The National Committee of the Estonian Republic

On 14 February 1944 the first meeting of the clandestine National Committee of the Estonian Republic (Eesti Vabariigi Rahvuskomitee) took place in Ernst Kull’s flat at Pärnu maantee 23 in Tallinn. It brought together representatives of all the parties that had been active in Estonia up to the referendum of 1933, apart from the Communists, and of the two largest underground groups. The committee was to prepare for the moment on which many Estonians were counting: a German withdrawal ahead of the Red Army’s arrival, and a brief chance to proclaim the restoration of an independent state in the gap between the two.

The date of this event is given in different ways. In many accounts, especially in English, the committee is held to have been founded on 23 March 1944. On that day, at its second meeting, in Tartu, it adopted its programmatic principles and elected a board. Estonian sources, however, indicate that the first meeting was held on 14 February in Tallinn, so that date marks the beginning of the committee’s activity, while 23 March was the day on which it formally constituted itself.

The underground between two occupations

Estonia lost its independence in June 1940, when after a Soviet ultimatum its government was replaced, and in August the USSR incorporated it. President Konstantin Päts was deported deep into Russia. In the summer of 1941 the Germans arrived, but instead of a state they gave the Estonians Hjalmar Mäe’s Self-Administration, subordinate to the German Generalkommissar. Disappointment soon turned into hostility, especially once conscription began for the police battalions, the SS Legion and the labour service.

It was against this background that the underground emerged. It did not wage armed struggle against the Germans, since their withdrawal was expected anyway and the greatest threat remained the return of the USSR. It concentrated on the clandestine press, contacts abroad and preparing the future authorities. In the autumn of 1941 Heinrich Mark and his associates founded the group from which the committee later grew. In August 1942 Juhan Reigo and Endel Inglist set up the Front for the Struggle for a Free Estonia, which published the newspaper Vaba Eesti. In 1943 Ernst Kull began uniting the various groups into a common representative body. The proximity of Finland and Sweden made communication easier: couriers and motor boats plied the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic, and Estonian diplomats in Helsinki and Stockholm passed messages on to London.

February 1944

The meeting of 14 February was called at a moment when the war had returned to Estonia. On 2 February the Red Army reached the Narva and seized bridgeheads on its western bank, beginning the fighting at Narva. On that same 14 February Soviet naval infantry landed at Mereküla in the rear of the German defences. On 1 February the occupiers had proclaimed a general mobilisation of men from twenty age groups, and on 7 February it was backed on the radio by Jüri Uluots, the last constitutional prime minister, who since June 1940 had regarded himself as acting president. His call for mobilisation was meant to give Estonia an army of its own for the moment of Germany’s collapse. The committee looked at the same moment from the political side: it wanted an authority capable of speaking for the state to exist at the moment the Germans withdrew.

The committee’s members believed that the Western Allies would not hand the Baltic states over to Stalin. They dismissed as a lie the German propaganda that kept repeating that Estonia had already been promised to the USSR. On 9 February 1944 August Rei, a pre-war Social Democratic head of state and a member of the movement’s foreign centre in Stockholm, gave an assurance in an interview with Dagens Nyheter that the fate of the Baltic peoples would remain open until the peace conference. The committee also passed intelligence on German forces in Estonia to the Finns and the Western Allies.

The committee and Uluots

The initiative came from the parties that before 1934 had been in opposition to Päts, and later to his authoritarian rule. For that reason the committee at first did not recognise the constitutional powers of Uluots, who in 1937–1940 had led the Patriotic League, the only legal political organisation of that period, and was one of the authors of the constitution adopted in 1937 and in force from 1938. Sources describe the subsequent relations between the two sides in different ways. Estonian accounts stress that the committee questioned Uluots’s mandate throughout, while English-language ones write that Uluots and his supporters soon joined the initiative. What is certain is that each side needed the other: the committee had no legal continuity with the pre-war republic, which only the person of the last constitutional prime minister could provide, and Uluots had no political base in the country. From April they worked together in practice.

On 23 March in Tartu the committee adopted its principles and elected a board. It was chaired by Kaarel Liidak, with Juhan Reigo as secretary. The committee declared itself the body exercising state authority until the constitutional organs of the republic were able to resume their functions.

Arrests

The German Security Police and the SD knew more about the underground than the conspirators supposed. On 19 and 20 April 1944 they carried out a wave of arrests. Estonian accounts speak of nearly 400 nationalists detained, English-language ones of about 200. Among them were many of the committee’s members, and Kaarel Liidak ceased to lead it at that point. For the leaders who escaped arrest, the round-up paralysed work for several weeks, and activity revived only in June.

Despite this, on 20 April – in June, according to some sources – the electoral body provided for in the constitution for choosing a deputy for the president met secretly in Tallinn. It declared that the appointment of Johannes Vares as prime minister in June 1940 had been illegal and that the duties of head of state had been exercised by Uluots since 21 June 1940. Uluots soon appointed Alfred Maurer and Otto Tief as deputy prime ministers. On 1 August the committee proclaimed itself the provisional supreme organ of state authority in occupied Estonia. Its membership was kept secret, and from August it was chaired by Tief. Politicians living in Sweden and Finland were also co-opted onto the committee.

The committee tried to bring home the Estonian volunteers fighting in Finland in the 200th Infantry Regiment. At the beginning of August the envoy in Helsinki, Aleksander Warma, made public the committee’s telegram with the words “Estonians, come home!”. Most of them did return and were sent to the front in southern Estonia.

September 1944

In September 1944 the Germans began to leave mainland Estonia. On 18 September Uluots, gravely ill with cancer, entrusted Tief with the duties of prime minister and appointed an eleven-member government. Some members of the committee joined this cabinet. On 19 September the committee met for the last time and considered whether at least part of the country could be held in order to restore the republic de facto, but no decision was taken. On 20 September it ceased its activity, and the Tief government took over. The blue, black and white flag was raised on the Pikk Hermann tower on Tallinn’s Toompea. Units under Rear Admiral Johan Pitka clashed with the retreating Germans and with the advancing Soviet troops. That same day Uluots left the country and sailed for Sweden.

On 22 September the Red Army entered Tallinn. Most members of the government had left the city the day before, and Tief on 22 September. They tried to get to Sweden or to hide in the west of the country. Pitka disappeared and, according to the most likely version, was killed in the autumn of 1944. Tief was arrested by the NKVD on 10 October, and a year later he was sentenced to ten years in the Gulag. After his release he was required to live in Ukraine, and later just across the Estonian border in Latvia, where he died in 1976. The Soviet authorities refused to allow him to be buried in Estonia. Members of the committee and the government who had stayed in the country were tried for “treason against the motherland”. The Western Allies did not intercede on their behalf.

Place in the war

The National Committee was unable to do what it had been created for. In 1944 there was no moment at which an independent state could have emerged between the German retreat and the Soviet advance. Unlike in 1918, no great power had any interest in it, and at the Tehran Conference the Western leaders had not opposed Soviet claims to the Baltic states – something the Estonians did not know. Throughout its existence the committee was in practice an underground organisation without an army and without territory.

Its significance, however, proved lasting. The electoral body of 1944 and Uluots’s appointments provided the basis for the legal continuity of the Republic of Estonia. The government-in-exile survived until 1992, when the last prime minister acting as president, Heinrich Mark, handed over his mandate to the newly elected President Lennart Meri. Thanks to this continuity, the Estonia that regained independence in 1991 regarded itself not as a new state but as the continuation of the republic of 1918, occupied in 1940–1991. The Tief government and the committee that preceded it occupy an important place in this construct, and 22 September is marked in Estonia as Resistance Day.