Fighting from the Forest for Freedom
Posted: Wednesday, June 8, 2005
One could castigate Mart Laar for idealizing the Estonian insurgents. One could also point out that the author eschews footnotes. But that would be petty: for Laar, author of War in the Woods: Estonia’s Struggle for Survival 1944-1956, is perhaps the first to describe the forgotten story of the Estonian Anti-Soviet Uprising.
In June 1940, the Soviets occupied Estonia, a small country on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea. The nation then had a population of 1,134,000, ninety percent of whom were ethnic Estonians. At the time, the Estonian Communist Party contained a paltry 150 members. Within a year, the Soviets had killed or deported 21,000 “enemies of the people;" these were military personnel, police officers, entrepreneurs, clergymen, political activists, prominent citizens, and their families. The churches were persecuted, private property confiscated, and voluntary associations from the Boy Scouts to cooking clubs were banned. Thirty-three thousand young Estonians were forcibly inducted into the Red Army. Lastly, the Communists falsified an election that turned Estonia into a Soviet Republic.
Threatened with arrest and deportation, many Estonians fled to the forest. That was the beginning of a movement called The Brotherhood of the Forest (metsavendlus). When, in 1941, the new occupiers, the Nazis, invaded the country and instituted a military draft, some refused to serve under the German banner even against the Soviets. A number of Estonian Forest Brothers decided to return to their sylvan hideaways. When the Nazis retreated in the autumn of 1944, the Estonian independence movement established its own authorities. The National Committee of the Estonian Republic, however, lasted only three days, its existence terminated by the return of the Red Army. According to Laar, “the Soviet Union transformed Estonia into a huge military base, where several accounts place 100,000 to 150,000 Soviet soldiers on Estonian soil, resulting in a ratio of one soldier for every four adult Estonians.”
Just as in 1940, the Soviets commenced mass arrests and deportations to Siberia. Among other unfortunates, the Minister of Education Arnold Susi found himself in the same Gulag camp as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. Soon, mock elections were held; predictably, it was announced that “the people” favored Communist rule. The author claims that “their goal was to sweep away all traces of the ‘former world,’ starting by destroying monuments and works of art, but also renaming streets and even a city. The actions of the Communists differed little from those of the Nazis.” This was the beginning of the second Soviet occupation.
Yet again the forests teemed with “several tens of thousands of people.” There were about 15,000 Forest Brothers in the south of the country; perhaps as many fought in the north. Laar claims that an overwhelming majority of the anti-Communist insurgents were children of petty landholding peasants—for instance, the legendary commander Ants Kaljurand, known as “Ants the Terrible.” Women also fought alongside the insurgents, especially during the latter part of the struggle. In Estonia’s towns, the so-called “Urban Brothers,” or small political and paramilitary groups, operated. The groups were composed largely of young people: Boy Scouts, high schoolers, and university students.
At first, the Estonian insurgents operated in large cohesive units. They launched attacks on Soviet transports; they freed prisoners; they conducted expropriation actions; and executed Communist agents and collaborators. Most insurgent units came into existence spontaneously. About five thousand insurgents subordinated themselves to the largest Estonian guerrilla organization, the League for Armed Resistance (Relvastatud Voitluse Liit—RVL). The cent
