Rigged elections in the Baltic states

On Sunday 14 July 1940 the people of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia went to the polls to elect new parliaments. The elections took place a month after the Red Army had occupied Lithuania and then Latvia and Estonia, and three weeks after the stage-managed “people’s” coups in Tallinn and Riga. In all three countries the ballot papers bore only the names from a single list, drawn up by local communists under the supervision of Moscow’s envoys. Voting lasted two days, until 15 July. The official results gave this list between 92 and more than 99 per cent of the vote. A week later, on 21 July, the assemblies elected in this way proclaimed their states Soviet republics and asked to be admitted to the USSR.

Under 14 July, war chronologies record that the Soviets organised rigged elections in the Baltic states and that the parliaments came under their control, and under 21 July that the parliaments they controlled applied for membership of the USSR. Both statements are accurate. It need only be added that voting lasted two days, not one, and that the Estonian parliament proclaimed a Soviet republic on 21 July but passed its formal request for admission to the Soviet Union a day later, on 22 July.

Electoral laws written in the legations

After the June coups a “people’s government” sat in each capital: that of Justas Paleckis in Kaunas, of Augusts Kirhenšteins in Riga and of Johannes Vares in Tallinn. Real power lay with three plenipotentiaries of the Kremlin: Molotov’s deputy Vladimir Dekanozov in Lithuania, Andrei Vyshinsky in Latvia and Andrei Zhdanov in Estonia. At the beginning of July they moved on to the second stage of a scenario that Moscow had already tried out in the autumn of 1939 in the occupied Polish lands, where sham elections to people’s assemblies had preceded the incorporation of Poland’s eastern borderlands into the USSR.

In Lithuania Paleckis dissolved the Seimas on 27 June; on 1 July all political, cultural and religious organisations were banned, and on 5 July the government adopted by resolution a new electoral law, written according to the instructions of Dekanozov and the Communist Party of Lithuania: in each constituency there could be only one candidate per seat. The Latvian government decided on 4 July to hold early elections to the Saeima. In Estonia on 5 July President Konstantin Päts, already under house arrest, signed under duress a decree calling elections to the lower house of parliament, the Riigivolikogu. The upper house was not convened, even though under the Estonian constitution the lower house could not legislate without it. On 6 July the three governments simultaneously announced that the elections would be held on 14 July. Little more than a week was left for preparations, whereas the Latvian electoral law required elections to be announced at least 40 days in advance.

All of this violated the constitutions of the three states. Electoral laws were changed by decrees of governments that had themselves come into being without any constitutional basis. In Latvia there had been no Saeima since Kārlis Ulmanis’s coup of 1934, and the constitution gave the power to make laws only to him, not to the government. In Lithuania the acting president, Paleckis, owed his office to a decision of Prime Minister Antanas Merkys, who, after the flight of Antanas Smetona, had no right to appoint a new head of government.

A single list

In all three countries the communists were a handful. According to frequently cited estimates, after emerging from the underground the Lithuanian party had around 1,500 members, the Latvian around 500 and the Estonian a mere 133. That was why the elections were contested not by the communist parties but by hastily founded fronts: the Union of the Working People of Lithuania, the Working People’s Bloc of Latvia and the Estonian Working People’s Union. Their lists also included non-party people: writers, teachers, doctors, peasants and soldiers. In Lithuania 38 of the 79 candidates were communists. There were well-known names among them, such as the novelist Petras Cvirka and the poet Liudas Gira, but according to Lithuanian historians some candidates had been talked into standing by threats, and some learned of their candidacy from the newspapers. In the Ukmergė constituency a “Jonas Abakonis, a thirty-year-old peasant” was registered who did not exist: another man’s name had been garbled. The communists noticed only after the results had been announced. In the Wilno (Vilnius) constituency the Union’s list included a Polish communist from Wilno, the doctor of law Stefan Jędrychowski, later for many years a member of the Politburo and foreign minister of communist Poland. The Polish underground’s Special Court later sentenced him to death in absentia for collaborating with the USSR to Poland’s detriment.

Attempts to put up other candidates ended badly. In Estonia the law initially allowed anyone who had collected 50 signatures to stand, and within three days the opposition had nominated candidates in most constituencies, among them the former prime minister Jaan Tõnisson and Rear Admiral Johan Pitka. On the morning of 10 July it was announced that every candidate had to submit an election programme by 2 p.m. that same day. Most managed to do so, but the commissions struck them off the lists anyway: according to Estonian studies, 17 withdrew “voluntarily”, one was arrested, and 58 were declared “enemies of the people” or struck off on the grounds that their programmes had been copied from the Union’s or had “provocative content”. The last opposition candidate, the farmer Jüri-Rajur Liivak, was arrested on a fabricated charge of forging promissory notes.

In Latvia the lawyer and former minister Atis Ķeniņš (PL), the poet Kārlis Skalbe and several politicians of the old parties tried to register a Democratic Bloc list. Officials sent them from one office to another, until the militia came to the bloc’s premises, drew up a report and confiscated the documents. Of the 17 lists submitted, one was admitted. Ķeniņš and several of his associates were soon arrested and deported; Hugo Celmiņš was later shot, while some managed to escape abroad.

No one in the campaign spoke of joining the USSR, of collective farms or of nationalisation. The Latvian bloc went into the elections with 36 slogans – on peace, bread and freedom, on land for the landless, on “indissoluble friendship” with the Soviet Union and gratitude to the Red Army – but not one of them announced a Soviet system. The same promises of higher wages and social welfare were made in Lithuania and Estonia.

Voting under supervision

Just before the elections the NKVD and the local security services subordinate to it struck at those who might lead resistance. In Lithuania, on the night of 11–12 July, leading politicians, officials and officers of the old state were arrested. Older literature speaks of some two thousand detainees, while Lithuanian historians who have studied the records of the state security service, by then headed by the communist Antanas Sniečkus, counted 504 arrests between 10 and 17 July. Some of those arrested were deported into the interior of the USSR, even though Lithuania was formally still an independent state.

The press and the agitators repeated that only enemies would fail to vote. The Estonian communist daily Rahva Hääl wrote on 14 July that it would be most unwise to avoid the elections, since “only enemies of the people stay at home”. Everyone who voted had their passport stamped, so the absence of a stamp could later serve as proof of “hostility”. The secrecy of the ballot was a fiction: the paper bearing a single name was dropped into the box in full view of the commission. In Tartu Red Army soldiers stood in the polling stations, and records from the Latvian provinces note visits by Soviet soldiers and political officers. In Lithuania, where voting was to last one day, it was extended to 15 July, according to some studies because of low turnout. In the end the polling stations were open for two days in all three countries.

The results

The official results looked as if they had been cut from a single template. In Lithuania turnout was said to be 95.51 per cent, with 99.19 per cent voting for the Union’s list. In Latvia, according to the Central Electoral Commission, 1,155,807 votes, or 97.8 per cent, were cast for the Working People’s Bloc, which won all 100 seats. In Estonia it was announced on 18 July that 84.1 per cent of those eligible had voted, of whom 92.9 per cent supported the Union, which took all 80 seats.

That the figures had been produced at a desk was obvious at once. In Lithuania the central commission compiled no electoral rolls and published no constituency results, and in several places it reported turnout above one hundred per cent: 106 per cent in Panevėžys and 123 per cent in Biržai. Surviving documents from some constituencies show that many people did vote, but that many ballot papers were blank, spoiled or covered in anti-Soviet slogans, and that more than one candidate failed to receive even half the votes. In Estonia, during the German occupation, the surviving records were recounted, and turnout was found to have been 80.1 per cent and support for the list 91.6 per cent; the commissions had artificially reduced the number of eligible voters, counted invalid votes as valid and credited to the Union the votes cast for Liivak, whose name had remained on the ballot papers. According to this study at least 35,119 votes were falsified. These calculations, made under German occupation, must be treated with caution, but Estonian historians regard them as reliable.

One anecdote in particular has gone down in history. According to accounts repeated in Western studies, the Soviet press services sent out the results so early that a London newspaper printed them a day before the polls closed. Latvian sources confirm that in Riga the result was announced before the polling stations had closed. Neither the title of the London newspaper nor the exact time of publication can be confirmed.

In the West nobody had any illusions. On 15 July, while voting was still under way in Kaunas, Riga and Tallinn, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt extended the order freezing the assets of countries occupied by Germany to the Baltic states, so that the gold and money of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia held in American banks would not fall into Moscow’s hands.

21 July: the “request” for admission

On 17 July Dekanozov, Vyshinsky and Zhdanov conferred on how the new assemblies should proceed. All three assemblies met on Sunday 21 July. The People’s Seimas of Lithuania sat in the hall of the State Theatre in Kaunas, and the session was opened by Paleckis. The speeches were long; there was no debate. The Lithuanian People’s Seimas and the Latvian People’s Saeima (Tautas Saeima) adopted declarations introducing Soviet power on the same day, proclaimed the Lithuanian and Latvian Soviet Socialist Republics and adopted declarations on “joining” the Soviet Union. The Latvian declaration asserted that only entry into the USSR would guarantee the state “genuine sovereignty” and the flourishing of its economy and culture. The Estonian Riigivolikogu proclaimed Estonia a Soviet republic on 21 July and on 22 July adopted a declaration on joining the USSR. Everything was passed unanimously, by acclamation or a show of hands. In the following days the assemblies voted to nationalise land, banks and larger enterprises.

The presidents, whose signatures had given the new authorities a semblance of legality over the past month, were no longer needed. Ulmanis lost his office on 21 July and the next day was arrested and deported to Voroshilovsk. On 21 July Päts sent his son to the American legation to ask for asylum, but the visas came too late. After the first session of the Riigivolikogu he signed his resignation, and on 30 July he was deported with his family to Ufa. According to most sources, the former Commander-in-Chief, General Johan Laidoner, and his wife had already been deported from Estonia by the Soviet authorities on 19 July.

On 30 July a twenty-member Lithuanian delegation led by Paleckis, which included the poet Salomėja Nėris and several writers, left for Moscow by train. Riga and Tallinn sent similar delegations. On 1 August the Supreme Soviet of the USSR met in session, and Vyacheslav Molotov, in his report on foreign policy, presented the changes in the Baltic countries as the will of their peoples.

Place in the war

The Supreme Soviet “granted the requests” one by one: on 3 August it admitted Lithuania as the fourteenth union republic, on 5 August Latvia and on 6 August Estonia. On 25 August the assemblies adopted constitutions copied from the Stalin Constitution and renamed themselves the supreme soviets of the republics. The Soviet border moved up to East Prussia, and Stalin gained the ports and airfields with which Moscow had justified the whole operation: they were to shield Leningrad and the Soviet coast. Berlin, which in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact had itself consigned the Baltic states to the Soviet sphere of influence, did not protest. The Germans only laid claim to the strip of land around Marijampolė that had been promised to them in September 1939, and in January 1941 sold it to Moscow for 7.5 million dollars in gold.

The United States reacted differently. On 23 July, two days after the sessions of the assemblies, Acting Secretary of State Sumner Welles issued a declaration condemning the “devious processes” by which the independence of three small states had been destroyed, and announcing that Washington would not recognise the annexation. It was an application of the Stimson Doctrine, formulated in 1932 after the Japanese conquest of Manchuria. The Baltic legations in Washington continued to operate, and the policy of non-recognition lasted 51 years. Most Western states never recognised the annexation de jure.

That is why the elections of July 1940 mattered beyond the war itself. Moscow staged them to make the annexation look voluntary, and until the end of the 1980s Soviet historiography presented them as the culmination of a “socialist revolution” carried out by the Baltic peoples themselves. When Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia regained their independence in 1990–1991, they declared the decisions of the people’s assemblies null and void, because they had been taken under occupation, on the basis of unlawful electoral laws and falsified results, and because the assemblies had had no right to change the political system without a referendum. As a result the three states did not declare themselves new states but restored the continuity of the pre-war republics.

For the people who on 14 and 15 July carried their passports to the polling stations, the consequences came quickly. Within a year the Soviet authorities had arrested thousands of “enemies of the people” in the three republics, among them many opposition candidates and some of the deputies who had believed the promises, and on 14 June 1941 the NKVD carried out a mass deportation which, according to most estimates, affected more than 40,000 people. It also struck Poles from Wilno and the Wilno region, which had belonged to Lithuania since October 1939 and in July 1940 had voted in the same elections. A week after the deportation Germany attacked the USSR and within a few weeks occupied the Baltic states. Moscow used the same pattern – a façade of single-list elections and an assembly’s “request” – many more times, and after 1944, in various forms, in the countries of Central Europe, Poland among them.