Roger Moorhouse - The Devils' Alliance - Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

On the night of June 14, 1940, while the world was transfixed by the entry of German troops into Paris, Molotov delivered the coup de grâce. Submitting an ultimatum to the Lithuanians, he demanded the arrest and trial of the two cabinet members of whom he disapproved and the formation of a new government capable of repairing relations with Moscow. Finally, an unspecified number of additional Soviet troops were to be allowed to enter Lithuanian territory to help preserve order. An answer was required by 10 a.m. the following morning.

Lithuania’s neighbors soon shared her agony. On June 15, as the government in Vilnius collapsed in acrimony and the Red Army began its unopposed invasion, Estonia was already blockaded. Now, Latvia and Estonia received the same ultimatum handed to the Lithuanians. As if to heighten tensions still further and warn of the perils of non-compliance, Soviet forces staged provocations against Baltic targets. At Masļenki on June 15, NKVD troops ambushed and killed five Latvian border guards and civilians; the day before, Soviet bombers en route to Helsinki from Tallinn had shot down a Finnish civilian aircraft, the Kaleva , with the loss of all nine passengers and crew on board, as well as a bag of French diplomatic mail, which was picked up by a Soviet submarine. The Soviet invasions quickly silenced the furor following both incidents.

Events at either end of the European continent that June had a chilling symmetry. On June 16, the same day that Wehrmacht troops paraded down the Champs Elysees in Paris, the Red Army trundled into the streets of the Latvian capital, Riga. The watching civilian populations of both cities were similarly dismayed and fearful. While the world had been distracted by Hitler’s spectacular victory over the French and the British in the west, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia had quietly surrendered their independence. Two days later, Molotov extended his “warmest congratulations” to German ambassador Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg on the “splendid success of the German armed forces” in France. He might have expected the compliment to be returned.

As the respective national leaders of the Baltic states shuffled their governments, trying desperately to find communists and fellow travelers acceptable to Moscow, a few of the senior national politicians stayed in place, hoping perhaps that something of value might be salvaged from the crisis, an attitude typified by the response of the Latvian president, Kārlis Ulmanis, who stressed continuity to his people in a radio address: “I will stay in my place, you stay in yours.” He would remain in office until he was arrested by the NKVD.

Others would not be so accommodating. General Ludvigs Bolšteins, commander of the Latvian Border Guards, committed suicide, leaving a scathing note to his superiors: “We, the Latvians, built ourselves a brand new house—our country. Now an alien power wants to force us to tear it down ourselves. In this I cannot take part.” The Lithuanian president, Antanas Smetona—who had been an advocate of armed resistance against the Soviets—fled to the safety of German East Prussia by wading across a brook; the Soviet press reported mockingly that he turned his trousers up to do so. Smetona’s foreign minister, Juozas Urbšys, who was already in Moscow on diplomatic business, was simply arrested. Such people were soon replaced. On the same day that Smetona fled, Stalin’s representative, Vladimir Dekanozov, arrived in Vilnius, followed by Andrei Zhdanov in Estonia and Andrei Vyshinsky in Latvia. These three senior Moscow officials would oversee the rapid incorporation of the Baltic states into the USSR. As Molotov made clear to the new Lithuanian foreign minister, Vincas Krėvė-Mickevičius, there was to be no alternative: “You must take a good look at reality and understand that in future small nations will have to disappear. Your Lithuania, along with the other Baltic nations will have to join the glorious family of the Soviet Union. Therefore you should begin to initiate your people into the Soviet system, which in future shall reign everywhere, throughout all Europe.” To his credit, Krėvė-Mickevičius would resign in protest once he had returned home, exclaiming that he did not want to participate in the burial of Lithuanian independence.

Events moved with dizzying speed that summer. After their experience in eastern Poland the previous autumn, the Soviets were already well practiced in the art of democratic demolition. Within a month, across all three Baltic states, parliamentary elections were called by the newly formed, Moscow-friendly governments. This in itself would have been quite a novelty, as all three states had spawned authoritarian—albeit largely benign—governments in the 1930s, but the Soviet variant of democracy was even less worthy of the name. Only approved candidates were permitted to stand; all others were removed from the ballot and arrested. Voting was compulsory, with those spoiling their ballot or refusing to vote risking arrest: “Only enemies of the people stay at home on election day,” warned one Estonian newspaper. To reassure the populace, Soviet representatives were at pains to stress that the independence of the Baltic nations would be respected, vehemently denying that incorporation into the USSR was in the offing. The results were preordained, to the point that they were even accidently announced in Moscow before the polls had closed: 97.2 percent of voters in Latvia, 99.2 percent in Lithuania, and 92.8 percent in Estonia were said to have voted for the approved list. Voter turnout was also unfeasibly high, ranging between 84 and 95 percent; one electoral precinct in Lithuania even achieved the remarkable feat of voter turnout reaching 122 percent. The true figure across all Lithuania has been estimated at barely 16 percent.

Once compliant “people’s parliaments” were installed, they merely had to vote themselves out of existence. The first act of each, therefore, upon meeting in late July was to petition Moscow for accession to the USSR as a constituent republic. After a period of “consultation,” the Supreme Soviet in Moscow duly granted the requests: Lithuania became a Soviet republic on August 3, 1940; Latvia followed two days later, and Estonia, on August 6. In Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius, there was confusion and humiliation as people sought to take in what had happened to them and to the independent states they had once inhabited. In desperation, a few took to the forests to fight the Soviet occupiers; others chose more passive forms of protest, such as placing flowers at national memorials or singing patriotic songs. Khrushchev would later write in his memoirs, without a hint of irony, that the annexation of the Baltic states was a “great triumph” for the Baltic peoples, as it gave them “the chance to live in conditions equal to those of the working class, peasantry, and labouring intelligentsia of Russia.”

Germany’s leadership was swift to recognize the new reality—all of which, of course, accorded with the terms of the secret protocol to the Nazi-Soviet Pact and its successor agreement—but it was a little more difficult to carry domestic opinion, which still tended to be distrustful of the Soviet Union. As if to sweeten the pill, Hitler ordered another round of evacuations of ethnic Germans from the Baltic region, which proved a godsend for those Volksdeutsche who had previously opted to remain behind and had now seen their worst fears realized. Accordingly, once procedures were formalized in January 1941, there was a second wave of evacuations from the former Baltic states, this time including many with only the most tenuous claims to German nationality. In Lithuania, over 50,000 volunteered to leave for Germany, even though the country’s remaining German population was estimated at barely 35,000. In Estonia, meanwhile, one official observed that, if the Soviets had allowed it, the vast majority of the Estonian population would have asked to be resettled.