Free and independent Poland and Estonia lost
The Soviet Union did not honour its peace agreements with Poland or Estonia. Through the Comintern they planned for the creation of communist revolutions, which would overthrow existing governments, throughout the world. In 1939, the Soviets had territorial ambitions for much of Europe, so planning for the subjugation of the Polish and Estonian people was already underway in Moscow.
Poland became the first country targeted by the Soviets because the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Germany would allow them to move on the eastern half of Poland with impunity. The Soviets did not yet have their annexation plan completely in place when they moved against Poland, but their goal was to install a system similar to what was in place in the Soviet Union.
The Soviets knew their regime would not be welcomed anywhere, so whereever they went, they tried to create dissent and revolutions of the proletariat, which would rise up and destroy the existing orders. In eastern Poland, the Soviets were able to initially encourage the different ethnic factions, the Ukrainians, Belorussians and Jews to rise up violently against the Polish minority who governed. As the Soviet occupation evolved, everyone became vulnerable to Soviet terror. All individuals lost their value and rights in the Soviet system, as they became wholly subservient to the whims of whoever was representing the monolithic state apparatus.
In Estonia the 1934 census showed 89% of the people as native Estonians, so a conflict based upon ethnic hatreds could not be created. However, because the Estonian population was much smaller than Poland’s, only one million as opposed to thirteen million in eastern Poland, the population could be more easily intimidated with the use of Soviet military force. Thus when Soviets demanded bases in Estonia, the Päts government had to acquiesce, and when the Red Army moved in on mass in June 1940 after the fall of France, the Estonians understood that armed resistance would be suicidal as they had no hope of outside help.
In Poland and Estonia, the Soviets made a concerted effort to position themselves as the popular choice of the working people and the peasant class. In both countries, (as well as in Lithuania and Latvia), elections were arranged where the popular will, as deemed by the Soviets, was that the local people sought unification with the glorious Soviet Union. In both Poland and Estonia, these fraudulent elections were orchestrated under tight military control, with local abstaining citizens being noted for future reprisals.
The governments of the United States, Great Britain and France knew that the absorption of Estonia (and Latvia and Lithuania) into the Soviet Union were illegal, and refused to recognize these forcible annexations. Both Poland and Estonia lost over 5% of their populations to executions and deportations that were initiated and carried out by Beria’s NKVD henchmen. Thus both were terrorized into compliant submission to the Soviet state. The ‘lost’ people were typically the educated and accomplished leaders of their respective societies, and they were replaced by the marginal and the underclass whose only qualifications for leadership were loyalty to the Soviet masters.
Still, with much turmoil in Europe, both countries held out hope that in the future there would once again be an opportunity when independent nation status could be realized.
Epilogue
At Yalta in February 1945, the western Allies (an ill Roosevelt and a tired Churchill) allowed Eastern Europe to fall once again under Soviet domination, meaning Stalin’s domination, and the cycle of “cleansings” and deportations began anew.
This was in fact tacit western recognition and approval of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Stalin and Hitler. For the peoples and nations that were abandoned, it was a bitter betrayal of the principles of the Atlantic Charter, the shallow agreement between Roosevelt and Churchill of August 1941, whose principles Stalin also agreed to in January 1942. There would be no serious attempt to abide by “... no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned”, and “... sovereign rights and self governement restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them”.
American career diplomat and authour George Kennan offered up “I have in mind here what seems to me to have been an inexcusable body of ignorance of the Russian communist movement, about the history of its diplomacy, about what happened in the purges, and about what has been going on in Poland and the Baltic States”.
To date, the West has still not yet demanded Russian recognition and retributive justice for the victims of Stalin’s Soviet crimes against humanity.
(End)
Made in Moscow: Bibliography
Courtois, S., and others, The Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1999
Gross, J.T., Revolution From Abroad, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2002
Kareda, E., Estonia, the Forgotten Nation, Estonian Central Council in Canada (EKN), Toronto, 1961
Kennan, G.F., Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, Little Brown and Company, Toronto, 1960
Lukowski, J. and Zawadzki, H., A Concise History of Poland, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002
Raun, T.U., Estonia and Estonians, Hoover Institution Press, Stanford, 2001.
Uustalu, E., The History of the Estonian People, Boreas Publishing Co. Ltd., London, 1952 .
***
(Footnotes from the article available on request from the author.)
Made in Moscow: The Soviet occupation of Poland and Estonia (5)
Archived Articles | 01 Apr 2005 | Toomas TreiEWR
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