The Russo-German struggle for a Baltic empire

The period 1914-45 offers both sharp contrasts and intriguing similarities with previous geopolitical eras in the Baltic Sea region. The major contrast concerns the actors and main axes of military operations. Unlike previous systemic wars in the region, the First World War involved neither Denmark nor Sweden. Since the Scandinavian countries maintained their neutrality and policy of non-belligerency, the wars of this period did not take place along an east-west or north-south axis, but along a north-east (or south-west) one between Germany and Russia in their various guises. There are significant parallels with previous eras regarding the interplay between regional aspirations and wider European dynamics – or, phrased differently, between western and eastern parts of Europe. As before, projects seeking the closure of the region’s waterways came from the powers of the Baltic Sea – during this period, Germany and Russia (and then the USSR) – while projects of openness (mare liberum) came from the west. In this period, the latter role was played by Britain and, from afar, by the United States.

In the short period between 1914 and 1945, the Baltic Sea went through a rapid cycle of openness-closure-openness, before entering a final phase of unprecedented political, strategic and cultural closure. Germany tried to subjugate the region twice, but failed both times. At the end of the period, the Soviet Union stood as the victorious hegemon. Until August 1914, like all of Europe, the region was characterised by a high degree of commercial freedom, and for many people freedom of movement. With the outbreak of war on both Western and Eastern Fronts, this Indian summer of the ancien régime ended abruptly. The interwar period was a time of unprecedented international pluralism, during which the Baltic Sea had nine littoral states. This flourishing of independence proved short-lived, however. As a consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union occupied Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, attacked Finland and conquered Karelia. After almost two years the Germans came with fire, death and the horrific fantasies of Generalplan Ost, which would have turned the Baltic into a German lake under Nazi occupation. Had they succeeded, all pluralism would have been lost in the wake of genocide and tyranny.

Ultimately, the Soviet Union was victorious, but as the Red Army rolled westwards it imposed its own yoke on the countries it conquered, from Estonia in the north to what became East Germany in the west. The Soviet Union brought paradigmatic change, not only by occupying the Baltic states and imposing vassalage on Poland, but also by dissolving Prussia and removing all Baltic Germans from the lands east of the River Oder. Earlier, the Nazis and their local lackeys had slain almost all Jewish people across the region. In 1945, the openness, freedom and hopes of the interwar years were gone. In their place was a charred and scarred region, with traumatised, frightened people and their grim overlords. This essay charts the story of those hard decades.

Unlike the North Sea, the Baltic did not see any major naval engagements during the First World War. Yet the absence of surface combat did not mean that the Baltic world was unaffected by the titanic clash of empires. From the viewpoint of maritime strategy, this was a war of blockades and sea mines. None of the Scandinavian powers took part in the war but all were hit, and hit hard, by the disruption of globalised trade that had been one of the blessings of the 19th century. In Sweden, hunger riots broke out on numerous occasions and the street violence sharpened the growing tensions between the forces of democratisation and reaction. Still, these internal tensions were resolved peacefully: at the end of the war, Denmark, Norway and Sweden emerged as full parliamentary democracies.

The eastern seaboard of the Baltic was, however, directly affected by the war. One of the first major engagements took place in East Prussia. Russian forces rolled into this, the easternmost German province, expecting little resistance. The invasion soon turned into a disaster as German forces, led by von Hindenburg, Ludendorff and von Mackensen, annihilated two Russian armies at the Battle of the Masurian Lakes in September 1914. The battle was not without consequences for Britain and France. The German war plan entailed a full concentration of forces on the Western Front. This stratagem required a weaker Eastern Front and cool heads at the General Staff to allow a Russian advance through the Prussian heartlands while France was dispensed with. However, commander-in-chief Helmuth von Moltke the Younger lost his nerve and dispatched two divisions to the east. This may have weakened the forces in the west and contributed to the outcome of the Battle of the Marne, where the Germans were repulsed. Thus Paris and France might have been saved in the Prussian forests.

Having unsuccessfully tried to defeat Russia during the winter of 1914–15, the summer offensive of the Central Powers in 1915 succeeded in conquering Congress Poland, parts of what is today Belarus, all of modern Lithuania and southern Latvia (Curonia/Kurland). Although Russia remained in the war, the road was now open for the project of German dominance of eastern Europe and the Baltic Sea. The conquered territories, gathered under the administration of Ober-Ost, were to become colonies or vassal states.

It was after the conclusion of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918, following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, that Germany’s imperial plans for the Baltic Sea region fully unfolded. A design emerged that would make the Baltic a sealed-off sea and a closed economic space. Newly independent Finland and Estonia would become client kingdoms with monarchs taken from German royal families. As Russia was defeated and thrown into a devastating civil war, Germany briefly enjoyed a hegemonic position on the eastern seaboard. It had also supported the movements for independence from the Russian Empire. Germany had trained Finnish elite forces (Jääkari) during the war and the German Baltic Sea Division had intervened in the Finnish Civil War in support of the Whites against the communist Reds.

When its forces were defeated on the Western Front in the late autumn of 1918 the German imperial project in the east fell apart abruptly. As the armistice was signed with America, Britain and France, revolution broke out in Germany and the monarchy was overthrown. With Germany in no position to enforce its grand plans, the Baltic states, Finland and Poland became sovereign republics. There was no military intervention by the powers of western Europe to promote this anti-imperial pluralism. Legally, however, the swiftness of America, Britain and France in recognising the new states and enshrining the principles of national self-determination at the Peace of Versailles provided crucial support.

One of the most significant results of the end of the First World War was that the four large continental empires were dissolved and their ruling dynasties exiled: the Austro-Hungarian (Habsburg), the German (Hohenzollern), the Ottoman (the House of Osman) and the Russian (Romanov). A great number of polities sprang up in their place, creating the most polycentric situation in central and eastern Europe since the late Middle Ages – certainly the most democratic. A conventional description of this process is that a number of nation states were established, partly through the efforts of national liberation movements, partly through the efforts of the victorious Great Powers. Most were nation states, however, in name and in principle only. None of the new borders had created ethnically homogenous polities.

Instead, a defining feature of the interwar era was what would be called ‘the minorities question’. Since time immemorial, peoples had mixed and lived under the same sovereign in Europe. But since the explosion of nationalism as a political form during the 19th century and since Woodrow Wilson introduced the ideals of the nation state as a prerequisite of a just polity and of democracy, ethnic and linguistic variety increasingly came to be viewed as a political and emotional problem. Most of the new states in Europe sought to continue the 19th-century tradition of regarding a single state-nationality as a norm. The presence of national minorities was obviously a problem for the vision of unity and monoethnicity on the part of the state and a fertile ground for the cultivation of irredentist movements. The prelude to the new war in Europe would consist of attempts to ‘correct’ the redrawings of boundaries and to make sure that estranged minorities were brought back into ‘the Fatherland’. By and large, the Baltic Sea region stands out for the relatively successful resolution of the minorities question during the interwar years.

The proliferation of national minorities was most pronounced in central Europe, but the Baltic Sea region also had its share. Finland had a substantial Swedish-speaking minority, both in the coastal provinces of the mainland and in the archipelago of Åland. It could have been a source of conflict, but the issue was resolved peacefully. Sweden and newly independent Finland had a complicated history: Finland had been part of the Swedish Realm until 1809, which ensured that Swedish elites maintained a nostalgia for the lost possessions, and commercial and familial ties at all social levels remained strong. The evolution of the old Grand Duchy of Finland into a sovereign republic raised a number of questions in Sweden. First, there was a sense of solidarity and relief that it was no longer controlled by Russia. Second, there was a considerable degree of doubt about the viability – and reliability – of the new state.

The question of the Swedish language and the rights of the ‘Finnish-Swedish’ (Finlandssvenska) minority did not arise suddenly in 1917. When Finland was first established as a semi-sovereign polity in the Russian Empire in 1809, Tsar Alexander wanted to avoid fostering rebellious sentiment and instead rule with a light hand. Hence the Grand Duchy of Finland was guaranteed to keep its old Swedish laws, was granted a considerable degree of self-rule and retained Swedish as a language of administration and politics alongside Russian. Finnish had always been spoken by the majority population, but it emerged as a language of law and politics during the second half of the 19th century due to the efforts of the Fennoman movement.

Several factors explain why the Swedish minority did not become a bone of contention after the end of the First World War. One of them might have to do with historical timing. The question of the Swedish minority was largely settled and their rights guaranteed in law well before the onset of nationalism and systemic wars. In the 19th century, not all Swedish-speakers belonged to the elite, but the elite was certainly Swedish-speaking. To them, acquiring their own semi-sovereign polity under the auspices of Russia was not a bad deal. Much of life could continue as before, with the added benefits of having immense business and career opportunities in the Russian Empire and of being free of the ever-present risk of being on the frontlines in a war between Moscow and Stockholm. Viewed from the Swedish side, the fact that the eastern provinces on the mainland were lost before nationalism had become a potent political force may explain why they were never an object of irredentist agitation. Indeed, there are signs that Sweden quickly came to terms with this initially traumatic loss. By the 1850s this was a non-question.

Åland was, however, a different matter. Its population was (and still is) exclusively Swedish-speaking and it had been considered part of the core territory of Sweden in a stronger sense than the other mainland provinces. The islands also had considerable strategic value: at the intersection of the Gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic Sea proper, and between Sweden and Finland, they were prime real estate for anyone wanting to control the northern Baltic. Located just a few hours of sailing from Stockholm, anyone possessing the islands would be in a position to threaten the Swedish capital. In recognition of their military importance, the archipelago had been demilitarised at the end of the Crimean War in 1856.

After the fall of the Romanov dynasty, everything seemed possible and the Ålanders voted to join Sweden. Their plea to join the old country found wide political support in Sweden, while Finnish politicians were adamantly against the plans for secession. Relations between Finland and Sweden grew progressively worse and ultimately the question was referred to the League of Nations. After a few years’ deliberation, the League decided in favour of the islands remaining with Finland, but with a considerable degree of self-government and with continued neutral status. Thus, thanks to an essentially western European intervention, a possible source of conflict between Finland and Sweden was resolved, paving the way for what would develop into one of the closest inter-state relationships in Europe over the coming decades.

The start of the Second World War is conventionally dated to 1 September 1939 – the day Germany invaded Poland. In the Baltic, it may be more apt to date it to 23 August of the same year, when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact that also entailed partitioning eastern Europe and, in particular, the Baltic Sea region. Until the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 we can speak of a dual imperial structure in which, for the first time in history, two local powers formally agreed to share overlordship of the Baltic. The agreement was a strategic shock of the first order of magnitude to the rest of the international system.

There was little appetite to contest the settlement in Britain or France, but even if there had been it is difficult to see how it would have been possible to do so. It is, of course, not clear if either of the two antagonists envisioned a lasting relationship or if both simply wanted to buy time to prepare for the main confrontation. In the meantime, however, Germany and the Soviet Union swallowed up almost all of the small states in the broad belt between them. Germany attacked Poland from the west on 1 September and the Soviets invaded from the east on 17 September, effectively resulting in a fourth partition of the country.

Meanwhile, Estonia, Finland, Latvia and Lithuania were subjected to Soviet pressure to enter into treaties of mutual assistance and to allow the deployment of Soviet forces on their soil. The three Baltic states saw no option but to yield to the demands. Finland, as is well known, did not, which resulted in the Winter War (Talvisota) of 1939-40. Despite fierce resistance, Finland lost the war and was forced to surrender Karelia and the Petsamo strip in the Arctic to the USSR. In the summer of 1940 the Soviets occupied and soon annexed the Baltic states. A year later the Soviet Union launched a programme of mass deportations to Siberia of Baltic citizens deemed to be potential threats to the state.

On 22 June 1941, Midsummer’s Eve, all hell was unleashed upon eastern Europe as Nazi Germany and its allies attacked the Soviet Union. The brief spell of the Nazi-Soviet duumvirate was over as Hitler launched the most ambitious imperial project the region had ever seen. The Germans quickly conquered the entire eastern seaboard of the Baltic Sea. By July, Nazi forces were poised to encircle Leningrad. As Denmark had been occupied on 9 April the previous year and Sweden remained neutral (and cowed by German demands to transit troops and sell iron ore), the Baltic Sea had essentially become a closed space under Nazi rule.

The Nazi imperial project was revolutionary and aimed to transform Europe into something that had never been seen before. As the northernmost part of eastern Europe, the Baltic Sea region was drawn into the fiendish schemes of the Generalplan Ost – the blueprint for a new order in the east. At its core, the plans were thoroughly genocidal and aimed to murder – through violence or starvation – the Baltic, Jewish and Slavic populations of the conquered territories. Eventually, they would be replaced by German settlers, or possibly used as slaves in the vast agricultural reserve that Hitler dreamed the European Soviet Union would become. The end result would be absolute closure and the inverse of pluralism, as a Germanic Lebensraum would reign for centuries. The dreams of the Nazis were shattered by the armies and industries of the Allied powers, but before their defeat they managed to murder tens of millions of civilians across eastern Europe and Russia, the territories so aptly named ‘bloodlands’ by Timothy Snyder.

Of the two empires that had carved up the Baltic Sea region in August 1939, only one was left standing in May 1945: the Soviet Union. One of Stalin’s central war aims, once the immediate struggle for survival was over, was the creation of a thick belt of territories around the Soviet Union to protect it from invasion. Strategic depth was increased, partly through annexation and partly through the establishment of subservient vassal states in central and eastern Europe.

At the end of the war, its conquests were immense. Finnish Karelia (along with Viborg), Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the northern half of East Prussia and the easternmost parts of Poland were annexed. Poland was shifted westwards as it received southern East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania as compensation for the lands lost in the east. However, along with the other states of central Europe, it was sovietised and forced into Moscow’s orbit. Germany up to the Elbe was placed under military occupation and eventually turned into a grim warrior satellite in the shape of the German Democratic Republic. Finland escaped the fate of the Baltic republics, but the Moscow Armistice subjected it to heavy reparations, restrictions on its armed forces and the indignities of a Soviet control commission operating from Helsinki.

The Second World War dramatically changed the geopolitical situation in the Baltic Sea region. For the first time in history a single power exercised uncontested control over the entire littoral from the Neva to the Elbe. The war also radically changed the ethnic composition of the region. First, and most obviously, most of the Jewish population had been murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators, ending a thousand years of history and culture. Although, the Jewish population in Finland and Sweden remained unharmed, and almost the entire Jewish population of Denmark was evacuated to Sweden, and thus saved, in a heroic operation by the Danish resistance movement.

The German population of the Baltic states and of Poland fled before the advance of the Red Army or was deported. The ethnic cleansing of 12 million Germans from large parts of the region also severed a historical link, established in the 12th and 13th centuries during the days of the Hanse and the German Order. The state of Prussia was abolished territorially and legally, by decree of the victorious powers on 25 February 1947. Königsberg, the city of Immanuel Kant, became Kaliningrad and was turned into a citadel of the Russian navy. Under communism Poland, once a multicultural commonwealth, became ethnically homogenous for the first time in its thousand years of existence. Finally, the composition of the Baltic states was changed, not only through genocidal conflict but also by renewed deportations of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians after the war and the immigration of ethnic Russians.

In the end, not only the people and the polities around the Baltic Sea were casualties of the war – so was the sea itself. The Baltic did not see any major naval battles, such as in the Mediterranean or the Pacific. Instead of fights between surface ships or between vessels and submarines that dominated the Atlantic theatre, the war in the Baltic was largely one of mines. Classic naval thought distinguishes between the two major strategies of ‘sea control’ and ‘sea denial’. In the first, the goal is to dominate a body of water. In the second, it is to deny it to the enemy. In order to do the latter, there are few tools more effective and cost-efficient than mines, either floating on the surface or fixed to the bottom of the sea. Naval mines were used in all theatres of the wars; the Royal Navy deployed vast shields of heavily mined areas in the North Sea to protect Britain.

The Baltic is particularly suited to mine warfare. It is a sea of narrow straits, chokepoints and locks at both ends: Kattegatt and the Danish straits in the west and the Gulf of Finland in the east. The major aim of any enemy of the Soviet Union was – and still is – to prevent its fleets leaving port, particularly from Kronstadt and St Petersburg. Unfortunately, many mines still litter the seabed.

Another legacy is the enormous quantities of ammunition that were dumped in the sea after the end of the war. Normal ordnance – shells and cartridges – are a major problem even today as fishermen risk catching them in their nets or setting them off by dragging the seabed. There are an estimated 300,000 tonnes of ammunition in the German waters of the Baltic. An even more heinous problem, however, is the vast number of German chemical weapons that the Allies sought to neutralise by simply dropping them into the sea. Over time, the metal containers of both conventional and chemical weapons corrode and toxic chemicals will be released into the water, harming ecosystems and human beings. The era of the world wars continues to cast a grim shadow over the Baltic.

This essay was originally published in  The Baltic Sea: A Geopolitical History, edited by Peter Haldén and published by Bokförlaget Stolpe.