The Red Army enters Latvia and Estonia

At dawn on 17 June 1940 columns of the Red Army crossed the borders of Latvia and Estonia. They entered Tallinn from the sea and from the bases the USSR had held in Estonia since the autumn; in Riga the tanks rolled in during the early afternoon. No one fired: the day before, the governments of both states had accepted Soviet ultimatums and ordered their armies not to resist. In the evening the Latvian President, Kārlis Ulmanis, said on the radio: “I will remain in my place; you remain in yours.” Two days earlier the same fate had befallen Lithuania. By 18 June, when France was already asking the Germans for an armistice and the world was watching Bordeaux and London, all three Baltic states were under Soviet occupation. Formally they existed for another seven weeks.

War chronologies spread these events over several days: on 9 June the Red Army is said to have provoked clashes on the Latvian border, on 16 June the USSR gave Latvia and Estonia an eight-hour ultimatum, on 17 June Soviet troops entered both countries, and by 18 June Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were occupied. Two clarifications are needed. No border incident is recorded for 9 June. What happened that day was the signing in Moscow of the directive that set the whole operation in motion, while the bloody raid on the Latvian posts near Masļenki took place on 15 June. The ultimatums of 16 June, for their part, allowed about nine hours: Latvia until 11 p.m., Estonia until midnight.

Preparations

Latvia and Estonia had had Soviet garrisons since the autumn of 1939. Estonia signed a mutual assistance pact on 28 September, and the Red Army entered its bases on 18 October. Latvia signed hers on 5 October and admitted 25,000 soldiers to Liepāja, Ventspils and the coast of Courland. Through the winter Moscow observed the principle of non-interference and praised its relations with its neighbours as exemplary. In the spring the Soviet press began attacking Ulmanis’s government, and in May and June, as the Germans were breaking through the front in France, the Kremlin decided that it was time to finish the Baltic business before the war in the West was decided. On 25 May Vyacheslav Molotov accused Lithuania of abducting Soviet soldiers, and in June all three states were charged with a secret military alliance against the USSR. The supposed evidence was the meetings within the Baltic Entente, which had never been a military alliance.

On 3 June all Soviet troops stationed in the Baltic states were placed under a single commander, the Deputy People’s Commissar for Defence, Aleksandr Loktionov. From 4 June, under the pretext of exercises, units of the Leningrad, Kalinin and Belorussian military districts moved towards the borders. On 9 June the People’s Commissar for Defence, Semyon Timoshenko, and the Chief of the General Staff, Boris Shaposhnikov, signed Directive No. 02622: by 12 June the Baltic Fleet and the Leningrad Military District were to prepare the seizure of Estonian and Latvian warships and merchant vessels, a blockade of the coasts, landings at Tallinn and Paldiski, and a land offensive against Estonia. That same day the Deputy People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs reported to the Politburo that NKVD convoy troops were ready to receive the disarmed soldiers of the Baltic armies in eight camps. This is the only event of 9 June that can be connected with the Latvian border. According to Latvian studies, some 450,000 soldiers, 8,000 guns and mortars, more than 3,000 tanks and 2,600 aircraft were earmarked for the operation. The entire Latvian Army numbered fewer than 31,000 men on 1 June; the Estonian was not much larger.

On 14 June, the day the Germans entered Paris, the naval and air blockade came into force. That afternoon Soviet bombers shot down the Finnish airliner Kaleva, which was flying from Tallinn to Helsinki. Before midnight Molotov handed an ultimatum to Lithuania, and on 15 June, as the Red Army was entering Lithuania, units of the NKVD Border Troops attacked the Latvian border guard posts of Masļenki and Šmaiļi at dawn, in the Abrene district – today Pytalovo in Russia. Three Latvian border guards and two civilians were killed, and 37 people, most of them civilians, including women and children, were abducted to the USSR. The government in Riga opened an investigation and put the army on alert, but with Soviet bases on its own territory it could do nothing more.

The ultimatums

At 2 p.m. on 16 June Molotov summoned the Latvian Minister, Fricis Kociņš (PL), to the Kremlin and read him a note from the Soviet government. In the afternoon the Estonian Minister, August Rei, received a similar document. Both notes began with a long indictment: Latvia and Estonia had concluded a military alliance with Lithuania directed against the USSR, had drawn Lithuania into the Baltic Entente, and had thereby flagrantly violated the mutual assistance pacts. There were two demands. Governments “capable and willing” to carry out the pacts honestly were to be formed at once in both countries, and Soviet troops were to be given free entry to their territory, to be stationed in the most important centres “in sufficient numbers” to prevent provocations against the Soviet garrisons. Latvia was to reply by 11 p.m., Estonia by midnight. Molotov warned that if no reply came, the Red Army would march in and crush all resistance.

In the evening the governments met in Riga and Tallinn. The picture was the same as it had been in Kaunas the day before. No help could come from outside: France was collapsing, Britain was thinking about defending its own islands, and Germany, which in August 1939 had itself ceded the Baltic states to the Soviet sphere of influence, had no intention of interfering. According to some Latvian sources, Ulmanis also asked the German Minister for permission to evacuate the government and army through Klaipėda (Memel), but did not receive it. Soviet troops were already in the country, whole armies were waiting on the borders, and the fleet was blockading the ports. Resistance would have meant the destruction of the cities and a hopeless war. The Estonian government noted, moreover, that the note did not demand a change of political system, the repudiation of the Treaty of Tartu or incorporation into the USSR, and deluded itself that Moscow did not intend to destroy the state. Both governments accepted the ultimatums. In Estonia the Foreign Minister, Ants Piip, informed the Soviet Minister; the government resigned, and President Konstantin Päts accepted its resignation. In the evening the radio announced that additional Soviet units would arrive in the country the next day. The Latvian government likewise accepted the demands and tendered its resignation to Ulmanis.

17 June

The troops did not wait for formalities. In Estonia the commander of the Leningrad Military District, Kirill Meretskov, informed the Commander-in-Chief of the Estonian Army, General Johan Laidoner, on 16 June that his Tenth Army had been ordered to march in, and summoned him to talks at Narva at 8 a.m. Laidoner left by train at midnight. At Jõhvi he already saw Soviet armoured cars, and beyond Jõhvi a line of infantry advancing across the fields in battle order. Soviet troops had crossed the border at 5 a.m., three hours before the talks. At 6 a.m. they took the Suurupi coastal battery; at 6.30 a.m. they landed on the island of Aegna, where an Estonian battery fired a single warning shot before the order to cease resistance arrived; and at 7 a.m. they began occupying Naissaar. Soviet warships lay in the roads off Tallinn, and units from the bases at Paldiski and Klooga were taking over Estonian barracks. At Narva Meretskov placed before Laidoner a text brought from Moscow and for six hours would not allow a single word of it to be changed. At 3 p.m. the two men signed a protocol that gave the Red Army the right to occupy military installations and set up commandant’s offices and airfields, and obliged Estonia to disarm the Defence League within 48 hours. Signed after the event, the document was meant to give an appearance of legality to what had already happened.

In Latvia things went much the same way. At 9 a.m. the commander of the Belorussian Special Military District, General Dmitry Pavlov, met a Latvian colonel, Otto Ūdentiņš, who at 1 p.m. signed a secret agreement on the “temporary” stationing of Soviet units in nine localities, Riga included. Units of the 8th and 2nd Armies did not wait for the signatures and crossed the border in the morning. At about 1 p.m. the first tanks drove into Riga and took up positions at the main crossroads. Soldiers occupied Spilve airfield, the railway stations, the bridges, the central post office, the telegraph office and the radio station, and throughout the country government buildings, telephone exchanges, banks and printing works. According to Latvian studies, nine divisions – some 90,000 men – crossed the border, while 25,000 were already waiting in the bases. From that moment every report in the Latvian press and on the radio passed through Soviet censorship. In Riga and other towns the newcomers were greeted by small groups of local communists and sympathisers, and the Soviet newsreel carefully recorded these welcomes. Most of the inhabitants watched the tanks in silence.

In the evening Ulmanis spoke from a broadcasting station already controlled by the Russians. He said that the troops were entering with the knowledge and consent of the government, called for calm and ended with a sentence that has gone down in Latvian history: “Es palikšu savā vietā, jūs palieciet savās vietās” – “I will remain in my place; you remain in yours.” Historians still argue over whether he was moved by concern to avoid bloodshed, by the belief that he could preserve the remnants of sovereignty, or by the illusion that Moscow needed him as a guarantor of order. In a country with the tradition of the War of Independence of 1918–1920, the sentence was remembered as a symbol of capitulation without a fight. That same day Timoshenko sent Joseph Stalin a report proposing that the border with East Prussia be manned at once by Soviet border troops, that the armies of the occupied republics be disarmed and disbanded, that the population and police be disarmed, that the Red Army take over the guarding of all installations, and that “Sovietisation begin”. In it he called states that were still formally independent “occupied republics”.

The Kremlin’s emissaries

The governments no longer had any say. In each capital an envoy from Moscow appeared, who from then on appointed ministers and stage-managed events. In Lithuania Molotov’s deputy, Vladimir Dekanozov, had been at work since 15 June. To Riga, on 18 June (according to some sources as early as 17 June), came Andrei Vyshinsky, Deputy Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, known to the whole world as the prosecutor at the Moscow show trials. He introduced himself to Ulmanis as the Soviet government’s special envoy. On 19 June Andrei Zhdanov, a Secretary of the Central Committee and head of the Leningrad party organisation, arrived in Tallinn; he called on Päts, met the commanders of the Soviet units and began looking for people for a new government. The choice of emissaries was telling: to Estonia, Leningrad’s neighbour, Moscow sent the master of that city, who during the Winter War had sat on the military council of the Leningrad Military District; to Latvia, a man whose name was associated with the Great Terror.

On 18 June, under pressure from the occupiers, a state of emergency was declared in Latvia, restricting among other things freedom of movement. In Estonia the Russians demanded that the authorities hand over by 19 June dozens of buildings, including hotels and flats in Raua Street in Tallinn, for the headquarters of the Baltic Fleet. That same day Molotov summoned the German Ambassador, Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg, to offer him his “warmest congratulations” on the Wehrmacht’s successes in France, and explained that it had been necessary to put an end to British and French intrigues in the Baltic states. Berlin took note. Thus by 18 June Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were occupied by the Soviet Union. Several hundred thousand Soviet soldiers were moving across their territory, their armies were confined to barracks, and their governments, which still formally existed, were carrying out the instructions of the Soviet legations.

The appearance of continuity

What distinguished the occupation of the Baltic states from the attack on Poland in September 1939 or the war with Finland was the care Moscow took to keep up appearances. No one declared war and no one fired on the armies. The troops came in “at the invitation” of governments that had accepted ultimatums. Presidents Ulmanis and Päts, unlike Smetona in Lithuania, stayed in their countries, and their signatures on one decree after another were meant to show that everything was being done in accordance with the constitution. By 21 July Ulmanis had signed more than 50 laws that helped dismantle Latvian statehood. Both he and Päts probably hoped that by yielding on everything they would save at least a shadow of independence. In reality they gave Moscow exactly what it needed.

During those days some still harboured illusions. In Estonia some politicians believed that it was only a matter of replacing the government with one more favourable to Moscow. In Latvia the commander of the border guard brigade, General Ludvigs Bolšteins, had no illusions: on 21 June, unwilling to collaborate with the occupier, he shot himself in his office.

Place in the war

The next steps followed a single script in all three countries. On 20 and 21 June “popular” demonstrations were organised in Riga and Tallinn under the cover of Soviet tanks, after which governments were formed under the microbiologist Augusts Kirhenšteins in Latvia and the poet Johannes Vares in Estonia; in Tallinn a signals battalion was the only unit to offer armed resistance. On 14 and 15 July elections were held with a single list of candidates. According to contemporary accounts, the Soviet results were announced so hastily that in London they were printed before the polling stations had closed. On 21 July the new parliaments asked for admission to the USSR, and on 5 and 6 August the Supreme Soviet admitted Latvia and Estonia as the Latvian and Estonian SSRs. Ulmanis was arrested on 22 July and deported to Voroshilovsk; Päts was deported a few days later to Bashkiria. Both died in captivity, as did Laidoner. On 14 June 1941, the anniversary of the shooting down of Kaleva, the NKVD deported tens of thousands of people from the three countries.

The United States and most Western states never recognised the annexation, and for half a century Latvian and Estonian diplomats abroad represented states that had formally ceased to exist. The USSR moved its border westwards and gained ports from which the Baltic Fleet could sail unhindered. It did little good: a year later, in June and July 1941, the Wehrmacht crossed the Baltic countries in a few weeks, and many Latvians and Estonians, after a year of arrests and deportations, welcomed the Germans as liberators. For Poland, the occupation of the Baltic states meant that Wilno (Vilnius) and the Wilno region, handed over to Lithuania in the autumn of 1939, came within the borders of the USSR, and that Polish refugees and interned soldiers in Lithuania and Latvia fell into the hands of the NKVD. Latvia and Estonia did not regain their independence until 1991. Since then 17 June has been a day of remembrance of the Soviet occupation in Latvia.