Between Giants (2 page)

Colonel-General Ivan Mikhailovich Chistiakov
– commander of 6th Guards Army from 1943 to the end of the war; he and his men played an important part in Operation
Cäsar
and in the fighting for Courland during October 1944.

Vladimir Georgievich Dekanozov
– a Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs sent by the Soviet Union to organise a new government in Lithuania after the removal of Antanas Smetona in June 1940; in November 1940, he became Soviet ambassador to Berlin.

Leonid Alexandrovich Govorov
– commander of the Leningrad Front from April 1942. In January 1945, following the disbanding of the Leningrad Front, he replaced Yeremenko as commander of 2nd Baltic Front.

Fyodor Isidorovich Kuznetsov
– commander of the Baltic Special Military District, the first line of defence of Leningrad during Operation
Barbarossa
.

Maxim Maximovich Litvinov
– Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs for most of the 1930s, but dismissed by Stalin in 1939, partly because of his Jewish ancestry.

Kirill Afanasevich Meretskov
– commander of the Volkhov Front in January 1944.

Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov
– became Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs in 1939, on the dismissal of Litvinov by Stalin. Along with Stalin, he negotiated the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, which came to an end with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

Lieutenant General Petr Petrovich Sobennikov
– commander of 8th Army at the start of Operation
Barbarossa
, he replaced Kuznetsov as Commander of the Baltic Special Military district following the fighting of June 1941.

Colonel-General Vasili Timofeevich Volskii
– commander of 5th Guards Tank Army during the fighting in the Courland area of October 1944.

Marshal of the Soviet Union Andrei Ivanovich Yeremenko
– commander of 2nd Baltic Front which joined the fighting in the Baltic during summer 1944.

Ivan Zotov
– the Soviet ambassador in Latvia in 1940.

A quote often attributed – possibly incorrectly – to Josef Stalin is that ‘the death of one person is a tragedy; the death of one million is a statistic’. Such a statement could certainly be said to apply to the Baltic States. The destruction and suffering endured by many nations during the Second World War are beyond question, but often the scale of the numbers involved can reduce their impact. The German atrocities in the Soviet Union, followed by Soviet atrocities in Germany, are well known and widely documented, but in terms of the proportion of the population lost, the countries caught between these powerful protagonists – Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – suffered far more than any other. Whilst the deaths in Poland are relatively well known, the suffering in the Baltic States is rarely mentioned, even though their population loss, at roughly 20 per cent, was higher than that of any country other than Poland.

These terrible casualties were brought about by the unique circumstances of these three nations, which suffered three occupations in quick succession – the first Soviet occupation in 1939, the German occupation in 1941 and the second Soviet occupation in 1944–45, which would last nearly half a century. But in contrast to the situation in Poland, many of the deaths of Baltic citizens, particularly in Lithuania and Latvia, were at the hands of their fellow Balts, as the occupying powers ruthlessly exploited divisions within these countries. And, unlike Poland, the three nations were forced by their unique situation to offer support, albeit limited and reluctant, to Germany, leaving them unable to claim the backing of the victorious Allies in the post-war settlement.

This book does not attempt to judge the decisions made by the leaders and people of the Baltic States, who struggled to reconcile the situation in which they found themselves with their own aspirations; it seeks to give an account of the terrible destruction and bloodshed that had such a devastating effect on this corner of Europe, the consequences of which are still felt today.

For several hundred years, the people of the Baltic States were little more than pawns in the wars fought by foreign rulers on their lands. During this period, their own aspirations – even those of the relatively small numbers of more affluent Balts – were of no consequence. Eventually, this led to the rise of nationalist movements in the late 18th century, and the series of wars that brought independence in the wake of the First World War. But despite their similar histories during these wars, and the Second World War that followed, the origins of the three nations were very different, resulting in three very distinct countries.

Lithuania, the most southerly of the Baltic States, was the first of the three to form a national entity when Mindaugas was crowned as its first king in 1253. Ten years later, his country began a long conflict with the crusading Teutonic Knights from neighbouring Prussia. In 1385, Lithuania formed a union with Poland and embraced Christianity for the first time; the two nations now cooperated against their shared enemy in Prussia, and won a decisive victory over the Teutonic Knights at Tannenberg or Grunwald in 1410. As the Prussian threat declined, many Lithuanian nobles sought to break the union with Poland, but the rising power of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy forced Poland and Lithuania into ever-closer cooperation. The resultant commonwealth lasted until it was dismembered during the First Partition of Poland in 1772. Thereafter, Lithuania became part of the Russian Empire.

Latvia, immediately to the north of Lithuania, was peopled by similar tribes to the original Lithuanians. They slowly merged into five distinct groupings, and resisted attempts by missionaries to introduce Christianity in the late 12th century. Like the tribes of Estonia, the Latvians were separated from the depths of Russia by dense forests and swamps, and until the advent of seaborne trade from the west they enjoyed a relatively isolated, if hard and frugal, existence. The traders who accompanied the Christian missionaries established a series of ports along the Baltic coast to facilitate the growing trade with northern Europe, and many of these ports became part of the Hanseatic League, a trading network of independent cities that originated in the German port of Lübeck. The resistance of the local people to Christianity attracted the attention of the German crusading orders, for whose members a crusade in the pagan Baltic region was regarded as spiritually equivalent to the much harder task of fighting to recapture the Holy Land; it had the added benefit of being much closer to home, and was therefore far easier – and cheaper – to organise. The sons of several kings of Western Europe served short spells in the Baltic Crusades, and were able to join the fighting orders and return home within a year. In 1202, the Bishop of Riga, whose post had only been in existence for a year, established a new order of knights, the Brotherhood of the Sword, which rapidly conquered the territory known as Livonia. In 1236, the knights of the order raided the territory of the Samogitians, one of the larger local tribes. As they returned home, they found their way blocked by a force of Samogitian warriors near the small settlement of Saule, today known as Šiauliai. In the fighting that followed, nearly the entire Christian army, which numbered 3,000, was killed, including up to 60 knights. Volkwyn, the Master of the Order, was amongst the dead. Tribes to the south of the River Daugava, who had been laboriously conquered by the Sword Brothers, rose up in revolt. In order to survive, the remaining knights were transformed into the Livonian Order, formally a branch of the Teutonic Knights of Prussia, though the presence of Lithuania between the territories controlled by the two crusading orders helped prevent a merging of their strength. As the power of the crusading orders declined, Latvian territory was annexed by its neighbours, with southern parts coming under Lithuanian and Polish control while Sweden occupied northern Livonia. Eventually, like Lithuania, Latvia was absorbed into the Russian Empire.

Estonia was culturally different from its two southern neighbours, with its language having far more in common with Finnish. It was the last part of the region to embrace Christianity, coming under the influence of the Teutonic crusaders from 1208 onwards. Shortly after, Denmark took an interest in the area, occupying the northern parts of the country. Local people rose up against Danish rule in 1343, and not long afterwards the Danes sold their interest in the region to the Livonian Order; an ecclesiastical state called
Terra Mariana
was then established under Livonian control. It was perhaps typical of the history of the region that various factions – the Livonian Knights, the ecclesiastical authorities and local secular Baltic German interests – fought a series of civil wars for control of Estonia, with little or no regard for the local people, other than as a source of manpower for their forces. When the Livonian Order was finally defeated in 1345, the various factions agreed to put aside their differences and formed the Livonian Confederation. In the 16th century, the Danes took a renewed interest in Estonia, before Sweden gained control of the northern part of the country. A series of wars between Sweden on the one hand, and the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth on the other, followed. Eventually, the Swedes gained complete control of the territory of modern Estonia, and forced the German landowners to grant greater autonomy to the Estonian peasantry, but in 1710, the region came under Russian control as a result of the Great Northern War. For the Estonians, this was more than the replacement of one foreign ruler by another; the Russians revoked the limited reforms that the Swedes had initiated, restoring serfdom and the dominance of the Baltic German nobility.

These different histories, with a common end point, left the three nations with distinct differences as well as similarities. Because of its association with Poland, Lithuania was a largely Catholic country, and its nobility had close family links with the Polish aristocracy. Estonia and Latvia, by contrast, had an ethnically German ruling and landowning class, who formed the bulk of the population of the larger towns and cities, and both countries followed much of Germany and Scandinavia in embracing Lutheran Christianity. In return for the restoration of their rights over the local peasantry, the Baltic German families provided the Russian Empire with many of its finest administrators, diplomats and army officers; inevitably, this resulted in great hostility between the ethnic Estonians and Latvians, and their Baltic German overlords. The roots of the Baltic antipathy to Russia that played such a big part in the region’s history in the 20th century therefore stretched back several hundred years.

The reimposition of serfdom proved to be short-lived, and was reversed in Estonia and parts of Latvia by 1819. Whatever the intention of this step, it proved to be of little value to the local peasants, as land remained in the control of the German landowning families, and the newly liberated former serfs lacked the financial resources to purchase land of their own. It was only in the middle of the 19th century that a limited degree of land reform occurred. At the same time, relaxation of laws relating to compulsory membership of trading guilds resulted in more Latvians and Estonians moving from the countryside into the large coastal cities; the population of Tallinn was over 50 per cent Estonian by 1871, and grew further to over 67 per cent Estonian by 1897. During the same period, the Latvian population of Riga grew from 23 to 42 per cent.

Religion was another field in which cultural differences provided ample opportunities for conflict. Competition between the established churches in the Baltic States – the Lutheran church in Latvia and Estonia and the Roman Catholic church in Lithuania – and the Russian Orthodox church led to an increase in publications in Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian, and to a rapid increase in literacy – by the end of the century, almost the entire population of the Baltic States was literate.
¹
A common feature in all three countries during the 19th century was an attempt by Russia to impose Russian culture upon the region. In addition to the efforts of the Orthodox Church, all school education was compulsorily in Russian, and in Lithuania the publication of Latin alphabet books in Lithuanian was banned until 1904. Catholics in Lithuania were barred from local government posts in 1894, a move which resulted in a tight association in the region between nationalist sentiment and the Catholic Church. Russian efforts were undermined by the presence of a substantial Lithuanian population in nearby East Prussia, where material continued to be published in Lithuanian and smuggled across the border. Unlike Latvia and Estonia, Lithuania was comparatively untouched by the industrial revolution, and remained a largely agricultural state. Consequently, much of its growing population emigrated to the New World rather than to the industrial cities, as was the case in the two northern countries.

The 20th century started with widespread turmoil across the Russian Empire. In 1905, nationalists convened assemblies in Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius, while in the countryside of Estonia and Latvia, the unrest targeted the unpopular German aristocracy. Some 200 country manors were set ablaze, and about 300 people were killed. Some of the victims were rich landowners, others were Latvians and Estonians who in the opinion of their neighbours were sympathetic to the Baltic Germans. A few were targeted for the flimsiest of associations with the landowning aristocracy, as was the case of an elderly parson in the town of Jelgava, or Mitau:

His chief delight had been the collection of Lettish [Latvian] songs, riddles, proverbs and legends. Over this labour he had gone blind … Suddenly the peasants attacked his parsonage, shot his sexton, threatened his daughter, burned his library, smashed his china, trampled on his harpsichord, and made a bonfire of his furniture in the garden, kindling it with his manuscripts.
²

In Lithuania, by contrast, there was much less civil disturbance, with a few attacks on Russian teachers and the Orthodox clergy. The Russian response varied in accord with the intensity of the trouble: in Lithuania, there was limited repression, while in Tallinn and Riga the Russian Army fired on protestors, killing over 150 and wounding hundreds more. About 400 Estonians were killed in the countryside as Russian troops put an end to attacks on landowners’ property; in Latvia, the nationalists gained control of considerable areas of countryside, and several expeditions were mounted before Russian control was restored, leaving over 1,100 dead. Many more were deported to Siberia.
³