The Otto Tief government

On the evening of 18 September 1944 Jüri Uluots, the last constitutional Prime Minister of Estonia, who since 1940 had regarded himself as Prime Minister acting in place of the President, handed his deputy, Otto Tief, an order to form a government. According to Estonian accounts, it read: “The Germans are withdrawing from Estonia. It is time to act! Gather the members of the government and set to work.” The day before, the German Generalkommissar, Karl-Siegmund Litzmann, had informed Hjalmar Mäe, the head of the Estonian Self-Administration, that the Reich was leaving the country. Between the departing German occupation and the approaching Red Army a gap of a few days had opened. Tief’s government tried to use it to restore an independent state before Soviet troops entered Tallinn.

The brief history of the Tief government falls into four dates: 18 September (the appointment of the government), 20 September (the takeover of the government buildings on Toompea, the appeal to the USSR and the great flight of Estonians across the sea), 21 September (the printing of the official gazette and the flight of the government) and 24 September (the dispersal of the cabinet on the west coast). The capture of Tallinn itself on 22 September was a separate chapter in these events.

The “third way” plan

The idea was not improvised. Since February 1944 the National Committee of the Estonian Republic, which brought together politicians of the former democratic parties, had been active underground. In a manifesto dated 23 June it proclaimed the continuity of the state and the nullity of the Soviet annexation of 1940, and in mid-August Tief – a lawyer, a veteran of the War of Independence and a former minister – became its chairman. The committee and Uluots had no illusions about Germany, but they feared even more the return of the power that in 1940–1941 had carried out arrests and deportations. That was why, in February and in August, Uluots had called on his compatriots to fight in the German ranks.

Behind this strategy lay a calculation that Estonian historians call the “third way”. Neither Germany nor the USSR intended to restore Estonia’s independence; hope lay with the Western powers and the Atlantic Charter, which promised that after the war there would be no territorial changes against the wishes of the peoples concerned. The plan assumed that at the moment of the German departure a legal government would be formed in Tallinn, take power and appeal to the West for help. A Soviet attack would then be directed against an existing, independent state, and not – as Moscow claimed – amount to the “liberation” of a Soviet republic. The German security services understood these intentions: according to Estonian figures, in April 1944 they arrested nearly 500 people connected with the committee, accusing them of spying for Britain.

September brought opportunity and catastrophe at the same time. On 4 September Finland ceased hostilities with the USSR, and holding mainland Estonia lost its point for the Germans. On 14 September three Baltic Fronts opened the offensive towards Riga, which became part of the Baltic offensive. On 16 September Hitler conditionally agreed to the evacuation of Estonia in Operation Aster, and on 17 September the 2nd Shock Army broke through the defences on the Emajõgi river near Tartu. Army Detachment Narwa began to retreat towards Latvia and the ports.

A cabinet for a few days

The government was appointed by an order of 18 September, announced on Uluots’s behalf by the State Secretary. Tief became Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior; formally, Uluots, gravely ill with stomach cancer, remained Prime Minister acting in place of the President. The cabinet included, among others, Arnold Susi (education), Kaarel Liidak (agriculture), Hugo Pärtelpoeg (finance), Voldemar Sumberg (social affairs), Juhan Pikkov (communications) and Juhan Kaarlimäe (minister without portfolio, head of the information centre). The foreign affairs portfolio went to the Social Democrat August Rei, then in Sweden, and justice to Johannes Klesment, who was to accompany Uluots on his journey to Stockholm. General Johan Holberg, designated Minister of War, refused to take office and announced that he was leaving the country. General Jaan Maide was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces.

The cabinet was dominated by politicians of the former democratic parties, many of whom had criticised the authoritarian rule of Konstantin Päts after 1934. The government nevertheless invoked the 1938 constitution, adopted under Päts, because it was on that constitution that Uluots’s title to exercise authority rested. Therein lay its legal strength: it was not a self-appointed committee but – as Estonian lawyers understood it – the last legally constituted government of the Republic.

On the morning of 20 September Uluots, accompanied by Klesment, left Estonia and sailed for Sweden. The same day the government held its first meeting in Tallinn, and the underground National Committee ceased its activity, handing authority over to the cabinet. The first issue of the revived official gazette, Riigi Teataja, also appeared, carrying the order appointing the government, dated 18 September. According to Estonian researchers, Holberg’s name no longer appeared in that issue; years later, in exile, this gave rise to a dispute over whether the printed text or the handwritten original of the order was binding.

Toompea and the flag on Tall Hermann

On 20 September the government took over the government buildings on Toompea hill and appealed to the Soviet Union to recognise Estonia’s independence. The Germans did not defend Tallinn; their troops and administration were evacuating hastily to the harbour. According to some accounts, Estonian units clashed with the retreating Germans and occupied the offices on Toompea; others speak rather of taking over buildings that were being abandoned and of seizing some of the Germans’ weapons. It was therefore not the capture of the castle in battle, but the assumption of power in a city that the occupier was in the act of leaving.

The best-known symbol of those days was the blue, black and white flag on the Tall Hermann tower (Pikk Hermann), which rises above the castle on Toompea – the seat of the Estonian authorities. Accounts differ as to the day it was raised. The Estonian White Book on the losses inflicted by the occupations, compiled by a state commission, states that the flag flew there on 21 and 22 September; other sources link its raising to 20 September. They agree about its end: on 22 September, after the Red Army entered, it was torn down and replaced by the red banner.

The government announced that it was assuming its duties, restoring the continuity of the Republic of Estonia and remaining neutral in the ongoing war. On 21 September it also informed the outside world of this by radio. The declaration to the world and to the Estonian nation was never printed in a full run, however: according to Estonian accounts, Soviet bombing cut off the printing works’ electricity. The White Book lists two issues of Riigi Teataja in all and the government’s declaration of neutrality, published before the Soviet troops entered; popular summaries speak of a few hundred copies of the gazette printed on 21 September. The print run was in any case symbolic, but it was precisely these sheets that later became evidence that a legal government of an independent state was functioning in Tallinn at the moment the Red Army marched in.

The appeal to Moscow, mentioned in English-language studies, was a gesture with no prospect of success. The USSR had regarded Estonia as a Soviet republic since August 1940 and had no intention of dealing with a government that invoked the pre-war constitution. The Western powers also remained silent; no state recognised a cabinet that controlled nothing beyond part of the capital and lacked the strength to hold it.

A government without an army

The “third way” plan assumed that the government would rely on the Estonian soldiers retreating from the Narva and the Emajõgi. This failed. The Estonian units were scattered and mixed up with the German columns heading for Latvia, and some of them were destroyed on 20–21 September at Lake Porkuni and near Avinurme by advancing Soviet units, among them the 8th Estonian Rifle Corps, made up largely of Estonians. General Maide had only a few small groups under his nominal command: the detachment of Rear Admiral Johan Pitka, the legendary naval commander of the War of Independence, who fought on the approaches to the capital with some 600 volunteers; some of the “Finnish Boys” – soldiers returning from the Finnish army; and units of the Omakaitse Home Guard. According to estimates cited in English-language studies, the forces supporting independence numbered about 2,000 men, against tens of thousands of soldiers of the Leningrad Front.

The government had to flee before the Soviet advance. Most of the ministers left Tallinn on 21 September, Tief and the last members of the cabinet on 22 September, a few hours before a Soviet mobile group entered the city. At Pääsküla, on the outskirts of the capital, the “Finnish Boys” fought the last skirmish in defence of Tallinn. Pitka’s detachment withdrew through Keila to the west coast; the admiral himself went missing in the second half of September, and it is still not known whether he was killed in action or died at sea.

Põgari: the boat that came too late

The members of the government gathered in western Estonia, in the village of Põgari on the Puise coast in Lääne County, where they waited for a promised boat from Sweden. On 24 September Soviet troops occupied Haapsalu and the coast as far as Virtsu; the ministers were still waiting on the shore, and the boat arrived only on 29 September. Only the State Secretary, Helmut Maandi, left on it. The others scattered and went into hiding.

Most of them fell into the hands of the Soviet security services over the following weeks. Tief was arrested by the NKVD on 10 October; sentenced to ten years in the Gulag, he served his sentence in Siberia and Kazakhstan, was then prevented for years from returning to Estonia, and died in 1976. Susi, Sumberg and Kaarlimäe went through the camps; Pärtelpoeg and Pikkov died in the Gulag. According to the White Book, General Maide and the head of internal security, Juhan Reigo, were executed, and the acting State Auditor, Oskar Gustavson, died in 1945 after jumping from the window of an NKGB interrogation room in Tallinn. Liidak hid under a false name and died in January 1945. Uluots, who had reached Sweden, died in Stockholm on 9 January 1945; before his death he passed his powers to August Rei.

The great flight

The collapse of the German front set off the largest exodus in Estonia’s history. People had been fleeing since August, but the peak came on 19–23 September. Estonian estimates of the number of refugees range from 70,000 to 80,000, or about 7 per cent of the pre-war population (the White Book states that some 70,000 reached their destination). According to the White Book, about 25,000 people made it to neutral Sweden (other Estonian estimates put the figure at nearly 30,000), some 6,000 to Finland, and the largest number – about 40,000 – left for the Reich on German ships and overland. The route to Sweden was usually covered in fishing boats and small craft; how many of them were lost on the autumn sea cannot be established, and Estonian estimates of the losses among those fleeing reach 6–9 per cent. After the Moscow Armistice the Estonians in Finland had to move on to Sweden, because the USSR regarded them as its citizens and demanded their extradition.

Almost all the Estonian Swedes, a centuries-old minority from the coast and islands, left Estonia. Most of them, however, had left the country earlier, in an organised evacuation carried out with the consent of the German authorities from 1943; in the summer of 1944 some 3,700 people were officially transported. September was the last wave. According to the research cited in the White Book, some 7,900 Estonian Swedes in all reached Sweden. In Sweden the refugees found shelter in schools, churches and community halls; their boats were confiscated and in 1945 handed over to the Soviet Union. According to the White Book, more than 12,000 refugees had been repatriated to Estonia by 1 March 1945; most of the rest formed the nucleus of the Estonian diaspora in Sweden, Canada, the United States and Australia.

Significance

Militarily, the Tief government changed nothing. It lasted four days in Tallinn and a few more on the coast, and it had no army, no recognition and no contact with the outside world apart from the radio and a few printed sheets. Its defeat was sealed by decisions taken far from Estonia: Finland’s exit from the war, Hitler’s order to abandon mainland Estonia, and the silence of the Western powers, which in 1944 had no intention of quarrelling with the USSR over the Baltic states. By the end of November the Red Army had also occupied the West Estonian islands, and Sovietisation began in the country: arrests and, in 1949, mass deportation and the collectivisation of agriculture.

The government’s significance lay elsewhere – in law. For Soviet historiography September 1944 was the “liberation of Tallinn”, and Estonia had been a Soviet republic since 1940. The existence of a government appointed in accordance with the constitution, which had proclaimed the continuity of the state and whose flag was flying on Toompea when the Red Army marched in, became an argument against that version. On it, alongside Uluots’s appointment, rested the concept of the legal continuity of the Republic of Estonia. August Rei, Uluots’s successor, formed a government-in-exile in Oslo in 1953. In October 1992 Heinrich Mark, the last Prime Minister in exile acting in place of the President, handed over his credentials to the newly elected President of Estonia. Estonia, restored in 1991, regarded itself not as a new state but as the continuation of the republic of 1918–1940.

Tief died in 1976 in hospital at Ahja; he was buried quietly in Tallinn’s Pärnamäe cemetery, and in 1993, in an independent Estonia, he was ceremonially reburied in the Forest Cemetery (Metsakalmistu). Since 2007 22 September, the day the government fell, has been observed in Estonia as Resistance Fighting Day (Vastupanuvõitluse päev), and in 2012 a cenotaph to the members of the cabinet who lie in unknown graves was unveiled in Tallinn’s Forest Cemetery. Some of Estonia’s Russian-speaking inhabitants still mark the same date as the day of the liberation of Tallinn – which shows clearly how differently September 1944 is remembered on the two sides.