DEfENCE LEAGUE mEmBERS AND 1941 A JOURNEy THROUGH A LONG RED NIGHT TO THE pRESENT DAy

Current developments in the world provide a good opportunity to recall and reflect on our experience in the not-so-distant past. The present day has shown that although each iteration of history may seem unique, events can and do happen in cycles.

By: MARTIN ANDRELLER , historian

Under the secret protocols to the non-aggression pact between the USSR and Germany of 23rd August 1939, Europe was divided into spheres of influence. Having secured the agreement with Stalin, Germany invaded Poland on 1st September, setting off the Second World War. On 17th September, the USSR joined the effort, conquering part of Poland. Other countries were threatened that autumn, and on 28th September 1939 the Republic of Estonia bowed under military and diplomatic pressure to accepting the terms of a mutual assistance pact with the USSR under which 25,000 Soviet troops were stationed in Estonia, a contingent that substantially exceeded the size of the Estonian Defence Forces. The Soviets also achieved control of Latvia and Lithuania in the same manner.

In early June 1940, the Red Army, Navy and Air Force established a military blockade of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, followed by ultimatums to install new governments and bring in additional military contingents. All of the countries bowed to these ultimatums. Estonia was occupied on 17th June and an additional 100,000 troops streamed in. A puppet govern- ment amenable to the Soviets was installed and Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were annexed by the USSR.

A communist reign of terror began. More than 70,000 Estonian inhabitants (about 6% of the pre-war population) fell direct victim to political repressions orchestrated by the Soviet regime, with the atrocities peaking in 1940–1941 and 1944–1953. More than 30,000 died in captivity and exile or were summarily executed. Between the WWII-era war crimes and terror waged against civilians, and resulting flight to the West, human losses amounted to one-fifth of Estonia’s population of slightly more than 1 million. A noteworthy share of Estonia’s political and social elite was imprisoned, deported or killed. This was a deliberate policy in Soviet-occupied areas. The goal was to destroy the “bourgeois” state and everyone who did not yearn for a socialist paradise.

As the volunteer home guard organization, Defence League members were also in the sights for the Soviets. Many members were active in their local community in other ways. Some were War of Independence veterans. Volunteer defenders of the country were one of the social groups that the Soviets felt had to be destroyed so that they could build the new order and suppress open resistance.

The mass deportation of Estonians in June in cattle cars also separated families. Men were sent in one direction; women and children in another. The latter had more hope of surviving the years of exile, to the extent possible given the overall situation. By the time of the March 1949 deportation, the ordeal of the June 1940 deportation and exile in wartime conditions (after all, the war impacted everyone and everything) was already firmly implanted in the national consciousness. June deportees recall how they packed everything they could – much of which proved useless later in Siberia. On the other hand, by 1949 people had learned, and took more food, clothing items and useful commodities that could be bartered for food and other supplies. The lessons of the first year of Soviet occupation (1940–1941) were still fresh in autumn 1944. Many of the recollections recorded decades later emanate a sense of not knowing what to expect, what the future might bring. Many wondered whether there would be any sort of future. Among the most poignant are accounts of how the men’s cattle cars pulled out of Tartu and those on board burst into full-throated song – a tune about yearning to be home. Having been stripped of their weapons, singing was the last remaining possibility to keep heads held high.

Today, trying to find out what became of some of the deportees is an ongoing process. The memorial to the victims of communism opened at Maarjamäe in Tallinn a few years ago and an electronic database have helped determine the fate of many, but the data are still being refined. Unfortunately, some of the entries in the database still have only a terse, dispassionate comment: “Deported in June 1941, fate unknown.”

Arrests In Estonia And The Journey To Distant Exile

For men, deportation was usually preceded by arrest and confiscation of assets. At the same time, the Estonian officer corps was rounded up and arrested in the Värska and Pechory bases. They faced internment in a prison camp for 5–8 years, followed – if they survived the Gulag – by 20 years of compulsory exile. Arrested heads of households were to be sent to the Starobelsk camp, but the course of the war kept that plan from being realized. Based on recollections from those targeted, it can be said that some trains from Estonia did wind up there and Estonians were kept in barracks for a short period, the walls of which were full of carved names, dates and military ranks of Polish officers who had been previously imprisoned there.

Sverdlovsk Oblast ended up being the new destination, while women and children were sent to Kirov and Tomsk oblasts, including the marshy Narym region. A small percentage of deportees were assigned to jobs in industry, where conditions were slightly better than in agrarian regions. Some of the sovkhozes and kolkhozes where the deportees were re-settled were in deplorable condition. Amidst this privation, 60% of the June deportees lost their lives. Arrested men faced a extended procedural ordeal, so that their “guilt” could be established, accomplices determined, punishments meted out. Sometimes the paperwork was only completed after the person had already died in prison camp. Others survived the proceedings and even outlived their sentence. An example was 1st Lieutenant Evald Räst, who was arrested on 14th June 1941 in Pechory for the fact that he was an Estonian officer, and sentenced to 10 years in a prison camp. Räst survived his years of imprisonment and was released on 30th November 1956. Incidentally, Räst’s birthday was 14th June, the day of his arrest and deportation. His good friend Paul Maitla published a notice in a local newspaper on his 25th birthday, the first anniversary of the deportation: “I have the greatest hope of finding you soon.” By the time Räst arrived back from camp, Maitla was dead, having been killed in the Czech Hell (a reprisal against those who had been pressed into service in Nazi forces) and the two friends whom the world war had separated never met again.

Many of the men who were spared or managed to evade the repressions of 1940 and 1941 entered the fight against the Reds, the destruction battalions and other agents of Soviet power as early as summer 1941. Among them was a later legendary “forest brother”, as the members of the resistance movement were called, Ants Kaljurand nicknamed Ants the Terrible. Undoubtedly a patriotic man who did not shy away from meeting the invaders with physical force, but also prioritized planning and preparation. Despite the desperate situation, Ants and many others were not averse to taking action in defence of their freedom and kept alive their belief in it. Many of them were caught in the machinery of repression during World War II and in some cases, their fate remains unknown.

Interrogations And The Present

It is gratifying to note that just as in the late 1980s and early 1990s, children took an interest in the fate of their parents, in recent years younger people have likewise taken an interest in their roots. They look for information about the fate of their grandparents and older ancestors. Although many of them died in prison camps and in exile, the foreign soil has not buried their memory. The investigation files for many of those arrested are in the Estonian National Archives and it is not too complicated to access them. Researching these materials may however be a major headache for rising history students. Sometimes the charge centred on possession of an Estonian tricolour flag, coupled with a few books on the War of

Independence and the fact that the person uttered the phrase “communists are pigs”. To generalize broadly, it could be said that if the same standards of guilt used to prosecute the people back then and isolate them from society, tens or hundreds of thousands of people today could also be deemed deserving of being sentenced to prison camp or condemned to die.

The language and style we see in these dossiers is however anything but contemporary. The pages are full of Soviet-style rhetoric. It is doubtful if not impossible that the Defence League members, officers or others began speaking in such Soviet bureaucratic cant under interrogation. Although the transcripts were supposedly put together based on the defendants’ own words, they largely reflect the investigator’s mindset and rhetoric, not to mention the interpreter who was supposed to convey it all, and the era in which the actions took place.

In one “transcript” of an interrogation of a Forest Brother, where he is told to stop lying to the Soviet investigators, the subject apologizes and then speaks at length about his opposition to the Soviet regime and his actions. The interrogation lasted hours, but rather few questions were asked. It appears that the subjects of the interrogation may have been subjected to duress – something that is not apparent from the transcripts – to elicit suitable responses. The reports on those arrested in summer 1941 are often shorter than later ones, but use of certain words and phrases comes through. Naturally, it should also be borne in mind that those detained in summer 1941 had no conception of any culpability, and spoke more forthrightly of matters than those who were arrested after WWII. By that time, everyone was all too familiar with the procedures used to establish the communist paradise, and defendants knew that the fact that they were being investigated meant they were already judged to be guilty and deserving of punishment. Anyone reading these transcripts and dossiers today might feel it is somehow absurd or odd and indeed it takes time and getting used to analyse and make sense of it all. But it is probably well-nigh impossible to get used to the sorts of “offences” that resulted in death sentences or 10 or 25 years (plus exile) in labour camps.

When The Past Is Prologue

There is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity. Investigations of such crimes can only take place in a free society, not under a military occupation. Much work has been done in past decades to study various topics and determine the fate of people. The walls of the memorial to the Estonian victims of communism which now stands in Maarjamäe has thousands of names for which there is no information on when they were killed or murdered. Besides a physical memory site and the names on the wall, there is an e-memorial online which represents a collection of data on repressed people including those who were arrested or deported but survived their ordeal.

The main emphasis has been on verifying the data and correcting errors, whether it is a matter of typographical errors in people’s names or dates of birth. Defence League members are also represented in the virtual memorial. A search of the data- base turns up 2528 names that, based on their dossiers, were tagged “Kaitseliit” (Defence League) by the database compilers from the Memento organization. Not all were tagged, however, as sometimes the defendant managed to hide their status during the interrogation, so we do not necessarily know how all of the pre-war Defence League members fared in the turbulent events before, during and after the war.

We owe these men the duty of safeguarding their memory and also ensuring that the horrors are never repeated. If we do not remember the past, we have no future. We have much to learn from the past, because the devastation visited on Estonian society back then is not that different from what is taking place in the Ukraine war. People are rounded up and transported to parts unknown, deported from their homes, killed executionstyle. The most important thing is to stand up for ourselves –if we do not do it ourselves, then who will help us? Resistance must be carefully planned. My neighbour, who was a veteran of the War of Independence, WWI and WWII used to say about any sloppy job, “that work was done with the feet”.

Ants Kaljurand, the aforementioned Saaremaa Defence League member who became Estonia’s most legendary symbol of resistance and Forest Brother movement, said; “think before you shoot”. You cannot catch or call back a bullet once it leaves the muzzle. So think about your people’s past with an open mind. Think about your forebears and ancestors and take from them the same calm mind and wisdom that helps us get through hard times as one nation and country. Although Ants Kaljurand was killed, the longing and hope for a free Estonia never disappeared from the minds of anyone who ever met him. The key to our future lies in our past. It may not always be the easiest thing to find but it is always there, as long as we are willing to see our future and stand up for it.

Confession of a defendant, 17 January 1941: Sild, Hugo son of Kustas

Question: You were an organizer in the Defence League in Mõniste?

Response: As the head of the company in Mõniste Municipality for many years, and namely over two years, I tried to muster a larger number of Defence League members, performed agitation and accepted new members into the Defence League’s organization.

Question: What sort of counterrevolutionary agitation did you carry out among Defence League mem- bers?

Response: As an active DL member, I personally defended the bourgeois order in Estonia and was hos- tile to the Communist Party. Being a company leader, I also cultivated members in the DL so that they could be loyal to the bourgeois Estonian government and in the explanations I conveyed to individual DL members, I engaged in agitation to get them to be hostile to the communists and fight the communists and if the communists should try to topple the bour- geois order by revolution, to resist them and suppress it.

Question: What role did you take on in the Isamaaliit Party?

Response: I was a member in the agrarian party Isamaaliit in 1936 and attended meetings and took part in agenda items at meetings and discussed them. At these meetings discussion was on how to harden the bourgeois order in Estonia and the fight against the Communist Party. Agitation was also carried out for government candidates for the benefit of the bourgeois government. In the run-up to elections, I as a member of Isamaaliit engaged in agitation among citizens of Mõniste Municipality so that a candidate would be elected. He was Prime Minister Eenpalu, proposed by the bourgeois government. I explained to the citizens that if Eenpalu formed the government, he would maintain the bourgeois government and order and keep the Soviet government’s system from coming to Estonia. The transcript is an accurate representation of my words and I have read it personally. H. Sild. Interrogation carried out by assistant operational commissioner Alvela.