The USSR annexes the Baltic states

On 3 August 1940 the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, meeting in Moscow for its seventh session, passed a law admitting the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic to the Soviet Union. Two days later, on 5 August, Latvia was admitted in the same way, and on 6 August Estonia. Within four days three states that for twenty years had been members of the League of Nations and had legations in capitals all over the world became the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth republics of the USSR. On 2 August the same session created the Moldavian SSR and divided between it and Soviet Ukraine the lands the Red Army had occupied in June after the ultimatum to Romania. And on 1 August, at the opening of the proceedings, Vyacheslav Molotov, in a major report on foreign policy, presented all this as the fruit of Moscow’s “peaceful” policy and proof of the durability of its friendship with Germany.

War chronologies record these matters under five different days: Molotov’s speech under 1 August, the annexation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina under 2 August, and the formal annexations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia under 3, 5 and 6 August. All were parts of a single session of a parliament that within a week gave legal form to a whole year’s territorial gains. One of these statements needs correcting. On 2 August the Soviet Union did not “annex” Bessarabia and northern Bukovina: it had occupied them five weeks earlier, between 28 June and 3 July. On that day the Supreme Soviet merely organised them administratively, creating a new republic and enlarging the Ukrainian SSR.

The road to the August session

The Baltic states had been assigned to the Soviet sphere of influence by the secret protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939 (Lithuania was added to it in September, in exchange for Polish lands between the Vistula and the Bug). In the autumn of 1939 Moscow forced mutual assistance pacts on Tallinn, Riga and Kaunas, which allowed it to station garrisons in those countries. In June 1940, while the world’s attention was fixed on the fall of France, the Kremlin accused the Lithuanians of abducting Red Army soldiers and the Latvians and Estonians of a hostile military alliance, and presented all three with ultimatums. On 15 June the Red Army occupied Lithuania, and on 17 June Latvia and Estonia. “People’s governments” were set up under the supervision of Moscow’s envoys, and on 14 and 15 July single-list elections were held, after which the new assemblies on 21 and 22 July proclaimed their states Soviet republics and asked for admission to the USSR.

The presidents whose signatures had for some weeks lent the operation an appearance of legality were already gone: Antanas Smetona had fled to Germany in June, Kārlis Ulmanis had been arrested and deported on 22 July, and Konstantin Päts had been deported to Ufa on 30 July. At the end of July delegations from the three assemblies set off for Moscow. The Lithuanian delegation, twenty strong, was led by the acting president, Justas Paleckis. Their task was to present the “requests” of their nations; the Supreme Soviet’s task was to “grant” them.

1 August: Molotov’s report

The session of the Supreme Soviet lasted from 1 to 7 August. On the first day Molotov, Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, delivered a report on the government’s foreign policy, similar to the one in which in March he had reminded Romania of Bessarabia. This time he had results to boast of.

The world paid most attention to what he said about Germany. Contrary to the rumours circulating in Europe in the summer of 1940, Molotov gave assurances that Soviet–German relations remained as they had been arranged in August 1939. According to a cable sent that same night by the American chargé d’affaires in Moscow, Walter Thurston, the commissar declared that the non-aggression pact had been “strictly observed”, that the events of the past year had not weakened its significance but had “emphasised” it, and that the friendly relations of the two states rested on their “fundamental state interests” rather than on chance considerations. Molotov also intimated that the agreement had secured Germany’s peace in the east while it waged war in the west. These assurances were given at a moment when Hitler – unbeknown to Moscow – had announced to his commanders at the Berghof conference the previous day, 31 July, that he intended to attack the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941.

The tone towards the West was cool or mocking. Britain, Molotov said, had decided to continue the war, counting on help from the United States. Nothing essential had changed in relations with it, although the dispatch of a new ambassador to Moscow, Stafford Cripps, might indicate a desire to improve them. The commissar came down harder on the United States. He accused the Americans of having “unlawfully detained the gold that our State Bank recently bought from the banks of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia”. This referred to the Baltic reserves deposited in American banks, which Washington had frozen on 15 July to keep them out of Moscow’s hands. Molotov also mocked American concern for the “Western Hemisphere”, behind which, he suggested, lay imperialist designs. Of Japan he said that relations were beginning to take on “a somewhat normal character”, and of Turkey and Iran that flights by foreign aircraft over their borders with the USSR called for heightened vigilance.

“The frontier moved to the Baltic”

The second part of the report was a balance sheet of gains. Molotov calculated that with the admission of the new republics the population of the Soviet Union would grow by the 2,880,000 inhabitants of Lithuania, 1,950,000 of Latvia and 1,120,000 of Estonia, and by a further 3,200,000 thanks to Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Together with the eastern lands of Poland seized in the autumn of 1939, he reckoned that the state had gained more than 23 million people in a single year. He did not mention that almost all these gains were the result of the agreement with Hitler.

He spoke of the Baltic states in the language of strategy. He described moving the frontier to the Baltic coast as a matter of “first-rate importance” for the country and stressed that the Soviet Union would now have ice-free ports on the Baltic, “which we need so much”. At the same time he presented the incorporation as the will of the nations themselves, which, having overthrown their former governments, had chosen Soviet power of their own accord. He declared the dispute with Romania over Bessarabia and northern Bukovina “peacefully settled”. He ended the report with a warning that the war was going on and spreading, and that the Soviet Union had to be ready for any surprise.

2 August: the Moldavian SSR

The next day the Supreme Soviet turned to the lands taken from Romania. The law of 2 August 1940 established the Moldavian SSR as the thirteenth union republic, after the Karelo-Finnish SSR created in March. It combined six of the nine counties of Bessarabia, with Chișinău (Kishinev) as its capital, and six of the fourteen districts of the Moldavian Autonomous SSR, set up in 1924 on the left bank of the Dniester as a showcase for Soviet claims to Bessarabia. In this way Tiraspol, until then the capital of the autonomous republic, also became part of the new republic.

The rest of the occupied lands were attached to the Ukrainian SSR: the northern part of Bukovina with Chernivtsi, the northern county of Bessarabia with Khotyn, and the two southern counties with Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi (Akkerman) and Izmail – that is, the whole Black Sea coast and the mouth of the Danube. Ukraine also received the Hertsa district, which belonged neither to Bessarabia nor to Bukovina and which the Red Army had occupied in June without any pretext in the ultimatum. On 7 August two new provinces were formed from these lands: Chernivtsi Oblast and Akkerman Oblast, renamed Izmail Oblast in December. The border between the two republics was adjusted once more by a decree of 4 November 1940, after the Germans of southern Bessarabia had left for the Reich.

The division had a purpose. The Moldavian SSR was given no access to the sea or to the Danube, and its borders were drawn so that some of the lands inhabited by Moldovans – in essence the Romanians of Bessarabia – went to Ukraine, while the republic itself also took in the inhabitants of the former autonomous republic beyond the Dniester. Moscow had long claimed that the Moldovans were a nation distinct from the Romanians, and now it gave that thesis the form of a state.

3, 5 and 6 August: three republics admitted

At its sitting on 3 August the Supreme Soviet heard the Lithuanian delegation. Paleckis read out the People’s Seimas’s declaration of “entry” into the USSR, after which the deputies unanimously passed the law admitting the Lithuanian SSR. Lithuania became the fourteenth republic of the Union. With it came Wilno (Vilnius), which the Red Army had occupied in September 1939 and which Moscow had handed to Lithuania in October in exchange for consent to its garrisons, under the mutual assistance pact. The Poles of Wilno and the surrounding region, who in July had had to vote in the Lithuanian elections, now became citizens of a Soviet republic. On 5 August the Latvian SSR was admitted according to the same script, and on 6 August the Estonian SSR.

The session closed on 7 August, and towards its end the deputies wrote the new republics into the 1936 Constitution of the USSR. Formally, the annexation was complete.

In the weeks that followed it was completed in practice. On 25 August the people’s assemblies in Kaunas and Riga and the chamber in Tallinn adopted constitutions copied from the Stalin Constitution and renamed themselves the supreme soviets of the republics. Alongside the formal heads of state, power passed to the first secretaries of the communist parties, such as Antanas Sniečkus in Lithuania. Land, banks and larger enterprises had already been nationalised at the end of July, and by the spring of 1941 the national currencies had been replaced by the rouble. In the autumn the disbanded armies of the three states were turned into territorial rifle corps of the Red Army, from which former officers were purged and arrested. The NKVD, which had detained thousands of people since June, took control of the whole of public life.

Who refused to recognise the annexation

Germany, which had itself handed the Baltic states to Moscow, took note of the annexation without protest. The United States acted differently. As early as 23 July, two days after the Soviet republics were proclaimed, the Acting Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, issued a declaration condemning the “devious processes” by which the independence of the three small states had been destroyed and announcing that Washington would not recognise them. It was an application of the Stimson Doctrine of non-recognition of territorial changes made by force. The Baltic legations in Washington continued to function, and the Baltic gold remained frozen – the grievance Molotov aired in his report. Britain also held on to the Baltic reserves and did not recognise the annexation de jure, although, seeking better relations with Moscow, it avoided sharp gestures on the matter throughout the war.

Protests also came from diplomats of the three states, to whom the governments in Kaunas and Riga had managed before the occupation to grant full powers in case independence were lost. The Latvian minister in London, Kārlis Zariņš, and the Lithuanian minister in Rome, Stasys Lozoraitis, head of the Lithuanian diplomatic service in exile, became for decades to come the informal representatives of their states. The Polish government-in-exile lodged its own protest. On 26 July the ambassador in Washington, Jerzy Potocki, handed the State Department a note in which Poland protested against a “new violation of international law” by the USSR, especially with regard to Wilno, and reserved all its rights to the lands occupied by the Soviet Union.

Place in the war

The August session of the Supreme Soviet closed a year in which Joseph Stalin, taking advantage of his agreement with Hitler, had moved the frontiers of the USSR from the Gulf of Finland to the mouth of the Danube. The Soviet Union gained the ports of Tallinn, Riga, Liepāja and Ventspils, air bases on the Baltic and a border with East Prussia, and in the south it reached the Prut and the Danube. Each of these shifts moved the future front line further from the old border, but at the same time placed the Red Army directly opposite the Wehrmacht and not far from the Romanian oil that Hitler needed to wage war. As early as November 1940, during Molotov’s visit to Berlin, the questions of Bukovina, Finland and the Balkans showed that the interests of the two powers were beginning to collide.

For the inhabitants of the new republics, August 1940 marked the beginning of the first Soviet occupation. On 12–14 June 1941 the NKVD carried out mass deportations in Bessarabia, northern Bukovina and the Baltic states: tens of thousands of people were taken deep into the USSR, among them many Poles from the Wilno region. A week later Germany attacked the Soviet Union and within a few weeks occupied the Baltic states, while Romania, fighting alongside Germany, recovered Bessarabia and Bukovina. In 1944–1945 the Red Army returned, and the borders drawn in the summer of 1940 survived until the collapse of the USSR.

The Western policy of non-recognition, begun with the Welles Declaration, endured for half a century. When Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia regained their independence in 1990–1991, they invoked it and the nullity of the decisions of August 1940: they did not proclaim themselves new states but restored the continuity of the pre-war republics. The Moldavian SSR of 2 August 1940 became the nucleus of today’s Moldova, while northern Bukovina, Khotyn and southern Bessarabia now belong to Ukraine.