WI: Soviets don't annex the Baltic states?

The Germans most certainly did try to overthrow a Baltic government in the interwar. In fact, they temporarily succeeded: the Latvian government was overthrown by the Germans in April 1919 (the "Liepaja Putsch") and replaced by a reactionary puppet regime under the collaborationist Andrievs Niedra. The Latvians eventually ousted the unpopular Niedra and restored their legitimate government, forcing out his German masters with Estonian and British help.

The experience of WWI and the early interwar years made the Baltic nations fear and resent the possibility of German occupation more than the possibility of Soviet occupation. Certainly the anti-Soviet feelings were not created by Stalin's repression; but this unexpected and extraordinary high level of repression is what made them stronger than the anti-German feelings...I don't see what would be so strange about that. For the record, I came across this assertion in War Land On The Eastern Front by Vejas Liulevicus (a Lithuanian-American historian whose family left their homeland to escape Soviet rule. So - putting it mildly - not a person likely to hold some kind of pro-Russian bias).

I understand that the people in the Baltic states were very divided on the matter of Germany and the USSR - in Estonia, for example, a slight majority of the people seems to have seen the Germans as a bigger threat, but then it seems that the majority of the political elite saw the USSR as the main threat. I base this estimate on the biography of the Estonian politician Jaan Tõnisson by Erkki Tuomioja. Perhaps we could say that from Lithuania and Latvia in the south to Estonia and Finland in the north, it was most likely for the people fear Germany in the south and the USSR in the north, due to simple historical and geographical reasons. The dichotomy between what the people believed and what the political establishment, being more in the know about actual foreign events and processes thought, is also important. By the 30s, things changed significantly from the early interwar years, and in Stalin's time a lot of horrible stories came out of the USSR. For those with more information about what actually happened east of the border, it would have been hard to realistically see Germany as the bigger threat, especially before the Nazis solidified their rule after the mid-30s.

For most people, the thing was, though, that they did not want to choose between the two nations and resented the possibility of being put to a position where a choice would be forced, wanting to be free and independent instead of becoming German or Soviet "allies" - people naturally knew that such an arrangement would mean subjugation and foreign domination by either of these major powers. The UK and France, or the Nordic nations, or even Poland would have been the nations most Baltic citizens would have chosen as nations to voluntarily ally with.

So, again (like hwyl also pointed out above), the Baltic peoples were not "relieved" to be occupied by the Soviets. True, a large part of the Baltic peoples seems to have been more afraid of German than Soviet occupation. But saying that they were "relieved" that Red Army troops and tanks rolled over their borders to end these nations' independence is like saying someone would be relieved being killed with an electric chair instead of being thrown to the lions. The end result, the death of national independence, was the same. The people did not need to see the Soviet repression of 40-41 to understand this.
 
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I understand that the people in the Baltic states were very divided on the matter of Germany and the USSR - in Estonia, for example, a slight majority of the people seems to have seen the Germans as a bigger threat, but then it seems that the majority of the political elite saw the USSR as the main threat. I base this estimate on the biography of the Estonian politician Jaan Tõnisson by Erkki Tuomioja. Perhaps we could say that from Lithuania and Latvia in the south to Estonia and Finland in the north, it was most likely for the people fear Germany in the south and the USSR in the north, due to simple historical and geographical reasons. The dichotomy between what the people believed and what the political establishment, being more in the know about actual foreign events and processes thought, is also important. By the 30s, things changed significantly from the early interwar years, and in Stalin's time a lot of horrible stories came out of the USSR. For those with more information about what actually happened east of the border, it would have been hard to realistically see Germany as the bigger threat, especially before the Nazis solidified their rule after the mid-30s.

For most people, the thing was, though, that they did not want to choose between the two nations and resented the possibility of being put to a position where a choice would be forced, wanting to be free and independent instead of becoming German or Soviet "allies" - people naturally knew that such an arrangement would mean subjugation and foreign domination by either of these major powers. The UK and France, or the Nordic nations, or even Poland would have been the nations most Baltic citizens would have chosen as nations to voluntarily ally with.

So, again (like hwyl also pointed out above), the Baltic peoples were not "relieved" to be occupied by the Soviets. True, a large part of the Baltic peoples seems to have been more afraid of German than Soviet occupation. But saying that they were "relieved" that Red Army troops and tanks rolled over their borders to end these nations' independence is like saying someone would be relieved being killed with an electric chair instead of being thrown to the lions. The end result, the death of national independence, was the same. The people did not need to see the Soviet repression of 40-41 to understand this.

According to this, we are more or less in agreement - except about the usage of the word "relieved".

So I looked up how Liulevicus phrases it in his conclusion...indeed, he does not say that the people of the Baltics were "relieved". He says that they "bitterly congratulated themselves" on at least not falling into the German sphere.
Caught between these regimes, native peoples at first congratulated themselves bitterly on at least having fallen to the Russians, not to the Germans. Remembering Ober Ost’s regime, people contrasted Russian rule, brutal but unsystematic, with the comprehensive, efficient severity of German occupation. The following year of intensifying Stalinist terror and deportations, turned this cold comfort into a crueler joke. New ideological energies abroad in Europe upset calculations based on earlier precedents.
Make of that what you will.
 
According to this, we are more or less in agreement - except about the usage of the word "relieved".

So I looked up how Liulevicus phrases it in his conclusion...indeed, he does not say that the people of the Baltics were "relieved". He says that they "bitterly congratulated themselves" on at least not falling into the German sphere.

Make of that what you will.

I'd say that if the people in general thought that Soviet occupation would be like Imperial Russian rule, they had not really kept up with the recent years' and decades' news making their way out of the Soviet state. Like I said, the political elite in the Baltics seems to have seen the USSR as a bigger threat more likely than "the man on the street", probably exactly because they could read intelligence and diplomatic reports and received up-to-date info on the USSR. The people seem to have been more remembering the last war, or the years just after it. In comparison, I'd say the Finns, in all their anti-Soviet paranoia, seem to have been more realistic in 1939 or so about what a Stalinist occupation would entail than many of our Baltic brethren to the south.
 
I'd say that if the people in general thought that Soviet occupation would be like Imperial Russian rule, they had not really kept up with the recent years' and decades' news making their way out of the Soviet state. Like I said, the political elite in the Baltics seems to have seen the USSR as a bigger threat more likely than "the man on the street", probably exactly because they could read intelligence and diplomatic reports and received up-to-date info on the USSR. The people seem to have been more remembering the last war, or the years just after it. In comparison, I'd say the Finns, in all their anti-Soviet paranoia, seem to have been more realistic in 1939 or so about what a Stalinist occupation would entail than many of our Baltic brethren to the south.

It might well be that many would have thought "that if we would have to choose to be occupied by either power that Russians would then be the better alternative". But such a thing would have been only a thought game and the near universal attitude was that of course we don't want to be occupied by either for God's sake. So, when the disaster happened and the brutal Stalinist occupation occurred, the universal feeling obviously wasn't of "relief" but horror. They didn't think that "oh well, this is probably better than the German occupation would have been" but "my god, our country is being raped!"
 

orwelans II

Banned
The thread has gone off course a bit, so I'll ask another related question for those with some more knowledge of the region to discuss:

Once the Axis are defeated what happens to the economies of the three independent countries? AFAIK over half of the Latvian SSR's industrial output became military goods. Perhaps, the Soviet leadership wouldn't be prepared to create such large military industries in what would de jure be foreign countries?
 
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