The USSR accuses Lithuania

On 25 May 1940, as the French and British armies were falling back towards Dunkirk, the Soviet People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, summoned the Lithuanian envoy in Moscow, Ladas Natkevičius (PL), to the Kremlin and made him a statement that amounted to an accusation. Soldiers, he said, were disappearing from the Soviet garrisons stationed in Lithuania under the treaty of October 1939. According to Molotov these were not ordinary desertions: the disappearances were being organised by “certain persons enjoying the protection of organs of the Lithuanian government”. The Commissar demanded that Kaunas put an end to these “provocations”, find the missing men and return them to their units, and expressed the hope that Lithuania would meet these demands and not force the Soviet government to take “other steps”. It was the first official Soviet complaint against Lithuania since the conclusion of the bases pact. Three weeks later the affair grew into an ultimatum, and the ultimatum into the end of Lithuanian independence.

The Soviet Union was preparing to take over the Baltic states by organising and staging conflicts between them and the USSR, and the accusation that Lithuania was abducting soldiers was part of that plan. In some of the literature, including works in English, Molotov’s statement is called a note. Formally it was an oral statement made to the envoy and recorded in the Soviet diplomatic files. Some studies also give the date as 28 May, but the Soviet documents point to 25 May.

The bases pact and a quiet winter

Lithuania had been assigned to the Soviet sphere of influence under the German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty of 28 September 1939, which amended the secret protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. After Estonia and Latvia, it was forced on 10 October 1939 to sign a mutual assistance pact. It received Wilno (Vilnius), seized from Poland, together with part of the surrounding region, but it had to admit Soviet garrisons: about 18,800 soldiers at Naujoji Vilnia (Nowa Wilejka), Alytus, Prienai and Gaižiūnai – almost as many as the entire Lithuanian Army.

Over the winter the garrisons caused no trouble. Moscow did not interfere in Lithuania’s internal affairs, and its legation was told not to encourage the local communists. As late as 29 March 1940, in the same speech in which he reminded Romania of Bessarabia, Molotov praised before the Supreme Soviet the implementation of the pacts with the three Baltic states. The government of Prime Minister Antanas Merkys and President Antanas Smetona publicly extolled Soviet generosity, although in private they understood what foreign garrisons near Kaunas meant. Contingency plans for an occupation, drawn up by Lithuanian diplomats in November 1939, remained on paper.

The garrisons did, however, have a weak point. Lithuania was poor by European standards but rich compared with the collectivised Soviet countryside, and Red Army soldiers saw this every day. Desertions occurred from the very first weeks. For the commanders they were a nuisance; for Moscow, whenever it saw fit, a ready-made pretext.

A change of course in May

In the spring of 1940 the situation changed. After the Moscow Peace Treaty of 12 March the Red Army was free of the war with Finland, and in April Germany occupied Denmark and Norway. When on 10 May the Wehrmacht attacked in the west and within a few days broke through the French front, Moscow concluded that it was time to settle the Baltic question before the war in the west was decided. Nikita Khrushchev later recalled that Joseph Stalin, taken aback by the speed of the German victories, feared that Hitler would eventually turn against the USSR.

On 16 May, a week after the invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, Izvestia published an article arguing that small states were naive to count on neutrality while giants fought for their survival. Between 18 and 25 May Soviet units moved some of their equipment from Wilno to Gaižiūnai, much closer to Kaunas, the seat of the government. On 24 May the Soviet envoy in Kaunas, Nikolai Pozdnyakov, sent a report to Moscow claiming that Lithuanian officials were hiding soldiers who had left their units. The next day Molotov summoned Natkevičius.

The missing soldiers

The statement of 25 May concerned two soldiers, the tank crewmen Nosov and Shmavgonets, who had disappeared from their units in April and May. At the end of May both returned to their units and said that they had been held in a cellar and interrogated about Soviet military secrets. Moscow accepted this version without reservation. In later Soviet versions the name Pisarev appears instead of Nosov, which in itself says something about how carefully these accusations were prepared.

The charges were soon joined by the case of Junior Commander Butayev of the Naujoji Vilnia garrison, who had deserted during the winter and was hiding in Wilno. According to the Lithuanian investigation, conducted with the participation of representatives of the Soviet forces, on 12 May, when the police came to arrest him, Butayev tried to flee and, seeing that he would not get away, shot himself. Moscow claimed that the Lithuanians had killed him. Some studies link the Butayev affair to the statement of 25 May itself, while others indicate that it emerged in the following days. In any event, it was Butayev whom Molotov dwelt on longest in his June talks with Merkys, and the charge of his murder found its way into the ultimatum.

Historians agree that this was a pretext, not a real problem. Desertions from the garrisons had been occurring since the autumn, and for half a year Moscow had not made them an interstate issue. It was no accident that it brought them up at a moment when the whole world’s attention was fixed on Flanders and the English Channel.

Kaunas tries to explain

The Lithuanian government replied that the accusations were unfounded, but promised a thorough investigation and set up a special commission. The Foreign Minister, Juozas Urbšys, proposed a joint Lithuanian–Soviet commission, which was in any case in keeping with the spirit of the mutual assistance treaty. Moscow rejected it. The Lithuanian commission’s requests to question witnesses and for descriptions, photographs and other information needed for the investigation went unanswered. The Soviet side maintained that Lithuania had to clear the matter up on its own and that its requests were an attempt to shift responsibility onto the USSR.

On 30 May the TASS news agency published a communiqué repeating the accusations and giving them publicity throughout the Soviet press. The Lithuanian police tightened surveillance around the bases and detained 272 suspects, which Moscow in turn treated as harassment of its soldiers. On the same day the Lithuanian government authorised its envoy in Rome, Stasys Lozoraitis, to head the Lithuanian diplomatic service abroad should the country be occupied. Urbšys offered to come to Moscow himself to clear the matter up. Molotov agreed to talks, but only with the Prime Minister.

The same script for Latvia and Estonia

The accusations against Lithuania were part of a wider campaign. Since the spring the Soviet press had been charging the Baltic governments with pro-Western sympathies, and in Latvia, immediately after Molotov’s March speech, it had begun attacking the government of Kārlis Ulmanis. On 17 May the Latvian government, fearing the worst, secretly conferred emergency powers on its envoy in London, Kārlis Zariņš. At the end of May and the beginning of June Moscow began accusing the three states of a military conspiracy against the USSR. The supposed evidence was the winter and spring meetings held within the Baltic Entente, a political alliance of 1934 that had never been a military one. The Baltic states worded their communiqués very cautiously, precisely so as not to give Moscow a pretext. It was all to no avail.

Place in the war

On 7 June Merkys arrived in Moscow. Molotov described one “incident” after another to him in detail and insisted that Butayev had been murdered. On 9 June he added the charge of a secret military alliance with Latvia and Estonia. Kaunas offered to leave the Baltic Entente, to hold an investigation and to dismiss the Minister of the Interior, Kazys Skučas, and the head of the State Security Department, Augustinas Povilaitis, while Smetona wrote a personal letter to Mikhail Kalinin. None of this changed anything. From 5 June all Soviet forces in the Baltic region were subordinated to the People’s Commissar for Defence, Semyon Timoshenko, and on 7 June the Red Army was ordered to prepare an attack on Lithuania.

Shortly before midnight on 14 June, with the Germans at the gates of Paris, Molotov handed Urbšys an ultimatum. It repeated the charges of abducting soldiers and of conspiring with Latvia and Estonia, and demanded that Skučas and Povilaitis be put on trial, that a new government be formed and that an unlimited number of Soviet troops be admitted. The reply was due by 10 a.m. The Lithuanian government accepted it; on 15 June the Red Army entered the country, and Smetona crossed the border into Germany. A puppet government was formed by Justas Paleckis under the supervision of Molotov’s deputy, Vladimir Dekanozov. On 16 June Latvia and Estonia received similar ultimatums. After rigged elections in July, on 3 August 1940 Lithuania was incorporated into the USSR as the Lithuanian SSR, followed in the next few days by Latvia and Estonia. Skučas and Povilaitis, detained near the German border, were taken to Moscow and shot in 1941. Merkys, deported into the interior of the USSR, died there in 1955 after years of prison and exile.

The affair of the missing soldiers, trivial as it seemed, was a textbook example of the method the Soviet Union had been applying to its neighbours since the autumn of 1939: first a “mutual assistance” treaty with garrisons, then a contrived incident and an accusation against which there was no defence, and finally an ultimatum and the entry of troops. The Winter War had begun in the same way, preceded by the shots at Mainila. The occupation of the Baltic states, and soon afterwards of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, moved the Soviet frontier westwards, but in June 1941 it did not protect the USSR from the German attack. For Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians, and for the Poles of the Wilno region as well, it meant arrests and deportations as early as 1940 and 1941. Most Western states never recognised the annexation, and the three countries regained their independence only in 1990–1991.