Between Giants (6 page)

The issue of Lithuania was far more complex, and Germany and the Soviet Union continued to haggle over the spoils of war. In addition to agreeing spheres of influence in the Baltic States, the secret protocol had outlined a demarcation line in Poland between the two nations. On 25 September, Stalin suggested that the existing agreement should be altered. German forces had seized the area around Lublin, which according to the secret protocol should have passed to the Soviet Union; Stalin now suggested that Germany should retain control of Lublin, and instead the Soviet Union should gain Lithuania. After all, he pointed out, the Red Army was already in Vilnius, and a resolution of the Vilnius question would be far easier if there were no need for a complex set of negotiations involving Germany, Lithuania and the Soviet Union. After a short delay, the Germans agreed on 28 September, though with the proviso that parts of south-west Lithuania would pass to Germany.

Two days before, the Lithuanian Communist Party – which had no links with Moscow – had issued a proclamation that Germany was intending to occupy Lithuania, and that Lithuania should look to the Soviet Union for its salvation. The day after Germany and the Soviet Union had agreed to divide Lithuania between them, the Lithuanian representative in Moscow, Ladas Natkevičius, was summoned to the Kremlin. Here, Molotov informed him that Stalin wished the Lithuanians to send a senior minister to Moscow for talks. Molotov also stated that Germany would agree to whatever arrangements were made between Lithuania and the Soviet Union, effectively confirming that Lithuania’s two large neighbours had already agreed that Lithuania would be within the Soviet sphere of influence. As had been the case with Estonia and Latvia, it was made clear that time was of the essence, and the meeting concluded with the words of Mikhail Kalinin, the titular Soviet head of state, that the time for a ‘platonic’ relationship was over: ‘To whom are you closer: the Germans or us?’
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Natkevičius returned to Kaunas for discussions, and in early October headed back to Moscow, followed by the Lithuanian Foreign Minister, Juozas Urbšys. The Germans were becoming nervous that their planned seizure of south-west Lithuania would be perceived as part of a predatory carve-up of a small nation (which is of course exactly what was intended), and asked the Soviet side to avoid discussing the matter with the Lithuanians until after the Soviet Union had already sent troops into Lithuania. They hoped that when the Red Army sent its troops into Lithuania, the south-west portion would be left free of occupying troops, and the Wehrmacht would then be able to secure the area, if necessary claiming that this was to prevent a complete Soviet takeover.

However, this request came too late; Stalin had met Urbšys on 3 October and informed him that Lithuania had three choices. The first was a mutual assistance pact, in line with the agreements with Estonia and Latvia. The second, not mutually exclusive with the first, was a treaty to return the Vilnius region to Lithuania. The third was a treaty that would result in south-west Lithuania being surrendered to Germany. Urbšys was genuinely shocked by the third suggestion, and declared that any surrender of Lithuanian territory to Germany would be ‘the greatest injustice that one could imagine’.
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Lithuanian suggestions that their declaration of neutrality was sufficient to protect Soviet interests were dismissed. Soviet troops would have to be deployed in Lithuania, insisted Stalin and Molotov. However, Lithuanian independence would be respected. Stalin even suggested that the Soviet troops in Lithuania would be ordered to suppress any communist rising if required.

Discussions then turned to the Vilnius question. The Lithuanians discovered that they were being offered a far smaller piece of territory than they had expected. Stalin made it clear that any return of territory to Lithuania was dependent on Moscow’s goodwill. The talks concluded without agreement. Lithuania had been forced to return the city of Klaipėda – Memel to the Germans – to Germany earlier in the year, and Urbšys complained that Lithuania now faced even further territorial losses. Stalin’s response showed how skilfully he and Molotov had manoeuvred events: ‘Germany tears away your territory. We, to the contrary are giving to you. What comparison can there be!’
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On 4 October, Molotov told Schulenburg, the German ambassador, that the question of German occupation of south-west Lithuania had already been raised with the Lithuanian delegation. In a desperate attempt to catch up with events, Berlin now informed the Lithuanians that the return of Vilnius to Lithuania had been at the insistence of Germany, and that the cession of south-west Lithuania to Germany was a small price to pay for this. On 7 October, discussions resumed in Moscow. The Lithuanians were prepared to accept a mutual assistance pact, but did not want Soviet troops on their soil. Molotov responded that Lithuania had to accept the same terms as Estonia and Latvia. His deputy, Vladimir Potemkin, commented that ‘Lithuania is showing no enthusiasm for recovering Vilnius’.
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The linkage of the Vilnius question and Soviet troop deployments was thus made explicit. The Lithuanian delegation paused briefly for private discussions. It was clear that Soviet troops would enter Lithuania regardless of what they did, but at least they would gain Vilnius if they accepted the Soviet pact, so they agreed to sign the treaty establishing a mutual assistance pact, the deployment of 20,000 Soviet troops in Lithuania, and the return of Vilnius.

It is not clear whether Stalin had always intended to control Lithuania, or whether he merely took advantage of events on the ground, particularly the unwillingness of the Lithuanians to seize Vilnius themselves. In any event, the Soviet leadership demonstrated adept and ruthless opportunism and skill in their manoeuvrings. During all of the complex negotiations with Germany, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Molotov and Stalin formed a very effective team; Molotov repeatedly acted as the ‘hard man’, while Stalin made conciliatory gestures, such as reducing the numbers of troops to be deployed in the Baltic States. Isolated from the west and denied support from Germany, the three Baltic governments ultimately had no choice but to agree to Stalin’s demands.

As Soviet garrison troops began to settle into their new billets – in the first months of their stay, they were ordered to keep a low profile – Moscow’s attention turned to Finland. The details of the Winter War
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are beyond the scope of this book, but the protracted fighting and the poor performance of the Red Army left Stalin and his associates fully occupied for the moment. Far too late, the three Baltic States held tentative talks about cooperation, though they were too anxious about Soviet reactions to take any significant military steps. Some of Latvia’s and Estonia’s gold reserves were sent to Britain and the United States, and some of the ambassadors in the west were given powers to assume the role of head of state, should the governments in the home countries be unable to continue to function. Meanwhile, the Baltic States attempted to tiptoe a neutral line in the diplomatic arena. They refused to join western condemnation of the Soviet Union’s attack on Finland in the League of Nations, and abstained in the vote that expelled the Soviet Union from the organisation.

For Lithuania, there was the added problem of trying to assimilate the Vilnius region. The head of state, Antanas Smetona, was anxious to take credit for the return of the ‘historic capital’ to Lithuania; opponents of the government wished to prevent this, and promoted the idea that Lithuania should be grateful to the Soviet Union rather than to Smetona for the territorial adjustment. Whatever the reaction of most of Lithuania, attitudes in Vilnius itself were far from universally in favour of reunion with Lithuania. The minority status of Lithuanians in Vilnius had actually worsened since the city was seized by Poland, with many Poles migrating into the city and its surrounding area. In addition, Jewish refugees fleeing from the German advance into Poland had further increased its non-Lithuanian population. For the Jews, the choice between German dominance and Soviet dominance was a simple one, and from the very start, Jews in both Latvia and Lithuania were amongst those who were the warmest supporters of the Soviet troops. Even if they regarded the Soviet Union as the lesser of two evils, they were well aware of the treatment of Jews in Germany and Poland by the Germans. Nevertheless, despite this, the attitude of the Jewish population was varied. Undoubtedly, the most vociferous and visible part of the community was composed of those who supported the presence of Soviet troops; however, it seems that they were outnumbered by more conservative elements, who simply wished to be left in peace, though they were conscious that this was far more likely to happen under Soviet control than German. As this conservative majority remained relatively silent, the public perception of Jewish hostility to the Lithuanian state was clearly established in the minds of the Lithuanian population throughout the country.

There were also significant food shortages in Vilnius, and on 31 October, allegations that Jewish shopkeepers were hoarding bread resulted in an eruption of anti-Jewish violence. Many Jewish shops were looted, and several Jews were badly beaten, but elsewhere there were demonstrations in favour of the Soviets and against the Lithuanians. Much of the violence against Jews came from the Polish community, and continued for several days. The Jewish community was critical of the recently arrived Lithuanian police force in the city, which intervened late and often ineffectively; their task was not helped by the fact that few police officers spoke Yiddish or Polish, or by their poor grasp of the layout of the city.

The Latvian Jewish community was also coming under increasing suspicion. At the outset of the Bolshevik Revolution, the industrialised heartland of Latvia was a fertile recruiting ground for communism, and Latvians formed a disproportionally large proportion of the Soviet Communist Party, partly due to the large numbers of ethnic Latvians who lived inside Russia itself. In the late 1930s, Stalin’s paranoia of any he regarded as having questionable loyalty to the Soviet Union – and to himself in particular – led to a series of ‘national operations’ by the NKVD. The Latvian Operation resulted in thousands of ethnic Latvians being deported to Siberia, and over 16,000 were executed. Despite this, the Soviets encouraged Latvian Jews, as well as ethnic Russians in Latvia, to regard the Soviet troops as their best protection against both the Germans and the Latvians themselves. The Ulmanis government policy of ‘Latvia for Latvians’ was unequivocally nationalistic, but it was also combined with strong measures to prevent violence against Jews. Nevertheless, Soviet agitators now set to work, persuading large parts of the Jewish community that Latvia was only marginally less anti-Semitic than Germany.

In February 1940, the Red Army finally began to get the upper hand over its tough Finnish opponents, and with a satisfactory end to the Winter War in sight, Stalin returned his attention to the Baltic States. The Soviet envoys to the three states attended a conference in Moscow, where they were instructed to increase political activity.
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Of the three states, Estonia represented the fewest opportunities for the Soviet agitators to play one ethnic group against another. Whilst the policy of forcing the Baltic States to accept mutual assistance treaties in the autumn of 1939 had started with Estonia and had then moved south, there were good reasons for further progress occurring in the opposite direction. Firstly, there were far more opportunities to set different ethnic communities against each other in Latvia and Lithuania, and secondly, securing the southern countries first would create a barrier to any refugee traffic.

In Latvia, the Soviet ambassador Ivan Zotov had for several years sent a steady stream of reports back to Moscow about the pro-Soviet sentiment not only of Jews, but of other urban dwellers, particularly the Russian and Belarusian minorities. To a large extent, these reports were influenced as much by what Zotov thought Stalin wished to hear as by the reality on the ground.
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The urban working classes were in favour of closer cooperation and even union with the Soviet Union, Zotov stated in several telegrams; and he claimed that the rural population, too, was unhappy with the Ulmanis regime.
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Zotov was not alone in sending misleading information. One of his colleagues, Ivan Cechaev, sent a report detailing the possibilities of establishing a communist underground movement in eastern Latvia, and sought to portray the Ulmanis government as a fascist dictatorship that held the Latvians back from their desire to join the Soviet Union. Colonel Vasiliev, the military attaché to the Soviet Embassy in Riga, reported in May 1939: ‘The workers are of the opinion that the Red Army will enter the territory in the near future. The intelligentsia think thus: better the Soviet forces than the Germans … the majority of the workers support a direct union of Latvia to the Soviet Union.’
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The reality was very different. For a few brief months during the Latvian war of independence, much of Latvia had been under Bolshevik control, and there had been widespread arrests and killings, usually with minimal or no judicial process, of those perceived as hostile to the Bolsheviks. Although large numbers of Latvians had originally been supporters of the Bolsheviks, many of these changed their opinion after these killings, while other Bolshevik sympathisers chose to leave Latvia as the Red Army retreated. The policies of Ulmanis following his victory in the post-war elections and during his years of dictatorial rule during the 1920s and 1930s had resulted in a remarkable increase in living standards throughout Latvia, further undermining support for radical changes. In particular, the land reforms introduced by Ulmanis during the 1920s were an effective answer to many of the long-held grievances of the rural population, and in any event, Soviet attempts to introduce collectivised farming in those parts of the Baltic States that the Bolsheviks had controlled during the wars of independence were not remembered with any fondness.