Iraq With Snow

Mart Laar's "War in the Woods: Estonia's Struggle for Survival, 1944-1956." (The Compass Press, 1992. Translated by Tiina Ets.)

As the history of Soviet Europe is being reviewed, it is often “revised” into new channels of anti-Communist political correctness. This standard allows great tolerance for pre-WWII myths and attitudes, and Cold War rationalizations, as long as they’re sufficiently anti-Soviet, anti-Moscow, and present the former “captive nation” as a paragon of injured innocence and virtue. The troubled twentieth-century history of the Baltic States is a good case of this political rugby.

“War in the Woods: Estonia’s Struggle for Survival 1944-1956,” was written by Estonian publicist Mart Laar in 1992. Under the auspices of the Estonian Heritage Society, Laar and his associates fanned out across Soviet Estonia in the first days of perestroika, gathering recollections of the postwar period, and of the remembered struggles of the anti-Soviet guerrillas popularly known as “the Forest Brothers.” Although the KGB harassed and often disrupted the bicycle journeys of these young anthropologists, with criminal proceedings initiated against Laar, their work nevertheless continued as perestroika unfolded. The dissolution of the USSR removed the last fetters from the group’s research and finally Laar could openly publish his findings in a memorial volume. Its success catapulted Laar, already in the center of Estonian nationalist politics, into two terms as Prime Minister of post-Soviet Estonia.

While Laar makes reference to Soviet archives as a source, these are hardly quoted. Instead the book is a rambling, often poorly organized, sometimes incoherent account based on those personal narratives collected by his group in the 1980s. Yet the anecdotes are often compelling as they put flesh on the story of the postwar anti-Soviet underground in Estonia; and are frequently more honest than Laar himself on the origins of the Forest Brothers.

The brutality of the Soviet occupations of 1940 and post-1944 are given as the “primary” recruiting source of the Forest Brothers. Desperate young men whose families were suffering deportation by the thousands in cattle cars bound for Siberia often had no place to go but the woods, forming bands whose goal was basic survival far from the occupation centers. However, as even Laar concedes, there was no real Forest Brother “movement” until the final days of the German occupation, and with good reason. Veterans of the Estonian SS Legion were instructed to stay behind as a rearguard for the retreating Wehrmacht, acting as a spoiler and sabotage guerrilla force to harass the Red enemy from behind the lines. Caches of German weaponry by the ton were left behind for them to do so. Thus, without German organization and arms, there could have been no Forest Brother armies in Estonia or the other Baltic States. The Germans had not conceded defeat at this point, and hoped that guerrilla movements in the Baltic and the Carpathians would bog down the Red Army’s western advance while Germany could negotiate an “honorable” cease-fire with the Western Allies.

Alas for both the Germans and their Baltic allies, such was not to be the case. As the Soviet Army enveloped the region, and Germany’s fortunes plummeted, the Forest Brothers were cut off from their supply sources. They maintained radio contact, and were still instrumental in smuggling out the collaborators of the Estonian National Committee who faced Soviet wrath, but as a German “contra” movement their purpose was served and done by 1945. Or so it seemed.

The tons of German weaponry, and the desperation of men who faced only life (or death) as Soviet prisoners of war, ensured a bitter-end struggle throughout the eastern zones of German/Soviet occupation. Estonia’s was no different in its brutality, although thanks to émigré publicists and perestroika researchers like Laar it is better known to English readers than other such formations.

Throughout the book we are treated to superficial analyses of occupation and Soviet-era politics, but there is in-depth accounting of Forest Brother attacks on stores, trains, Soviet authorities and collaborators; of pitched battles with the KGB and the Soviet-organized Peoples’ Defense Committees; on the Soviet authorities who led the KGB’s partisan-repression squads; on how to build and stock an underground bunker; on the support given by the surrounding population in the classic “fish-sea” model. Laar denies any systematic brutality on the part of the Forest Brothers, while offering grisly anecdotes of Soviet treatment of forest partisans and their civilian supporters in the villages of Estonia.

Laar maintains that while Estonian bodies may have worn German uniforms, their hearts were not in them. He also makes the sweeping statement that no Estonian Forest Brothers are, despite their service to Germany in WW II, known to have committed war crimes against Jews or any innocent civilians. Yet he concedes that Latvian Forest Brothers often took refuge over the border in Estonia, and in such areas intermingled feely with Estonian partisans - these neighboring guerrillas being direct offshoots of the Latvian SS, which were indeed complicit in the extermination of Baltic Jews and war crimes on the eastern front. He also portrays the Estonian National Committee as a resurrected civic group of leaders from the First Republic, revived in the waning days of German occupation, who hoped to fill the void of the Third Reich but were knocked out of power in three days by the Red Army. The Armed Resistance League formed by the ENC was to act as the coordinating body for the scattered partisans.

Here Laar is being his most disingenuous, for the ENC was formed from the ranks of civilian German collaborators, as the ARL was composed of former soldiers of the SS Legion. It is true that Estonian collaborators were much more pragmatic than other such groups: few of them were ideological fascists, and anti-Semitism played a negligible role, if only because Jews were nearly invisible outside Tallinn, with a total Estonian population of 5000. Yet there is no evidence presented for Laar’s claim that that the ENC and the ARL were formed from an “anti-German resistance,” just as there is no evidence for any such resistance itself. These nationalists may have had their own agenda, yet they saw nothing wrong in donning the uniforms of a foreign occupier or serving as its civil administrators; an attitude now regarded as treason as the Second Republic seeks prosecution of those who served the USSR.

Laar also touches on the role of the Forest Brothers in the early cold war. As hopes from Germany waned, the rising power of the US and Britain in Europe gave new inspiration from the West. The ENC and the ARL served as a conduit for anti-Soviet refugees who did their best to propagate and magnify the “ongoing struggle behind the Iron Curtain.” It was sincerely believed by many (and not just in Baltic forests) that there would soon be a Third World War between the US and USSR. It was on this “hope” that the Forest Brothers pegged their ultimate deliverance, looking to scattered accounts of the Korean War as the first sign of an apocalyptic anti-Soviet liberation struggle which would sweep in and rescue them - as the Germans had done in 1941. The Western Allies, on their part, also saw the Baltic forest partisans as an asset, and took much time and trouble in supporting émigré groups, sending in agents and radio operators and money to fan the anti-Soviet resistance. The German war service of these veterans was overlooked in the name of “saving the West,” as the ENC knew it would be. But here, too, it was to be disappointed, for thanks to famous KGB moles like Philby and Burgess the Baltic operations were riddled with KGB double agents and wrecked from within.

Laar’s descriptions of the Estonian domestic scene are as superficial as his rendition of the region’s high politics. In reference to the Soviet-organized Peoples’ Defense Committees he dismisses their members as “failures” under the old system who now saw their chance to achieve social prominence under the Soviet occupation. Aside from the fact that the same could be said of a number of those serving the Germans, the question is yet begged as to how such intrinsic “losers” could rise to prominence under anyone’s regime. Thanks to such myopia, which sees only the Forest Brothers as “true Estonians” and their opponents as “criminals,” we may never know the full story of the social issues and struggles that framed the postwar years. Laar’s own prejudices here, as usual, take the place of analysis and help render the entire book into a flawed and biased – though often gruesomely entertaining – account of the Sovietization of Estonia.

In summation, this willful blindness - from his disingenuous admission-cum-dismissal of the German role in organizing the Forest Brothers, to the Estonian domestic scene – not only plagues much of Laar’s book but the nationalist cause it serves,. His chief defense is that wearing German uniforms in the context of 1940 was no shame, and was done reluctantly, having no real portion in the struggle for Estonian survival. Yet this contention is undermined by the very testimony he presents. It is undeniable that the Soviet invasion of the Baltic and Finland was an illegal, opportunistic move to reverse the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and grab Russian “losses” at a convenient moment in history; that the wishes of the population, who had enjoyed twenty years of self-government, were not considered; and that the first Soviet regime was ruthless in its quick elimination of perceived “class enemies.” Without the Soviet brutalities of 1940-41 there would have been much less German collaboration from the Balts, much fewer willing executioners putting on SS uniforms and seeking scapegoats among their fellow citizens. Yet Balts did so, and the atrocious deeds done in the name of "freedom" in a conqueror's uniform yet taint the memory of these nations to this day. Baltic refusal to honestly face these issues – by angry denial, by books such as Laar’s extolling the anti-Soviet “national resistance”, or by post-Soviet discrimination against ethnic Russians or those who served the USSR – will not otherwise erase this still-indelible stain.