The Power of Freedom. Mart Laar

      During the first year of occupation, the Baltic countries were forcibly Sovietised. A massive terror campaign was launched with arrests in the Baltic countries starting just before the countries officially ‘joined’ the Soviet Union. During the first year of Soviet occupation, about 8,000 people were arrested in Estonia. In Latvia and Lithuania too, the prisons filled up with prisoners. Many of those arrested were interrogated in the cruellest way and then killed – often without a court ruling. The names are known of 2,199 Estonians murdered by the Soviets between 1940 and 1941. Eighty-two minors, including three infants, were among them. The most extensive act of genocide was the deportation of whole families to Siberia in the course of the “June deportations” that started on 14 June 1941.22 According to the ‘final report’ prepared by Merkulov, the People’s Commissar of the USSR State Security Office, a total of 9,146 people were deported from Estonia, 3,173 of whom were arrested, 15,500 Latvian citizens were sent to Siberia and a further 17,730 people were deported from Lithuania.23 The majority of them never saw their homeland again. Among the children deported to Siberia in those terrible days was Lennart Meri, the son of the Estonian diplomat Georg-Peeter Meri. In 1992, he became the first democratically elected President of free Estonia. Many other children were not so lucky. Several reminiscences and documents testify to the difficult fate of the deportees, the most shocking of which is the diary of ten-year-old Rein Vare covering the years 1941–1944. It speaks about deportation, the journey to Siberia and his experiences there. With the gravity of an adult, Rein Vare draws tombstones for his playmates in his diary. A large part of the diary is dedicated to his beloved father, Rein Vare, a schoolteacher from Sausti who by that time had already died of hunger in Isaroskino prison camp, yet he lived on in his son’s diary. The family’s history took a happier turn in 1946 when Rein and his sister were given permission to return to their relatives in Estonia. At that time, their mother’s yearning for her children overruled her common sense – she fled from Siberia and tried to follow them but, unfortunately, only got as far as Leningrad. Her attempt was followed by arrest and three years in a labour camp. In 1951, Rein Vare, who meanwhile had finished school in Estonia, was arrested again. He was kept in Patarei prison for a few months and then sent back to Siberia. This finally broke him. Although the family managed to return to Estonia by the end of 1958, its members were no longer the people they had been. Rein Vare was utterly embittered and the sunny side of life had disappeared for him. His inability to hold down a job gave way to excessive drinking and, eventually, death in George Orwell’s year of 1984, in Viljandi, where his body was only recovered several days after he had died. His diary, however, was preserved until the day came when the document, which can be compared to Anne Frank’s, was published in Estonia.24

      The people in the countries occupied by the Nazis or the Soviets continued their fight for freedom during the first years of the Second World War. They created governments in exile that sustained diplomatic activity and organised resistance movements in their occupied homelands. The Western countries did not recognise the occupation of the Baltic states and allowed their diplomatic representatives to continue their work in Western capitals.25 All this appeared to be consistent with the tenets of the Atlantic Charter approved by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at Placentia Bay in August 1941. The Charter affirmed ‘the right to restore self-government to nations who have forcibly been deprived thereof.’ Four months later, the Prince of Wales (the flagship used by Churchill during the summit) was sunk by Japanese dive bombers off the coast of Singapore. The principles of the Atlantic Charter were scuttled only a short while after.26

      During the first years of the Second World War, Hitler and Stalin cooperated closely.27 Deliveries and military assistance from the Soviet Union helped Hitler to conquer Western Europe. Stalin even rallied the Communist parties of Western countries against their own governments, in this way supporting Hitler’s aggression. Cooperation between the two dictators went so far that the Gestapo and the NKVD began to exchange detainees. Stalin delivered German Communists who had escaped to the Soviet Union in the 1930s to Hitler. In 1940, tensions nevertheless began to develop between Hitler and Stalin. Stalin became jealous of Hitler’s success in Europe, while Hitler was displeased about Stalin’s plans to start a new war with Finland at the end of 1940 and his plans to swallow Romania and take control of Turkey.28 As a result, both sides started to make secret preparations for war. Hitler prepared his ‘Barbarossa’ plan, while Stalin began preparations for his plan ‘Groza’ (Thunder) to launch a surprise attack against Hitler with the aim of conquering and subsequently Sovietising all of Western Europe. Overwhelming numbers of Soviet troops, tanks and planes were concentrated on the Western borders of the Soviet Union.29 However, Hitler was faster and attacked at dawn on 22 June 1941. The war between Russia and Germany had started. The German attack took Stalin by surprise: the Soviet forces were surrounded and destroyed, taking Hitler to the gates of Moscow.30 The German attack opened the way for Great Britain and later the United States to join the Soviet Union and restore a modified version of the the First World War ‘Entente’. Churchill explained Great Britain’s decision to support Stalin thus: ‘If Hitler invaded hell, [he (Churchill)] would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.’ Massive Western help allowed Stalin to restore the strength of the Red Army faster than Hitler had anticipated.

      Early in the war, Stalin was clearly eager for an arrangement based on the 1941 borders. He would probably have been willing to trade recognition of these for acceptance by the Eastern European governments in exile with the caveat that the Baltic States remain under Soviet dominance. Unfortunately, the United States had other ideas. Roosevelt preferred to concentrate on the war effort rather than stand against Soviet expansionism. This gave Stalin the opportunity to delay political discussions and seize as much booty as he could. He was not asked to make any concessions while German army was still in the field. Although Churchill understood what was taking place, Great Britain alone was not strong enough to oppose Stalin’s creation of a Soviet sphere of influence in Central and Eastern Europe. Consequently, Stalin took what he wanted. Using Western support to great effect and disregarding enormous losses, Stalin built the Red Army up into the fighting machine that by 1942–1943 crushed the German army and then pushed it back to the West.31

      Vae victis! Red Army in conquered Germany, 1945

      At the Yalta Summit in February 1945, the Western allies accepted Russia’s conquests prior to 1941 and put their stamp of approval on the new ones. For the countries that were thus absorbed into the Soviet bloc, this sentence was to last 45 years. Stalin’s concession to his allies was a Joint Declaration on Liberated Europe that promised free elections and the establishment of democratic governments in Central and Eastern Europe. As the weeks passed after Yalta, it became increasingly evident that Stalin did not intend to honour the terms of the agreement. Governments in the countries conquered by the Red Army were appointed by the Soviet authorities.32

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