Occupation of the Baltic states

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The occupation of the Baltic states is one of modern Europe's longest and most contested erasures of national sovereignty. In August 1939, in the early hours before dawn, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a ten-year non-aggression pact that secretly divided northern and eastern Europe into spheres of influence. Finland, Estonia, and Latvia fell to the Soviet sphere. Lithuania, though initially slotted into the German sphere, was reassigned to Moscow's control in a second secret protocol signed the following September. The three small nations on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea had no voice in the agreement. Within a year, all three were absorbed into the Soviet Union. Within fifty years, they would fight their way back out.

  What unfolded between 1939 and 1991 was not a single occupation but a sequence of them, interrupted by war and overlapping in violence. The questions at the heart of this story are not only about tanks and treaties. They are about whether a people can be erased through paperwork, through immigration, through the suppression of language. They are about who gets to write history, and what happens when a state insists that coercion was consent.

• 2. The Pact and the Pressure

  ›

  Estonia was the first to feel the squeeze. On the 18th of September 1939, a Polish submarine that had been interned in Estonian waters escaped, and Soviet authorities used the incident to question Estonian neutrality. Six days later, on the 24th of September, the Estonian foreign minister received an ultimatum: accept a treaty of mutual assistance or face the consequences. The Estonians were forced to agree to Soviet naval, air, and army bases on two Estonian islands and at the port of Paldiski, with the corresponding agreement signed on the 28th of September 1939. Latvia followed on the 5th of October, Lithuania on the 10th. The agreements granted the Soviet Union the right to station 25,000 soldiers in Estonia, 30,000 in Latvia, and 20,000 in Lithuania starting that October.

  By May 1940, the Soviets had moved from coercion to occupation planning. Their model was the Finnish Democratic Republic, the puppet regime they had installed at the start of the Winter War. A press campaign accused the Baltic governments of military collaboration against the Soviet Union. Lithuania was first to break: on the 15th of June 1940, its government was coerced into accepting Soviet troops. President Antanas Smetona urged armed resistance; his own government refused him, offering instead a candidate to lead a new regime. The Soviets rejected that compromise and dispatched Vladimir Dekanozov to take charge while the Red Army occupied the state.

  On the 16th of June, Latvia and Estonia received their ultimata as well. Andrey Vyshinsky was sent to oversee Latvia; Andrey Zhdanov took Estonia. New governments of Communists and fellow travelers were installed on the 18th and the 21st of June. Under Soviet surveillance, these governments staged elections in which voters were presented with a single list, no opposition candidates were permitted, and vote tallies were forged to reach a 99.6 percent turnout. The assemblies convened with a single item of business: a resolution to join the Soviet Union, passed in each case by acclamation. Lithuania was formally incorporated on the 3rd of August 1940, Latvia on the 5th, and Estonia on the 6th. The deposed presidents, Estonia's Konstantin Päts and Latvia's Kārlis Ulmanis, were deported to the USSR and imprisoned; Päts died in the Tver region and Ulmanis in Central Asia.

• 3. Nazi Rule and the Holocaust

  ›

  On the 22nd of June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union and the Baltic states changed occupiers within weeks. Many Balts initially greeted the arriving German forces as liberators, a reaction born of the mass deportations the Soviets had carried out in June 1941, which cost Estonia alone an estimated 60,000 citizens. In Lithuania, a revolt broke out before the Wehrmacht even arrived in Kaunas, and an independent provisional government was briefly established.

  Those hopes dissolved quickly. Germany's aim was to incorporate the Baltic territories into the Third Reich, assimilating what Nazi racial doctrine deemed "suitable" and exterminating the rest. For administrative purposes, the Baltic states were grouped with Belorussia in the Reichskommissariat Ostland, governed by Hinrich Lohse. In practice, the most lethal policies were directed at the Jewish populations concentrated in Vilnius, Kaunas, and Riga. Einsatzgruppe A, the mobile killing unit assigned to the Baltic area, was the most effective of the four such units deployed across the eastern front. In 1943, Heinrich Himmler ordered the liquidation of the ghettos and the transfer of survivors to concentration camps. Some Latvian and Lithuanian conscripts participated actively in the killing of Jews, and the Nazis succeeded in provoking local pogroms, particularly in Lithuania. By the war's end, only about 75 percent of Estonian Jews had survived, while the figures for Latvia and Lithuania were roughly 10 percent.

  For the majority of Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians who were not Jewish or Roma, German rule was harsh but comparatively less lethal than what the Soviets had done and less brutal than German occupations elsewhere in eastern Europe. Local puppet administrations handled routine governance, schools were allowed to function, though most people were denied the right to own land or run businesses. The Latvian Legion, created in 1943, eventually reached 87,550 men by the 1st of July 1944. The 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, formed from Estonian conscripts in January 1944, numbered 38,000 men and fought at the Battle of Narva and the Battle of Tannenberg Line, names that would later carry complicated meaning for Estonian memory.

• 4. Resistance and Return

  ›

  Several efforts to restore Baltic independence surfaced during the occupation years, each one frustrated by the larger forces at play. In Estonia in 1941, Jüri Uluots proposed restoring independence, and by 1944 he had become a central figure in the secret National Committee; in September 1944 he briefly served as acting president of independent Estonia. Latvia's Latvian Central Council was set up as an underground organization in 1943 before being destroyed by the Gestapo in 1945. Unlike France or Poland, none of the Baltic states had a recognized government in exile operating in the West, which left Britain and the United States with limited practical interest in the Baltic cause while the war against Germany remained undecided.

  The Soviet Baltic Offensive launched on the 14th of September 1944 moved quickly. By the 16th of September, the German Army High Command had issued a plan for Estonian forces to cover a German withdrawal. Soviet forces reached Tallinn shortly after, with the NKVD's first priority being to prevent anyone from escaping westward, though many refugees did manage to reach safety. German and Latvian forces were trapped in the Courland Pocket, capitulating on the 10th of May 1945.

  After reoccupation, Baltic partisans known as the Forest Brothers continued armed resistance for years. The Soviet response was massive deportation. In March 1949 alone, Soviet authorities organized the deportation of 90,000 Baltic nationals in a single operation. Estimated totals for the period 1944-1955 reach over half a million people: 124,000 from Estonia, 136,000 from Latvia, and 245,000 from Lithuania. The estimated death toll among Lithuanian deportees between 1945 and 1958 was 20,000, including 5,000 children. Deportees were permitted to return after Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956 denouncing Stalinist excesses, though many had not survived their years in Siberia.

• 5. Demographic Engineering

  ›

  Industrialization became the mechanism for reshaping who lived in the Baltic states. The Soviets invested in manufacturing to integrate the Baltic economies into the Soviet economic sphere, developing some of the USSR's best industrial complexes in electronics and textile production. With the factories came workers, and the workers were overwhelmingly imported from Russia and other parts of the Soviet Union.

  Ethnic Estonians had made up 88 percent of their country's population before the war. By 1970 that figure had fallen to 60 percent, and by the 1989 census to 61.5 percent. In Latvia, between 1945 and 1955 alone, the number of immigrants reached 535,000, most from Russia. Latvians had constituted about 79 percent of Latvia's population in 1940; by 1989 they made up 52 percent. Lithuania received immigration on a smaller scale, and the ethnic drop there was only about 4 percent.

  Political control mirrored the demographic shift. During the last quarter of 1944, the Estonian Communist Party had only 56 members. By 1946, Estonians made up just 42 percent of Estonia's own Communist Party. The Latvian Communist Party was 52 percent Latvian in 1949; Lithuania's was only 38 percent Lithuanian in 1953. In March 1949, of the 30 non-staff lecturers in the Agitprop Department in the city of Riga, only 8 knew Latvian. These were the people charged with spreading Soviet ideology among the native population.

  Archival budget records for Latvia show that from 1946 to 1990, the USSR extracted significantly more resources from Latvian territory than it reinvested, with over 18 percent of revenues net-transferred out of the republic. Lithuania sent roughly a third of all its annual national budgets to the USSR budget across the entire occupation period. A Latvian government commission in 2016 calculated the total economic damage of the occupation at 185 billion euros at prices of that year. Estonia's own estimates in 2005 placed the economic losses from the final Soviet occupation period alone at over 100 billion dollars.

• 6. The Road to Independence

  ›

  The first visible cracks in Soviet control appeared in the streets, not the parliaments. The first major environmental demonstrations broke out in Riga in November 1986, followed in spring by protests in Tallinn. Small successful protests built confidence, and by the end of 1988, reformist factions had gained decisive positions in Baltic Communist party structures. Popular Fronts assembled coalitions of reformists and nationalist forces across all three republics.

  The Estonian language was restored as an official state language by the Supreme Soviet of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic in January 1989, with Latvia and Lithuania enacting similar legislation soon after. The three republics declared sovereignty in sequence: Estonia in November 1988, Lithuania in May 1989, Latvia in July 1989. On the 23rd of August 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Baltic Way unfolded: a human chain stretching across all three countries, the largest organized demonstration against Soviet rule. That December, the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union condemned the pact and its secret protocol as "legally untenable and invalid."

  Lithuania moved first on formal independence. On the 11th of March 1990, the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet declared independence. Estonia's Supreme Soviet on the 30th of March 1990 declared the Soviet Union an occupying power and announced a transitional period toward independence; Latvia followed on the 4th of May. Moscow condemned all three declarations as illegal. After an economic blockade of Lithuania failed, negotiations began, but they broke down. In January 1991, Soviet military forces killed civilians in what became known as the Vilnius massacre in Lithuania and the Barricades in Latvia.

  The failed August 1991 coup against Gorbachev changed the outcome. A day after the coup attempt, on the 21st of August, the Estonian Supreme Council restored independence, and the Latvian parliament made a similar declaration the same day. An independence referendum held in Estonia on the 3rd of March 1991 had already been approved by 78.4 percent of voters with an 82.9 percent turnout. The Soviet government recognized the independence of all three Baltic states on the 6th of September 1991.

• 7. Withdrawal and Aftermath

  ›

  Even after recognition of independence, roughly 120,000 Russian troops remained on Baltic soil in 1992, and the process of removing them became its own negotiation. Russia sought to retain facilities including the Liepaja naval base, the Skrunda anti-ballistic missile radar station, the Ventspils space-monitoring station, and the Paldiski submarine base, as well as transit rights through Lithuania to Kaliningrad. Moscow tied troop withdrawal to legislation guaranteeing the civil rights of ethnic Russians, a linkage that Baltic leaders and Western governments viewed as implicit coercion.

  Lithuania was the first to see a complete Russian withdrawal, on the 31st of August 1993, partly because of the Kaliningrad transit question. Withdrawal agreements for Latvia were signed on the 30th of April 1994, and for Estonia on the 26th of July 1994. A U.S. Senate threat in mid-July 1994 to halt all aid to Russia if forces were not withdrawn by August's end helped accelerate the timeline. Final withdrawal was completed on the 31st of August 1994. Russian troops at the Paldiski base in Estonia stayed until nuclear reactors there were suspended on the 26th of September 1995. The Skrunda-1 radar station in Latvia was decommissioned on the 31st of August 1998, and the dismantled equipment was repatriated to Russia; the site was returned to Latvian control, and the last Russian soldier left Baltic soil in October 1999.

  The question of Soviet-era structures lingered alongside the question of reparations. As author Aliide Naylor wrote, it is "clearly offensive" to pour money into restoring a Soviet monument that reminds local populations of an occupying force or the destruction of a Jewish cemetery, given the violence such structures symbolize. Latvia removed the Monument to the Liberators of Soviet Latvia and Riga from the German Fascist Invaders in 2022, despite its name. Estonia's Tehumardi Soviet propaganda monument on the island of Saaremaa was preserved for its scale and later artistically reinterpreted in late 2025, with the red star removed and previous inscriptions replaced. The Soviet Union and its successor Russia have never paid reparations to the Baltic states, and Russia's current official position continues to maintain the annexations were legitimate.