What if the Baltic states had resisted Stalin?

‘You see, we resisted’, the Finnish press officer who accompanied me on my first visit to Finland in 1977 told me, looking out over the Gulf of Finland, ‘they didn’t.’

The resistance she was referring to was the Winter War, the celebrated 105-day war the Finns fought when Moscow invaded Finland after the Finnish government’s refusal to comply with the ‘non-negotiable’ territorial demands the Kremlin confronted Helsinki with in the autumn of 1939.

The ‘they’ she was referring to were Finland’s three occupied Baltic cousins, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Beginning that autumn, the three Baltic republics complied with escalating demands from Moscow. The Kremlin insisted that they sign treaties of mutual assistance allowing Moscow to station troops on their territory.

The ultimatums stemmed from the secret protocol of the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which Hitler and Stalin’s foreign ministers signed on 23 August 1939, in which Hitler signed over the Finnish, Estonian and Latvian republics to his nemesis-turned-ally, and later Lithuania, too.

Put simply, the Finns baulked. The Balts blinked. Hence my Finnish host’s superciliousness.

The staggered capitulation to Soviet power culminated in June 1940 when hundreds of thousands of Red Army troops stormed across the borders of the three Baltic states, after the commanders of their respective armies ordered their outnumbered troops to stand down, leading to their annexation and a Soviet reign of terror, one which continued for another half century, except for the intervening and no less horrific Nazi occupation of 1941-44.

This in turn led to the question that has haunted the Balts ever since: what would have happened if the Balts had not capitulated and resisted the ‘second’ Red onslaught that led to their re-absorption into Mother Russia?

One hastens to say that today Finns have considerably more respect, and perhaps understanding, for their sister republics across the Baltic, who regained their independence after the Soviet Union fell in 1991, and with whom they are fellow members of NATO, than they did 50 years ago, when they were separated by the Iron Curtain.

Nowadays, I cannot imagine any competent Finn, let alone a government official, making a remark similar to the one my bumptious Finnish guide made 50 years ago as she looked southward in the direction of enchained Eesti.

Still, the question stands: what would have happened if the Balts had resisted, too?

Indeed, with relations between the Balts and Russia at their lowest point since 1939, and the increasing possibility of a smash-up between the two, the question, which continues to be a divisive one in Baltic historiography, is no longer academic.

Most observers agree that given the modest size and parlous state of the three Balts’ armed forces relative to that of the titanic, if lumbering, Red Army, whose own lack of preparedness was proven in November 1939, when Stalin’s under-dressed myrmidons stumbled across the ice-laden Finnish-Soviet border into the crosshairs of the machine guns of the Finns’ own, highly prepared 300,000-strong army, the three Baltic governments didn’t have much of a choice in the matter.

To be sure, it is questionable whether it is even fair to compare Finland’s situation in November 1939, when the Soviets invaded and the Finns did fight back, and the Balts’ unenviable position in June 194o when Moscow confronted the three cowed governments with the second set of stiletto-edged ultimatums.

For one thing, except for the one ill-starred Soviet attack in Kainuu – which ended in the Finns’ greatest victory, in the snows of Suomussalmi, where one fleet-footed regiment of ski troops decimated two Russian divisions – the Finns basically fought on the narrow, heavily fortified front north of Leningrad known as the Mannerheim Line.

By contrast, the following spring the Balts were completely surrounded. Moreover, by June 1940, when the second Red dam broke, each country had garrisons of 20,000 to 25,000 Soviet troops stationed within their borders, so they were already effectively occupied.

Additionally, unlike the Finns, the Balts and their short-sighted, authoritarian presidents, slow to perceive the Soviet threat, failed to mobilise.

‘Finland is almost twice the size of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania combined’, says American military historian Michael O’Hanlon, ‘and is significantly more forested as well.’

‘So the motti [cordwood] tactics the Finns used so well in the Winter War would not have worked as well against Soviet tank armies in the Baltics,’ adds O’Hanlon, referring to the deadly process that Finnish ski troops used to methodically ‘cut up’ and decimate Soviet columns, as they did at Suomussalmi.

The Balts also lacked a Mannerheim Line, or anything like it, let alone commanders of the towering Finnish marshal’s skill and vision.

Nevertheless, even though Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania were already hostage to Soviet forces within their own borders, they were still well-armed.

To be precise, as of June 1940, Latvia fielded a standing army of some 30,000 soldiers, with 20 tanks, 576 artillery pieces of all calibres and 172 aircraft, while Estonia boasted around 15,700 soldiers, 36 tanks, 591 artillery pieces and 110 aircraft, and Lithuania roughly 28,000 soldiers, 30 tanks, 400 artillery pieces and 117 aircraft.

Hence there was a choice: resistance was possible, even if it might well have led to a suicidal, Masada-like last stand.

‘Military resistance was possible’, concedes Ēriks Jēkabsons, professor of history at the University of Latvia, ‘though it could not have been successful, or comparable to what the Finns achieved half a year earlier when they managed to retain their independence after they capitulated at the end of the Winter War.’

Lithuanian historian Algimantas Kasparavičius agrees that resistance was possible, ‘although there would have been no chance of defending the state’s independence under the prevailing circumstances at the time. I think it would be unrealistic to imagine that, in Europe, particularly after the disaster at Dunkirk, some tiny oasis of independence could have actually survived on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea’.

Granted, whatever resistance the Balts’ outnumbered and encircled armed forces might have mustered as the hundreds of thousands of additional Soviet troops flooded the streets of Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius in June 1940 would doubtless have been futile and short-lived.

‘So, it would indeed have been a last stand, with disastrous results,’ says O’Hanlon. ‘And let’s not forget that the Finns lost their war, too.’

Indeed. In that sense, the Talvisota, as the Finns call the Winter War, was a last stand, culminating with Suomi’s defeat, and the loss of roughly 10 per cent of Finland’s territory and the lives of an estimated 25,000 soldiers and civilians.

But so were Thermopylae, Shiloh and the Chosin Reservoir, and those heroic last stands carried moral and inspirational weight, both at the time, and for future generations, as did the Winter War.

‘Finland, superb, nay, sublime in the jaws of peril,’ said Winston Churchill in a celebrated speech broadcast by the BBC on 20 January 1940, following the astounding back-to-back Finnish victories at Suomussalmi and Raate Road, which heartened worried democrats around the world at the time, ‘Finland shows what free men can do’.

Unfortunately, the Finns squandered the moral capital they gained during the Winter War in June 1941, when, in their eagerness to revenge themselves on the Soviets and recover their lost territories, they joined Nazi Germany when it invaded the USSR, leading to the even more disastrous 1941-44 so-called Continuation War, and another defeat.

Which is another story.

Nevertheless, the Talvisota and the memory of the nation’s valiant resistance the outnumbered, outgunned, isolated Finnish army mustered in the snows of the winter of 1940 remained the country’s finest hour, inspiring future generations.

And so it does today.

By contrast, 1940 was not the Balts’ finest hour – or so it seemed at the time.

The joint capitulation of 14–16 June in the East, shortly after the fall of Paris, which provided Stalin cover for absorbing the three republics, led to the dark, half-century-long night of Soviet occupation.

Ultimately the Balts did have their finest hour on 23 August 1989, the 50th anniversary of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, when two million citizens of the three enchained Soviet republics literally linked arms in a 400-mile-long demonstration known as the Baltic Way. It broke the back of the USSR. In the crackdowns that followed, two dozen Latvian and Lithuanian freedom fighters perished.

So the eight million Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians showed ultimately what free men can do, as well. As they do today, as they and their rebuilt armies stand on the front line of the new Cold War with Russia. My long-ago Finnish host was wrong, as I expect she would readily admit today. The peoples of the then-enslaved Baltic republics were prepared to fight for their freedom, too. And so they are today under the flags of their reborn democratic republics.

The myth of Baltic submission was exactly that – a myth. My Finnish host’s memory of the Balts’ supposedly unanimous agreement to capitulate to Moscow in June 1940 was rusty. One of the presidents of the three, Antanas Smetona of Lithuania, urged his government and military to fight. A symbolic resistance, he felt, was better than nothing. Smetona was overruled and left the country. A tragic figure, he died in American exile in a house fire in 1944.

His resounding no to the Soviets still stands. Also, one military unit, the Estonian Independent Signal Battalion, did put up a courageous fight at the time in Tallinn.

On 21 June 1940, the battalion, which was then stationed at a high school on the capital’s Raua Street, refused to submit to the communist militia and Red Army forces who had been dispatched to seize their arms and belongings. The Estonians suffered one dead and three wounded, while the Reds suffered ten dead and several wounded in the firefight that followed, before the brave holdouts surrendered.

Eesti had its last stand, too.