Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

This article examines the Baltic Regiment, a military unit of Baltic Germans that served under the Estonian army in the Estonian War of Independence, fighting against the Bolshevik Red Army. It focuses on issues of loyalty and the complex relationships between the Baltic Regiment, the Estonian military leadership and Estonian society. Before Estonia declared independence in 1918, the Baltic Germans were the ruling class in Estonian society, and centuries of tension between them and the Estonian population created challenges for cooperation during the war. These strained relations led the Estonian military leadership to assign the Baltic Regiment to the Russian White Army, keeping the unit at a distance from Estonia. Despite this, the Baltic Regiment fought courageously as part of the Estonian forces and earned recognition, both locally and internationally, as an elite and highly effective combat unit. After the war, the Estonian commander-in-chief General Laidoner highlighted the Baltic Regiment as an example of successful cooperation between Estonia’s diverse ethnic groups.

Historians believe that between 2,000 and 4,000 Jewish soldiers took part in the struggle for Lithuanian independence in 1919–1923, of whom at least 500 joined the Lithuanian army as volunteers. Although recent research casts doubt on these figures, it is clear that only a small number of Lithuanian Jews joined the fledgling Lithuanian army. One explanation for this could be the deliberate intentions of the leadership of the Lithuanian armed forces to avoid active Jewish involvement, since Jews were not trusted. Despite the atmosphere of mistrust, some Lithuanian Jews chose to join the Lithuanian army. The article tries to establish what motives led to their decision. The discussion may help find answers to the often-raised and still relevant questions about Jewish-Lithuanian political relations during the period of the creation of the modern Lithuanian state.

In the interwar years, Finland and Estonia were characterised by the fact that in both countries exceptionally broad linguistic and cultural rights were given to national minorities, compared with the situation in the rest of Europe. There were several factors behind this. One was the relationship between ethnic groups from a historical perspective. Another was each country’s internal debate on the kind of social order in general that was to be built. The third was how politics in Finland and Estonia was influenced by international trends and theories on how national minorities should be treated. The article analyses how national minorities were taken into account in the Finnish and Estonian constitutions which held true in the period between the two world wars, and why account was taken precisely in a certain way. At the same time, it considers what kind of views in this regard were presented by different political parties, what kind of debates were held in the parliaments of both countries, and how the matter was dealt with by other significant interest groups.

This article offers a comparative analysis of how the First World War affected emerging Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian nationalisms. There has been a clear tendency to treat the three states declared by these national movements in 1918 as a single ‘Baltic’ grouping created as a result of common factors and processes. Yet, such a characterisation downplays differences which arise due to the position of the region at the very frontline of the war in the East, which brought a variety of jurisdictions and political contexts. A further tendency has been to retrospectively portray the nationstate framework ultimately created in all three cases as the realisation of the long-cherished goal of the pre-1918 national movements. Such an understanding of national self-determination, however, only emerged much later, and federalist thinking continued to shape both external and internal conceptions of sovereignty during and immediately after the war. How statehood was conceived, moreover, had a lot to do with which side of the line a region was located during the conflict, with key points of difference being discernible between the Estonian and Lithuanian cases in particular.

In the course of the First World War, ‘the nationalities question’ exploded in Eastern Europe. By the fall of 1918, the Eastern Europe of the three empires had collapsed, and national states were rising. During the war, the nationalities question as perceived in Switzerland, a neutral country, had developed from an initial concern about the loyalty of the minorities in the borderlands of the three East European empires into a battle royal for recognition as individual states. The article focuses on the activities of the German ambassador in Bern who was the most active force in the development, and he gave special support for the nationalities on Russia’s western border. Poland’s future quickly became the major issue but this threatened Germany’s own ambitions in Eastern Europe. The Lithuanians and the Ukrainians particularly opposed Polish dreams of establishing a large state. The Germans, however, considered the future of Ukraine to lie mostly in the hands of the Austrian Empire, and therefore Lithuania appeared to be the more promising force to limit any new Polish state.