The Red Army enters Estonia

On 18 October 1939 units of the Red Army crossed Estonia’s land border. The columns moved along two main roads: from Narva through Kohila and Keila to the port of Paldiski and the area around Haapsalu, and from Izborsk, then part of Estonia’s Petseri County, through Võru and Pärnu towards the islands. Eighty-two trains brought troops and equipment by rail. The entry proceeded calmly and in accordance with protocols agreed a few days earlier, and the Estonian authorities took care that no incident should occur. It was the first time that Soviet ground forces had entered one of the Baltic states under a pact of mutual assistance, which Estonia had signed under the threat of war on 28 September. On the same day the first ship carrying Baltic Germans sailed from the port of Tallinn; at Hitler’s call they were leaving a country in which their ancestors had lived for seven hundred years.

From the pact to the garrisons

The pact and its confidential protocol allowed the Soviet Union to establish naval and air bases on the islands of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa and at Paldiski, and to keep up to 25,000 ground and air force troops in Estonia. The details were settled by a joint military commission that sat in Tallinn from 2 to 10 October. The Soviet delegation was led by the commander of the Leningrad Military District, Kirill Meretskov, and the Estonian delegation by the Chief of the Army Staff, General Nikolai Reek. The Russians demanded more than the pact provided for: as early as 30 September the People’s Commissar for Defence had ordered the Leningrad Military District to station troops not only at the bases but also in the areas of Haapsalu, Tallinn, Viljandi, Valga, Pärnu and Paide. The Estonians managed to fend off some of these demands, but not all. In protocols signed on 10 and 11 October the USSR obtained sites for its garrisons, the right to build coastal batteries, anti-aircraft artillery positions and observation posts, and, for two years, the right to use the ports of Tallinn and Rohuküla.

The fleet came first. On 11 October the flotilla leader Minsk and three destroyers entered the Tallinn roadstead, followed a few days later by warships led by the battleship Oktyabrskaya Revolyutsiya with the cruiser Kirov. The inhabitants of Paldiski, where the most important base was to be built, were resettled by the Estonian authorities before the Russians even arrived, so as to carry out the pact to the letter and give Moscow no pretext for accusations.

Soldiers in an alien world

The ground forces were organised as the 65th Special Rifle Corps, with its headquarters at Haapsalu, under the command of Aleksandr Tyurin. As of 1 May 1940 there were 21,347 soldiers, 283 tanks, 54 armoured cars and 255 aircraft in Estonia, not counting the fleet and the coastal units. In February 1940 the Estonian government protested that the Soviet contingent already numbered some 27,300 men, exceeding the agreed 25,000. Moscow also demanded thousands of labourers and engineer battalions for the construction of the bases.

Soviet soldiers and officers, brought up on propaganda about poverty in the capitalist countries, were astonished at the standard of living and the well-stocked shops. They asked how long the Estonian government would be able to keep up this “show”. For the time being Moscow took care not to arouse alarm. On 23 October Molotov admonished the Soviet minister in Tallinn, Kuzma Nikitin, by telegram that any encouragement of sentiment in favour of the “Sovietisation” of Estonia, or even failure to oppose it, served only the enemies of the USSR, and that Soviet personnel, including the military, were to adhere strictly to the pact and to the principle of non-interference in Estonia’s affairs. At the end of October Stalin explained to the head of the Comintern, Georgi Dimitrov, as Dimitrov recorded in his diary, that in the mutual assistance pacts with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania a form had been found that made it possible to draw these countries into the Soviet Union’s orbit; that there was no need to seek their Sovietisation for the present; and that “the time will come when they will do it themselves”.

Estonia was the first, but not the only one. Latvia had signed a similar pact on 5 October, and the first Soviet troop trains crossed its border on 29 October. Lithuania, which in exchange for Soviet garrisons had received Wilno (Vilnius), let them in in mid-November.

Umsiedlung

The departure of the Baltic Germans was the other side of the same partition of Eastern Europe. Once it became clear after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact that Estonia and Latvia would fall within the Soviet sphere, the leaders of the German communities there began to press Berlin for the evacuation of the whole group. Hitler agreed, subject to an arrangement with Moscow, and a confidential protocol to the Boundary and Friendship Treaty of 28 September obliged the USSR not to hinder persons of German descent from moving to the German sphere. On 6 October, in his Reichstag speech, Hitler announced “a new ordering of ethnographic conditions” in Eastern Europe and the resettlement of national minorities so as to remove sources of conflict. The next day he appointed Heinrich Himmler Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of German Nationhood, and Himmler instructed Reinhard Heydrich to set up a central office to register and naturalise the newcomers.

The Baltic Germans learned of the operation on 8 October, and the next day their newspapers published the call to leave, presented as a “return to the Reich”, although their ancestors had never lived in it. Departure was formally voluntary, but propaganda, pressure from the community’s leadership, the promise of compensation and the threat that anyone who stayed behind would be regarded as a traitor to the nation meant that almost the entire minority left. On 15 October Estonia and Germany signed a protocol on the resettlement. Those who left lost their Estonian citizenship, and the German schools were closed as early as 16 October. On 18 October the first ship, the Utlandshörn, sailed from Tallinn, followed in the next few days by others from Tallinn, Pärnu and Kuressaare. The sailings continued until 14 December. According to the figure most often given, 12,600 Baltic Germans left Estonia. Estonian and German studies give figures ranging from about 12,600 to 14,000, depending on whether they count only the autumn transports or also departures up to the spring of 1940. From Latvia, where there were four times as many Germans, some 50,000 left. Latvia signed the resettlement agreement on 30 October, and the first ships carrying its citizens sailed from Riga at the beginning of November.

Place in the war

The ships carrying the resettlers docked at Gdynia, which the Germans had renamed Gotenhafen. The Baltic Germans were settled in the Polish lands annexed to the Reich, above all in Arthur Greiser’s Reichsgau Wartheland (the Warthegau) and in Danzig-West Prussia. They were given flats, workshops and farms taken from Poles and Jews, who were being deported to the General Government at the same time, and their “compensation” for the property left behind on the Baltic was paid out of this plundered property. The resettlement from Estonia and Latvia was the first large-scale Heim ins Reich operation, followed by the resettlement of Germans from Volhynia, Galicia, Bessarabia and Bukovina. In the spring of 1941, in the so-called Nachumsiedlung, some 17,000 more people left the Baltic states, by then occupied by the USSR, among them many Estonians and Latvians fleeing Sovietisation. In 1945 the resettlers in the Warthegau had to flee west before the Red Army.

The garrisons that entered Estonia on 18 October played their part only a few weeks later: during the Winter War aircraft bombing Finland took off from airfields in Estonia, and the Estonian government protested against landings outside the designated bases. In June 1940 they became a ready-made bridgehead for occupation. On 16 June Molotov presented Estonia with an ultimatum, the next day the Red Army occupied the whole country, and on 6 August 1940 Estonia was incorporated into the USSR. President Konstantin Päts and General Johan Laidoner were deported into the interior of the USSR and died there, and in June 1941 the NKVD deported thousands of Estonians to Siberia. Paldiski, cleared of its inhabitants in October 1939 for the Soviet base, remained a closed military town until 1994.