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

Life in the new Soviet Socialist Republics of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldavia was quickly coordinated to conform to that in the rest of the Soviet Union. Over the weeks and months that followed the annexations, the Soviet constitution and law code were adopted, and all political parties deemed “unfriendly” to the Soviet Union were banned. The old regional administrations were ruthlessly purged: in Lithuania, for instance, 11 out of 12 mayors of principal cities were removed, as were 19 of 23 town mayors and 175 out of 261 regional governors. Police forces were disbanded and replaced by communist militias, often comprised of former political prisoners. Planned economies were introduced, with private property outlawed and businesses and industries nationalized and placed under central administrative control. A partial collectivization of the land was carried out, affecting the largest estates, with a number of collective farms being established and land redistributed. All youth and student organizations were banned or else forcibly incorporated into the youth organizations of the Soviet Union, with cultural and pedagogical output being thoroughly sovietized and Marxist-Leninist principles adopted across academic and intellectual life. A list of banned books—those with nationalist or “reactionary” content—was produced, and all offending titles were removed from bookshops and libraries to be pulped or in some cases burned. Schoolbooks were also “edited,” with offending pages simply being torn out and discarded. The churches, although nominally spared closure, were nonetheless harassed and persecuted, with clergy and congregations placed under surveillance or subjected to arbitrary arrest and services disrupted by “atheist brigades.”

Some certainly did not experience the change as dramatically as others. One Latvian, for instance, remembered the early period after the annexation as surreal rather than immediately threatening, with everyday life continuing on its course, despite the ubiquitous presence of Soviet troops and the jaunty marches incessantly played by Red Army bands. Yet, for all the apparent normality, the Soviet regime was already showing its teeth, with those who displeased the NKVD facing arrest, interrogation, and torture. The first to feel Soviet wrath were the old political elites. Now surplus to requirements, the former president of Latvia, Kārlis Ulmanis, and the acting president of Lithuania, Antanas Merkys, were arrested by the NKVD and deported. They had stayed on in the hope of salvaging something from the catastrophe but instead formed the vanguard of their countrymen shipped to an uncertain fate in Siberia. They would be followed by the majority of their fellow politicians: fifty-one of the fifty-three former ministers of the Estonian government, for instance, were arrested in 1940 and 1941, as were all but one of the thirteen serving ministers of the Latvian government, the sole exception being social affairs minister Alfrēds Bērziņš, who escaped to Finland in 1940. In Lithuania the situation was no different. Already on the eve of the elections that summer, the NKVD had rounded up 2,000 or so of the political class who were deemed to be a potential threat. One of them was the former minister of justice, Antanas Tamošaitis, a professor of law and a socialist, who had chaired a commission to investigate the earlier Soviet claims about Red Army soldiers being “encouraged” to desert. He was tortured to death in Kaunas prison.

One story testifies to the collective horror. Konstantin Päts was already sixty-six when arrested by the NKVD in the summer of 1940. A veteran politician who was in many ways the godfather of independent Estonia, he had served in most senior positions in government and finally as president from 1938. In 1940, when the Soviets arrived, Päts had hoped that by remaining at his post, he could ameliorate the worst effects of Soviet rule, but he was mistaken. Arrested with his family on June 29, he was deported a month later and spent a year in provincial obscurity at Ufa in the Urals under house arrest. In July 1941, he was picked up by the NKVD once again, separated from his family and sent to prison, convicted of counterrevolutionary sabotage. Päts would end his days consigned to a psychiatric hospital, declared insane by the Soviet authorities because he persistently claimed that he was the president of Estonia—which, morally perhaps, he still was.

Like the political class, the military forces of the Baltic states also faced violent upheaval and “coordination.” Although the vast majority of ordinary soldiers were simply incorporated wholesale into the Red Army in the autumn of 1940—many would subsequently desert—their officers faced a much more sinister fate. NKVD methods were simple: suspect elements would be ordered to attend special “training courses” at remote army camps, where they would then be selected for deportation to the Soviet interior or simply shot. As one Lithuanian eyewitness recalled, “Commanders of battalions, companies and some platoons were called to the headquarters of the regiment, told that they were going on reconnaissance training, put into trucks, and taken into the forest. There they were brutally disarmed, robbed, squeezed into cattle cars at the Varėna railroad station and deported.”

As many as 6,500 officers and men of the Lithuanian army are thought to have been deported in this way or simply shot. A similar fate awaited members of the Latvian armed forces. At Litene, for example, around two hundred officers were executed and over five hundred were deported to the camp complex at Norilsk in the Soviet Far North—dubbed the “Baltic Katyn”—where they would perform hard labor in horrific conditions in nickel and copper mines. As one of the deportees noted years later, “A quick death would have been a far kinder fate than all of those terrible years spent in the hell camps of the north.” Fewer than one in five of his fellows would survive the experience.

Once the political and military elites had been dealt with, the Soviets moved on to ordinary citizens picked up for minor transgressions or considered guilty by association. Those arrested would generally be charged under the catchall of “anti-Soviet activities,” whether carried out privately or in public life. In this first phase, it is estimated that over 7,000 persons in Estonia, 7,000 in Latvia, and 12,000 in Lithuania were arrested or deported. In Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, meanwhile, some 48,000 are thought to have been arrested, with 12,000 deported and as many as over 8,000 executed or dying during NKVD interrogation.

Many of those who survived the NKVD’s jails testified to the bestial nature of the tortures they endured, with sleep deprivation, threats, and casual violence forming the basis for most interrogations. Other methods included electrocution, choking or drowning, and the infamous “manicure,” during which needles were inserted beneath the victim’s nails. After enduring such techniques, many exhausted prisoners were willing to sign their “confessions,” especially if doing so would remove the threat of further questioning. As one prisoner recalled, “NKVD official Sokolov began talking to me in a calm voice, saying, ‘You see what we have made of you. We know how to turn a man into nothing, to push him into the dark. But we also know how to wash dirt from a man. If you admit your guilt, we will call off the interrogation.’” It took a brave man to resist.

Some of the “crimes” recorded were extremely petty. Andres Raska, for instance, was a twenty-four-year-old student imprisoned in 1940 for distributing lapel ribbons in the Estonian national colors. Deported to the Soviet Union, he died in a camp in Kirov in the summer of 1942. Ironically, at the time of Raska’s arrest, the prewar Estonian flag still held official status, but in the Kafkaesque world of the Soviet occupation, its distribution was enough to earn him deportation to the Gulag.