The deportation of Päts and Laidoner

On 30 July 1940 NKVD officers arrived at the Kloostrimetsa farm outside Tallinn, where the President of Estonia, Konstantin Päts, had been living under guard for several weeks. The 66-year-old politician, one of the founders of the independent state, was taken away together with his son Viktor, his daughter-in-law Helgi, his two grandsons, Matti and Henn, and the children’s nanny, Olga Tünder, who went with them of her own accord. On 9 August the family reached Ufa, capital of the Bashkir ASSR, where they were housed under surveillance in a house on Kommunisticheskaya Street. Eleven days earlier, on 19 July, the same road east had been taken by General Johan Laidoner, commander-in-chief of the Estonian army during the War of Independence and again in the last six years before the occupation. With his wife Maria, a Pole by birth (née Kruszewska), he was taken from his estate at Viimsi, driven to Moscow and a few days later sent on to Penza.

Chronologies record under 19 July that Laidoner was deported “to Siberia”, and under 30 July that Päts was arrested and deported by the Russians. The dates agree with the sources, and the two cases are closely linked. These accounts, however, need two qualifications. Penza lies in the central Volga region, some 600 kilometres south-east of Moscow, and Ufa at the foot of the Urals – neither city is in Siberia. Secondly, in July 1940 this was not yet formally an arrest followed by investigation and sentence, but a forced administrative resettlement into the interior of the USSR. Estonian historians point out that in the first year both men were given tolerable conditions: according to the documents, Laidoner received a personal pension of 2,000 roubles a month, and Päts lived in a furnished house with a garden. Real imprisonment began for them in June 1941. That does not alter the essence of the matter: the head of state and his highest military commander were removed from the country against their will, without any legal basis, a few days before formal annexation, and neither ever regained his freedom.

Men who were no longer needed

In the first weeks of the occupation Moscow needed Päts and Laidoner. Their presence was meant to show that Estonia was changing “legally”, in accordance with the will of its own authorities. On 17 June it was Laidoner, summoned to Narva by the commander of the Leningrad Military District, Kirill Meretskov, who signed the protocol on the stationing of the troops that had already crossed the border. On 21 June, the day of the stage-managed coup, the two men stood on the balcony of Kadriorg Palace before a crowd that drowned out the President with its shouting, and that evening Päts appointed as prime minister Johannes Vares, the man chosen by the Kremlin’s envoy Andrei Zhdanov. The next day, 22 June, under pressure from the new authorities, Päts dismissed Laidoner as commander-in-chief.

Throughout the following month Päts signed the decrees of the Vares government, some two hundred in all, including the change to the electoral law that opened the way to the rigged elections of 14 and 15 July. From 29 June he was in effect under house arrest. Laidoner, stripped of his post, lived at Viimsi under observation. Once the elections had officially given the communist list almost 93 per cent of the vote, and the new parliament had assembled to proclaim Estonia a Soviet republic, both men became superfluous to Moscow, and even dangerous: should the international situation change, they could become a focus of resistance or the embodiment of the state’s continuity.

Laidoner was taken first, on 19 July, the day the election results had already been announced, with two days to go before the first sitting of the new chamber. According to Maria Laidoner’s account, the couple were kept in Moscow for a few days at a dacha of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs and then taken to Penza, where living conditions were, as she wrote, “satisfactory”. On 21 July, when the new parliament proclaimed the Estonian SSR and resolved to ask for admission to the USSR, Päts sent his son to the American legation to request asylum for the whole family. The Acting Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, agreed the next day to issue diplomatic visas, but by then it was too late. On 21 or 22 July – the sources differ on the day – Päts signed his resignation. Nine days later he too was taken away.

Decapitating three states

The fate of Päts and Laidoner was not an exception but part of the systematic removal of the region’s leaders in those same weeks. In Lithuania, whose president, Antanas Smetona, had managed to flee to Germany, the NKVD arrested several hundred political and public figures on the night of 11–12 July, just before the elections (Lithuanian archival research speaks of more than five hundred, older literature of about two thousand). On 17 July the last prime minister, Antanas Merkys, detained while trying to escape, and the foreign minister, Juozas Urbšys, were deported with their families to Saratov. On 22 July, the day after the Latvian SSR was proclaimed, the President of Latvia, Kārlis Ulmanis, was sent to Voroshilovsk, today’s Stavropol, and on 31 July his closest associate, the former war minister General Jānis Balodis, was sent with his wife to Syzran.

In Estonia those arrested in July 1940 included the former prime minister and interior minister Kaarel Eenpalu, who after Laidoner had been Päts’s closest associate during the years of authoritarian rule, and, on 23 July, the former State Elder Jaan Teemant. In the months that followed it was the turn of other former heads of state: in the autumn Friedrich Akel and Jaan Tõnisson, who as late as July had tried to put up opposition candidates in the elections, then Juhan Kukk, and, just after the outbreak of the German–Soviet war, Ants Piip. None of them survived. Otto Strandman, summoned by the NKVD in February 1941, shot himself at home. Of the former heads of state only August Rei, who escaped to Sweden, was saved. Of the eleven ministers of the last government of independent Estonia only one survived the war; the last prime minister, Jüri Uluots, who was not arrested, died in exile in 1945. The Soviet authorities followed the same pattern they had applied a year earlier in the occupied Polish lands: first they removed the people capable of leading society, and then it was the turn of their families and circles.

Prison and death

The year of relative freedom ended with the outbreak of the German–Soviet war. Päts and his son were arrested in Ufa on 26 June 1941 on charges of contacts with German diplomatic circles and anti-Soviet activity; the grandsons were placed in a children’s home, where the younger, Henn, died of hunger in 1944. The Laidoners were arrested in Penza at the end of June 1941 (most accounts give 28 June). Their adopted son, Maria’s nephew Aleksiej Kruszewski, died in November 1941 in a camp near Solikamsk. In September 1942 Laidoner was moved to Moscow’s Butyrka prison, where Päts was also brought. In the prison register, where the names of Baltic politicians were replaced by numbers, Laidoner was prisoner No. 11, Päts No. 12 and his son Viktor No. 13.

Laidoner was afterwards held in the prisons of Kirov and Ivanovo. According to the documents in his case, on 16 April 1952 the Special Council sentenced him in absentia to 25 years’ imprisonment and confiscation of property for “active counter-revolutionary and anti-Soviet activity” – in practice, for commanding the Estonian army in the War of Independence; some Estonian publications state that the sentence was not announced to him until March 1953. He died on 13 March 1953 in the prison at Vladimir and was buried in a mass grave in the town cemetery, together with Jan Stanisław Jankowski, the Polish government-in-exile’s Government Delegate for Poland, who had died in the same prison on the same day. His remains have never been found. Maria Laidoner, who was never charged, spent twelve years in prisons and returned to Estonia for good only in 1961.

From 1943 Päts was held in prison psychiatric hospitals in Kazan and Chistopol, and in 1952, found guilty of anti-Soviet agitation, he was committed to compulsory treatment – a typical case of punitive psychiatry. His son Viktor died in Butyrka in 1952. At the end of 1954 the old president was transferred to a hospital at Jämejala in Estonia, and when people began to recognise him he was moved to Burashevo near Kalinin, today’s Tver, where he died on 18 January 1956.

Place in the war

The removal of Päts and Laidoner completed the political phase of the annexation. A few days later, between 3 and 6 August 1940, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR admitted Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia as union republics, and the Estonian army was converted into the Red Army’s 22nd Territorial Rifle Corps, many of whose officers were arrested even before the war with Germany. The mass deportation of 14 June 1941, which in Estonia affected some ten thousand people and in the three countries more than 40,000, was a direct continuation of what had begun with the leaders in July 1940.

The abduction of the head of state, however, had a consequence that Moscow had not foreseen. Because Päts had been removed by force and could not freely exercise his office, and because his acts of June and July 1940 had been made under duress, Estonia in exile held that his duties had passed in turn to Uluots, Rei and the prime ministers of the government-in-exile. As early as 23 July 1940, in the Welles Declaration, the United States refused to recognise the annexation of the Baltic states, and most Western countries maintained that position for half a century. In 1992 the last prime minister in exile handed over his powers to the newly elected president of independent Estonia.

Both men remain controversial in Estonia. Päts and Laidoner are remembered as founders of the state and victors of the War of Independence, but also as the authors of the 1934 coup and as men who in 1939–1940 chose concessions without a fight, did not mobilise the army and did not appeal to the nation. Their exile and death in captivity showed that this strategy saved neither the state nor themselves. Päts’s remains were brought back to Tallinn in 1990 and buried in Metsakalmistu cemetery; Laidoner has a symbolic grave in Tallinn beside his wife and son, and his former estate at Viimsi now houses the Estonian War Museum, which bears his name.