “the free nations of the whole world led by England and North America”. It aligned itself with the ideals of the Atlantic Charter, which the Estonian underground had invoked from the outset. In Nurmis’s assessment it was more emphatic in declaring support for the Western Allies than the Estonian declaration of independence of 1918, which had announced neutrality.

Before publication the text was sent to Uluots. According to Kaasik, the last prime minister made amendments that rendered it “somewhat vaguer”. Politicians at home – not only those around Uluots but also the committee’s democratic leaders – rejected the delegation’s pressure for sharper anti-German rhetoric. They believed that at a time when Estonians were fighting in German uniforms at Narva, coming out openly against the Germans would undermine the country’s defence against the Red Army. At a meeting, probably on 30 July, the committee decided to make both documents public. At home the version dated 1 August appeared.

Two versions

The difference between the text intended for the West and the one that appeared on Estonia’s streets proved significant. At the end of July Estonia’s envoy in Sweden, Heinrich Laretei, presented the manifesto to the international press and assured it that the document expressed the hopes of the “overwhelming majority” of the Estonian people, hopes which, he trusted, would be duly appreciated by the democratic nations of the world, “to whose family the Estonian nation wishes to belong”. According to Kaasik the declaration then attracted a certain amount of attention in the foreign press.

In the domestic version, as Nurmis established, both the expressions of solidarity with Britain and the United States and the accusation that Germany had used violence against the Estonian people were removed. What remained was the announcement that a committee had been formed to exercise state authority until the constitutional organs were restored, “and in particular to organise the defence of the state and the Estonian nation”. “Order No. 1” declared the committee to be the supreme authority in the state and set out its tasks in five points. It called for support for Estonian soldiers at the front, categorically forbade evasion of the mobilisation, warned against both Soviet and National Socialist propaganda, and instructed people to be guided solely by “the interest of the Estonian land and people”. It also urged them not to help the occupiers persecute patriots and their families.

Between Germany and the USSR

Toning down the text was no accident. In the summer of 1944 the committee firmly supported the German mobilisation, called on all Estonians to fight the Red Army’s offensive, and branded draft dodgers and deserters traitors to the nation. The foreign delegation shared this view too, although for a long time it pressed for a sharper tone towards Germany. On 27 July 1944 Warma wrote to Uluots: “Since for us too it is a matter of life and death to halt Russian expansion towards Estonia and to weaken the Red Army, we naturally defend the borders of our state loyally together with the Germans and make the maximum use of them, just as they do of us.”

Nurmis describes this as a deliberate double narrative. For the West the committee was a democratic coalition, faithful to Allied ideals and hostile to both dictatorships. At home it was a centre calling for defence alongside the Germans, because only in this way could the return of Soviet rule be held off. The committee’s members were aware of the contradiction. In September 1944 Rei was still urging his colleagues in Estonia to print the Western version of the manifesto, dated 23 June, locally and send it to Sweden, and to present the toned-down version as a forgery by the German-controlled Self-Administration.

Distribution

The documents were printed in up to 6,000 copies. Their distribution was entrusted to the committee’s head of propaganda, Endel Inglist. On the night of 6/7 August 1944 they were posted on the walls of houses in Tallinn, pushed into letterboxes, sent by post and left in public places, for example in railway carriages. The German authorities quickly tore down and collected the leaflets, but many people managed to read them.

Those who took part regarded the operation as a success and wrote of “great excitement and a rise in national feeling”. Yet the accounts of people who fled Estonia in the second half of 1944 show, as Kaasik notes, that some readers treated the leaflets with suspicion. The wider public knew nothing of the committee’s earlier activity, and some suspected a German provocation. Ülo Mathiesen, who fled to Sweden in August, remembered that only in those days did he hear in Tallinn of some underground national committee, “something like the former Estonian underground government”, and that the leaflets called on the “Forest Brothers” to come out of the woods and fight the Bolsheviks while the Germans were still in the country.

Kaasik also points out that the call to fight “for the existence and independence of Estonia” did not say what resistance was envisaged in the event of a renewed Soviet occupation. Enemy and allies alike were essentially left unnamed. Later attempts to link “Order No. 1” with the post-war Forest Brothers’ guerrilla war are, in his view, far-fetched, because at the time the appeal concerned the fighting then in progress.

Summer and autumn 1944

The manifesto was the committee’s first public act and also the beginning of its brief period of open activity. At the beginning of August Warma published in Helsinki the committee’s telegram “Estonians, come home!”. It was addressed to the Estonian volunteers fighting in the Finnish 200th Infantry Regiment. Nine out of ten of them returned and were sent straight to the front in southern Estonia, where Soviet troops had broken through the defences at Tartu. On 19 August Uluots made a second radio speech, in which he argued that Estonian soldiers were neither a “herd of slaves” nor mercenaries, but “a small, sober, northern nation” fighting for its right to life and freedom.

In September the Germans began to evacuate mainland Estonia. On 18 September the gravely ill Uluots entrusted the duties of prime minister to Otto Tief and appointed his government, and two days later the committee ceased its activity. On 22 September the Red Army entered Tallinn. Uluots managed to escape to Sweden and died in Stockholm on 9 January 1945. Tief and many committee members who had stayed in the country were arrested by the NKVD. In the autumn of 1944 tens of thousands of Estonians fled across the Baltic to Sweden and Germany; Estonian estimates put the total number of refugees at about 70,000–80,000.

Place in the war

The manifesto “To the Estonian people” did not change the course of the war. The Western powers had long since given up any intention of quarrelling with Stalin over the Baltic states. In 1942 the British had left the question of borders out of the Anglo-Soviet Treaty, but had not settled it in the Baltic peoples’ favour, and at the Tehran Conference Roosevelt and Churchill did not oppose Soviet claims. Laretei could count on the interest of the press, not on the intervention of governments.

The document nevertheless remained important to Estonians. It was a public statement that the state founded in 1918 still existed, and that its authorities recognised neither the annexation of 1940 nor German rule. On this, together with Uluots’s appointment of the Tief government, rested the later doctrine of the legal continuity of the Republic of Estonia, upheld by the government-in-exile and adopted by the restored Estonian state in 1991. Historians also draw attention to the less comfortable side of the story: the difference between the version for the West and the text posted in Tallinn, which said nothing of faith in the Allies and called for fighting alongside the Germans. Both versions reflect the position of a small nation in 1944, trying at once to win the world over to its cause and to survive between two armies.