Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

The Riflemen’s Union (Związek Strzelecki) was a paramilitary organisation in the Second Polish Republic which oversaw the military training of young pre-military age people. Simultaneously, it was a civic education movement. The activities of the organisation covered all of Poland, and it also had structural subdivisions in Polish communities outside the country. The article discusses the circumstances of the foundation of the organisation, its relationship with the Polish army, the main features of its activities, organisational structure and principles of management, the staff, the composition of members, and the dynamics of their numbers.

The paper deals with the role of the Kaitseliit (Defence League) voluntary defence organisation in Estonia’s defence in the years of the Estonian War of Independence (also known as the Liberation War) and in peacetime until 1940, with attention focused mainly on the 1930s. An overview is provided of the historiography, the formation of Kaitseliit in 1918, its role in the Liberation War, the period of decreasing activity of the organisation after the war, and the restoration and development of Kaitseliit in the 1920s and 1930s. The author reviews the objectives of the organisation, issues of its membership, structure, management and armament, as well as the use of Kaitseliit and its units in Estonian military defence and internal training. The paper also attempts to answer the question how the role of Kaitseliit in Estonian national defence developed.

This paper deals with concepts of images of ethnic minorities in the ideologies of the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union, the Latvian Aizsargi, and the Estonian Kaitseliit, with the aim of identifying factors that predetermined qualitative changes in these images in the different periods of activity of these paramilitary organisations. In addition, possible functions of the images of ethnic minorities in the ideologies of the Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian riflemen are analysed. The study is based on the presumption that, in the ideologies of the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union, the Latvian Aizsargi and the Estonian Kaitseliit, the formation of the images of ethnic minorities in the different periods of activity of these organisations (the struggles for independence, the formation of the parliamentary system, authoritarian coups and presidential power, and national political crises) was predetermined by the practice of attaching ethnic groups to the relative camps of allies or foes, and by the policy of dividing ethnic minorities into groups of ‘reliable’ and ‘unreliable’.